12-letter words containing a, b, l, n, c
- bill and coo — the parts of a bird's jaws that are covered with a horny or leathery sheath; beak.
- binary color — secondary color.
- bingo caller — the person who shouts out the numbers to bingo players
- binocularity — binocular characteristics
- biotechnical — relating to biotechnology
- black bryony — a climbing herbaceous Eurasian plant, Tamus communis, having small greenish flowers and poisonous red berries: family Dioscoreaceae
- black canyon — a canyon of the Colorado River between Arizona and Nevada: site of Boulder Dam.
- black heroin — a very potent and addictive form of heroin that is dark-colored.
- black knight — a person or firm that makes an unwelcome takeover bid for a company
- black prince — Edward2 (Prince of Wales)
- black tongue — canine pellagra.
- black walnut — a North American walnut tree, Juglans nigra, with hard dark wood and edible oily nuts
- blackbirding — a common European thrush, Turdus merula, the male of which is black with a yellow bill.
- blackcurrant — In Europe, blackcurrants are a type of very small, dark purple fruits that grow in bunches on bushes.
- blank cheque — If someone is given a blank cheque, they are given the authority to spend as much money as they need or want.
- blind casing — (in a box window frame) a rough framework to which the trim is secured.
- bliss carman — (William) Bliss, 1861–1929, Canadian poet and journalist in the U.S.
- block caving — a method of mining a large block of ore by systematically undercutting so the ore will cave. Compare cave (def 5a).
- block island — an island off the coast of and a part of Rhode Island, at the E entrance to Long Island Sound.
- block signal — a fixed railroad signal governing the movements of trains entering and using a given section of track.
- bonnyclabber — clotted or curdled milk
- botticellian — Sandro [san-droh,, sahn-;; Italian sahn-draw] /ˈsæn droʊ,, ˈsɑn-;; Italian ˈsɑn drɔ/ (Show IPA), (Alessandro di Mariano dei Filipepi) 1444?–1510, Italian painter.
- boudin blanc — a boiled sausage made with light-colored meat, as veal or chicken, and without blood
- bounce flash — a flash lamp designed to produce a bounced flash.
- bowel cancer — cancer of the colon
- branch plant — a plant or factory in Canada belonging to a company whose headquarters are in another country
- brown hackle — an artificial fly having a peacock herl body, golden tag and tail, and brown hackle.
- bubble dance — a solo dance by a nude or nearly nude woman, as in a burlesque show, using one or more balloons for covering.
- buccolingual — of or relating to the cheek and tongue.
- cable length — a unit of length in nautical use that has various values, including 100 fathoms (600 feet)
- cable-laying — involved in or connected to the activity of laying cables
- cablecasting — relating to broadcasting by cable
- calabar bean — the dark brown very poisonous seed of a leguminous woody climbing plant, Physostigma venenosum, of tropical Africa, used as a source of the drug physostigmine
- calibrations — Plural form of calibration.
- 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).
- cannibalised — Simple past tense and past participle of cannibalise.
- cannibalized — Simple past tense and past participle of cannibalize.
- cannibalizes — Third-person singular simple present indicative form of cannibalize.
- cannonballed — Simple past tense and past participle of cannonball.
- carbocholine — carbachol.
- carbon black — a black finely divided form of amorphous carbon produced by incomplete combustion of natural gas or petroleum: used to reinforce rubber and in the manufacture of pigments and ink
- carbon cycle — the circulation of carbon between living organisms and their surroundings. Carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is synthesized by plants into plant tissue, which is ingested and metabolized by animals and converted to carbon dioxide again during respiration and decay
- carbon steel — steel whose characteristics are determined by the amount of carbon it contains
- carbon value — an empirical measurement of the tendency of a lubricant to form carbon when in use
- carnal abuse — Law. any lascivious contact with the sexual organs of a child by an adult, especially without sexual intercourse.
- carolina bay — any of the shallow, usually marshy, oval depressions found in the coastal plains of the eastern U.S. that are heavily forested and have rich soil.
- cassel brown — Vandyke brown.
- celebrations — Plural form of celebration.
- celebutantes — Plural form of celebutante.