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18-letter words containing l, a, n, r

  • preantepenultimate — third from the end.
  • 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.
  • prepositional verb — a combination of verb and preposition, often with idiomatic meaning, differing from other phrasal verbs in that an object must always follow the preposition, as take after in The children take after their mother.
  • prerelease showing — a showing of a film before it goes on general release
  • presenile dementia — a form of dementia, of unknown cause, starting before a person is old
  • present participle — Grammar. a participle form, in English having the suffix -ing, denoting repetition or duration of an activity or event: used as an adjective, as in the growing weeds, and in forming progressive verb forms, as in The weeds are growing.
  • presentation layer — (networking)   The second highest layer (layer 6) in the OSI seven layer model. Performs functions such as text compression, code or format conversion to try to smooth out differences between hosts. Allows incompatible processes in the application layer to communicate via the session layer. Documents: ITU Rec. X.226 (ISO 8823), ITU Rec. X.216 (ISO 8822).
  • presidential suite — a suite of rooms, as in a hotel, suitable for a president or other head of state.
  • presumption of law — a presumption based upon a policy of law or a general rule and not upon the facts or evidence in an individual case.
  • primate of england — a title of the archbishop of Canterbury.
  • principal argument — the radian measure of the argument between −π and π of a complex number. Compare argument (def 8c).
  • principal diagonal — a diagonal line or plane.
  • principal meridian — a meridian line accurately laid out to serve as the reference meridian in land survey
  • prisoner's dilemma — (in game theory) a scenario in which the outcome of one person's decision is determined by the simultaneous decisions of the other participants, resulting in a bad outcome for all of them if all act in their own self-interest.
  • programme planning — the act of creating plans or schedules, esp in relation to your occupation
  • programming skills — the skills required to write a program so that data may be processed by a computer
  • proportional limit — elastic limit.
  • proprietary colony — any of certain colonies, as Maryland and Pennsylvania, that were granted to an individual or group by the British crown and that were granted full rights of self-government.
  • 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.
  • provincial council — (formerly) a council administering any of the New Zealand provinces
  • psychogalvanometer — a type of galvanometer for detecting and measuring psychogalvanic currents.
  • public corporation — a corporation, owned and operated by a government, established for the administration of certain public programs.
  • pulmonary embolism — the blockage of a pulmonary artery, often by a blood clot, that stops the flow of blood to the lungs and which can result in death if untreated
  • pulmonic airstream — a current of lung air set in motion by the respiratory muscles in the production of speech.
  • pulp canal therapy — endodontics.
  • quality controller — a person responsible for checking that the goods or services produced by an organization are of an acceptable standard
  • quartz-iodine lamp — a type of tungsten-halogen lamp containing small amounts of iodine and having a quartz envelope, operating at high temperature and producing an intense light for use in car headlamps, etc
  • racial segregation — social policy: separation of races
  • radical expression — an expression in which radical signs appear.
  • ragtag and bobtail — the riffraff; rabble: The ragtag and bobtail of every nation poured into the frontier in search of gold.
  • rail rapid transit — a system of rail transit within an urban area that has exclusive right of way either below, above, or on the ground and so is capable of relatively high operating speed. Abbreviation: RRT.
  • random walk theory — the theory that the future movement of share prices does not reflect past movements and therefore will not follow a discernible pattern
  • range of stability — the angle to the perpendicular through which a vessel may be heeled without losing the ability to right itself.
  • rare-earth element — any of a group of closely related metallic elements, comprising the lanthanides, scandium, and yttrium, that are chemically similar by virtue of having the same number of valence electrons.
  • rational operation — any of the mathematical operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
  • rattlesnake master — any of various plants of the genus Eryngium, especially E. yuccifolium, having spiny leaves and dense, rounded flower heads.
  • redevelopment area — an urban area in which all or most of the buildings are demolished and rebuilt
  • reggio nell'emilia — a city in N Italy.
  • regional enteritis — Crohn's disease.
  • 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.
  • regular hexahedron — a solid cube with six square faces
  • reinforced plastic — plastic with fibrous matter, such as carbon fibre, embedded in it to confer additional strength
  • relational algebra — (database, theory)   A family of algebra with a well-founded semantics used for modelling the data stored in relational databases, and defining queries on it. The main operations of the relational algebra are the set operations (such as union, intersection, and cartesian product), selection (keeping only some lines of a table) and the projection (keeping only some columns). The relational data model describes how the data is structured.
  • relative frequency — the ratio of the number of times an event occurs to the number of occasions on which it might occur in the same period.
  • relative minor key — a minor key that has the same key signature as a major key, but a different tonic
  • repayment schedule — a document detailing the specific terms of a borrower's loan, such as monthly payment, interest rate, due dates etc
  • replacement engine — an engine used to replace or substitute an older or broken engine (in a vehicle, etc)
  • reprocessing plant — a plant where materials are treated in order to make them reusable
  • residential school — (in Canada) a boarding school maintained by the Canadian government for Indian and Inuit children from sparsely populated settlements
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