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19-letter words containing y

  • autoerotic asphyxia — asphyxia caused by intentionally strangling oneself while masturbating in order to intensify the orgasm through reduced oxygen flow to the brain.
  • bacillary dysentery — shigellosis.
  • bacteriochlorophyll — a pale blue-gray form of chlorophyll that is unique to the photosynthetic but anaerobic purple bacteria.
  • balance of payments — A country's balance of payments is the difference, over a period of time, between the payments it makes to other countries for imports and the payments it receives from other countries for exports.
  • balloon angioplasty — angioplasty in which a balloon catheter is moved to a blocked area of a blood vessel where the balloon is inflated to expand or force open the vessel
  • balsam woolly aphid — any plant louse of the family Aphididae, characterized by a waxy secretion that appears like a jumbled mass of fine, curly, white cottony or woolly threads, as Eriosoma lanigerum (woolly apple aphid or American blight) and Prociphilus tessellatus (woolly alder aphid)
  • bankruptcy petition — an official request for protection under bankruptcy laws, which initiates bankruptcy proceedings
  • barbados gooseberry — Also called lemon vine. a treelike cactus, Pereskia aculeata, of tropical America, characterized by broad, elliptical leaves and spiny stems bearing a yellow, edible fruit.
  • barrack-room lawyer — a person who freely offers opinions, esp in legal matters, that he or she is unqualified to give
  • basic object system — (programming)   (BOS) A C-callable library that implements the notion of object and which uses Tcl as its interpreter for interpreted methods (you can have "compiled" methods in C, and mix compiled and interpreted methods in the same object, plus lots more). You can subclass and mix in existing objects using BOS to extend, among other things, the set of tk widgets. BOS is a class-free object system, also called a prototype-based object system; it is modelled loosely on the Self system from Stanford University. Version 1.31 by Sean Levy <[email protected]>.
  • beauty preparations — the cosmetics, creams etc used to improve someone's beauty
  • beggar-my-neighbour — a card game in which one player tries to win all the cards of the other player
  • beginning inventory — A beginning inventory is all of the goods, services, or materials that a business has available for use or sale at the start of a new accounting period.
  • bellybutton surgery — laparoscopy.
  • benzylidene acetone — a colorless, crystalline, water-insoluble solid, C 10 H 10 O, having a vanillalike odor, used chiefly as a scent in the manufacture of perfume.
  • beta-naphthyl group — See under naphthyl.
  • betamethyl acrolein — crotonaldehyde.
  • bi-lateral symmetry — a basic body plan in which the left and right sides of the organism can be divided into approximate mirror images of each other along the midline.
  • binary large object — (database)   (BLOB) A large block of data stored in a database, such as an image or sound file. A BLOB has no structure which can be interpreted by the database management system but is known only by its size and location.
  • binocular disparity — the small differences in the positions of the parts of the images falling on each eye that results when each eye views the scene from a slightly different position; these differences make stereoscopic vision possible
  • bird's-eye primrose — a Eurasian primrose, Primula farinosa, having clusters of purplish flowers with yellow centres
  • bismuth oxychloride — a white, crystalline, water-insoluble powder, BiOCl, used chiefly in the manufacture of pigments, face powders, and artificial pearls.
  • bit-paired keyboard — (hardware)   (Obsolete, or "bit-shift keyboard") A non-standard keyboard layout that seems to have originated with the Teletype ASR-33 and remained common for several years on early computer equipment. The ASR-33 was a mechanical device (see EOU), so the only way to generate the character codes from keystrokes was by some physical linkage. The design of the ASR-33 assigned each character key a basic pattern that could be modified by flipping bits if the SHIFT or the CTRL key was pressed. In order to avoid making the thing more of a Rube Goldberg kluge than it already was, the design had to group characters that shared the same basic bit pattern on one key. Looking at the ASCII chart, we find: high low bits bits 0000 0001 0010 0011 0100 0101 0110 0111 1000 1001 010 ! " # $ % & ' ( ) 011 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 This is why the characters !"#$%&'() appear where they do on a Teletype (thankfully, they didn't use shift-0 for space). This was *not* the weirdest variant of the QWERTY layout widely seen, by the way; that prize should probably go to one of several (differing) arrangements on IBM's even clunkier 026 and 029 card punches. When electronic terminals became popular, in the early 1970s, there was no agreement in the industry over how the keyboards should be laid out. Some vendors opted to emulate the Teletype keyboard, while others used the flexibility of electronic circuitry to make their product look like an office typewriter. These alternatives became known as "bit-paired" and "typewriter-paired" keyboards. To a hacker, the bit-paired keyboard seemed far more logical - and because most hackers in those days had never learned to touch-type, there was little pressure from the pioneering users to adapt keyboards to the typewriter standard. The doom of the bit-paired keyboard was the large-scale introduction of the computer terminal into the normal office environment, where out-and-out technophobes were expected to use the equipment. The "typewriter-paired" standard became universal, "bit-paired" hardware was quickly junked or relegated to dusty corners, and both terms passed into disuse.
  • blackbelly rosefish — a reddish scorpionfish, Helicolenus dactylopterus, inhabiting the deep waters of the western Atlantic Ocean.
  • blind carbon (copy) — a carbon copy of a letter sent to someone other than the addressee, with no indication on the original letter that such a copy has been sent
  • bloodstock industry — the breeding and training of racehorses
  • bloody-nosed beetle — a beetle, Timarcha tenebricosa, that exudes bright red blood when alarmed: family Chrysomelidae
  • blot one's copybook — to spoil one's reputation by making a mistake, offending against social customs, etc
  • blowing your buffer — (jargon)   Losing your train of thought. A reference to buffer overflow.
  • bottomhole assembly — The bottomhole assembly is the lower part of a drill string, which has the drill bit and mud motor.
  • 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
  • bright young things — young, fun-loving, fashionable upper-class people, esp of the 1920s
  • brimstone butterfly — a common yellow butterfly, Gonepteryx rhamni, of N temperate regions of the Old World: family Pieridae
  • 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.
  • buy a pig in a poke — to buy, get, or agree to something without sight or knowledge of it in advance
  • by hook or by crook — If someone says they will do something by hook or by crook, they are determined to do it, even if they have to make a great effort or use dishonest means.
  • by leaps and bounds — with unexpectedly rapid progess
  • by one's bootstraps — by one's own efforts; unaided
  • cable-stayed bridge — a type of suspension bridge in which the supporting cables are connected directly to the bridge deck without the use of suspenders
  • calcium oxychloride — a white powder that decomposes on contact with water and has the characteristic odor of gaseous chlorine: regarded, when dry, as a mixed calcium hypochlorite-chloride, used as a commercial bleach for wood pulp, textiles, oils, and soaps, and in laundering as a decolorizer and disinfectant.
  • cannot very well do — If you say that you cannot very well do something, you mean that it would not be right or possible to do it.
  • canterbury pilgrims — the pilgrims whose stories are told in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
  • capacity attendance — a situation when a venue for an event is as full as it can be
  • cape york peninsula — large peninsula in NE Australia, part of Queensland, between the Gulf of Carpentaria & the Coral Sea
  • captain of industry — You can refer to the owners or senior managers of industrial companies as captains of industry.
  • catalytic converter — A catalytic converter is a device which is fitted to a car's exhaust to reduce the pollution coming from it.
  • catalytic reforming — Catalytic reforming is a process that converts petroleum refinery naphthas to high-octane blending components.
  • catch someone's eye — If something catches your eye, you suddenly notice it.
  • category management — the management of a range of related products in a way designed to increase sales of all of the products
  • cauchy's inequality — Schwarz inequality (def 1).
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