One-Letter Words, a Dictionary Read Online Free PDF Page B

Smullyan, The Lady or the Tiger?
     
    27. adj. A mediocre movie, usually low-budget.
I learned the delirious pleasure of watching old “B” movies in the dead of night. —Eddie Muller, Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir The film was among the first musical productions shot in CinemaScope and director Harry Horner, a B-movie helmer who rose to create his only A-level production here, wonderfully fills the extra-wide screen during the kinetic dance interludes. —Phil Hall, in a Film Threat review of the 1954 musical comedy New Faces
     
     
    SCIENTIFIC MATTERS
    28. n. A class of vitamins including B1 (thiamine), B2 (riboflavin), B3 (niacin), B5 (pantothenic acid), B6 (pyridoxine), and B12 (cyanocobalamin).
Vitamin B12 works with folic acid to build the genetic material of cells and produce blood cells in bone marrow. It is also involved in the activities of some of the body’s enzymes (substances that promote chemical reactions in the body) and helps maintain a healthy nervous system…. The best sources of vitamin B12 are organ meats. Fish (especially sardines, herring, and oysters), lean meats, poultry, cheese, and eggs are also good sources. The only known plant sources are yeast, alfalfa, and two Japanese seaweeds—wakame and kombu. —American Medical Association
     
    29. n. A blood type.
Genes for types A and B are dominant, and will always be expressed. Type O is recessive. A child who inherits one A and one O gene will be type A. Similarly, a child who inherits one B and one O gene will be type B. If both an A and a B gene are passed on, a child will be type AB. Only a child who inherits one O gene from each parent will be type O. —Mayo Clinic
     
    30. n. A person with type B blood.
     
    31. n. (electronics) Susceptance.
     
    32. n. (electronics) A battery, as in “B supply.”
     
    33. n. (chemistry) The symbol for the element boron in the periodic table.
     
    34. n. An event in the present caused by something in the past. [A] feeling of timelessness, the feeling that what we know as time is only the result of a naïve faith in causality—the notion that A in the past caused B in the present, which will cause C in the future. —Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
     
    35. n. A high-level perception of cosmic unity, beyond causality.
[A]ctually, A, B, and C are all part of a pattern that can be truly understood only by opening the doors of perception and experiencing it…in this moment…this supreme moment…this kairos.—Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
     
    36. n. (astronomy) A class of blue-white stars.
For blue-white stars like Rigel we use the letter B. —Dennis Richard Danielson, The Book of the Cosmos
     
    37. n. B horizon: the layer of subsoil accumulating deposits from mineralized water in the soil above.
     
     
    FOREIGN MEANINGS
    38. n. (French) Être marqué au b means to be one-eyed or hump-backed. Set in the Middle Ages, The Hunchback of Notre Dame tells the story of Quasimodo, a grotesquely deformed bell ringer at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The French might have said of Quasimodo: Il est marqué au b. “He is hump-backed.”
     
    39. n. (Hebrew) The letter B is called beth, which means “a house.”
     
     
    FACTS AND FIGURES
    40. In the Middle Ages, a B was branded on a blasphemer’s forehead.
     
     

 
    C IN PRINT AND PROVERB
    1. (in literature) Said of handwriting: “By my life, this is my lady’s hand. These be her very c’s, her u’s, and her t’s, and thus she makes she her great P’s.” —William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, II.v.86–88 (The speaker here has unwittingly spelled out the word cut, slang for the female pudenda. The joke is carried further by “her great P’s. ”)
     
    2. (in literature) “C is where murder took place.” —James Joyce, Ulysses
     
    3. (in literature) Described as an infuriating letter: “[Volume 3 of The Oxford English Dictionary, ] embracing the entirety of the infuriating letter C (which the