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18-letter words containing a, p, l, n, o, s

  • parathyroid glands — any of several small oval glands usually lying near or embedded in the thyroid gland.
  • passing modulation — a modulation of a temporary nature.
  • peano's postulates — a collection of axioms concerning the properties of the set of all positive integers, including the principle of mathematical induction.
  • pectoral sandpiper — an American sandpiper, Calidris melanotos, the male of which, when courting, inflates its chest conspicuously.
  • pellitory of spain — a small Mediterranean plant, Anacyclus pyrethrum, the root of which contains an oil formerly used to relieve toothache: family Asteraceae (composites)
  • percussion flaking — a method of forming a flint tool by striking flakes from a stone core with another stone or a piece of bone or wood.
  • personal allowance — the amount of money you are allowed to earn each year without paying tax
  • personal assistant — aide
  • personal bodyguard — a person employed to protect a particular person
  • personal exemption — Your personal exemption is the amount of money that is deducted from your gross income before you have to start paying income tax.
  • personal insurance — insurance on personal risk, such as car insurance, health insurance or loss of earnings insurance
  • personal organizer — a small notebook with sections for personal information, as dates and addresses.
  • pescadores-islands — (used with a plural verb) Penghu.
  • phanerocrystalline — (of a rock) having the principal constituents in the form of crystals visible to the naked eye.
  • phantasmagorically — having a fantastic or deceptive appearance, as something in a dream or created by the imagination.
  • phosphatidylserine — any of a class of phospholipids occurring in biological membranes and fats
  • physical education — systematic instruction in sports, exercises, and hygiene given as part of a school or college program.
  • physical inventory — To carry out a physical inventory is to count all the stock on hand.
  • plains grasshopper — a large, destructive short-horned grasshopper, Brachystola magna, of the western U.S., marked by pinkish hind wings.
  • plate-glass window — a window that has glass which has been formed by rolling
  • play cat and mouse — Also called cat and rat. a children's game in which players in a circle keep a player from moving into or out of the circle and permit a second player to move into or out of the circle to escape the pursuing first player.
  • play second fiddle — be considered less important
  • play someone false — to deceive, cheat, hoodwink, or betray someone
  • policeman's helmet — a Himalayan balsaminaceous plant, Impatiens glandulifera, with large purplish-pink flowers, introduced into Britain
  • political prisoner — sb imprisoned for political dissidence
  • political question — a question regarded by the courts as being a matter to be determined by another department of government rather than of law and therefore one with which they will not deal, as the recognition of a foreign state.
  • polynesian tattler — a sandpiper, H. incanus, native to the Pacific coastal regions
  • population density — ratio: inhabitants to area
  • population figures — population totals; statistics relating to the size of populations
  • post-revolutionary — of, pertaining to, characterized by, or of the nature of a revolution, or a sudden, complete, or marked change: a revolutionary junta.
  • postmaster general — the executive head of the postal system of a country.
  • postmillenarianism — postmillennialism.
  • postviral syndrome — debilitating condition occurring as a sequel to viral illness
  • precedence lossage — /pre's*-dens los'*j/ A misunderstanding of operator precedence resulting in unintended grouping of arithmetic or logical operators when coding an expression. Used especially of mistakes in C code due to the nonintuitively low precedence of "&", "|", "^", "<<" and ">>". For example, the following C expression, intended to test the least significant bit of x, x & 1 == 0 is parsed as x & (1 == 0) which is always zero (false). Some lazy programmers ignore precedence and parenthesise everything. Lisp fans enjoy pointing out that this can't happen in *their* favourite language, which eschews precedence entirely, requiring one to use explicit parentheses everywhere.
  • prepositional verb — a combination of verb and preposition, often with idiomatic meaning, differing from other phrasal verbs in that an object must always follow the preposition, as take after in The children take after their mother.
  • prerelease showing — a showing of a film before it goes on general release
  • presentation layer — (networking)   The second highest layer (layer 6) in the OSI seven layer model. Performs functions such as text compression, code or format conversion to try to smooth out differences between hosts. Allows incompatible processes in the application layer to communicate via the session layer. Documents: ITU Rec. X.226 (ISO 8823), ITU Rec. X.216 (ISO 8822).
  • presumption of law — a presumption based upon a policy of law or a general rule and not upon the facts or evidence in an individual case.
  • 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.
  • programming skills — the skills required to write a program so that data may be processed by a computer
  • pseudointellectual — a person exhibiting intellectual pretensions that have no basis in sound scholarship.
  • psychogalvanometer — a type of galvanometer for detecting and measuring psychogalvanic currents.
  • 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.
  • radical expression — an expression in which radical signs appear.
  • 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
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