12-letter words containing y, a, b
- boobytrapped — to set with or as if with a booby trap; attach a booby trap to or in.
- bootleg play — a play in which the quarterback pretends to hand the ball to a teammate, hides it by placing it next to his hip, and runs with it.
- bothy ballad — a folk song, esp one from the farming community of NE Scotland
- bottle party — a party to which guests bring drink
- bottom yeast — a yeast whose cells, in the manufacture of wine and lager beer, fall to the bottom as a sediment.
- boulder clay — an unstratified glacial deposit consisting of fine clay, boulders, and pebbles
- boyoma falls — a series of seven cataracts in the NE Democratic Republic of Congo, on the upper River Congo: forms an unnavigable stretch of 90 km (56 miles), which falls 60 m (200 ft)
- brachycephal — a person with a brachycephalic head
- brachycerous — (of insects) having short antennae
- brachycranic — having a cranial index of 81.0–85.4.
- brachygraphy — shorthand; stenography
- bradykinesia — abnormal slowness of physical movement, esp as an effect of Parkinson's disease
- bradykinetic — slowness of movement, as found, for example, in Parkinson's disease.
- brahmacharya — the stage of life of the student, entailing study of the Vedas and complete celibacy, usually lasting for twelve years.
- brambleberry — the fruit of a bramble.
- break of day — dawn; daybreak.
- breathalyser — a device for estimating the amount of alcohol in the breath: used in testing people suspected of driving under the influence of alcohol
- breathalyzer — A Breathalyzer is a bag or electronic device that the police use to test whether a driver has drunk too much alcohol.
- breathe easy — to take air, oxygen, etc., into the lungs and expel it; inhale and exhale; respire.
- breathlessly — without breath or breathing with difficulty; gasping; panting: We were breathless after the steep climb.
- bridal party — the people who accompany the bride as she comes to her wedding
- bridge party — a gathering for the purpose of playing bridge
- brigham city — a city in N Utah.
- bring to bay — to force into a position from which retreat is impossible
- brushability — the quality of being brushable
- buck's party — a party for men only, esp one held for a man before he is married
- buffaloberry — any shrub of the genus Shepherdia native to North America
- bunny rabbit — rabbit
- buoyancy aid — a type of usually foam-filled lifejacket designed for use in sports such as canoeing
- bushy-tailed — bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, fresh, alert, eager, and lively
- butyric acid — type of acid
- buy the farm — a tract of land, usually with a house, barn, silo, etc., on which crops and often livestock are raised for livelihood.
- buzzards bay — arm of the Atlantic, on the SE coast of Mass., at the base of Cape Cod peninsula
- by all means — You can say 'by all means' to tell someone that you are very willing to allow them to do something.
- by and large — You use by and large to indicate that a statement is mostly but not completely true.
- by any means — in any way possible; at all; somehow
- by reason of — If one thing happens by reason of another, it happens because of it.
- by the balls — so as to be rendered powerless
- by wholesale — at wholesale
- by-a-whisker — whiskers, a beard.
- byelorussian — Byelorussian means belonging or relating to Byelorussia or to its people or culture.
- bypass ratio — the ratio of the amount of air that bypasses the combustion chambers of an aircraft gas turbine to that passing through them
- cable-laying — involved in or connected to the activity of laying cables
- call-by-name — (reduction) (CBN) (Normal order reduction, leftmost, outermost reduction). An argument passing convention (first provided by ALGOL 60?) where argument expressions are passed unevaluated. This is usually implemented by passing a pointer to a thunk - some code which will return the value of the argument and an environment giving the values of its free variables. This evaluation strategy is guaranteed to reach a normal form if one exists. When used to implement functional programming languages, call-by-name is usually combined with graph reduction to avoid repeated evaluation of the same expression. This is then known as call-by-need. The opposite of call-by-name is call-by-value where arguments are evaluated before they are passed to a function. This is more efficient but is less likely to terminate in the presence of infinite data structures and recursive functions. Arguments to macros are usually passed using call-by-name.
- call-by-need — (reduction) A reduction strategy which delays evaluation of function arguments until their values are needed. A value is needed if it is an argument to a primitive function or it is the condition in a conditional. Call-by-need is one aspect of lazy evaluation. The term first appears in Chris Wadsworth's thesis "Semantics and Pragmatics of the Lambda calculus" (Oxford, 1971, p. 183). It was used later, by J. Vuillemin in his thesis (Stanford, 1973).
- cam ranh bay — an inlet of the South China Sea, on the SE coast of Vietnam: U. S. military facility during the Vietnam War.
- cape cod bay — a part of Massachusetts Bay, enclosed by the Cape Cod peninsula.
- carbamylurea — biuret.
- carbohydrase — a digestive enzyme that breaks down carbohydrates through hydrolysis
- carbohydrate — Carbohydrates are substances, found in certain kinds of food, that provide you with energy. Foods such as sugar and bread that contain these substances can also be referred to as carbohydrates.