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19-letter words containing n, i, s

  • attachment disorder — an emotional and behavioral disorder arising from a failure to form a strong bond with one’s primary caregiver in early childhood and affecting one’s social relationships in later childhood and adulthood. See also attachment (def 3a).
  • attendance register — an official list of people who are present at an institution such as a school
  • attractive nuisance — Law. a doctrine of tort law under which a person who creates or permits to exist on his or her land a dangerous condition attractive to children, as an unfenced swimming pool, is liable for their resulting injuries, even though the injured are trespassers.
  • audio response unit — a device that enables a computer to give a spoken response by generating sounds similar to human speech.
  • augsburg confession — the statement of beliefs and doctrines of the Lutherans, formulated by Melanchthon and endorsed by the Lutheran princes, which was presented at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 and which became the chief creed of the Lutheran Church.
  • australian fan palm — a fan palm, Livistona australis, of Australia, having a slender, reddish-brown trunk, spiny leafstalks, and round fruit.
  • australian tea tree — a shrubby Australian tree, Leptospermum laevigatum, of the myrtle family, having lance-shaped leaves and white, bell-shaped flowers.
  • austro-prussian war — the war (1866) in which Prussia, Italy, and some minor German states opposed Austria, Saxony, Hanover, and the states of southern Germany.
  • author's alteration — a correction or change made in typeset copy that is not a correction of an error introduced by the compositor. Abbreviation: AA, A.A., a.a., aa.
  • autotransplantation — autograft.
  • axiomatic semantics — (theory)   A set of assertions about properties of a system and how they are effected by program execution. The axiomatic semantics of a program could include pre- and post-conditions for operations. In particular if you view the program as a state transformer (or collection of state transformers), the axiomatic semantics is a set of invariants on the state which the state transformer satisfies. E.g. for a function with the type: sort_list :: [T] -> [T] we might give the precondition that the argument of the function is a list, and a postcondition that the return value is a list that is sorted. One interesting use of axiomatic semantics is to have a language that has a finitely computable sublanguage that is used for specifying pre and post conditions, and then have the compiler prove that the program will satisfy those conditions. See also operational semantics, denotational semantics.
  • bachelor of science — A Bachelor of Science is a first degree in a science subject. In British English, it can also mean a person with that degree. The abbreviation BSc or , BSc is also used.
  • bacillary dysentery — shigellosis.
  • baja california sur — a state of NW Mexico, in the S part of the Lower California peninsula. Capital: La Paz. Pop: 423 516 (2000). Area: 73 475 sq km (28 363 sq miles)
  • 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
  • ballot-box stuffing — the act of illegally submitting more than one vote in a ballot in which only one vote is permitted
  • bandar seri begawan — the capital of Brunei. Pop: 64 000 (2005 est)
  • bargaining position — the position of a person, group, or organization in a negotiation, with respect to their ability to achieve a deal which is favourable to themselves
  • batterie de cuisine — cooking utensils collectively; pots and pans, etc
  • be burnt to a crisp — If something is burnt to a crisp, it is completely burnt.
  • be someone's junior — to be younger than someone
  • beauty preparations — the cosmetics, creams etc used to improve someone's beauty
  • behavioral genetics — an interdisciplinary field studying the effects of genetics and hereditary factors on animal and human behavior.
  • behavioural science — the application of scientific methods to the study of the behaviour of organisms
  • behind closed doors — If people have talks and discussions behind closed doors, they have them in private because they want them to be kept secret.
  • belgian east africa — a former Belgian trust territory in Africa, also (1924–62) Ruanda-Urundi, now the independent countries of Rwanda and Burundi.
  • benedict's solution — a chemical solution used to detect the presence of glucose and other reducing sugars. Medically, it is used to test the urine of diabetics
  • bernoulli's theorem — Statistics. law of averages (def 1).
  • bernstein condition — (parallel)   Processes cannot execute in parallel if one effects values used by the other. Nor can they execute in parallel if any subsequent process uses data effected by both, i.e. whose value might depend on the order of execution.
  • beside the question — not related to the subject under discussion
  • bicarbonate of soda — Bicarbonate of soda is a white powder which is used in baking to make cakes rise, and also as a medicine for your stomach.
  • 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
  • bloodstock industry — the breeding and training of racehorses
  • blow someone's mind — (of a drug, esp LSD) to alter someone's mental state
  • blow the whistle on — to make a clear musical sound, a series of such sounds, or a high-pitched, warbling sound by the forcible expulsion of the breath through a small opening formed by contracting the lips, or through the teeth, with the aid of the tongue.
  • blue screen of life — (operating system)   (BSOL, by analogy with "Blue Screen of Death") The opening screen of Microsoft Windows NT. This screen shows the file system loading, and any problems such as conversions from FAT to NTFS or a scan of a hard drive. The Blue Screen of Life occurs in one way, as opposed to the Blue Screen of Death, which can occur in many different ways and times.
  • blue-ringed octopus — a highly venomous octopus, Octopus maculosus, of E Australia which exhibits blue bands on its tentacles when disturbed
  • booker t washington — Booker T(aliaferro) [boo k-er tol-uh-ver] /ˈbʊk ər ˈtɒl ə vər/ (Show IPA), 1856–1915, U.S. reformer, educator, author, and lecturer.
  • bordering countries — countries that share a border with a particular country
  • 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
  • bracket abstraction — (compiler)   An algorithm which turns a term into a function of some variable. The result of using bracket abstraction on T with respect to variable v, written as [v]T, is a term containing no occurrences of v and denoting a function f such that f v = T. This defines the function f = (\ v . T). Using bracket abstraction and currying we can define a language without bound variables in which the only operation is monadic function application. See combinator.
  • breathing apparatus — an apparatus, usually consisting of tanks of air or oxygen and a mouthpiece, that enables the wearer to breath in difficult conditions such as a smoke-filled building
  • briggsian logarithm — common logarithm.
  • bright young things — young, fun-loving, fashionable upper-class people, esp of the 1920s
  • brightline spectrum — the spectrum of an incandescent substance appearing on a spectrogram as one or more bright lines against a dark background.
  • brimstone butterfly — a common yellow butterfly, Gonepteryx rhamni, of N temperate regions of the Old World: family Pieridae
  • british west indies — a former name for the states in the Caribbean that are members of the Commonwealth: the Bahamas, Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Kitts-Nevis, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Lucia, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines; along with the islands which remain as United Kingdom dependencies: Anguilla, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat, the Turks and Caicos Islands and the British Virgin Islands
  • 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.
  • buildings insurance — insurance which covers buildings
  • business accounting — the keeping of detailed accounts relating to a business or businesses
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