26-letter words containing i, a, p, e
- not touch with a bargepole — to refuse to have anything to do with
- obscene publications squad — a division of the police force which deals with illegal books, pictures, or films which are judged obscene because they deal with sex or violence in a way that is considered offensive to the general public
- official production system — (language) (OPS) The first production system (i.e. rule based) programming language, developed at CMU in 1970 and used for building expert systems. OPS was originally written in Franz Lisp and later ported to other LISP dialects.
- open database connectivity — (standard, database) (ODBC) A standard for accessing different database systems. There are interfaces for Visual Basic, Visual C++, SQL and the ODBC driver pack contains drivers for the Access, Paradox, dBase, Text, Excel and Btrieve databases. An application can submit statements to ODBC using the ODBC flavor of SQL. ODBC then translates these to whatever flavor the database understands. ODBC 1.0 was released in September 1992. ODBC is based on Call-Level Interface and was defined by the SQL Access Group. Microsoft was one member of the group and was the first company to release a commercial product based on its work (under Microsoft Windows) but ODBC is not a Microsoft standard (as many people believe). ODBC drivers and development tools are available now for Microsoft Windows, Unix, OS/2, and Macintosh.
- open document architecture — (standard) (ODA) ISO standard (8613) for describing documents. It allows text, graphics, and facsimile documents to be transferred between different systems.
- paraconsistent probability — (logic) A notion introduced by Florentin Smarandache: The probability (T, I, F) that an event occurs is calculated from different sources which may be contradictory or may overlap information; here T, I, F are real subsets representing the truth, indeterminacy, and falsity percentages respectively, and n_sup = sup(T)+sup(I)+sup(F) > 100. See neutrosophic probability
- parent teacher association — an organization of teachers and the parents of their students, as within a public school, to promote mutual understanding and to increase the effectiveness of the educational program. Abbreviation: PTA, P.T.A.
- parent-teacher association — an organization of teachers and the parents of their students, as within a public school, to promote mutual understanding and to increase the effectiveness of the educational program. Abbreviation: PTA, P.T.A.
- pellagra-preventive factor — nicotinic acid or its amide, nicotinamide, being the vitamin-B-complex members that serve to prevent pellagra.
- people's republic of china — People's Republic of, a country in E Asia. 3,691,502 sq. mi. (9,560,990 sq. km). Capital: Beijing.
- period-luminosity relation — the relationship between the period of light variation and of the absolute magnitude of Cepheid variable stars.
- permanent health insurance — a form of insurance that provides up to 75 per cent of a person's salary, until retirement, in case of prolonged illness or disability
- personal digital assistant — a handheld computer, often pen-based, that provides especially organizational software, as an appointment calendar, and communications hardware, as a fax modem. Abbreviation: PDA.
- phenylethylbarbituric acid — phenobarbital.
- phenylpyruvic oligophrenia — phenylketonuria.
- physical transport network — (communications) (PTN) The actual hardware through which data transfer devices are connected.
- physics analysis workbench — (tool) (PAW) A general purpose portable tool for analysis and presentation of physics data.
- pick up the threads of sth — If you pick up the threads of an activity, you start it again after an interruption. If you pick up the threads of your life, you become more active again after a period of failure or bad luck.
- pin the tail on the donkey — a children's party game in which a blindfolded player, holding a paper tail, is turned around several times before a large picture of a tailless donkey that the player then attempts to locate in order to pin the tail in place.
- plain old telephone system — Public Switched Telephone Network
- pokémon exception handling — (programming, humour) A humourous term for a try-catch exception handling construct with no constraint on which exceptions will be caught, for when you just "Gotta Catch 'Em All." (a slogan used in the Pokémon media empire). Pokémon is a trademark of the Pokémon Company of Japan.
- political action committee — A political action committee is an organization which campaigns for particular political policies, and that gives money to political parties or candidates who support those policies. The abbreviation PAC is also used.
- portable forth environment — (language) (PFE) A highly portable Forth development system based on the ANSI standard for Forth, by Dirk-Uwe Zoller of FHT, Mannheim, Germany. PFE aims to be correct, complete, usable, and simple but it isn't optimised for speed. It supports all dpANS word sets. It runs on Linux, RS/6000, and HP-UX. E-mail: Guido Draheim <[email protected]>.
- post-and-beam construction — wall construction in which beams rather than studs are used to support heavy posts.
- postprandial thermogenesis — the rate at which food is broken down after a meal and used by your body
- primary sex characteristic — any of the body structures directly concerned in reproduction, as the testes, ovaries, and external genitalia.
- primo de rivera y orbaneja — Miguel [mee-gel] /miˈgɛl/ (Show IPA), 1870–1930, Spanish general and dictator 1923–30.
- prince henry the navigator — Prince, 1394–1460, prince of Portugal.
- private finance initiative — (in Britain) a government scheme to encourage private investment in public projects
- privately held corporation — A privately held corporation is a company whose shares cannot be bought by the general public.
- professional office system — (messaging) (PROFS) An office messaging system from IBM, used worldwide, mainly on IBM mainframes.
- psychophysical parallelism — the view that mental and bodily events occur in parallel series without causal interaction.
- public-liability insurance — insurance covering the insured against risks involving liability to the public for damages arising from negligence.
- public-service corporation — a private or quasi-private corporation chartered to provide an essential commodity or service to the public.
- pulse-amplitude modulation — modulation of the amplitude of a train of electric pulses used to carry signals (pulse carrier) Abbreviation: PAM.
- purely functional language — (language) A language that supports only functional programming and does not allow functions to have side-effects. Program execution consists of evaluation of an expression and all subexpressions are referentially transparent.
- put a bug in someone's ear — Also called true bug, hemipteran, hemipteron. a hemipterous insect.
- put one's signature to sth — If you put your signature to a document, you sign it as a way of officially showing that you agree with what is written.
- quite apart from something — used to indicate that you are aware of one aspect of a situation, but that you are going to focus on another aspect
- real-time operating system — (operating system) (RTOS) Any operating system where interrupts are guaranteed to be handled within a certain specified maximum time, thereby making it suitable for control of hardware in embedded systems and other time-critical applications. RTOS is not a specific product but a class of operating systems.
- remembrance of things past — a novel (1913–27) by Marcel Proust.
- repetitive strain disorder — overuse strain injury
- replacement cost insurance — Replacement cost insurance is insurance in which the cost of replacing property is calculated without a reduction for depreciation.
- retained object complement — an object complement that is kept in its predicative position following the verb when the verb is transformed into the passive voice, as genius in He was considered a genius from (They) considered him a genius.
- ritz combination principle — the principle that the frequencies of lines in atomic spectra can be represented as differences of a smaller number of terms, all characteristic of the emitting system, interpreted in quantum theory as the emission of exactly one photon in a transition between energy levels.
- round peg in a square hole — a person in a position, situation, etc. for which he or she is unsuited or unqualified
- scintillation spectrometer — a scintillation counter adapted for measuring the energy distribution of particles emitted in radioactive processes.
- search engine optimization — the process of adjusting the content, structure, etc, of a website so that it will be displayed prominently by a search engine
- serotonin receptor agonist — A serotonin receptor agonist is any compound that activates serotonin receptors when serotonin is not present.
- show a clean pair of heels — to run off