kiloamp

One thousand ( 10 ) amperes. Symbol: kA or KA.

— Wiktionary

kilo-amp

One thousand ( 10 ) amperes. Symbol: kA or KA.

— Wiktionary

Mecca

A city in Saudi Arabia, the holiest place in Islam, location of the sacred Ka'ba, and to which Muslims are required to make a hajj at least once in their lifetime.

— Wiktionary

barye

Symbol Ba. A unit of pressure under the CGS system. 1 Ba = 0.1 Pa = 0.1 N/m2

— Wiktionary

candrabindu

A diacritic used in the Devanagari (), Bengali (), Gurmukhi ( ), Gujarati (), Oriya (), and Telugu () scripts. It usually indicates that the previous vowel is nasalized. Shown here over the letter "ka" (or in the case of Telugu, after the "ka"):

— Wiktionary

Endoplastica

a group of Rhizopoda having a distinct nucleus, as the am/ba

— Webster Dictionary

Eight Section Brocade

Ba Duan Jin, a Chinese exercise.

— Wiktionary

anticommutator

A function of two elements A and B, defined as AB + BA.

— Wiktionary

barium

a metallic chemical element (symbol Ba) with an atomic number of 56.

— Wiktionary

tripos

Any of the final examinations for a BA honours degree at Cambridge University.

— Wiktionary

Deca-

a prefix, from Gr. de`ka, signifying ten; specifically (Metric System), a prefix signifying the weight or measure that is ten times the principal unit

— Webster Dictionary

little-go

The first exam taken at university towards a BA degree, discontinued during the twentieth century.

— Wiktionary

barium thiocyanate

The barium salt of thiocyanic acid, Ba(SCN), used in photography and in dyeing

— Wiktionary

barium arsenate

The barium salt of arsenic acid, Ba(AsO), formed as a precipitate when removing arsenic from water supplies.

— Wiktionary

Tetracid

capable of neutralizing four molecules of a monobasic acid; having four hydrogen atoms capable of replacement ba acids or acid atoms; -- said of certain bases; thus, erythrine, C4H6(OH)4, is a tetracid alcohol

— Webster Dictionary

fullwidth

Occupying two columns on a traditional text display such as kanji, as opposed to halfwidth occupying only one column such as alphanumeric letters. Some characters have both forms: for example katakana ka has the fullwidth u30AB and the halfwidth uFF76.

— Wiktionary

trade acceptance

A negotiable instrument in the course of international trade similar to a Banker's Acceptance (BA) except it is drawn on and accepted by a buyer/importer (as opposed to a bank). May be sold to a bank or investor at a discount becoming a marketable money-market instrument.

— Wiktionary

Barium

one of the elements, belonging to the alkaline earth group; a metal having a silver-white color, and melting at a very high temperature. It is difficult to obtain the pure metal, from the facility with which it becomes oxidized in the air. Atomic weight, 137. Symbol, Ba. Its oxide called baryta

— Webster Dictionary

Barium Radioisotopes

Unstable isotopes of barium that decay or disintegrate emitting radiation. Ba atoms with atomic weights 126-129, 131, 133, and 139-143 are radioactive barium isotopes.

— U.S. National Library of Medicine

commutator

(of a ring) an element of the form ab-ba, where a and b are elements of the ring, it is identical to the ring's zero element if and only if a and b commute

— Wiktionary

Complement Factor B

A glycine-rich, heat-labile serum glycoprotein that contains a component of the C3 CONVERTASE ALTERNATE PATHWAY (C3bBb). Bb, a serine protease, is generated when factor B is cleaved by COMPLEMENT FACTOR D into Ba and Bb.

— U.S. National Library of Medicine

Barium

An element of the alkaline earth group of metals. It has an atomic symbol Ba, atomic number 56, and atomic weight 138. All of its acid-soluble salts are poisonous.

— U.S. National Library of Medicine

Chassé, David Hendrik, Baron

a Dutch soldier; served France under Napoleon, who called him "General Baïonnette," from his zealous use of the bayonet; fought at Waterloo on the opposite side; as governor of Antwerp, gallantly defended its citadel in 1832 against a French and Belgian force twelve times larger than his own (1765-1849).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

regional satellite communications support center

United States Strategic Command operational element responsible for providing the operational communications planners with a single all-spectrum (extremely high frequency, super-high frequency, ultrahigh frequency, Ku, and Ka) point of contact for accessing and managing satellite communications (SATCOM) resources. Specific tasks include: supporting combatant commanders

— Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms

Pleiades, The

the name given to the promoters of a movement in the middle of the 16th century that aimed at the reform of the French language and literature on classical models, and led on by a group of seven men, Ronsard, Du Bellay, Belleau, Baïf, Daurat, Jodelle, and Pontus de Tyard. The name "Pleiad" was originally applied to seven contemporary poets in ancient Greece, and afterwards to seven learned men in the time of Charlemagne.

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

nerd

1. [mainstream slang] Pejorative applied to anyone with an above-average IQ and few gifts at small talk and ordinary social rituals.

2. [jargon] Term of praise applied (in conscious ironic reference to sense 1) to someone who knows what's really important and interesting and doesn't care to be distracted by trivial chatter and silly status games. Compare geek.

The word itself appears to derive from the lines “And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo / And Bring Back an It-Kutch, a Preep and a Proo, / A Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!” in the Dr. Seuss book If I Ran the Zoo (1950). (The spellings ‘nurd’ and ‘gnurd’ also used to be current at MIT, where ‘nurd’ is reported from as far back as 1957; however, knurd appears to have a separate etymology.) How it developed its mainstream meaning is unclear, but sense 1 seems to have entered mass culture in the early 1970s (there are reports that in the mid-1960s it meant roughly “annoying misfit” without the connotation of intelligence.

Hackers developed sense 2 in self-defense perhaps ten years later, and some actually wear “Nerd Pride” buttons, only half as a joke. At MIT one can find not only buttons but (what else?) pocket protectors bearing the slogan and the MIT seal.

— The New Hacker's Dictionary

feature key

[common] The Macintosh key with the cloverleaf graphic on its keytop; sometimes referred to as flower, pretzel, clover, propeller, beanie (an apparent reference to the major feature of a propeller beanie), splat, open-apple or (officially, in Mac documentation) the command key. In French, the term papillon (butterfly) has been reported. The proliferation of terms for this creature may illustrate one subtle peril of iconic interfaces.

Many people have been mystified by the cloverleaf-like symbol that appears on the feature key. Its oldest name is ‘cross of St. Hannes’, but it occurs in pre-Christian Viking art as a decorative motif. Throughout Scandinavia today the road agencies use it to mark sites of historical interest. Apple picked up the symbol from an early Mac developer who happened to be Swedish. Apple documentation gives the translation “interesting feature”!

There is some dispute as to the proper (Swedish) name of this symbol. It technically stands for the word sevärdhet (thing worth seeing); many of these are old churches. Some Swedes report as an idiom for the sign the word kyrka, cognate to English ‘church’ and pronounced (roughly) /chur´ka/ in modern Swedish. Others say this is nonsense. Other idioms reported for the sign are runa (rune) or runsten /roon´stn/ (runestone), derived from the fact that many of the interesting features are Viking rune-stones. The term fornminne /foorn´min'@/ (relic of antiquity, ancient monument) is also reported, especially among those who think that the Mac itself is a relic of antiquity.

— The New Hacker's Dictionary

ASCII

[originally an acronym (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) but now merely conventional] The predominant character set encoding of present-day computers. The standard version uses 7 bits for each character, whereas most earlier codes (including early drafts of ASCII prior to June 1961) used fewer. This change allowed the inclusion of lowercase letters — a major win — but it did not provide for accented letters or any other letterforms not used in English (such as the German sharp-S ß. or the ae-ligature æ which is a letter in, for example, Norwegian). It could be worse, though. It could be much worse. See EBCDIC to understand how. A history of ASCII and its ancestors is at http://www.wps.com/tex/definition/index.

Computers are much pickier and less flexible about spelling than humans; thus, hackers need to be very precise when talking about characters, and have developed a considerable amount of verbal shorthand for them. Every character has one or more names — some formal, some concise, some silly. Common jargon names for ASCII characters are collected here. See also individual entries for bang, excl, open, ques, semi, shriek, splat, twiddle, and Yu-Shiang Whole Fish.

This list derives from revision 2.3 of the Usenet ASCII pronunciation guide. Single characters are listed in ASCII order; character pairs are sorted in by first member. For each character, common names are given in rough order of popularity, followed by names that are reported but rarely seen; official ANSI/CCITT names are surrounded by brokets: <>. Square brackets mark the particularly silly names introduced by INTERCAL. The abbreviations “l/r” and “o/c” stand for left/right and “open/close” respectively. Ordinary parentheticals provide some usage information.