18-letter words containing a, l, e
- primate of england — a title of the archbishop of Canterbury.
- principal argument — the radian measure of the argument between −π and π of a complex number. Compare argument (def 8c).
- principal meridian — a meridian line accurately laid out to serve as the reference meridian in land survey
- prisoner's dilemma — (in game theory) a scenario in which the outcome of one person's decision is determined by the simultaneous decisions of the other participants, resulting in a bad outcome for all of them if all act in their own self-interest.
- probability theory — the theory of analyzing and making statements concerning the probability of the occurrence of uncertain events. Compare probability (def 4).
- programme planning — the act of creating plans or schedules, esp in relation to your occupation
- proprietary colony — any of certain colonies, as Maryland and Pennsylvania, that were granted to an individual or group by the British crown and that were granted full rights of self-government.
- provascular tissue — procambium.
- przewalski's horse — a wild horse, Equus caballus przevalskii, chiefly of Mongolia and Sinkiang, characterized by light yellow coloring and a stiff, upright black mane with no forelock: the only remaining breed of wild horse, it is now endangered and chiefly maintained in zoos.
- pseudo-socialistic — of or relating to socialists or socialism.
- pseudointellectual — a person exhibiting intellectual pretensions that have no basis in sound scholarship.
- psychogalvanometer — a type of galvanometer for detecting and measuring psychogalvanic currents.
- public examination — an examination, such as a GCSE exam, that is set by a central examining board
- pull one's head in — the upper part of the body in humans, joined to the trunk by the neck, containing the brain, eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.
- pulmonary embolism — the blockage of a pulmonary artery, often by a blood clot, that stops the flow of blood to the lungs and which can result in death if untreated
- pulmonic airstream — a current of lung air set in motion by the respiratory muscles in the production of speech.
- pulp canal therapy — endodontics.
- put a bold face on — to seem bold or confident about
- put the clock back — to regress
- pyromucic aldehyde — furfural.
- quality controller — a person responsible for checking that the goods or services produced by an organization are of an acceptable standard
- quality of service — (communications, networking) (QoS) The performance properties of a network service, possibly including throughput, transit delay, priority. Some protocols allow packets or streams to include QoS requirements.
- quarry-tiled floor — a floor covered with square or diamond-shaped unglazed floor tiles
- quarter-wave plate — a crystal thin enough to cause a phase difference of 90° between the ordinary and extraordinary rays of polarized light, thereby converting circularly polarized light into plane polarized light.
- quarterlife crisis — a crisis that may be experienced in one's twenties, involving anxiety over the direction and quality of one's life
- quartz-iodine lamp — a type of tungsten-halogen lamp containing small amounts of iodine and having a quartz envelope, operating at high temperature and producing an intense light for use in car headlamps, etc
- quasi-metaphysical — pertaining to or of the nature of metaphysics.
- quevedo y villegas — Francisco Gómez de. 1580–1645, Spanish poet and writer, noted for his satires and the picaresque novel La historia de la vida del Buscón (1626)
- rabbit-foot clover — a plant, Trifolium arvense, having trifoliate leaves with narrow leaflets and fuzzy, cylindrical, grayish-pink flower heads.
- racial segregation — social policy: separation of races
- racially motivated — motivated by (the hate or prejudice of) someone's race
- radical empiricism — (in the philosophy of William James) the doctrine that the only proper subject matter of philosophy is that which can be defined in terms of experience, and that relations are a part of experience.
- radical expression — an expression in which radical signs appear.
- random walk theory — the theory that the future movement of share prices does not reflect past movements and therefore will not follow a discernible pattern
- range of stability — the angle to the perpendicular through which a vessel may be heeled without losing the ability to right itself.
- rare-earth element — any of a group of closely related metallic elements, comprising the lanthanides, scandium, and yttrium, that are chemically similar by virtue of having the same number of valence electrons.
- rational operation — any of the mathematical operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
- rattlesnake master — any of various plants of the genus Eryngium, especially E. yuccifolium, having spiny leaves and dense, rounded flower heads.
- real-estate office — the place where a real-estate agent works
- real-time computer — a computer that can process data or information almost immediately
- rear its ugly head — the upper part of the body in humans, joined to the trunk by the neck, containing the brain, eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.
- redevelopment area — an urban area in which all or most of the buildings are demolished and rebuilt
- refrigerated lorry — a lorry which is chilled in the back as for storing food
- reggio di calabria — a seaport in S Italy, on the Strait of Messina: almost totally destroyed by an earthquake 1908.
- reggio nell'emilia — a city in N Italy.
- regional enteritis — Crohn's disease.
- registration plate — a plate mounted on the front and back of a motor vehicle bearing the registration number
- regular expression — 1. (text, operating system) (regexp, RE) One of the wild card patterns used by Perl and other languages, following Unix utilities such as grep, sed, and awk and editors such as vi and Emacs. Regular expressions use conventions similar to but more elaborate than those described under glob. A regular expression is a sequence of characters with the following meanings (in Perl, other flavours vary): An ordinary character (not one of the special characters discussed below) matches that character. A backslash (\) followed by any special character matches the special character itself. The special characters are: "." matches any character except newline; "RE*" (where RE is any regular expression and the "*" is called the "Kleene star") matches zero or more occurrences of RE. If there is any choice, the longest leftmost matching string is chosen. "^" at the beginning of an RE matches the start of a line and "$" at the end of an RE matches the end of a line. (RE) matches whatever RE matches and \N, where N is a digit, matches whatever was matched by the RE between the Nth "(" and its corresponding ")" earlier in the same RE. Many flavours use \(RE\) instead of just (RE). The concatenation of REs is a RE that matches the concatenation of the strings matched by each RE. RE1 | RE2 matches whatever RE1 or RE2 matches. \< matches the beginning of a word and \> matches the end of a word. Many flavours use "\b" instead as the special character for "word boundary". RE{M} matches M occurences of RE. RE{M,} matches M or more occurences of RE. RE{M,N} matches between M and N occurences. Other flavours use RE\{M\} etc. Perl provides several "quote-like" operators for writing REs, including the common // form and less common ??. A comprehensive survey of regexp flavours is found in Friedl 1997 (see below). 2. Any description of a pattern composed from combinations of symbols and the three operators: Concatenation - pattern A concatenated with B matches a match for A followed by a match for B. Or - pattern A-or-B matches either a match for A or a match for B. Closure - zero or more matches for a pattern. The earliest form of regular expressions (and the term itself) were invented by mathematician Stephen Cole Kleene in the mid-1950s, as a notation to easily manipulate "regular sets", formal descriptions of the behaviour of finite state machines, in regular algebra.
- regular hexahedron — a solid cube with six square faces
- regular tertiaries — of the third order, rank, stage, formation, etc.; third.