21-letter words containing a, h, n
- pass the hat (around) — In British English, if you pass the hat around, you collect money from a group of people, for example in order to give someone a present. In American English, you just say pass the hat.
- path coverage testing — (testing) Testing a program by examining which lines of executable code are visited (as in code coverage testing) and also the ways of getting to each line of code and the subsequent sequence of execution. Path coverage testing is the most comprehensive type of testing that a test suite can provide. It can find more bugs, especially those that are caused by data coupling. However, path coverage is hard and usually only used for small and/or critical sections of code.
- pathfinder prospectus — a prospectus regarding the flotation of a new company that contains only sufficient details to test the market reaction
- peephole optimisation — (compiler) A kind of low-level code optimisation that considers only a few adjacent machine code instructions at a time and looks for certain combinations which can be replaced with more efficient sequences. E.g. ADD R0, #1 ADD R0, #1 (add one to register R0) could be replaced by ADD R0, #2 as long as there were no jumps to the second instruction.
- peephole optimization — peephole optimisation
- pentamethylenediamine — cadaverine.
- performance-enhancing — noting or relating to a drug or other substance used to improve one's performance in a sport or other activity requiring strength, stamina, etc.: The use of performance-enhancing steroids by athletes is banned.
- phenarsazine chloride — adamsite.
- physical anthropology — the branch of anthropology dealing with the evolutionary changes in human anatomy and physiology, using mensurational and descriptive techniques.
- physically challenged — See example at challenged (def 1).
- physician's assistant — a person trained to perform under the supervision of a physician many clinical procedures traditionally performed by a physician, as diagnosing and treating minor ailments. Abbreviation: PA.
- pipelined burst cache — Pipeline Burst Cache
- ploughman's spikenard — a European plant, Inula conyza, with tubular yellowish flower heads surrounded by purple bracts: family Asteraceae (composites)
- pneumoencephalography — encephalography.
- polygenic inheritance — the heredity of complex characters that are determined by a large number of genes, each one usually having a relatively small effect.
- potassium thiocyanate — a colorless, crystalline, hygroscopic, water-soluble solid, KSCN, used chiefly in the manufacture of chemicals, dyes, and drugs.
- privacy enhanced mail —
- profit-sharing scheme — a scheme employing profit-sharing; a system in which a portion of the net profit of a business is distributed to its employees, usually in proportion to their wages or their length of service
- propantheline bromide — a substance, C 2 3 H 3 0 BrNO 3 , used in the treatment of peptic ulcers.
- protestant work ethic — work ethic.
- psychomotor agitation — agitation (def 3).
- psychomotor-agitation — the act or process of agitating; state of being agitated: She left in great agitation.
- pulse height analyser — a multichannel analyser that sorts pulses into selected amplitude ranges
- pulse height analyzer — an instrument that records or counts an electrical pulse if its amplitude falls within specified limits: used in nuclear physics research for the determination of energy spectra of nuclear radiations
- purchasing department — the group of staff within an organization that is responsible for buying goods or products
- push the panic button — an alarm button for use in an emergency, as to summon help.
- put in the hard yards — to make a great effort to achieve an end
- put sb in their place — If you put someone in their place, you show them that they are less important or clever than they think they are.
- rap over the knuckles — to reprimand
- rayleigh distribution — (mathematics) A curve that yields a good approximation to the actual labour curves on software projects.
- reading comprehension — a text that students use to help them improve their reading skills, by reading it and answering questions relating to the text. Sometimes used as a test or examination of reading skills. A reading comprehension can be in the student's own or another language
- reciprocal inhibition — the theory that the pairing of an anxiety-provoking stimulus with anxiety-reducing reactions will weaken the association between the stimulus and the anxiety.
- recompression chamber — hyperbaric chamber.
- reconnaissance flight — a flight made by an aircraft in order to obtain military information about a particular place
- record of achievement — a statement of the personal and educational development of each pupil
- rectangular hyperbola — a hyperbola with perpendicular asymptotes
- rehabilitation centre — a centre or clinic where people with an alcohol or drug addiction are treated
- reinforcement therapy — a behavior modification technique in which appropriate behavior is strengthened through systematic reinforcement.
- replacement algorithm — The method used to determine which entry in an associative cache to flush to main memory when it is desired to cache a new block of data. The "least recently used" algorithm flushed the block which has not been accessed for the longest time. A random replacement algorithm picks any block with equal probability.
- reverberation chamber — a room with walls that reflect sound. It is used to make acoustic measurements and as a source of reverberant sound to be mixed with direct sound for recording or broadcasting
- reverse polish syntax — postfix notation
- richard coeur de lion — ("Richard the Lion-Hearted"; "Richard Coeur de Lion") 1157–99, king of England 1189–99.
- right-angled triangle — a triangle one angle of which is a right angle
- ring down the curtain — to lower the curtain at the end of a theatrical performance
- ring-around-the-rosey — a children's game in which the players sing while going around in a circle and squat when the lyrics “all fall down” are sung.
- rolling in the aisles — (of an audience) overcome with laughter
- roman catholic church — the Christian church of which the pope, or bishop of Rome, is the supreme head.
- rutherford scattering — the scattering of an alpha particle through a large angle with respect to the original direction of motion of the particle, caused by an atom (Rutherford atom) with most of the mass and all of the positive electric charge concentrated at a center or nucleus.
- s-k reduction machine — An abstract machine defined by Professor David Turner to evaluate combinator expressions represented as binary graphs. Named after the two basic combinators, S and K.
- safe in the knowledge — If you do something safe in the knowledge that something else is the case, you do the first thing confidently because you are sure of the second thing.