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16-letter words containing y, e, a

  • binuclear family — a social unit composed of an extended family, usually the children and subsequent spouses of divorced parents.
  • biodegradability — capable of decaying through the action of living organisms: biodegradable paper; biodegradable detergent.
  • bird's-eye maple — a cut of sugar maple wood used especially for veneers, having a wavy grain with many dark, circular markings.
  • birthday present — a gift given to someone on their birthday
  • black chokeberry — See under chokeberry (def 1).
  • black-eyed susan — any of several North American plants of the genus Rudbeckia, esp R. hirta, having flower heads of orange-yellow rays and brown-black centres: family Asteraceae (composites)
  • black-letter day — an unlucky or tragic day.
  • bootstrap memory — memory that allows new programs to be entered because some simple preliminary instructions or information are already built in.
  • boston tea party — a raid in 1773 made by citizens of Boston (disguised as Indians) on three British ships in the harbour as a protest against taxes on tea and the monopoly given to the East India Company. The contents of several hundred chests of tea were dumped into the harbour
  • boundary dispute — dispute between neighbours about the boundary between their properties
  • brandy alexander — an Alexander cocktail made with brandy
  • bright and early — very early in the morning
  • brittany spaniel — a short-tailed French bird dog that typically has a smooth orange- or liver-and-white coat
  • broomrape family — the plant family Orobanchaceae, characterized by scaly, leafless herbaceous plants that are parasitic on the roots of other plants and have irregular flowers and many-seeded capsular fruit, and including beechdrops, broomrape, and squawroot.
  • brown-eyed susan — a composite plant, Rudbeckia triloba, of the southeastern U.S., having a single flower with yellow rays darkening to an orange orbrown at the base and a brownish-black disk.
  • buckley's chance — no chance at all
  • buckwheat family — the plant family Polygonaceae, characterized by herbaceous plants, vines, shrubs, and trees having stems with swollen joints, simple leaves, small, petalless flowers, and fruit in the form of an achene, and including the buckwheat, dock, knotweed, rhubarb, sea grape, and smartweed.
  • bunker mentality — a defensive attitude in which others are seen as hostile or potentially hostile
  • bunya-bunya pine — a tall dome-shaped Australian coniferous tree, Araucaria bidwillii, having edible cones (bunya nuts) and thickish flattened needles
  • buoyancy chamber — an enclosed section of a canoe, float, ship or other object that contains air, foam, or another buoyant substance in order to help maintain buoyancy
  • bureaucratically — of, relating to, or characteristic of a bureaucrat or a bureaucracy; arbitrary and routine.
  • bury the hatchet — to cease hostilities and become reconciled
  • business analyst — (job)   A person who analyses the operations of a department or functional unit to develop a general systems solution to the problem. The solution will typically involve a combination of manual and automated processes. The business analyst can provide insights into an operation for an information systems analyst.
  • buttercup family — the plant family Ranunculaceae, typified by mostly herbaceous plants having usually alternate leaves, multistaminate flowers sometimes lacking petals but with colorful sepals, and including the anemone, buttercup, clematis, columbine, delphinium, and monkshood.
  • butterfly ballot — a ballot paper in the form of two leaves extending from a central spine
  • butterfly damper — a damper, as in a flue, that rotates about a central axis across its face.
  • buying behaviour — the behaviours displayed by consumers when they purchase things, such as preferences, price points, etc
  • bypass operation — an operation involving redirection of blood flow, either to avoid a diseased blood vessel or in order to perform heart surgery
  • byzantine church — Orthodox Church (def 1).
  • byzantine empire — the continuation of the Roman Empire in the East, esp after the deposition of the last emperor in Rome (476 ad). It was finally extinguished by the fall of Constantinople, its capital, in 1453
  • cabbage root fly — a dipterous fly, Erioischia brassicae, whose larvae feed on the roots and stems of cabbages and other brassicas: family Muscidae (houseflies, etc)
  • calorimetrically — In a calorimetric manner.
  • can you beat it? — an expression of utter amazement or surprise
  • canada mayflower — a small wildflower (Maianthemum canadense) of the lily family, with white flowers and red, beadlike berries, found in the N U.S. and in Canada; bead-ruby
  • canterbury bells — a cultivated bellflower (Campanula medium) with white, pink, or blue cuplike flowers
  • canterbury tales — an unfinished literary work by Chaucer, largely in verse, consisting of stories told by pilgrims on their way to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket at Canterbury
  • canyon de chelly — a canyon in NE Arizona, in the Navajo reservation: site contains prehistoric cliff dwellings.
  • cape may warbler — a North American wood warbler, Dendroica tigrina, olive-green striped with black on the wings and back and yellow striped with black on the breast.
  • capital employed — the money used by a business for buying land, buildings, equipment etc
  • carboxylesterase — (enzyme) Any enzyme that catalyses the hydrolysis of a carboxylic ester.
  • carboxypeptidase — any of several digestive enzymes that catalyze the removal of an amino acid from the end of a peptide chain having a free carbonyl group.
  • carry-on luggage — luggage that is taken inside an aircraft by hand personally by a passenger
  • cartridge player — an audio or video system that reads cartridges of magnetic tape
  • caryophyllaceous — of, relating to, or belonging to the Caryophyllaceae, a family of flowering plants including the pink, carnation, sweet william, and chickweed
  • case sensitivity — (text)   Whether a text matching operation distinguishes upper-case (capital) letters from lower case (is "case sensitive") or not ("case insensitive"). Case in file names should be preserved (for readability) but ignored when matching (so the user doesn't have to get it right). MS-DOS does not preserve case in file names, Unix preserves case and matches are case sensitive. Any decent text editor will allow the user to specify whether or not text searches should be case sensitive. Case sensitivity is also relevant in programming (most programming languages distiguish between case in the names of identifiers), and addressing (Internet domain names are case insensitive but RFC 822 local mailbox names are case sensitive). Case insensitive operations are sometimes said to "fold case", from the idea of folding the character code table so that upper and lower case letters coincide. The alternative "smash case" is more likely to be used by someone who considers this behaviour a misfeature or in cases where one case is actually permanently converted to the other. "MS-DOS will automatically smash case in the names of all the files you create".
  • cash on delivery — If you pay for goods cash on delivery, you pay for them in cash when they are delivered. The abbreviation C.O.D. is also used.
  • cashless society — a society in which purchases of goods or services are made by credit card or electronic funds transferral rather than with cash or checks.
  • catachrestically — In a catachrestic way.
  • category listing — A category listing is a list of different product categories such as menswear, womenswear, and childrenswear.
  • category mistake — a sentence that says of something in one category what can only intelligibly be said of something in another, as when speaking of the mind located in space
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