18-letter words containing a, l, o, p
- publishing company — a firm which publishes books
- 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.
- put a bold face on — to seem bold or confident about
- put the clock back — to regress
- pyromucic aldehyde — furfural.
- pyrosulphuric acid — a fuming liquid acid made by adding sulphur trioxide to concentrated sulphuric acid. Formula: H2S2O7
- 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
- radical expression — an expression in which radical signs appear.
- rational operation — any of the mathematical operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
- real-time computer — a computer that can process data or information almost immediately
- redevelopment area — an urban area in which all or most of the buildings are demolished and rebuilt
- 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.
- reinforced plastic — plastic with fibrous matter, such as carbon fibre, embedded in it to confer additional strength
- reporters' gallery — an area in parliament reserved for journalists and reporters
- reprocessing plant — a plant where materials are treated in order to make them reusable
- resurrection plant — a desert plant, Selaginella lepidophylla, occurring from Texas to South America, having stems that curl inward when dry.
- rhodes scholarship — one of a number of scholarships at Oxford University, established by the will of Cecil Rhodes, for selected students (Rhodes scholars) from the British Commonwealth and the United States.
- root canal therapy — endodontics.
- salt of phosphorus — a colorless, odorless, crystalline, water-soluble solid, NaNH 4 HPO 4 ⋅4H 2 O, originally obtained from human urine: used as a blowpipe flux in testing metallic oxides.
- scholarship holder — a person who, because of academic merit, receives financial aid for their studies
- seafloor spreading — a process in which new ocean floor is created as molten material from the earth's mantle rises in margins between plates or ridges and spreads out.
- seasonal promotion — Seasonal promotions are items marketed to customers at the appropriate time of year, such as coats in the winter and bathing suits in the summer.
- secondary syphilis — the second stage of syphilis, characterized by eruptions of the skin and mucous membrane.
- segmental phonemes — phonemes consisting of sound segments; hence, the vowel, consonant, and semivowel sounds of a language
- self-contemplation — the act or process of thinking about oneself or one's values, beliefs, behavior, etc.
- self-preoccupation — the state of being preoccupied.
- sell someone a pup — to swindle someone by selling him something worthless
- september holidays — a period of time in September when people do not have to go to school, college or work
- shatterproof glass — glass designed to resist shattering
- simple enumeration — a procedure for arriving at empirical generalizations by haphazard accumulation of positive instances.
- sleeping policeman — a bump built across roads, esp in housing estates, to deter motorists from speeding
- slow on the uptake — slow to understand or learn
- slow-motion replay — a showing again in slow motion of a sequence of action, esp of part of a sporting contest immediately after it happens
- small pastern bone — the part of the foot of a horse, cow, etc., between the fetlock and the hoof.
- sociopsychological — of, relating to, or characterized by interrelated social and psychological factors.
- soda-lime feldspar — plagioclase.
- sodium-vapour lamp — a type of electric lamp consisting of a glass tube containing neon and sodium vapour at low pressure through which an electric current is passed to give an orange light. They are used in street lighting
- software backplane — (programming, tool) A CASE framework from Atherton.
- solitary sandpiper — a North American sandpiper, Tringa solitaria, of inland wetlands, having a brownish-gray, white-spotted back and whitish underparts.
- southampton island — an island in N Canada, in the Northwest Territories at the entrance to Hudson Bay. 19,100 sq. mi. (49,470 sq. km).
- spackling compound — spackle
- speak for yourself — If you say 'Speak for yourself' when someone has said something, you mean that what they have said is only their opinion or applies only to them.
- special collection — a collection of materials segregated from a general library collection according to form, subject, age, condition, rarity, source, or value.
- special prosecutor — (formerly) an independent counsel.
- spectroheliography — the process of obtaining an image of the sun in light of a particular wavelength, such as calcium or hydrogen, showing the distribution of the element over the surface and in the solar atmosphere, using a spectroheliograph
- spectropolarimeter — an instrument for determining the extent to which plane-polarized light of various wavelengths is rotated by certain solutions, consisting of a combination of a spectroscope and a polarimeter.
- spectropolariscope — an instrument combining the functions of a spectroscope with those of a polariscope.