20-letter words containing a, p, e, r
- pico della mirandola — Count Giovanni [jaw-vahn-nee] /dʒɔˈvɑn ni/ (Show IPA), 1463–94, Italian humanist and writer.
- pipeline burst cache — (hardware, storage) (PB Cache) A synchronous cache built from pipelined SRAM. A cache in which reading or writing a new location takes multiple cycles but subsequent locations can be accessed in a single cycle. On Pentium systems in 1996, pipeline burst caches are frequently used as secondary caches. The first 8 bytes of data are transferred in 3 CPU cycles, and the next 3 8-byte pieces of data are transferred in one cycle each.
- planetary precession — the small component of the precession of the equinoxes contributed by the motion of the ecliptic, the change in orientation of the plane of the earth's orbit being produced by the gravitational attraction of the planets.
- play merry hell with — to disturb greatly; disrupt
- play pass-the-parcel — to try to avoid a responsibility, or blame, by passing it on to someone else
- polaroid land camera — any of several types of camera yielding a finished print by means of a special developing and processing technique that occurs inside the camera and takes only a few seconds to complete
- poor man's something — a (cheaper) substitute for something
- population inversion — a condition of matter in which more electrons are in a high energy state than in a lower energy state, as is required for the operation of a laser.
- population parameter — a quantity or statistical measure that, for a given population, is fixed and that is used as the value of a variable in some general distribution or frequency function to make it descriptive of that population: The mean and variance of a population are population parameters.
- portuguese water dog — one of a breed of medium-sized dogs originally developed to assist Portuguese fishermen and having a profuse black or brown coat with or without white markings and webbed feet.
- post-order traversal — traversal
- postal delivery zone — zone (def 10).
- postgraduate student — a student who has obtained a degree from a university, etc, and is pursuing studies for a more advanced qualification
- postnatal depression — a form of clinical depression that occurs in mothers after the birth of a baby
- potassium bichromate — an orange-red, crystalline, water-soluble, poisonous powder, K 2 Cr 2 O 7 , used chiefly in dyeing, photography, and as a laboratory reagent.
- potassium bitartrate — cream of tartar.
- potassium dichromate — an orange-red crystalline soluble solid substance that is a good oxidizing agent and is used in making chrome pigments and as a bleaching agent. Formula: K2Cr2O7
- potassium-bitartrate — a white, crystalline, water-soluble powder, C 4 H 5 KO 6 , used chiefly as an ingredient in baking powders and in galvanic tinning of metals. Also called potassium bitartrate, potassium acid tartrate. Compare tartar (def 3).
- potential difference — voltage
- pound cost averaging — a method of accumulating capital by investing a fixed sum in a particular security at regular intervals, in order to achieve an average purchase price below the arithmetic average of the market prices on the purchase dates
- pour out one's heart — Anatomy. a hollow, pumplike organ of blood circulation, composed mainly of rhythmically contractile smooth muscle, located in the chest between the lungs and slightly to the left and consisting of four chambers: a right atrium that receives blood returning from the body via the superior and inferior vena cavae, a right ventricle that pumps the blood through the pulmonary artery to the lungs for oxygenation, a left atrium that receives the oxygenated blood via the pulmonary veins and passes it through the mitral valve, and a left ventricle that pumps the oxygenated blood, via the aorta, throughout the body.
- power of appointment — the authority granted by a donor to a donee to select the person or persons who are to enjoy property rights or income upon the death of the donor or of the donee or after the termination of existing rights or interests.
- powhatan confederacy — a network of Algonquian-speaking Indian settlements in Virginia that was ruled by Powhatan.
- poza rica de hidalgo — a city in N Veracruz, in E Mexico.
- practical imperative — (in Kantian ethics) the dictum that one should treat oneself and all humanity as an end and never as a means.
- predicate nominative — (in Latin, Greek, and certain other languages) a predicate noun or adjective in the nominative case.
- prefecture apostolic — a territory in the early stage of missionary development.
- premenstrual tension — Premenstrual tension is the same as premenstrual syndrome. The abbreviation PMT is often used.
- prenuptial agreement — A prenuptial agreement is a written contract made between a man and a woman before they marry, in which they state how their assets such as property and money should be divided if they get divorced.
- prepatellar bursitis — inflammation and swelling of the bursa in front of the kneecap, caused esp by constant kneeling on a hard surface
- prepositional phrase — a phrase consisting of a preposition, its object, which is usually a noun or a pronoun, and any modifiers of the object, as in the gray desk I use.
- prescription glasses — corrective spectacles
- prescriptive grammar — an approach to grammar that is concerned with establishing norms of correct and incorrect usage and formulating rules based on these norms to be followed by users of the language.
- presentation manager — The elephantine graphical user interface to the OS/2 operating system.
- preservation society — a society dedicated to the preservation of something, especially a building, environment, or animal
- presidential primary — a direct primary for the selection of state delegates to a national party convention and the expression of preference for a U.S. presidential nominee.
- price discrimination — the practice of offering identical goods to different buyers at different prices, when the goods cost the same.
- price-dividend ratio — the ratio of the price of a share on a stock exchange to the dividends per share paid in the previous year, used as a measure of a company's potential as an investment
- price-earnings ratio — the current price of a share of common stock divided by earnings per share over a 12-month period, often used in stock evaluation. Abbreviation: p/e.
- prima facie evidence — evidence sufficient to establish a fact or to raise a presumption of fact unless rebutted.
- prima-facie evidence — evidence that is sufficient to establish a fact or to raise a presumption of the truth of a fact unless controverted
- primary optical area — a point in or toward the upper left-hand corner of a printed page, advertisement, or the like, looked at first in reading. Abbreviation: POA.
- primary spermatocyte — a male germ cell (primary spermatocyte) that gives rise by meiosis to a pair of haploid cells (secondary spermatocytes) that give rise in turn to spermatids.
- primitive polynomial — a polynomial that has content equal to 1. Compare content1 (def 11a).
- prince edward island — an island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, forming a province of Canada: 2184 sq. mi. (5655 sq. km). Capital: Charlottetown.
- prince william sound — a sound in the Gulf of Alaska, on the S coast of Alaska: S end of Trans-Alaska oil pipeline at port of Valdez.
- priority inheritance — (parallel) A technique for avoiding priority inversion by temporarily raising the prioriry of all processes that want to access a shared resource to the highest priority level of any of them. Priority inversion occurs where a low priority process, L is holding a resource required by a high priority process, H, but L is not running because a medium priority process, M is running. Under priority inheritance, L temporarily inherits H's priority, allowing L to run and release the resource H is waiting for. For example, an ambulance (H) is stuck behind a lorry (L) waiting at a junction (the shared resource) for a gap in a line of cars (M) using the junction. Applying priority inheritance, the cars give way to the lorry as they would to the ambulance, thus allowing the lorry and then the ambulance to use the junction.
- private investigator — private detective. Abbreviation: PI, p.i., P.I.
- proactive inhibition — the tendency for earlier memories to interfere with the retrieval of material learned later
- procedural agreement — regulations agreed between the parties to collective bargaining, defining the bargaining units, bargaining scope, procedures for collective bargaining, and the facilities to be provided to trade union representatives