16-letter words containing p
- biocompatibility — the capability of coexistence with living tissues or organisms without causing harm: Artificial joint adhesives must have biocompatibility with bone and muscle.
- biotic potential — the capacity of a population of organisms to increase in numbers under optimum environmental conditions.
- bipolar disorder — Bipolar disorder is a mental illness in which a person's state of mind changes between extreme happiness and extreme depression.
- bird of paradise — A bird of paradise is a songbird which is found mainly in New Guinea. The male birds have very brightly coloured feathers.
- bird's-eye maple — a cut of sugar maple wood used especially for veneers, having a wavy grain with many dark, circular markings.
- bird's-nest soup — a rich spicy Chinese soup made from the outer part of the nests of SE Asian swifts of the genus Collocalia
- bird-of-paradise — Also called bird-of-paradise flower. any of several plants of the genus Strelitzia, native to southern Africa, especially S. reginae, having a large, showy orange and blue inflorescence.
- birthday present — a gift given to someone on their birthday
- bit-mapped image — a computer image that is held in memory as a series of colored dots in a grid, each dot represented by one or more bits.
- bitter principle — any of various bitter-tasting substances, such as aloin, usually extracted from plants
- black bottom pie — a rich pie with a rum- or whiskey-flavored chocolate filling, often with a crust of crushed gingersnaps, and topped with whipped cream.
- black propaganda — propaganda that does not come from the source it claims to come from
- black woodpecker — a large woodpecker, Dryocopus martius, found in parts of Eurasia and Africa
- black-light trap — a trap for insects that uses ultraviolet light as an attractant.
- bleaching powder — a white powder with the odour of chlorine, consisting of chlorinated calcium hydroxide with an approximate formula CaCl(OCl).4H2O. It is used in solution as a bleaching agent and disinfectant
- blenheim spaniel — a variety of toy spaniel that is white with reddish-brown spots
- 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.
- bloomsbury group — a group of writers, artists, and intellectuals living and working in and around Bloomsbury in London from about 1907 to 1930. Influenced by the philosophy of G. E. Moore, they included Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, and John Maynard Keynes
- board of pardons — an agency that determines which prisoners are to be released on parole or discretionary mandatory supervision and recommends pardons
- boatswain's pipe — a whistle used formerly to give orders on board ship
- bombing campaign — a concerted, intensive and prolonged bombing of a target
- 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.
- bootstrap memory — memory that allows new programs to be entered because some simple preliminary instructions or information are already built in.
- boston cream pie — a cake of two layers with icing and a creamy filling
- boston tea party — a raid in 1773 made by citizens of Boston (disguised as Indians) on three British ships in the harbour as a protest against taxes on tea and the monopoly given to the East India Company. The contents of several hundred chests of tea were dumped into the harbour
- bound up in/with — If one thing is bound up with or in another, they are closely connected with each other, and it is difficult to consider the two things separately.
- boundary dispute — dispute between neighbours about the boundary between their properties
- 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.
- 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.
- brake horsepower — the rate at which an engine does work, expressed in horsepower. It is measured by the resistance of an applied brake
- branchiopneustic — breathing by means of gills, as certain aquatic insect larvae.
- brand acceptance — the extent to which consumers recognize and welcome a brand
- break-even point — When a company reaches break-even point, the money it makes from the sale of goods or services is just enough to cover the cost of supplying those goods or services, but not enough to make a profit.
- breeding plumage — the plumage assumed by a male bird during the courtship period, especially in those species that are more colorful at this period.
- bristlecone pine — a coniferous tree, Pinus aristata, of the western US, bearing cones with bristle-like prickles: one of the longest-lived trees, useful in radiocarbon dating
- brittany spaniel — a short-tailed French bird dog that typically has a smooth orange- or liver-and-white coat
- broadloom carpet — any carpet woven on a wide loom and not having seams, especially one wider than 54 inches (137 cm).
- brompton mixture — a mixture of narcotics, tranquilizers, and alcohol, used to kill pain for terminally ill patients
- bronchopneumonia — inflammation of the lungs, originating in the bronchioles
- brood parasitism — a type of parasitism in which a bird (brood parasite), as a cowbird or European cuckoo, lays and abandons its eggs in the nest of another species
- 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.
- brothel-creepers — soft-soled men's shoes that were originally popular in the 1950s
- bulletproof vest — a protective garment
- bumper to bumper — If traffic is bumper to bumper, the vehicles are so close to one another that they are almost touching and are moving very slowly.
- bumper-to-bumper — marked by a long line of cars moving slowly or with many stops and starts, one behind the other: bumper-to-bumper traffic.
- bunya-bunya pine — a tall dome-shaped Australian coniferous tree, Araucaria bidwillii, having edible cones (bunya nuts) and thickish flattened needles
- burkitt lymphoma — a rare type of tumour of the white blood cells, occurring mainly in Africa and associated with infection by Epstein-Barr virus
- burnt-tip orchid — a small orchid, Orchis ustulata, resembling the lady orchid, having dark reddish-brown hoods that give a burnt look to the tip of the flower spike