17-letter words containing m, r, s
- peaches and cream — If you say that a woman or a girl has a peaches and cream complexion, you mean that she has very clear, smooth, pale skin.
- peppermint spirit — a green or colorless alcoholic solution of the volatile oil produced by the peppermint leaf, used as a carminative and flavoring agent.
- performance bonus — a monetary bonus paid to staff who have performed well in their job
- performance drugs — the drugs that are taken illegally by athletes to enhance their sporting performance
- permanent address — a fixed address
- pernicious anemia — Pernicious anemia is a very severe blood disease.
- persistent memory — non-volatile storage
- personal computer — a compact computer that uses a microprocessor and is designed for individual use, as by a person in an office or at home or school, for such applications as word processing, data management, financial analysis, or computer games. Abbreviation: PC.
- personnel manager — head of Human Resources department
- peterloo massacre — an incident at St Peter's Fields, Manchester, in 1819 in which a radical meeting was broken up by a cavalry charge, resulting in about 500 injuries and 11 deaths
- phlebotomus fever — sandfly fever.
- picture messaging — Picture messaging is the sending of photographs or pictures from one mobile phone to another.
- 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.
- plateau's problem — the problem in the calculus of variations of finding the surface with the least area bounded by a given closed curve in space.
- plumbing fixtures — things such as pipes, sinks, toilets that are fixed in position in a building
- poor man's orange — a grapefruit
- postimpressionism — a varied development of Impressionism by a group of painters chiefly between 1880 and 1900 stressing formal structure, as with Cézanne and Seurat, or the expressive possibilities of form and color, as with Van Gogh and Gauguin.
- poststructuralism — a variation of structuralism, often seen as a critique, emphasizing plurality of meaning and instability of concepts that structuralism uses to define society, language, etc.
- potassium bromate — a white, crystalline, water-soluble powder, KBrO 3 , used chiefly as an oxidizing agent and as an analytical reagent.
- potassium bromide — a white, crystalline, water-soluble powder, KBr, having a bitter saline taste: used chiefly in the manufacture of photographic papers and plates, in engraving, and in medicine as a sedative.
- potassium nitrate — a crystalline compound, KNO 3 , produced by nitrification in soil, and used in gunpowders, fertilizers, and preservatives; saltpeter; niter.
- poulter's measure — a metrical pattern using couplets having the first line in iambic hexameter, or 12 syllables, and the second in iambic heptameter, or 14 syllables.
- pre-manifestation — an act of manifesting.
- pre-modifications — an act or instance of modifying.
- precision bombing — aerial bombing in which bombs are dropped, as accurately as possible, on a specific, usually small, target.
- preemptive strike — preventive war.
- premiere danseuse — the leading female dancer in a ballet company.
- premonstratensian — a member of a religious order founded at Prémontré in N France in 1120 by St Norbert (about 1080–1134)
- presentationalism — a style of production in which the audience is addressed directly with songs, skits, exposition, etc., and no attempt is made at realism.
- prima inter pares — (of a female) first among equals.
- primary processes — the generally unorganized mental activity characteristic of the unconscious and occurring in dreams, fantasies, and related processes.
- primary qualities — any of the qualities inherent in an object, namely quantity, extent, figure, solidity, and motion or rest.
- primary structure — Biochemistry. the basic sequence of amino acids in a polypeptide or protein.
- prime ministerial — of or relating to the head of a parliamentary government
- primitive baptist — (especially in the Southern U.S.) one belonging to a highly conservative, loosely organized Baptist group, characterized by extreme fundamentalism and by opposition to missionary work, Sunday Schools, and the use of musical instruments in church.
- prismatic compass — a hand compass equipped with sights and prisms to permit aiming the instrument at a point and at the same time reading the compass direction of the point.
- production system — (programming) A production system consists of a collection of productions (rules), a working memory of facts and an algorithm, known as forward chaining, for producing new facts from old. A rule becomes eligible to "fire" when its conditions match some set of elements currently in working memory. A conflict resolution strategy determines which of several eligible rules (the conflict set) fires next. A condition is a list of symbols which represent constants, which must be matched exactly; variables which bind to the thing they match and "<> symbol" which matches a field not equal to symbol. Example production systems are OPS5, CLIPS, flex.
- professional army — an army of trained soldiers
- program statement — a single instruction in a computer program
- property mistress — a female member of the stage crew in charge of the stage properties
- protective system — protectionism (def 1).
- proton microscope — a powerful type of microscope that uses a beam of protons, giving high resolution and sharp contrast
- pseudo-democratic — pertaining to or of the nature of democracy or a democracy.
- pseudo-moralistic — a person who teaches or inculcates morality.
- psychometric test — a test designed to test a person's mental state, personality and thought processes
- purely and simply — You use purely and simply to emphasize that the thing you are mentioning is the only thing involved.
- quantum chemistry — the application of quantum mechanics to the study of chemical phenomena.
- quasiexperimental — (medicine) Describing a trial in which the assignment to a group is based upon an experimental condition.
- queen's messenger — a person who takes dispatches to or from the sovereign
- racial harassment — persecution on the basis of race