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22-letter words containing t, r, o

  • attachment of earnings — (in Britain) a court order requiring an employer to deduct amounts from an employee's wages to pay debts or honour financial obligations
  • audience participation — the active involvement of an audience in a live show or broadcast
  • audio video interleave — (multimedia)   (AVI) An audio-video standard designed by Microsoft. Apparently proprietary and Microsoft Windows-specific.
  • automatic gain control — control of a radio receiver in which the gain varies inversely with the magnitude of the input, thus maintaining the output at an approximately constant level
  • automatic send receive — (hardware)   (ASR) Part of a designation for a hard-copy terminal, manufactured by Teletype Corporation, which could be commanded remotely to send the contents of its paper tape reader. The ASR-33 was the most common minicomputer terminal in the early 1970s.
  • automatic transmission — A car that is fitted with automatic transmission has a gear system in which the gears change automatically.
  • autoxidation-reduction — disproportionation.
  • axonometric projection — a geometric drawing of an object, such as a building, in three dimensions showing the verticals and horizontals projected to scale but with diagonals and curves distorted, so that the whole appears inclined
  • backward combatability — (humour)   /bak'w*d k*m-bat'*-bil'*-tee/ (Play on "backward compatibility") A property of hardware or software revisions in which previous protocols, formats, layouts, etc. are irrevocably discarded in favour of "new and improved" protocols, formats and layouts, leaving the previous ones not merely deprecated but actively defeated. (Too often, the old and new versions cannot definitively be distinguished, such that lingering instances of the previous ones yield crashes or other infelicitous effects, as opposed to a simple "version mismatch" message.) A backward compatible change, on the other hand, allows old versions to coexist without crashes or error messages, but too many major changes incorporating elaborate backward compatibility processing can lead to extreme software bloat. See also flag day.
  • backward compatibility — (jargon)   Able to share data or commands with older versions of itself, or sometimes other older systems, particularly systems it intends to supplant. Sometimes backward compatibility is limited to being able to read old data but does not extend to being able to write data in a format that can be read by old versions. For example, WordPerfect 6.0 can read WordPerfect 5.1 files, so it is backward compatible. It can be said that Perl is backward compatible with awk, because Perl was (among other things) intended to replace awk, and can, with a converter, run awk programs. See also: backward combatability. Compare: forward compatible.
  • bacterial endocarditis — a bacterial infection of the inner lining of the heart, most often of the heart valves, characterized by fever, enlarged spleen, and heart murmur.
  • badlands national park — a national park in SW South Dakota: rock formations and animal fossils. 380 sq. mi. (985 sq. km).
  • baldassare castiglione — Baldassare [bahl-dahs-sah-re] /ˌbɑl dɑsˈsɑ rɛ/ (Show IPA), 1478–1529, Italian diplomat and author.
  • ballistic galvanometer — a type of galvanometer for measuring surges of current. After deflection the instrument returns slowly to its original reading
  • bank deposit insurance — the protection of bank deposits against the insolvency of banks in the U.S., up to a specified maximum per account that is revised periodically, under special insurance through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
  • bankruptcy proceedings — the legal business of a bankruptcy case
  • baptismal regeneration — the doctrine that regeneration and sanctification are received in and through baptism.
  • bark up the wrong tree — to misdirect one's attention, efforts, etc; be mistaken
  • bartolome de las casas — Bartolomé de las [bahr-taw-law-me th e lahs] /ˌbɑr tɔ lɔˈmɛ ðɛ lɑs/ (Show IPA), Las Casas, Bartolomé de.
  • basal body temperature — the lowest temperature the body reaches in the resting state, typically during sleep. It is usually measured on waking
  • basic operating system — (operating system)   (BOS) An early [when?] IBM operating system. According to folklore, BOS was the predecessor to TOS on the IBM 360 and it was IPL'd from a card reader. It may have been intended for very small 360's with no disks and limited tape drives. BOS died out really early [when?] as disks such as the 2311 and 2314 became common with the IBM 360, whereas disks had been a real luxury on the IBM 7090.
  • be brought to bed (of) — to give birth (to)
  • be for it/be in for it — If you are in for it or, in British English, if you are for it, you are likely to get into trouble because of something you have done.
  • be in one's right mind — to be mentally well; be sane
  • be streets ahead of sb — If someone is streets ahead of you, they are much better at something than you are.
  • behaviour modification — the use of techniques to change someone's behaviour by reinforcing desired behaviour
  • being from outer space — a monster; an imaginary creature
  • bell-bottomed trousers — a pair of trousers with legs widening at the bottom
  • benoit de sainte-maure — 12th-century French trouvère: author of the Roman de Troie, which contains the episode of Troilus and Cressida
  • bereavement counsellor — a person giving advice to bereaved people to help them cope with their grief
  • bernoulli distribution — binomial distribution.
  • bernoulli's lemniscate — Analytic Geometry. lemniscate.
  • bidirectional printing — (hardware)   A feature of a printer whose printer head can print both when moving left to right and when moving right to left. Also known as "boustrophedonic".
  • big bend national park — a national park in W Texas, on the Rio Grande. 1080 sq. mi. (2800 sq. km).
  • blow one's own trumpet — to boast of one's own skills or good qualities
  • bone marrow transplant — the transplantation of bone marrow from donor to recipient
  • bone-marrow transplant — Surgery. a technique in which a small amount of bone marrow is withdrawn by a syringe from a donor's pelvic bone and injected into a patient whose ability to make new blood cells has been impaired by a disease, as anemia or cancer, or by exposure to radiation.
  • book of original entry — a book in which transactions are recorded before being transferred into a ledger.
  • borderline personality — Psychiatry. a personality disorder characterized by instability in many areas, as mood, identity, self-image, and behavior, and often manifested by impulsive actions, suicide attempts, inappropriate anger, or depression.
  • borel-lebesgue theorem — Heine-Borel theorem.
  • born in/out of wedlock — If a baby is born in wedlock, it is born while its parents are married. If it is born out of wedlock, it is born at a time when its parents are not married.
  • brachiocephalic artery — a major artery, arising from the arch of the aorta, that supplies blood to the right arm and the head.
  • bread-and-butter model — Naval Architecture. a wooden hull model carved from a number of horizontal planks glued together to represent the outlines of the various decks.
  • break (or keep) faith — to be disloyal (or loyal) to one's beliefs, principles, etc.
  • bring down the curtain — If something brings down the curtain on an event or situation, it causes or marks the end of it.
  • british library method — (algorithm)   Brute force searching. According to legends circulating in the 1970s, in the British Library books are searched for by examining each book sequentially in the first shelf, then the next shelf, continuing until the book is found or the entire library has been searched. The term was referred to in a Dutch coursebook, "Inleiding In De Informatica" (Introduction to Informatics) from a course given by C.H.A. Koster and Th.A. Zoethout. This was based on a course given at the TU Berlin.
  • british national party — a far-right political party
  • brush-footed butterfly — any of several butterflies of the family Nymphalidae, including the fritillaries, mourning cloaks, anglewings, and commas, characterized by reduced, nonfunctional forelegs.
  • buffered write-through — (memory management)   A variation of write-through where the cache uses a "write buffer" to hold data being written back to main memory. This frees the cache to service read requests while the write is taking place. There is usually only one stage of buffering so subsequent writes must wait until the first is complete. Most accesses are reads so buffered write-through is only useful for very slow main memory.
  • bug-for-bug compatible — Same as bug-compatible, with the additional implication that much tedious effort went into ensuring that each (known) bug was replicated.
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