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

  • potential gradient — the rate of change of potential with respect to distance in the direction of greatest change.
  • 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.
  • preparatory school — a private or parochial secondary school, especially one boarding its students and providing a college-preparatory education.
  • 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
  • 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).
  • 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 diagonal — a diagonal line or plane.
  • 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.
  • probability theory — the theory of analyzing and making statements concerning the probability of the occurrence of uncertain events. Compare probability (def 4).
  • 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.
  • provably difficult — The set or property of problems for which it can be proven that no polynomial-time algorithm exists, only exponential-time algorithms.
  • provascular tissue — procambium.
  • provincial council — (formerly) a council administering any of the New Zealand provinces
  • przewalski's horse — a wild horse, Equus caballus przevalskii, chiefly of Mongolia and Sinkiang, characterized by light yellow coloring and a stiff, upright black mane with no forelock: the only remaining breed of wild horse, it is now endangered and chiefly maintained in zoos.
  • psychogalvanometer — a type of galvanometer for detecting and measuring psychogalvanic currents.
  • psychopharmacology — the branch of pharmacology dealing with the psychological effects of drugs.
  • 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.
  • pyromucic aldehyde — furfural.
  • pyrosulphuric acid — a fuming liquid acid made by adding sulphur trioxide to concentrated sulphuric acid. Formula: H2S2O7
  • quality controller — a person responsible for checking that the goods or services produced by an organization are of an acceptable standard
  • quality of service — (communications, networking)   (QoS) The performance properties of a network service, possibly including throughput, transit delay, priority. Some protocols allow packets or streams to include QoS requirements.
  • quarry-tiled floor — a floor covered with square or diamond-shaped unglazed floor tiles
  • 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
  • rabbit-foot clover — a plant, Trifolium arvense, having trifoliate leaves with narrow leaflets and fuzzy, cylindrical, grayish-pink flower heads.
  • racial segregation — social policy: separation of races
  • racially motivated — motivated by (the hate or prejudice of) someone's race
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • rational operation — any of the mathematical operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
  • real-estate office — the place where a real-estate agent works
  • real-time computer — a computer that can process data or information almost immediately
  • redevelopment area — an urban area in which all or most of the buildings are demolished and rebuilt
  • refrigerated lorry — a lorry which is chilled in the back as for storing food
  • reggio di calabria — a seaport in S Italy, on the Strait of Messina: almost totally destroyed by an earthquake 1908.
  • 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
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