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18-letter words containing b, e, l

  • exhibition killing — the murder of a hostage by terrorists, filmed for broadcasting on television or the internet
  • eyeball to eyeball — If you are eyeball to eyeball with someone, you are in their presence and involved in a meeting, dispute, or contest with them. You can also talk about having an eyeball to eyeball meeting or confrontation.
  • fantasy basketball — imagination, especially when extravagant and unrestrained.
  • farmer-labor party — a political party in Minnesota, founded in 1920 and merged with the Democratic Party in 1944.
  • file control block — (operating system)   (FCB) An MS-DOS data structure that stores information about an open file. The number of FCBs is configured in CONFIG.SYS with a command FCBS=x,y where x (between 1 and 255 inclusive, default 4) specifies the number of file control blocks to allocate and therefore the number of files that MS-DOS can have open at one time. y (not needed from DOS 5.0 onward) specifies the number of files to be closed automatically if all x are in use.
  • fire in your belly — If you say that someone has fire in their belly, you are expressing approval of them because they are energetic, enthusiastic, and have very strong feelings.
  • flash butt welding — a method of welding metal edge-to-edge with a powerful electric flash followed by the application of pressure.
  • flat file database — (database)   A database containing a single table, stored in a single flat file, often in a human-readable format such as comma-separated values or fixed-width columns.
  • flat on one's back — lying supine
  • flat-bottomed rail — a rail having a cross section like an inverted T, with the top extremity enlarged slightly to form the head
  • football supporter — a person who supports a particular football team
  • forget-me-not blue — a shade of blue similar to the shade of the flowers of a forget-me-not
  • forward compatible — forward compatibility
  • four-color problem — the problem, solved in 1976, of proving the theorem that any geographic map can be colored using only four colors so that no connected countries with a common boundary are colored the same color.
  • fuller rose beetle — a beetle, Pantomorus godmani, that feeds on the leaves of roses as well as on those of citrus and other fruit trees.
  • gabriele dannunzio — Gabriele [Italian gah-bree-e-le] /Italian ˌgɑ briˈɛ lɛ/ (Show IPA), (Duca Minimo) 1863–1938, Italian soldier, novelist, and poet.
  • gamal abdel nasser — Gamal Abdel [guh-mahl ab-doo l,, juh-] /gəˈmɑl ˈæb dʊl,, dʒə-/ (Show IPA), 1918–70, Egyptian military and political leader: prime minister of Egypt 1954–56; president of Egypt 1956–58; president of the United Arab Republic 1958–70.
  • gamblers anonymous — an organization that holds group meetings to help people who are addicted to gambling
  • garbage collection — (programming)   (GC) The process by which dynamically allocated storage is reclaimed during the execution of a program. The term usually refers to automatic periodic storage reclamation by the garbage collector (part of the run-time system), as opposed to explicit code to free specific blocks of memory. Automatic garbage collection is usually triggered during memory allocation when the amount free memory falls below some threshold or after a certain number of allocations. Normal execution is suspended and the garbage collector is run. There are many variations on this basic scheme. Languages like Lisp represent expressions as graphs built from cells which contain pointers and data. These languages use automatic dynamic storage allocation to build expressions. During the evaluation of an expression it is necessary to reclaim space which is used by subexpressions but which is no longer pointed to by anything. This reclaimed memory is returned to the free memory pool for subsequent reallocation. Without garbage collection the program's memory requirements would increase monotonically throughout execution, possibly exceeding system limits on virtual memory size. The three main methods are mark-sweep garbage collection, reference counting and copying garbage collection. See also the AI koan about garbage collection.
  • gas-permeable lens — a semisoft contact lens, usually removed each day, that allows air to pass through to the eye and affords a wider range of vision corrections than a soft contact lens.
  • geiger-muller tube — a tube functioning as an ionization chamber within a Geiger counter.
  • gilbert and george — a team of artists, Gilbert Proesch, Italian, born 1942, and George Passmore, British, born 1943: noted esp for their photomontages and performance works
  • giuseppe garibaldi — Giuseppe [juh-sep-ee;; Italian joo-zep-pe] /dʒəˈsɛp i;; Italian dʒuˈzɛp pɛ/ (Show IPA), 1807–82, Italian patriot and general.
  • gladden sb's heart — If you say that something gladdens someone's heart, you mean that it makes them feel pleased and hopeful.
  • gnu public licence — (legal)   Properly known as the General Public License. Improperly known as the General Public Virus.
  • golden bantam corn — a horticultural variety of sweet corn having yellow kernels.
  • golden gate bridge — a bridge connecting N California with San Francisco peninsula. 4200-foot (1280-meter) center span.
  • golden-brown algae — a group of mostly marine, motile algae of the phylum Chlorophyta, characterized by the presence of the pigments chlorophyll, carotene, and xanthophyll, which impart golden to yellow-brown colors.
  • gooseneck barnacle — goose barnacle
  • ground rule double — a safe hit ruled for two bases according to the rules of a particular stadium, as when a fly ball bounces once in the outfield and then clears a fence.
  • grumbling appendix — a condition in which the appendix causes intermittent pain but appendicitis has not developed
  • hamilton's problem — Hamiltonian problem
  • handkerchief table — corner table.
  • handlebar mustache — A handlebar mustache is a long thick mustache with curled ends.
  • hardy-weinberg law — a principle stating that in an infinitely large, randomly mating population in which selection, migration, and mutation do not occur, the frequencies of alleles and genotypes do not change from generation to generation.
  • hawksbill (turtle) — a medium-sized marine turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata, family Cheloniidae) having a hawklike beak and a horny shell from which tortoise shell is obtained
  • head disk assembly — (hardware, storage)   (HDA) A sealed, high capacity mainframe hard disk with integral heads, as opposed to a removable disk.
  • hebdomadal council — the governing council or senate of Oxford University
  • hexachlorobiphenyl — (organic compound) Either of forty-two isomers of the polychlorinated biphenyl containing six chlorine atoms.
  • highbush blueberry — a spreading, bushy shrub, Vaccinium corymbosum, of eastern North America, having small, urn-shaped, white or pinkish flowers, and bluish-black edible fruit, growing about 10 feet (3 meters) high.
  • honorable ordinary — any of the ordinaries believed to be among those that are oldest or that were the source of the other ordinaries, as the chief, pale, fess, bend, chevron, cross, and saltire.
  • honourable mention — If something that you do in a competition is given an honourable mention, it receives special praise from the judges although it does not actually win a prize.
  • how the wind blows — air in natural motion, as that moving horizontally at any velocity along the earth's surface: A gentle wind blew through the valley. High winds were forecast.
  • htmlcommentbox.com — (web)   A service for adding a comment box to any web page, allowing visitors to leave comments and the site owner to review them.
  • hyperbilirubinemia — an abnormally high level of bilirubin in the blood, manifested by jaundice, anorexia, and malaise, occurring in association with liver disease and certain hemolytic anemias.
  • i would be obliged — expressions used to tell someone in a polite but firm way that one wants them to do something
  • impressionableness — The quality of being impressionable.
  • in black and white — without colour
  • in the belief that — If you do one thing in the belief that another thing is true or will happen, you do it because you think, usually wrongly, that it is true or will happen.
  • incommensurability — not commensurable; having no common basis, measure, or standard of comparison.
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