17-letter words containing m, o, n, p, h, a
- pashmina politics — the adoption of political policies immediately after they have gone out of fashion
- pastoral symphony — the Symphony No. 6 in F major (1807–08) by Ludwig van Beethoven.
- phantom limb pain — a phenomenon characterized by the experience of pain, discomfort, or other sensation in the area of a missing limb or other body part, as a breast.
- phantom pregnancy — the occurrence of signs of pregnancy, such as enlarged abdomen and absence of menstruation, when no embryo is present, due to hormonal imbalance
- phase of the moon — Used humorously as a random parameter on which something is said to depend. Sometimes implies unreliability of whatever is dependent, or that reliability seems to be dependent on conditions nobody has been able to determine. "This feature depends on having the channel open in mumble mode, having the foo switch set, and on the phase of the moon." See also heisenbug. True story: Once upon a time there was a bug that really did depend on the phase of the moon. There was a little subroutine that had traditionally been used in various programs at MIT to calculate an approximation to the moon's true phase. GLS incorporated this routine into a Lisp program that, when it wrote out a file, would print a timestamp line almost 80 characters long. Very occasionally the first line of the message would be too long and would overflow onto the next line, and when the file was later read back in the program would barf. The length of the first line depended on both the precise date and time and the length of the phase specification when the timestamp was printed, and so the bug literally depended on the phase of the moon! The first paper edition of the Jargon File (Steele-1983) included an example of one of the timestamp lines that exhibited this bug, but the typesetter "corrected" it. This has since been described as the phase-of-the-moon-bug bug.
- phenylformic acid — benzoic acid.
- phumiphon aduldet — (Phumiphon Aduldet; Bhumibol Adulyadej) born 1927, king of Thailand since 1946.
- plains of abraham — a high plain adjoining the city of Quebec, Canada: battlefield where the English under Wolfe defeated the French under Montcalm in 1759.
- ploughman's lunch — a light lunch consisting of bread and cheese, and sometimes pickled onions.
- polymorphonuclear — (of a leukocyte) having a lobulate nucleus.
- portmanteau morph — a phonological unit of more than one morpheme, as French au to (him) from a to + le masculine article, which realizes a preposition and the definite article; a single morph that is analyzed as representing two underlying morphemes.
- pseudo-humanistic — a person having a strong interest in or concern for human welfare, values, and dignity.
- put on the market — offer for sale
- rhodope mountains — a mountain range in SE Europe, in the Balkan Peninsula extending along the border between Bulgaria and Greece. Highest peak: Golyam Perelik (Bulgaria), 2191 m (7188 ft)
- sandwich compound — any of a class of organometallic compounds whose molecules have a metal atom or ion bound between two plane parallel organic rings
- south sea company — a British joint stock company that traded in South America in the 18th century. The South Sea Company took over the national debt in return for a monopoly of trade with the South Seas, causing feverish speculation in their stocks, and a financial crash in 1720 (the South Sea Bubble)
- southampton water — an inlet of the English Channel in S England
- spiny-headed worm — any of a small group of endoparasites of the phylum Acanthocephala, as larvae parasitic in insects and crustaceans and as adults in various vertebrates.
- spongy parenchyma — the lower layer of the ground tissue of a leaf, characteristically containing irregularly shaped cells with relatively few chloroplasts and large intercellular spaces.
- steamship company — a company which has a fleet of steamships
- support mechanism — any formal system or method of providing support or assistance
- telephone message — a message that is transmitted by telephone
- thermal expansion — expansion caused by heat
- thermal pollution — a rise in the temperature of rivers or lakes that is injurious to water-dwelling life and is caused by the disposal of heated industrial waste water or water from the cooling towers of nuclear power plants.
- thiopental sodium — a barbiturate, C 11 H 18 N 2 NaO 2 S, used as an anesthetic in surgery and, in psychiatry, for narcoanalysis and to stimulate recall of past events.
- throat microphone — a microphone worn around the throat and actuated by vibrations of the larynx, used when background noise would obscure the sound of speech, as in an airplane cockpit.
- youth programming — the creation and scheduling of television programmes specifically aimed at young people