18-letter words containing a, p, u, l, e, i
- potassium fluoride — a white, crystalline, hygroscopic, toxic powder, KF, used chiefly as an insecticide, a disinfectant, and in etching glass.
- potassium sulphate — a soluble substance usually obtained as colourless crystals of the decahydrate: used in making glass and as a fertilizer. Formula: K2SO4
- preantepenultimate — third from the end.
- predicate calculus — predicate logic
- presidential suite — a suite of rooms, as in a hotel, suitable for a president or other head of state.
- pressure altimeter — an aneroid barometer adapted for measuring altitude by converting the indicated atmospheric pressure to altitude according to a standard relationship.
- 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.
- principal argument — the radian measure of the argument between −π and π of a complex number. Compare argument (def 8c).
- provascular tissue — procambium.
- pseudo-socialistic — of or relating to socialists or socialism.
- pseudointellectual — a person exhibiting intellectual pretensions that have no basis in sound scholarship.
- public examination — an examination, such as a GCSE exam, that is set by a central examining board
- 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.
- pyromucic aldehyde — furfural.
- 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
- quasi-metaphysical — pertaining to or of the nature of metaphysics.
- real-time computer — a computer that can process data or information almost immediately
- 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.
- resurrection plant — a desert plant, Selaginella lepidophylla, occurring from Texas to South America, having stems that curl inward when dry.
- sampling equipment — Sampling equipment is equipment which is used to remove small amounts of something for analysis and monitoring.
- sampling frequency — sample rate
- scripting language — a language that is used to write scripts, or executable sections of code that automate tasks.
- self-preoccupation — the state of being preoccupied.
- simple enumeration — a procedure for arriving at empirical generalizations by haphazard accumulation of positive instances.
- sit up like jackie — to sit bolt upright, esp cheekily
- special prosecutor — (formerly) an independent counsel.
- status epilepticus — a condition in which repeated epileptic seizures occur without the patient gaining consciousness between them. If untreated for a prolonged period it can lead to long-term disability or death
- subatomic particle — physics:
- super giant slalom — a slalom race in which the course is longer and has more widely spaced gates than in a giant slalom.
- superciliary ridge — browridge.
- supraorbital ridge — browridge.
- surgical appliance — a specialized device used by somebody to relieve a particular medical condition
- temporal summation — the act or process of summing.
- the general public — the people in a society; people in general
- to play favourites — to display favouritism
- unit magnetic pole — the unit of magnetic pole strength equal to the strength of a magnetic pole that repels a similar pole with a force of one dyne, the two poles being placed in a vacuum and separated by a distance of one centimeter.
- universal coupling — a coupling between rotating shafts set at an angle to one another, allowing for rotation in three planes.
- upper middle class — wealthy, highly-educated people
- upper palaeolithic — the latest of the three periods of the Palaeolithic, beginning about 40 000 bc and ending, in Europe, about 12 000 bc: characterized by the emergence of modern man, Homo sapiens
- upper partial tone — overtone (def 1).
- venture capitalist — funds invested or available for investment in a new or unproven business enterprise.
- vulcan nerve pinch — (jargon) (Or "three-finger salute", Vulcan death grip; from the old "Star Trek" TV series via Commodore Amiga hackers) The keyboard combination that forces a soft boot or jump to ROM monitor (on machines that support such a feature). On an Amiga this is done with Ctrl/Right Amiga/Left Amiga; on IBM PCs and many microcomputers it is Ctrl/Alt/Del; on Suns, L1-A; on some Macintoshes, it is
- ! Silicon Graphics users are obviously the most dextrous however, as these machines use the five-finger combination: Left Shift/Left Ctrl/Left Alt/Keypad Divide/F12. Compare quadruple bucky.