15-letter words starting with d
- draw oneself up — to assume a straighter posture; stand or sit straight
- drawing account — an account used by a partner or employee for cash withdrawals.
- dress rehearsal — a rehearsal of a play or other performance in costume and with scenery, properties, and lights arranged and operated as for a performance: often the final rehearsal.
- dressed to kill — woman: in stylish clothes
- dribs and drabs — small sporadic amounts
- drift indicator — an instrument that indicates the amount of drift of an aircraft.
- drilling jacket — A drilling jacket is a small steel platform used for drilling wells in shallow and calm water.
- drink deep (of) — to take in a large amount (of) by or as by drinking
- drinking trough — a narrow open container in which water for animals is put
- drip irrigation — a system of crop irrigation involving the controlled delivery of water directly to individual plants through a network of tubes or pipes.
- drive-up window — a window through which customers are served at a drive-through facility.
- driving licence — A driving licence is a card showing that you are qualified to drive because you have passed a driving test.
- driving license — A driving license is the same as a driver's license.
- drop handlebars — aerodynamic handlebars that drop down and curve towards the rider at the ends rather than turning upwards as on conventional bicycles
- dropping bottle — a bottle with correlated lengthwise grooves in the neck and in the stopper, permitting a controlled flow of the liquid contents in the form of drops.
- droste-hulshoff — Annette Elisabeth Freiin von [ah-net-uh ey-lee-zah-bet frahy-in fuh n] /ɑˈnɛt ə eɪˈli zɑˌbɛt ˈfraɪ ɪn fən/ (Show IPA), 1797–1848, German poet.
- drug trafficker — someone that trades in illegal drugs
- drunken driving — the crime of driving while classified as under the influence of alcohol because the quantity of alcohol in your blood exceeds legally permitted levels
- dry goods store — a shop selling textiles and haberdashery
- drying-up cloth — a tea towel
- dryland farming — a mode of farming, practiced in regions of slight or insufficient rainfall, that relies mainly on tillage methods rendering the soil more receptive of moisture and on the selection of suitable crops.
- dual admissions — a system whereby students attaining less good marks than what is required are offered a place provided they successfully complete another course first to improve some aspect of their work
- duchesse brisee — See under duchesse.
- duelling pistol — one of a pair of identical pistols made specifically for use in duels
- dumbbell nebula — the planetary nebula in the constellation Vulpecula, which in photographs appears to have the shape of a dumbbell.
- dumdum (bullet) — a soft-nosed bullet that expands when it hits, inflicting a large, jagged wound
- dumpster diving — the practice of foraging in garbage that has been put out on the street in dumpsters, garbage cans, etc., for discarded items that may still be valuable, useful, or fixable.
- duplex printing — a feature of some printers allowing them automatically to do double-sided printing
- duplicitousness — The state or condition of being duplicitous.
- duque de caxias — a city in SE Brazil: a suburb of Rio de Janeiro.
- durchkomponiert — having a different tune for each section rather than having repeated melodies
- dutchman's-pipe — a climbing vine, Aristolochia durior, of the birthwort family, having large, heart-shaped leaves and brownish-purple flowers of a curved form suggesting a tobacco pipe.
- duty to retreat — a legal principle that requires a person as a first response to back away or flee from a threatening situation rather than attempt self-defense by deadly force: Duty to retreat has always been a debatable doctrine.
- dvorak keyboard — a keyboard designed to facilitate typing speed by having the most frequently used characters on the home row, with all the vowels on the left side.
- dwarf poinciana — royal poinciana.
- dye sensitizing — the producing of panchromatic or orthochromatic film by treating it with an emulsion containing dyes that absorb light of all or certain colors.
- dyer's woodruff — a European plant, Asperula tinctoria, of the madder family, having red or pinkish-white flowers and red roots.
- dynamic binding — The property of object-oriented programming languages where the code executed to perform a given operation is determined at run time from the class of the operand(s) (the receiver of the message). There may be several different classes of objects which can receive a given message. An expression may denote an object which may have more than one possible class and that class can only be determined at run time. New classes may be created that can receive a particular message, without changing (or recompiling) the code which sends the message. An class may be created that can receive any set of existing messages. One important reason for having dynamic binding is that it provides a mechanism for selecting between alternatives which is arguably more robust than explicit selection by conditionals or pattern matching. When a new subclass is added, or an existing subclass changes, the necessary modifications are localised: you don't have incomplete conditionals and broken patterns scattered all over the program. See overloading.
- dynamic pricing — the practice of offering goods at a price that changes according to the level of demand, the type of customer, the state of the weather, etc
- dynamic routing — (networking) (Or "adaptive routing") Routing that adjusts automatically to network topology or traffic changes.
- dynamic scoping — dynamic scope
- dysfunctionally — not performing normally, as an organ or structure of the body; malfunctioning.
- dysmorphophobia — an obsessive fear that one's body, or any part of it, is repulsive or may become so
- dysmorphophobic — relating to or affected with dysmorphophobia
- dysteleological — Of or pertaining to dysteleology.
- dystrophication — the process by which a body of water becomes dystrophic.