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24-letter words containing a, n, t, e, p

  • passive balance of trade — a negative balance of trade
  • people's liberation army — See under Huk (def 1).
  • permeability coefficient — the volume of an incompressible fluid that will flow in unit time through a unit cube of a porous substance across which a unit pressure difference is maintained
  • photomechanical transfer — a method of producing photographic prints or offset printing plates from paper negatives by a chemical transfer process rather than by exposure to light
  • plantation walking horse — one of a breed of saddle horses developed largely from Standardbred and Morgan stock.
  • polychlorinated biphenyl — PCB.
  • port address translation — (networking)   (PAT) A function provided by some routers which allows hosts on a LAN to communicate with the rest of a network (such as the Internet) without revealing their own private IP address. All outbound packets have their IP address translated to the routers external IP address. Replies come back to the router which then translates them back into the private IP address of the original host for final delivery. Compare SOCKS.
  • portable document format — (file format)   (PDF) The native file format for Adobe Systems' Acrobat. PDF is the file format for representing documents in a manner that is independent of the original application software, hardware, and operating system used to create those documents. A PDF file can describe documents containing any combination of text, graphics, and images in a device-independent and resolution independent format. These documents can be one page or thousands of pages, very simple or extremely complex with a rich use of fonts, graphics, colour, and images.
  • potassium cobaltinitrite — a yellow, crystalline, slightly water-soluble powder, K 3 Co(NO 2) 6 , used as a pigment in oil and watercolor paints, and for coloring surfaces of glass, porcelain, etc.
  • potentiometric titration — titration in which the end point is determined by measuring the voltage of an electric current of given amperage passed through the solution.
  • prairie button snakeroot — a stout composite plant, Liatris pycnostachya, of prairies in the central U.S., having showy, rose-purple flower heads in dense spikes.
  • pre-emptive multitasking — (operating system, parallel)   A type of multitasking where the scheduler can interrupt and suspend ("swap out") the currently running task in order to start or continue running ("swap in") another task. The tasks under pre-emptive multitasking can be written as though they were the only task and the scheduler decides when to swap them. The scheduler must ensure that when swapping tasks, sufficient state is saved and restored that tasks do not interfere. The length of time for which a process runs is known as its "time slice" and may depend on the task's priority or its use of resources such as memory and I/O. This contrasts with cooperative multitasking where each task must include calls to allow it to be descheduled periodically.
  • preparatory to doing sth — If one action is done preparatory to another, it is done before the other action, usually as preparation for it.
  • present company excepted — If you are making a general, unfavourable comment about a particular type of person, and you are with people of that type, you can say 'present company excepted' as a way of making your comment sound more polite.
  • pretty amazing new stuff — (humour, communications)   (PANS) What PSTN is evolving into.
  • principal quantum number — the nonnegative, integral quantum number that defines the stationary orbits in the Bohr model of the atom.
  • private health insurance — insurance against the need for medical treatment as a private patient
  • privileged communication — a communication that one cannot legally be compelled to divulge, as that to a lawyer from a client
  • professional association — a body of persons engaged in the same profession, formed usually to control entry into the profession, maintain standards, and represent the profession in discussions with other bodies
  • professional corporation — a corporation formed by one or more licensed practitioners, especially medical or legal, to operate their practices on a corporate plan. Abbreviation: PC, P.C.
  • program information file — (file format)   Under Windows, a file providing information on how a non-Windows application program should be run, including how much memory should be allocated to it and what graphics interface it requires.
  • progressive assimilation — assimilation in which a preceding sound has an effect on a following one, as in shortening captain to cap'm rather than cap'n.
  • progressive conservative — a member of the Progressive Conservative party of Canada.
  • psychopathic personality — an antisocial personality characterized by the failure to develop any sense of moral responsibility and the capability of performing violent or antisocial acts
  • public access television — television in which local producers or individuals can participate
  • public international law — Also called public law. the law governing the legal relations between independent states or nations and, increasingly, between these and individuals.
  • public relations officer — a person who is responsible for communications with the public
  • public-access television — a noncommercial system of broadcasting on television channels made available to independent or community groups for programs of general interest to the community.
  • punch above one's weight — to do something that is considered to be beyond one's ability
  • pure functional language — purely functional language
  • put the fear of god into — a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc., whether the threat is real or imagined; the feeling or condition of being afraid. Synonyms: foreboding, apprehension, consternation, dismay, dread, terror, fright, panic, horror, trepidation, qualm. Antonyms: courage, security, calm, intrepidity.
  • put the show on the road — to set things in operation; start an activity, venture, etc.
  • put two and two together — a cardinal number, 1 plus 1.
  • rapid eye movement sleep — REM sleep.
  • rational-emotive therapy — a form of therapy in which a patient is asked to reject irrational attitudes and assumptions in order to deal effectively with stressful situations.
  • reciprocal translocation — an exchange of segments between two nonhomologous chromosomes.
  • recommended retail price — the selling price of a product officially suggested by a manufacturer to a retailer
  • recursive descent parser — (grammar)   A "top-down" parser built from a set of mutually-recursive procedures or a non-recursive equivalent where each such procedure usually implements one of the productions of the grammar. Thus the structure of the resulting program closely mirrors that of the grammar it recognises.
  • referential transparency — (programming)   An expression E is referentially transparent if any subexpression and its value (the result of evaluating it) can be interchanged without changing the value of E. This is not the case if the value of an expression depends on global state which can change value. The most common example of changing global state is assignment to a global variable. For example, if y is a global variable in: f(x) { return x+y; } g(z) { a = f(1); y = y + z; return a + f(1); } function g has the "side-effect" that it alters the value of y. Since f's result depends on y, the two calls to f(1) will return different results even though the argument is the same. Thus f is not referentially transparent. Changing the order of evaluation of the statements in g will change its result. We could make f above referentially transparent by passing in y as an argument: f(x, y) = x+y Similarly, g would need to take y as an argument and return its new value as part of the result: g(z, y) { a = f(1, y); y' = y+z; return (a + f(1, y'), y'); } Referentially transparent programs are more amenable to formal methods and easier to reason about because the meaning of an expression depends only on the meaning of its subexpressions and not on the order of evaluation or side-effects of other expressions. We can stretch the concept of referential transparency to include input and output if we consider the whole program to be a function from its input to its output. The program as a whole is referentially transparent because it will always produce the same output when given the same input. This is stretching the concept because the program's input may include what the user types, the content of certain files or even the time of day. If we do not consider global state like the contents of files as input, then writing to a file and reading what was written behaves just like assignment to a global variable. However, if we must consider the state of the universe as an input rather than global state then any deterministic system would be referentially transparent! See also extensional equality, observational equivalence.
  • repetitive strain injury — overuse strain injury
  • repondez s'il vous plait — Répondez s'il vous plait
  • report program generator — (tool)   (RPG) An IBM programming language developed by Wilf Hey at IBM in 1965 for easy production of sophisticated large system reports. RPG is a 3GL similar to COBOL, but more concise and supposedly easier for non-programmers to use. It processes its input one line at a time and does not treat tables as conceptual entities. It was popular on System 34/36 minicomputers. Versions: RPG II, RPG III, RPG/400 for IBM AS/400. MS-DOS versions by California Software and Lattice. Unix version by Unibol. Cross-platform version by J & C Migrations runs on MS-DOS, Windows, AIX, HP-UX, and OS/390. See also CL, OCL.
  • representative democracy — a person or thing that represents another or others.
  • reproductive imagination — the faculty of imagining, or of forming mental images or concepts of what is not actually present to the senses.
  • resale price maintenance — the practice by which a manufacturer establishes a fixed or minimum price for the resale of a brand product by retailers or other distributors
  • research and development — the part of a commercial company's activity concerned with applying the results of scientific research to develop new products and improve existing ones
  • responsibility allowance — payment made to somebody who has special responsibilities
  • sequentially compact set — a set in which every sequence has a subsequence that converges to a point of the set.
  • serial interface adaptor — (SIA) The Ethernet driver chip used on a Filtabyte Ethernet card.
  • shenandoah national park — a national park in N Virginia, including part of the Blue Ridge mountain range. 302 sq. mi. (782 sq. km).
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