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16-letter words containing a, l, b

  • blind man's buff — a game in which a blindfolded person tries to catch and identify the other players
  • blind man's rule — a carpenter's rule having large numbers to permit its reading in dim light.
  • blind salamander — any of several North American salamanders, especially of the genera Typhlotriton, Typhlomolge, and Haideotriton, that inhabit underground streams or deep wells and have undeveloped eyes and scant pigmentation.
  • blink comparator — an optical instrument used to detect small differences in two photographs of the same field or object by viewing them alternately, switching rapidly from one to the other.
  • block and tackle — a hoisting device in which a rope or chain is passed around a pair of blocks containing one or more pulleys. The upper block is secured overhead and the lower block supports the load, the effort being applied to the free end of the rope or chain
  • blow one's stack — to lose one's temper; fly into a rage
  • blue dawn-flower — a tropical American vine, Ipomoea acuminata, of the morning glory family, having large, funnel-shaped flowers that turn from blue to pink.
  • blue in the face — the pure color of a clear sky; the primary color between green and violet in the visible spectrum, an effect of light with a wavelength between 450 and 500 nm.
  • blue-green algae — any of a division (Cyanophycota) of photosynthetic monerans, microorganisms that contain a blue pigment which obscures the chlorophyll; cyanobacteria
  • blue-winged teal — a small North American duck (Anas discors) found on ponds and rivers
  • bluegrass region — a region in central Kentucky, famous for its horse farms and fields of bluegrass.
  • boarding kennels — a place where dog owners can pay to have their dogs looked after while they are away
  • bomb calorimeter — a device for determining heats of combustion by igniting a sample in a high pressure of oxygen in a sealed vessel and measuring the resulting rise in temperature: used for measuring the calorific value of foods
  • bon gre, mal gre — whether willing or not; willy-nilly.
  • bonneville flats — an area of salt flats in the W part of Great Salt Lake Desert, in NW Utah: site of automobile speed tests.
  • boolean-operator — any operation in which each of the operands and the result take one of two values.
  • bootstrap loader — (operating system)   A short program loaded from non-volatile storage and used to bootstrap a computer. On early computers great efforts were expended on making the bootstrap loader short, in order to make it easy to toggle in via the front panel switches. It was just clever enough to read in a slightly more complex program (usually from punched cards or paper tape), to which it handed control. This program in turn read the application or operating system from a magnetic tape drive or disk drive. Thus, in successive steps, the computer "pulled itself up by its bootstraps" to a useful operating state. Nowadays the bootstrap loader is usually found in ROM or EPROM, and reads the first stage in from a fixed location on the disk, called the "boot block". When this program gains control, it is powerful enough to load the actual OS and hand control over to it. A diskless workstation can use bootp to load its OS from the network.
  • bordelaise sauce — a dark sauce made from meat stock, flour, wine, onions, seasonings, etc., served over broiled meat
  • boreal chickadee — a brown-capped, black-throated chickadee (Parus hudsonicus) found near the Atlantic coast from Labrador to N New York
  • bornholm disease — an epidemic virus infection characterized by pain round the base of the chest
  • borosilicic acid — any of several hypothetical acids that form borosilicates.
  • botanical garden — a place where collections of plants and trees are kept for scientific study and exhibition
  • bouillotte table — a small round table of the 18th century, having around its top a gallery within which a bouchon could be set for the playing of card games.
  • bouquet larkspur — a plant, Delphinium grandiflorum, of eastern Asia, having blue or whitish flowers and hairy fruit.
  • bowman's capsule — a membranous, double-walled capsule surrounding a glomerulus of a nephron.
  • bracknell forest — a unitary authority in SE England, in E Berkshire. Pop: 110 100 (2003 est). Area: 109 sq km (42 sq miles)
  • braille embosser — Braille printer
  • brain aid prolog — (language)   (BAP) A parallel Prolog environment for transputer systems by Frank Bergmann <[email protected]>, Martin Ostermann <[email protected]>, and Guido von Walter <[email protected]> of Brain Aid Systems GbR. BAP is based on a model of communicating sequential Prolog processes. The run-time system consists of a multi-process operating system with support for several applications running concurrently.
  • branchial groove — one of a series of rudimentary depressions on the surface of the embryo between adjacent branchial arches, homologous to the branchial clefts of gill-breathing ancestral forms.
  • brandy alexander — an Alexander cocktail made with brandy
  • breakfast cereal — a type of food made from a cereal plant and commonly eaten at breakfast
  • breeding plumage — the plumage assumed by a male bird during the courtship period, especially in those species that are more colorful at this period.
  • bright and early — very early in the morning
  • british columbia — a province of W Canada, on the Pacific coast: largely mountainous with extensive forests, rich mineral resources, and important fisheries. Capital: Victoria. Pop: 4 400 057 (2011 est). Area: 930 532 sq km (359 279 sq miles)
  • british longhair — a breed of large cat with a semi-long thick soft coat
  • brittany spaniel — a short-tailed French bird dog that typically has a smooth orange- or liver-and-white coat
  • brittle diabetes — uncontrolled insulin disorder
  • broad-shouldered — having broad shoulders
  • broadloom carpet — any carpet woven on a wide loom and not having seams, especially one wider than 54 inches (137 cm).
  • bronchial asthma — asthma.
  • 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.
  • buckley's chance — no chance at all
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • bullet-resistant — not allowing bullets to pass through
  • bullying tactics — the use of intimidation to gain one's objective
  • bundled software — software sold as part of a package with computers or other hardware or software
  • bunker mentality — a defensive attitude in which others are seen as hostile or potentially hostile
  • bureaucratically — of, relating to, or characteristic of a bureaucrat or a bureaucracy; arbitrary and routine.
  • burge's language — Unnamed functional language based on lambda-calculus. Recursive Programming techniques", W.H. Burge, A-W 1975.
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