15-letter words containing a, p, l, s, i
- parallel cousin — a cousin who is the child either of one's mother's sister or of one's father's brother.
- parasiticalness — the condition or characteristic of being parasitic
- parkinson's law — the statement, expressed facetiously as if a law of physics, that work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion.
- partial eclipse — astronomy
- particularistic — exclusive attention or devotion to one's own particular interests, party, etc.
- passifloraceous — of, relating to, or belonging to the Passifloraceae, a tropical and subtropical family of climbing plants including the passionflowers: the flowers have five petals and threadlike parts forming a dense mass (corona) around the central disc
- past participle — a participle with past, perfect, or passive meaning, as fallen, sung, defeated; perfect participle: used in English and other languages in forming the present perfect, pluperfect, and passive and as an adjective.
- pastoralization — to make pastoral or rural.
- pathophysiology — the physiology of abnormal or diseased organisms or their parts; the functional changes associated with a disease or syndrome.
- pay-and-display — denoting a car-parking system in which a motorist buys a permit to park for a specified period from a coin-operated machine and displays the permit on or near the windscreen of his or her car so that it can be seen by a parking attendant
- pearly nautilus — nautilus (def 1).
- pedestrian mall — A pedestrian mall is the same as a pedestrian precinct.
- penal servitude — imprisonment together with hard labor.
- perissosyllabic — (of a line of verse) containing more syllables than expected for the metre being used
- personal friend — a person who is a friend, rather than a colleague or acquaintance
- personal injury — injury to an individual
- personalization — to have marked with one's initials, name, or monogram: to personalize stationery.
- peruvian balsam — Peru balsam.
- pessimistically — pertaining to or characterized by pessimism or the tendency to expect only bad outcomes; gloomy; joyless; unhopeful: His pessimistic outlook kept him from applying for jobs for which he was perfectly qualified.
- phenomenalistic — the doctrine that phenomena are the only objects of knowledge or the only form of reality.
- philosophically — of or relating to philosophy: philosophical studies.
- phoenix islands — a group of eight coral islands in the central Pacific: administratively part of Kiribati. Area: 28 sq km (11 sq miles). The islands and surrounding waters form the Phoenix Islands Protected Area, the world's largest marine protected area. Area: 410 500 sq km (158 500 sq miles)
- phosphorylation — to introduce the phosphoryl group into (an organic compound).
- phosphorylative — of or relating to phosphorylation
- photoelasticity — the phenomenon of double refraction of polarized light by a transparent substance under elastic stress, used to measure strain in elastic, transparent materials.
- photojournalism — journalism in which photography dominates written copy, as in certain magazines.
- physical change — a usually reversible change in the physical properties of a substance, as size or shape: Freezing a liquid is a physical change.
- physical memory — (memory management) The memory hardware (normally RAM) installed in a computer. The term is only used in contrast to virtual memory.
- physical optics — the branch of optics concerned with the wave properties of light, the superposition of waves, the deviation of light from its rectilinear propagation in a manner other than that considered by geometrical optics, the interaction of light with matter, and the quantum, corpuscular aspects of light.
- physicalization — to express in physical terms; give form or shape to: The dancers physicalized the mood of the music.
- physicochemical — physical and chemical: the physicochemical properties of an isomer.
- physiologically — of or relating to physiology.
- physiopathology — pathophysiology.
- pick-and-shovel — marked by drudgery; laborious: the pick-and-shovel work necessary to get a political campaign underway.
- pictorial janus — K. Kahn, Xerox. Visual extension of Janus. Requires Strand88 and a PostScript interpreter.
- pilgrim fathers — the Pilgrims (of Plymouth Colony)
- pilgrimage site — a shrine or other sacred place that people travel to as an act of religious devotion
- pilsner glass's — a pale, light lager beer.
- pitcairn island — a small British island in the S Pacific, SE of Tuamotu Archipelago: settled 1790 by mutineers of the Bounty. 2 sq. mi. (5 sq. km).
- pitch blackness — extreme darkness; lack of light
- plagiostomatous — plagiostome
- plain of sharon — a plain in W Israel, between the Mediterranean and the hills of Samaria, extending from Haifa to Tel Aviv
- plainclothesman — a police officer, especially a detective, who wears ordinary civilian clothes while on duty.
- plane surveying — the surveying of areas of limited size, making no corrections for the earth's curvature
- planet-stricken — believed to be adversely affected mentally or physically by the planets
- plantaginaceous — relating to or belonging to the family Plantaginaceae
- plastic surgeon — doctor who performs cosmetic surgery
- plastic surgery — the branch of surgery dealing with the repair or replacement of malformed, injured, or lost organs or tissues of the body, chiefly by the transplant of living tissues.
- plate tectonics — a theory of global tectonics in which the lithosphere is divided into a number of crustal plates, each of which moves on the plastic asthenosphere more or less independently to collide with, slide under, or move past adjacent plates.
- platform tennis — a variation of tennis played on a wooden platform enclosed with chicken wire in which the players hit a rubber ball with wooden paddles following the same basic rules as tennis except that only one serve is permitted and balls can be played off the back and side fences.