18-letter words containing e, i, g, n, s, p
- registered company — a company which has officially registered its business
- registration plate — a plate mounted on the front and back of a motor vehicle bearing the registration number
- 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.
- reprocessing plant — a plant where materials are treated in order to make them reusable
- 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.
- seafloor spreading — a process in which new ocean floor is created as molten material from the earth's mantle rises in margins between plates or ridges and spreads out.
- self-comprehending — to understand the nature or meaning of; grasp with the mind; perceive: He did not comprehend the significance of the ambassador's remark.
- self-deprecatingly — in a self-deprecating manner
- self-disparagement — the act of disparaging.
- self-tapping screw — a screw designed to tap its corresponding female thread as it is driven.
- shape-note singing — a traditional style of a capella singing using shape-note notation.
- shipping container — a large, strong container, usually of metal, used to store goods in during shipment
- shipping documents — documents relating to the sending of a shipment of goods, for example containing details of contents, weight, value etc.
- shotgun microphone — a directional microphone with a narrow-angle range of sensitivity.
- shunting operation — an operation in which rail coaches are manoeuvred
- sleeping policeman — a bump built across roads, esp in housing estates, to deter motorists from speeding
- sling psychrometer — a psychrometer so designed that the wet-bulb thermometer can be ventilated, to expedite evaporation, by whirling in the air.
- slip of the tongue — If you describe something you said as a slip of the tongue, you mean that you said it by mistake.
- something to spare — a surplus of something
- spaghetti junction — an interchange, usually between motorways, in which there are a large number of underpasses and overpasses and intersecting roads used by a large volume of high-speed traffic
- specimen signature — a signature to be compared to an original signature in order to verify someone's identity
- speech recognition — Computers. the computerized analysis of spoken words in order to identify the speaker, as in security systems, or to respond to voiced commands: the analysis is performed by finding patterns in the spectrum of the incoming sound and comparing them with stored patterns of elements of sound, as phones, or of complete words.
- spherical triangle — a triangle formed by arcs of great circles of a sphere.
- spread one's wings — to make full use of one's abilities
- stepping-off place — jumping-off place (def 2).
- summary proceeding — a mode of trial authorized by statute to be held before a judge without the usual full hearing.
- super giant slalom — a slalom race in which the course is longer and has more widely spaced gates than in a giant slalom.
- superstring theory — any supersymmetric string theory in which each type of elementary particle is treated as a vibration of a single fundamental string (superstring) at a particular frequency.
- supporting actress — an actress playing a supporting role
- surgical appliance — a specialized device used by somebody to relieve a particular medical condition
- sweptwing aircraft — an aircraft which has wings that are swept (usually) backwards
- sympathetic string — a thin wire string, as in various obsolete musical instruments, designed to vibrate sympathetically with the bowed or plucked strings to reinforce the sound.
- system-programming — a program, as an operating system, compiler, or utility program, that controls some aspect of the operation of a computer (opposed to application program).
- to scrape a living — If you say that someone scrapes a living or scratches a living, you mean that they manage to earn enough to live on, but it is very difficult. In American English, you say they scrape out a living or scratch out a living.
- torsion-free group — a group in which every element other than the identity has infinite order.
- transporter bridge — a bridge for carrying passengers and vehicles by means of a platform suspended from a trolley.
- universal coupling — a coupling between rotating shafts set at an angle to one another, allowing for rotation in three planes.
- visiting professor — a professor from another institution invited to teach at a university or college for a limited period, usually for a semester or one academic year.
- whispering gallery — a space or gallery beneath a dome or broad arch in which low sounds produced at any of certain points are clearly audible at certain other distant points.
- working hypothesis — See under hypothesis (def 1).