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18-letter words containing c, l, a, p, e, d

  • oedipus at colonus — a tragedy by Sophocles, written toward the end of his life and produced posthumously in 401? b.c.
  • optical disc drive — optical disk drive
  • optical disk drive — (hardware)   (Or "optical disc drive", "optical storage") A generic term for any device that reads and/or writes optical media, i.e. compact discs, DVDs and/or Blu-ray discs or future media that uses light (from a small laser) to read data off a removable, rotating disk. At least one such drive is commonly installed in most personal computers to allow them to play and/or record audio and video media and load and store data such as program installers. The floppy disk has been replaced by optical media due to its vastly greater capacity, e.g. 50,000 megabytes for a dual-layer blu-ray disc compared with 1.5 megabytes for a floppy (over 30,000 times as much).
  • palm beach gardens — a city in SE Florida, near North Palm Beach.
  • parallel reduction — A form of applicative order reduction in which all redexes in an expression are reduced simultaneously. Variants include parallel outermost reduction and lenient reduction. See normal order reduction.
  • payload specialist — an astronaut trained to handle highly complex or classified equipment carried aboard a space shuttle and to conduct experiments in space.
  • pectoral sandpiper — an American sandpiper, Calidris melanotos, the male of which, when courting, inflates its chest conspicuously.
  • pennsylvania dutch — the descendants of 17th- and 18th-century settlers in Pennsylvania from southwest Germany and Switzerland.
  • people's democracy — (in Communist ideology) a country or form of government in transition from bourgeois democracy to socialism. In this stage there is more than one class, the largest being the proletariat, led by the Communist Party, which is therefore the dominant power
  • perceptual defence — the process by which it is thought that certain stimuli are either not perceived or are distorted due to their offensive, unpleasant, or threatening nature
  • perpetual calendar — a calendar devised to be used for many years, as in determining the day of the week on which a given date falls.
  • pescadores-islands — (used with a plural verb) Penghu.
  • phenylacetaldehyde — a colorless, oily, water-insoluble liquid, C 3 H 1 4 O, having a hyacinthlike odor: used chiefly in perfumery.
  • phthalic anhydride — a white, crystalline, slightly water-soluble solid, C 8 H 4 O 3 , used chiefly in the manufacture of dyes, alkyd resins, and plasticizers.
  • physical education — systematic instruction in sports, exercises, and hygiene given as part of a school or college program.
  • pig-tailed macaque — a forest-dwelling southeast Asian macaque, Macaca nemestrina, having a short, curled tail, colonized for animal behavior studies.
  • plane of incidence — a plane determined by a given ray, incident on a surface, and the normal at the point where the incident ray strikes the surface.
  • 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 the race card — to introduce the subject of race into a public discussion, esp to gain a strategic advantage
  • plenary indulgence — a remission of the total temporal punishment that is still due to sin after absolution. Compare indulgence (def 6).
  • politically-minded — (of a person or group of people) interested in the way power is achieved and used in a country or society (through government, policy-making, etc)
  • positively charged — having a positive charge
  • potassium chloride — a white or colorless, crystalline, water-soluble solid, KCl, used chiefly in the manufacture of fertilizers and mineral water, and as a source of other potassium compounds.
  • pour cold water on — If someone pours cold water on a plan or idea, they criticize it so much that people lose their enthusiasm for it.
  • 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.
  • predicate calculus — predicate logic
  • principal meridian — a meridian line accurately laid out to serve as the reference meridian in land survey
  • pseudo-socialistic — of or relating to socialists or socialism.
  • pseudointellectual — a person exhibiting intellectual pretensions that have no basis in sound scholarship.
  • put a bold face on — to seem bold or confident about
  • pyromucic aldehyde — furfural.
  • radical empiricism — (in the philosophy of William James) the doctrine that the only proper subject matter of philosophy is that which can be defined in terms of experience, and that relations are a part of experience.
  • radical expression — an expression in which radical signs appear.
  • reinforced plastic — plastic with fibrous matter, such as carbon fibre, embedded in it to confer additional strength
  • repayment schedule — a document detailing the specific terms of a borrower's loan, such as monthly payment, interest rate, due dates etc
  • resaca de la palma — a locality in S Texas, near Brownsville: battle 1846.
  • resistance plasmid — any of a group of bacterial plasmids carrying genetic information that provide resistance to antibiotic drugs: some resistance plasmids are able to transfer themselves, and hence resistance, during conjugation
  • retail price index — The retail price index is a list of the prices of typical goods which shows how much the cost of living changes from one month to the next.
  • rhodes scholarship — one of a number of scholarships at Oxford University, established by the will of Cecil Rhodes, for selected students (Rhodes scholars) from the British Commonwealth and the United States.
  • richard p. gabriel — Richard Gabriel
  • scholarship holder — a person who, because of academic merit, receives financial aid for their studies
  • secondary syphilis — the second stage of syphilis, characterized by eruptions of the skin and mucous membrane.
  • self-deprecatingly — in a self-deprecating manner
  • spotted flycatcher — a European woodland songbird, Muscicapa striata, with a greyish-brown streaked plumage: family Muscicapidae (Old World flycatchers)
  • superciliary ridge — browridge.
  • to hold your peace — If you hold or keep your peace, you do not speak, even though there is something you want or ought to say.
  • upper middle class — wealthy, highly-educated people
  • valle de la pascua — a city in N Venezuela.
  • welland ship canal — a ship canal in S Canada, in Ontario, connecting Lakes Erie and Ontario: 8 locks. 25 miles (40 km) long.
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