15-letter words containing a, c, p, s
- pack one's bags — If you pack your bags, you leave a place where you have been staying or living.
- packet-switched — packet switching
- packing density — a measure of the amount of data that can be held by unit length of a storage medium, such as magnetic tape
- painter's colic — Pathology. lead poisoning causing intense intestinal pain.
- pairs champions — competitors in or winners of a pairs championship
- paleogeophysics — (used with a plural verb) inferred geophysical conditions or processes of designated periods of the geologic past.
- pamprodactylous — having all four toes directed forward, as in swifts and colies.
- pan-americanism — the idea or advocacy of a political alliance or union of all the countries of North, Central, and South America.
- panoramic sight — an artillery sight that can be rotated horizontally in a full circle.
- pantopragmatics — universal intervention in the affairs of others
- paracel islands — a group of uninhabited islets and reefs in the N South China Sea, the subject of territorial claims by China and Vietnam
- paralinguistics — the study of paralanguage.
- parallel cousin — a cousin who is the child either of one's mother's sister or of one's father's brother.
- parallel pascal — (language) A data-parallel language, similar to Actus and Glypnir.
- parasiticalness — the condition or characteristic of being parasitic
- parasympathetic — pertaining to that part of the autonomic nervous system consisting of nerves and ganglia that arise from the cranial and sacral regions and function in opposition to the sympathetic system, as in inhibiting heartbeat or contracting the pupil of the eye.
- parmesan cheese — of or from Parma, in northern Italy.
- parti québécois — (in Canada) a political party in Quebec, formed in 1968 and originally advocating the separation of Quebec from the rest of the country
- partial eclipse — astronomy
- particularistic — exclusive attention or devotion to one's own particular interests, party, etc.
- pass-the-parcel — a children's game in which a parcel with lots of wrappings is passed round while music plays; each time the music stops the person holding the parcel takes a layer of wrapping off
- passenger coach — a carriage in which passengers sit
- passifloraceous — of, relating to, or belonging to the Passifloraceae, a tropical and subtropical family of climbing plants including the passionflowers: the flowers have five petals and threadlike parts forming a dense mass (corona) around the central disc
- passport office — an office which issues passports
- past continuous — past progressive.
- past participle — a participle with past, perfect, or passive meaning, as fallen, sung, defeated; perfect participle: used in English and other languages in forming the present perfect, pluperfect, and passive and as an adjective.
- pastel-coloured — pale-coloured; in a shade such as pink or pale blue
- peace offensive — an active program, policy, propaganda campaign, etc., by a national government for the purpose of terminating a war or period of hostility, lessening international tensions, or promoting peaceful cooperation with other nations.
- peachblow glass — an American art glass made in various pale colors and sometimes having an underlayer of milk glass.
- pectoral muscle — muscle of the chest
- penshurst place — a 14th-century mansion near Tunbridge Wells in Kent: birthplace of Sir Philip Sidney; gardens laid out from 1560
- pergamentaceous — (esp of plants) resembling parchment, whether in texture or composition
- perissosyllabic — (of a line of verse) containing more syllables than expected for the metre being used
- personal column — The personal column in a newspaper or magazine contains messages for individual people and advertisements of a private nature.
- personification — the attribution of human nature or character to animals, inanimate objects, or abstract notions, especially as a rhetorical figure.
- pessimistically — pertaining to or characterized by pessimism or the tendency to expect only bad outcomes; gloomy; joyless; unhopeful: His pessimistic outlook kept him from applying for jobs for which he was perfectly qualified.
- phase-switching — a technique used in radio interferometry in which the signal from one of the two antennae is periodically reversed in phase before being multiplied by the signal from the other antenna
- pheasant coucal — a brown and black, red-eyed Australian bird, Centropus phasianinus, with a pheasantlike tail.
- phenakistoscope — an early form of a zoetrope in which figures are depicted in different poses around the edge of a disc. When the disc is spun, and the figures observed through the apertures around the edge of the disc, they appear to be moving
- phenomenalistic — the doctrine that phenomena are the only objects of knowledge or the only form of reality.
- philosophically — of or relating to philosophy: philosophical studies.
- phosphocreatine — a compound, C 4 H 1 0 O 5 N 3 P, found chiefly in muscle, formed by the enzymatic interaction of an organic phosphate and creatine, the breakdown of which provides energy for muscle contraction.
- phosphoric acid — any of three acids, orthophosphoric acid, H 3 PO 4 , metaphosphoric acid, HPO 3 , or pyrophosphoric acid, H 4 P 2 O 7 , derived from phosphorus pentoxide, P 2 O 5 , and various amounts of water.
- photodissociate — to split or break up molecules as a result of the absorption of photons
- photoelasticity — the phenomenon of double refraction of polarized light by a transparent substance under elastic stress, used to measure strain in elastic, transparent materials.
- physical change — a usually reversible change in the physical properties of a substance, as size or shape: Freezing a liquid is a physical change.
- physical memory — (memory management) The memory hardware (normally RAM) installed in a computer. The term is only used in contrast to virtual memory.
- physical optics — the branch of optics concerned with the wave properties of light, the superposition of waves, the deviation of light from its rectilinear propagation in a manner other than that considered by geometrical optics, the interaction of light with matter, and the quantum, corpuscular aspects of light.
- physicalization — to express in physical terms; give form or shape to: The dancers physicalized the mood of the music.
- physicochemical — physical and chemical: the physicochemical properties of an isomer.