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17-letter words containing a, t, e, n, o

  • personal equation — the tendency to personal bias that accounts for variation in interpretation or approach and for which allowance must be made.
  • personal property — an estate or property consisting of movable articles both corporeal, as furniture or jewelry, or incorporeal, as stocks or bonds (distinguished from real property).
  • personality clash — friction between two people who have different personalities or points of view
  • perth and kinross — a council area of N central Scotland, corresponding mainly to the historical counties of Perthshire and Kinross-shire: part of Tayside Region from 1975 until 1996: chiefly mountainous, with agriculture, tourism, and forestry. Administrative centre: Perth. Pop: 135 990 (2003 est). Area: 5321 sq km (2019 sq miles)
  • petrarchan sonnet — a sonnet form popularized by Petrarch, consisting of an octave with the rhyme scheme abbaabba and of a sestet with one of several rhyme schemes, as cdecde or cdcdcd.
  • phantom pregnancy — the occurrence of signs of pregnancy, such as enlarged abdomen and absence of menstruation, when no embryo is present, due to hormonal imbalance
  • phase of the moon — Used humorously as a random parameter on which something is said to depend. Sometimes implies unreliability of whatever is dependent, or that reliability seems to be dependent on conditions nobody has been able to determine. "This feature depends on having the channel open in mumble mode, having the foo switch set, and on the phase of the moon." See also heisenbug. True story: Once upon a time there was a bug that really did depend on the phase of the moon. There was a little subroutine that had traditionally been used in various programs at MIT to calculate an approximation to the moon's true phase. GLS incorporated this routine into a Lisp program that, when it wrote out a file, would print a timestamp line almost 80 characters long. Very occasionally the first line of the message would be too long and would overflow onto the next line, and when the file was later read back in the program would barf. The length of the first line depended on both the precise date and time and the length of the phase specification when the timestamp was printed, and so the bug literally depended on the phase of the moon! The first paper edition of the Jargon File (Steele-1983) included an example of one of the timestamp lines that exhibited this bug, but the typesetter "corrected" it. This has since been described as the phase-of-the-moon-bug bug.
  • phenethyl alcohol — a colorless, viscous, slightly water-soluble liquid, C 8 H 1 0 O, having a faint roselike odor: used chiefly in perfumery.
  • phenyl isocyanate — a liquid reagent, C 7 H 5 NO, having an unpleasant, irritating odor: used chiefly for identifying alcohols and amines.
  • phonetic alphabet — an alphabet containing a separate character for each distinguishable speech sound.
  • photo-respiration — the oxidation of carbohydrates in many higher plants in which they get oxygen from light and then release carbon dioxide, somewhat different from photosynthesis.
  • photoreactivation — a process that repairs DNA damaged by ultraviolet light using an enzyme that requires visible light.
  • phumiphon aduldet — (Phumiphon Aduldet; Bhumibol Adulyadej) born 1927, king of Thailand since 1946.
  • pietro da cortona — Pietro da [pye-traw dah] /ˈpyɛ trɔ dɑ/ (Show IPA), (Pietro Berrettini) 1596–1669, Italian painter and architect.
  • pile on the agony — to exaggerate one's distress for sympathy or greater effect
  • platinic chloride — chloroplatinic acid.
  • play with oneself — a dramatic composition or piece; drama.
  • pocket dictionary — a small portable dictionary
  • point of purchase — designating or in use at a retail outlet where an item can be purchased; point-of-sale: point-of-purchase displays to entice the buyer.
  • point reyes lilac — a prostrate shrub, Ceanothus gloriosus, of southern California, having leathery, roundish leaves and purplish or deep-blue flowers.
  • point-of-purchase — designating or in use at a retail outlet where an item can be purchased; point-of-sale: point-of-purchase displays to entice the buyer.
  • polar continental — a type of cold, dry air mass originating at high latitudes over land areas
  • polar coordinates — Usually, polar coordinates. one of two coordinates used to locate a point in a plane by the length of its radius vector and the angle this vector makes with the polar axis (polar angle)
  • polarizing filter — a camera lens filter used to control the plane of polarization of light entering the lens.
  • police department — A police department is an official organization which is responsible for making sure that people obey the law.
  • polioencephalitis — a disease characterized by inflammation of the gray matter of the brain.
  • political economy — a social science dealing with political policies and economic processes, their interrelations, and their influence on social institutions.
  • political science — a social science dealing with political institutions and with the principles and conduct of government.
  • polyacrylonitrile — a polymer of acrylonitrile used in the manufacture of Orlon and other synthetic textiles.
  • polyvinyl acetate — a colorless, odorless, nontoxic, transparent, thermoplastic, water-insoluble resin used as an adhesive in certain paints and as an intermediate in the synthesis of polyvinyl acetal and polyvinyl alcohol.
  • portfolio manager — a person employed by others to make investments for them
  • portmanteau morph — a phonological unit of more than one morpheme, as French au to (him) from a to + le masculine article, which realizes a preposition and the definite article; a single morph that is analyzed as representing two underlying morphemes.
  • portuguese guinea — former name of Guinea-Bissau.
  • post-and-rail tea — (in the 19th century) a coarse tea in which floating particles resembled a post-and-rail fence
  • post-depositional — removal from an office or position.
  • postal stationery — an envelope, postal card, wrapper, or aérogramme, with the stamp printed directly on the paper.
  • postmillennialism — the doctrine or belief that the second coming of Christ will follow the millennium.
  • postural drainage — a therapy for clearing congested lungs by placing the patient in a position for drainage by gravity, often accompanied by percussion with hollowed hands.
  • potassium cyanide — a white, granular, water-soluble, poisonous powder, KCN, having a faint almondlike odor, used chiefly in metallurgy and photography.
  • potassium nitrate — a crystalline compound, KNO 3 , produced by nitrification in soil, and used in gunpowders, fertilizers, and preservatives; saltpeter; niter.
  • potential divider — a resistor or series of resistors connected to a voltage source and used to provide voltages that are fractions of that of the source.
  • power of attorney — a written document given by one person or party to another authorizing the latter to act for the former.
  • pre-authorization — the act of authorizing.
  • pre-communication — the act or process of communicating; fact of being communicated.
  • pre-concentration — the act of concentrating; the state of being concentrated.
  • pre-configuration — the relative disposition or arrangement of the parts or elements of a thing.
  • pre-incorporation — the act of incorporating or the state of being incorporated.
  • pre-investigation — the act or process of investigating or the condition of being investigated.
  • pre-manifestation — an act of manifesting.
  • pre-modifications — an act or instance of modifying.
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