14-letter words containing a, c, d, i
- placido's disk — a device marked with concentric black rings, used to detect corneal irregularities.
- platinocyanide — a salt of platinocyanic acid.
- platonic solid — one of the five regular polyhedrons: tetrahedron, octahedron, hexahedron, icosahedron, or dodecahedron.
- pneumatic duct — the duct joining the air bladder and alimentary canal of a physostomous fish.
- pneumodynamics — Physics. pneumatics.
- polar distance — codeclination.
- police academy — a school for training police officers
- policy adviser — a person who provides ideas or plans that are used by an organization or government as a basis for making decisions
- polyacrylamide — a white, solid, water-soluble polymer of acrylamide, used in secondary oil recovery, as a thickening agent, a flocculant, and an absorbent, and to separate macromolecules of different molecular weights.
- polysaccharide — a carbohydrate, as starch, inulin, or cellulose, containing more than three monosaccharide units per molecule, the units being attached to each other in the manner of acetals, and therefore capable of hydrolysis by acids or enzymes to monosaccharides.
- prawn-sandwich — characterizing or belonging to the type of spectator at a football match who is motivated to attend more by the corporate hospitality available than a true devotion to a particular club
- pre-accredited — to ascribe or attribute to (usually followed by with): He was accredited with having said it.
- precision-made — made to precise specifications
- predicate noun — a noun used in the predicate with a copulative verb or a factitive verb and having the same referent as the subject of the copulative verb or the direct object of the factitive verb, as in She is the mayor or They elected her mayor.
- predictability — consistent repetition of a state, course of action, behavior, or the like, making it possible to know in advance what to expect: The predictability of their daily lives was both comforting and boring.
- pride of china — the chinaberry, Melia azedarach.
- pride of place — the highest or most outstanding position; first place.
- procaine amide — a white, crystalline compound, C 1 3 H 2 1 ON 3 , used in the treatment of cardiac arrhythmias.
- procrastinated — to defer action; delay: to procrastinate until an opportunity is lost.
- propaedeutical — relating to preliminary instruction; introductory
- propagandistic — a person involved in producing or spreading propaganda.
- propanoic acid — propionic acid.
- propenoic acid — systematic name of acrylic acid
- propionic acid — a colorless, oily, water-soluble liquid, C 3 H 6 O 2 , having a pungent odor: used in making bread-mold-inhibiting propionates, in perfumery, and in medicine as a topical fungicide.
- provincialised — to make provincial in character.
- pseudo-archaic — marked by the characteristics of an earlier period; antiquated: an archaic manner; an archaic notion.
- pseudo-classic — falsely or spuriously classic.
- pseudo-ethical — pertaining to or dealing with morals or the principles of morality; pertaining to right and wrong in conduct.
- pseudo-medical — of or relating to the science or practice of medicine: medical history; medical treatment.
- psychodynamics — Psychology. any clinical approach to personality, as Freud's, that sees personality as the result of a dynamic interplay of conscious and unconscious factors.
- public holiday — national day off work
- pyramid scheme — pyramid (def 8).
- quadratic form — a polynomial all of whose terms are of degree 2 in two or more variables, as 5 x 2 − 2 xy + 3 y 2 .
- quadrisyllabic — a word or poetic meter with four syllables
- quadruplicated — Simple past tense and past participle of quadruplicate.
- quadruplicates — Plural form of quadruplicate.
- quasi-academic — of or relating to a college, academy, school, or other educational institution, especially one for higher education: academic requirements.
- quasi-judicial — noting, pertaining to, or exercising powers or functions that resemble those of a court or a judge: a quasi-judicial agency.
- quasi-periodic — almost periodic
- quintuplicated — Simple past tense and past participle of quintuplicate.
- quitclaim deed — a deed that conveys to the grantee only such interests in property as the grantor may have, the grantee assuming responsibility for any claims brought against the property.
- race condition — Anomalous behavior due to unexpected critical dependence on the relative timing of events. For example, if one process writes to a file while another is reading from the same location then the data read may be the old contents, the new contents or some mixture of the two depending on the relative timing of the read and write operations. A common remedy in this kind of race condition is file locking; a more cumbersome remedy is to reorganize the system such that a certain processes (running a daemon or the like) is the only process that has access to the file, and all other processes that need to access the data in that file do so only via interprocess communication with that one process. As an example of a more subtle kind of race condition, consider a distributed chat network like IRC, where a user is granted channel-operator privileges in any channel he starts. If two users on different servers, on different ends of the same network, try to start the same-named channel at the same time, each user's respective server will grant channel-operator privileges to each user, since neither will yet have received the other's signal that that channel has been started. In this case of a race condition, the "shared resource" is the conception of the state of the network (what channels exist, as well as what users started them and therefore have what privileges), which each server is free to change as long as it signals the other servers on the network about the changes so that they can update their conception of the state of the network. However, the latency across the network makes possible the kind of race condition described. In this case, heading off race conditions by imposing a form of control over access to the shared resource -- say, appointing one server to be in charge of who holds what privileges -- would mean turning the distributed network into a centralized one (at least for that one part of the network operation). Where this is not acceptable, the more pragmatic solution is to have the system recognize when a race condition has occurred and to repair the ill effects. Race conditions also affect electronic circuits where the value output by a logic gate depends on the exact timing of two or more input signals. For example, consider a two input AND gate fed with a logic signal X on input A and its negation, NOT X, on input B. In theory, the output (X AND NOT X) should never be high. However, if changes in the value of X take longer to propagate to input B than to input A then when X changes from false to true, there will be a brief period during which both inputs are true, and so the gate's output will also be true. If this output is fed to an edge-sensitive component such as a counter or flip-flop then the temporary effect ("glitch") will become permanent.
- radicalization — to make radical or more radical, as in politics: young people who are being radicalized by extremist philosophies.
- radio cassette — A radio cassette is a radio and a cassette player together in a single machine.
- radio receiver — an apparatus that receives incoming modulated radio waves and converts them into sound
- radio spectrum — the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that includes radio waves.
- radioacoustics — the science and technology of the production, transmission, and reproduction of sounds carried by radio waves.
- radiobroadcast — a broadcast by radio.
- radiochemistry — the chemical study of radioactive elements, both natural and artificial, and their use in the study of chemical processes.
- radiofrequency — the frequency of the transmitting waves of a given radio message or broadcast.