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16-letter words containing y, r

  • behavior therapy — therapy employing behavior modification
  • benzoyl peroxide — a white, crystalline, water-insoluble, explosive solid, C 7 H 5 O 4 , used chiefly as a bleaching agent for flour, fats, oils, and waxes, and as a catalyst in polymerization reactions.
  • berkeley edif200 — translator-building toolkit Wendell C. Baker and Prof A. Richard Newton of the Electronics Research Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. Version 7.6. Restriction: no-profit without permission.
  • berkeley network — (B-NET) Top level Unix Ethernet software developed at the University of California at Berkeley. There are no formal specifications but UCB's 4.2BSD Unix implementation on the VAX is the de facto standard. Distributed by Unisoft. Includes net.o driver routines for specific hardware, pseudo ttys, daemons, hostname command to set/get name, /etc/hosts database of names and Internet addresses of other hosts, /etc/hosts.equiv host-wide database to control remote access, .rhosts per user version of hosts.equiv. UCB's implementation of the Internet Protocol includes trailers to improve performance on paged memory management systems such as VAXen. These trailers are an exception to the Internet Protocol specification.
  • bertillon system — a system formerly in use for identifying persons, esp criminals, by means of a detailed record of physical characteristics
  • beryllium copper — a copper alloy containing a small amount of beryllium and often some nickel or cobalt, having high strength, hardness, and electrical conductivity.
  • bicyclic terpene — (originally) any of a class of monocyclic hydrocarbons of the formula C 10 H 16 , obtained from plants.
  • bidirectionality — capable of reacting or functioning in two, usually opposite, directions.
  • biliary calculus — an abnormal stonelike mass, usually of cholesterol, formed in the gallbladder or bile passages.
  • billy goat beard — a man's beard that is long under the chin and shaved elsewhere
  • binary operation — a mathematical operation in which two elements are combined to yield a single result: Addition and multiplication are binary operations on the set of real numbers.
  • 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 honours — (in Britain) honorary titles conferred on the official birthday of the sovereign
  • birthday present — a gift given to someone on their birthday
  • birthwort family — the plant family Aristolochiaceae, typified by mostly tropical woody vines and herbaceous plants, having alternate, heart-shaped leaves and flowers lacking true petals but having three petallike sepals, and including the birthwort, Dutchman's-pipe, and wild ginger.
  • bite your tongue — either of the two fleshy parts or folds forming the margins of the mouth and functioning in speech.
  • black chokeberry — See under chokeberry (def 1).
  • black-letter day — an unlucky or tragic day.
  • blocked currency — a currency that is not freely convertible because of exchange controls imposed on it
  • bloomsbury group — a group of writers, artists, and intellectuals living and working in and around Bloomsbury in London from about 1907 to 1930. Influenced by the philosophy of G. E. Moore, they included Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, and John Maynard Keynes
  • blue huckleberry — tangleberry.
  • blue-ribbon jury — a jury composed of persons having more than ordinary education and presumably exceptional intelligence and perceptiveness, selected by the court on the motion of plaintiff or defendant to try cases of unusual complexity or importance.
  • board of inquiry — a group set up to inquire into accidents, etc
  • bob's your uncle — everything is or will turn out all right
  • bog whortleberry — a plant, Vaccinium uliginosum, of mountain regions, having pink flowers and black fruits
  • 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
  • boutique brewery — microbrewery.
  • 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.
  • buckthorn family — the plant family Rhamnaceae, characterized by shrubs and trees having alternate, simple leaves, clusters of small flowers, and fruit in the form of a drupe or capsule, and including the buckthorn, cascara, and New Jersey tea.
  • bunker mentality — a defensive attitude in which others are seen as hostile or potentially hostile
  • 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.
  • burgundy trefoil — alfalfa.
  • burkitt lymphoma — a rare type of tumour of the white blood cells, occurring mainly in Africa and associated with infection by Epstein-Barr virus
  • burrowing blenny — graveldiver.
  • bury st. edmunds — a city in W Suffolk, in E England: medieval shrine.
  • bury the hatchet — to cease hostilities and become reconciled
  • bush huckleberry — a huckleberry shrub, Gaylussacia dumosa, having sticky, hairy twigs, white or pink flowers, and tasteless but edible black fruit.
  • 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.
  • butterfly effect — the idea, used in chaos theory, that a very small difference in the initial state of a physical system can make a significant difference to the state at some later time
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