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

  • 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
  • price on sb's head — If there is a price on someone 's head, an amount of money has been offered for the capture or killing of that person.
  • prince of darkness — Satan.
  • principal diagonal — a diagonal line or plane.
  • principal meridian — a meridian line accurately laid out to serve as the reference meridian in land survey
  • product acceptance — the verification or acceptance that a manufactured item meets required specifications or standards and is usable for its purpose
  • production company — an organization which produces, films, plays, television or radio programmes
  • production manager — a supervisor of the budget, crew and other details in the production of a film or play
  • propaganda machine — the group of people, publications, etc, such as of a government, country etc, responsible for the organized dissemination of information, allegations, etc, to assist or damage the cause of a government, movement, etc
  • protocol data unit — (PDU) A packet of data passed across a network. The term implies a specific layer of the OSI seven layer model and a specific protocol.
  • provably difficult — The set or property of problems for which it can be proven that no polynomial-time algorithm exists, only exponential-time algorithms.
  • pseudo-anarchistic — a person who advocates or believes in anarchy or anarchism.
  • pseudo-socialistic — of or relating to socialists or socialism.
  • pseudo-symptomatic — pertaining to a symptom or symptoms.
  • pseudoappendicitis — inflammation of the vermiform appendix.
  • pseudointellectual — a person exhibiting intellectual pretensions that have no basis in sound scholarship.
  • put a bold face on — to seem bold or confident about
  • puvis de chavannes — Puvis de [py-vee duh] /püˈvi də/ (Show IPA), Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre.
  • pyromucic aldehyde — furfural.
  • pyrosulphuric acid — a fuming liquid acid made by adding sulphur trioxide to concentrated sulphuric acid. Formula: H2S2O7
  • 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.
  • redundancy payment — a sum of money given by an employer to an employee who has been made redundant: usually calculated on the basis of the employee's rate of pay and length of service
  • registered company — a company which has officially registered its business
  • 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
  • report an accident — If you report an accident, you inform an insurer or the police or other authorities that an accident has occurred.
  • 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. feynman — (person, computing, architecture)   /fayn'mn/ 1918-1988. A US physicist, computer scientist and author who graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton. Feynmane was a key figure in helping Oppenheimer and team develop atomic bomb. In 1950 he became a professor at Caltech and in 1965 became Nobel Prize Laureate in Physics for QED (quantum electrodynamics). He was a primary figure in "solving" the Challenger disaster O-ring problem. He "rediscovered" the former Soviet Socialist Republic of Tuva. The 2001 film "Infinity" about Feynman's early life featured Matthew Broderick and Patricia Arquette. In 2001, "QED", a play about Feynman's life featuring Alan Alda opened.
  • richard p. gabriel — Richard Gabriel
  • scholarship holder — a person who, because of academic merit, receives financial aid for their studies
  • scissors-and-paste — designating or of a piece of writing that has been assembled from a variety of sources rather than by original research, often in a hasty or uninspired way
  • secondary syphilis — the second stage of syphilis, characterized by eruptions of the skin and mucous membrane.
  • self-deprecatingly — in a self-deprecating manner
  • service department — a repair shop
  • sound spectrograph — an electronic device for recording a sound spectogram.
  • spackling compound — spackle
  • spotted flycatcher — a European woodland songbird, Muscicapa striata, with a greyish-brown streaked plumage: family Muscicapidae (Old World flycatchers)
  • subsidiary company — a company whose controlling interest is owned by another company.
  • summary proceeding — a mode of trial authorized by statute to be held before a judge without the usual full hearing.
  • superciliary ridge — browridge.
  • thiosulphuric acid — an unstable acid known only in solutions and in the form of its salts. Formula: H2S2O3
  • threatened species — a species likely, in the near future, to become an endangered species within all or much of its range.
  • ticker-tape parade — a parade honoring a visiting dignitary, hero, or the like in which confetti, shredded newspapers, or the like are showered into the streets from buildings along the parade route.
  • 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.
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