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19-letter words containing u, n, b

  • blowing your buffer — (jargon)   Losing your train of thought. A reference to buffer overflow.
  • blue screen of life — (operating system)   (BSOL, by analogy with "Blue Screen of Death") The opening screen of Microsoft Windows NT. This screen shows the file system loading, and any problems such as conversions from FAT to NTFS or a scan of a hard drive. The Blue Screen of Life occurs in one way, as opposed to the Blue Screen of Death, which can occur in many different ways and times.
  • blue-ringed octopus — a highly venomous octopus, Octopus maculosus, of E Australia which exhibits blue bands on its tentacles when disturbed
  • blue-tongued lizard — a large Australian lizard, Tiliqua scincoides, characterized by having a cobalt-blue tongue.
  • board of trade unit — a unit of electrical energy equal to 1 kilowatt-hour
  • bordering countries — countries that share a border with a particular country
  • born out of wedlock — born when one's parents are not legally married
  • bound hand and foot — with hands and feet tied
  • boundary commission — (in Britain) a body established by statute to undertake periodic reviews of the boundaries of parliamentary constituencies and to recommend changes to take account of population shifts
  • breathing apparatus — an apparatus, usually consisting of tanks of air or oxygen and a mouthpiece, that enables the wearer to breath in difficult conditions such as a smoke-filled building
  • bright young things — young, fun-loving, fashionable upper-class people, esp of the 1920s
  • brightline spectrum — the spectrum of an incandescent substance appearing on a spectrogram as one or more bright lines against a dark background.
  • brimstone butterfly — a common yellow butterfly, Gonepteryx rhamni, of N temperate regions of the Old World: family Pieridae
  • brown paper bag bug — (programming)   A programming bug that is so stupid that it makes the programmer want to put a brown paper bag over his head.
  • bug tracking system — (programming)   (BTS) A system for receiving and filing bugs reported against a software project, and tracking those bugs until they are fixed. Most major software projects have their own BTS, the source code of which is often available for use by other projects. Well known BTSs include GNATS, Bugzilla, and Debbugs.
  • building contractor — an individual or company that contracts for the construction of houses, etc
  • buildings insurance — insurance which covers buildings
  • bulbourethral gland — Cowper's gland
  • business accounting — the keeping of detailed accounts relating to a business or businesses
  • buster brown collar — a medium-sized, starched collar with rounded edges, lying flat on the shoulders, worn by women and girls.
  • buy a pig in a poke — to buy, get, or agree to something without sight or knowledge of it in advance
  • by leaps and bounds — with unexpectedly rapid progess
  • california bluebell — either of two plants, Phacelia campanularia or P. minor, of southern California, having ovate leaves and bell-shaped blue or purple flowers.
  • canterbury pilgrims — the pilgrims whose stories are told in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
  • cerebrospinal fluid — the clear colourless fluid in the spaces inside and around the spinal cord and brain
  • chlorofluorocarbons — Plural form of chlorofluorocarbon.
  • circulating library — a small library circulated in turn to a group of schools or other institutions
  • cock and bull story — an absurd, improbable story presented as the truth: Don't ask him about his ancestry unless you want to hear a cock-and-bull story.
  • cock-and-bull story — If you describe something that someone tells you as a cock-and-bull story, you mean that you do not believe it is true.
  • connecticut warbler — a North American wood warbler, Oporornis agilis, olive-green above with a gray head and throat and yellow below.
  • contagious abortion — brucellosis of domestic cattle, an infectious disease characterized by spontaneous abortion and caused by the bacterium Brucella abortus; Bang's disease.
  • contributing factor — something that is partly responsible for a development or phenomenon
  • convergent boundary — a major geologic discontinuity or suture marking the juncture of lithospheric plates that have been joined by plate tectonics.
  • coordination number — the number of coordinated species surrounding the central atom in a complex or crystal
  • corruption of blood — the impurity before law that results from attainder and disqualifies the attainted person from inheriting, retaining, or bequeathing lands or interests in lands: abolished in 1870.
  • counterpoise bridge — another name for bascule bridge
  • cudgel one's brains — to think hard about a problem
  • current liabilities — business liabilities maturing within a year
  • darby and joan club — a club for elderly people
  • de broglie equation — the postulate of wave mechanics that a particle of mass m moving at a velocity v will have the properties of a wave of wavelength h / mv (de Broglie wavelength) where h is Planck's constant.
  • debugging by printf — (programming)   The debugging technique where the programmer inserts print statements into a program so that when run the program leaves a "trail of breadcrumbs" allowing him to see which parts were executed. The information output may just be a short string to indicate that a particular point in the code has been reached or it might be a complete stack trace. The output typically just goes to the window or terminal in which the program is running or may be written to a log file.
  • deoxyribonucleoside — a compound composed of deoxyribose and either a purine or a pyrimidine.
  • deoxyribonucleotide — an ester of a deoxyribonucleoside and phosphoric acid; a constituent of DNA.
  • differential backup — (operating system)   A kind of backup that copies all files that have changed since the last full backup. Each differential backup will include all files in previous differential backups since the full backup so to restore a version of a file, you only need to search the full backup and the relevant differential backup. Some systems support differential backup by associating an "Archive" flag with each file and setting this flag whenever the file is modified to indicate that it should be included in the next backup. A differential backup does not change this flag, whereas an incremental backup resets it.
  • disambiguation page — a page on a website that lists various websites or web pages that have or could have the same title. The user is able to select from the list that page, site etc that he or she actually wants
  • distinguishableness — The state or quality of being distinguishable.
  • distribution system — The distribution system is the part of an electric system after the transmission system that is dedicated to delivering electric energy to an end user.
  • do not disturb sign — A do not disturb sign is a sign that a guest in a hotel hangs outside their room to tell other people not to knock the door or enter.
  • double counterpoint — invertible counterpoint using two transposable voices.
  • double yellow lines — parallel yellow lines painted down the centre of a roadway to indicate that overtaking is not permitted in either direction
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