18-letter words containing n, i, e, s, p
- self-tapping screw — a screw designed to tap its corresponding female thread as it is driven.
- semiprecious stone — See at semiprecious.
- separation anxiety — the normal fear and apprehension expressed by infants when removed from their mothers or approached by strangers.
- service department — a repair shop
- shape-note singing — a traditional style of a capella singing using shape-note notation.
- sharp-shinned hawk — a North American hawk, Accipiter striatus, having extremely slender legs, a bluish-gray back, and a white, rusty-barred breast.
- shipping container — a large, strong container, usually of metal, used to store goods in during shipment
- shipping documents — documents relating to the sending of a shipment of goods, for example containing details of contents, weight, value etc.
- shotgun microphone — a directional microphone with a narrow-angle range of sensitivity.
- shunting operation — an operation in which rail coaches are manoeuvred
- sierra blanca peak — a mountain in S New Mexico: highest peak in the Sacramento Mountains. 11,997 feet (3651 meters).
- silvery spleenwort — a fern, Diplazium pycnocarpon, of eastern North America, having fronds from 20 to 30 inches (50.8 to 76.2 cm) long on yellowish-green stalks.
- simple enumeration — a procedure for arriving at empirical generalizations by haphazard accumulation of positive instances.
- sleeping policeman — a bump built across roads, esp in housing estates, to deter motorists from speeding
- sling psychrometer — a psychrometer so designed that the wet-bulb thermometer can be ventilated, to expedite evaporation, by whirling in the air.
- slip of the tongue — If you describe something you said as a slip of the tongue, you mean that you said it by mistake.
- slow-motion replay — a showing again in slow motion of a sequence of action, esp of part of a sporting contest immediately after it happens
- solitary sandpiper — a North American sandpiper, Tringa solitaria, of inland wetlands, having a brownish-gray, white-spotted back and whitish underparts.
- something to spare — a surplus of something
- sonic depth finder — a sonar instrument that uses echolocation to measure depths under water.
- spaghetti junction — an interchange, usually between motorways, in which there are a large number of underpasses and overpasses and intersecting roads used by a large volume of high-speed traffic
- spanish succession — War of thea war (1701-14) between European powers disputing the succession to the Spanish throne
- special assessment — a tax levied by a local government on private property to pay the cost of local public improvements, as sidewalk construction or sewage disposal, that are of general benefit to the property taxed.
- special collection — a collection of materials segregated from a general library collection according to form, subject, age, condition, rarity, source, or value.
- specimen signature — a signature to be compared to an original signature in order to verify someone's identity
- speech recognition — Computers. the computerized analysis of spoken words in order to identify the speaker, as in security systems, or to respond to voiced commands: the analysis is performed by finding patterns in the spectrum of the incoming sound and comparing them with stored patterns of elements of sound, as phones, or of complete words.
- speech synthesizer — device that imitates human voice
- sperry corporation — (company) The company which merged with the Burroughs Corporation to form Unisys Corporation. Divisions included Sperry Univac, Sperry Flight Systems, and others. Some of these were sold off after the merger.
- spherical triangle — a triangle formed by arcs of great circles of a sphere.
- spinal anaesthesia — anaesthesia of the lower half of the body produced by injecting an anaesthetic beneath the arachnoid membrane surrounding the spinal cord
- spread one's wings — to make full use of one's abilities
- stepping-off place — jumping-off place (def 2).
- summary proceeding — a mode of trial authorized by statute to be held before a judge without the usual full hearing.
- super giant slalom — a slalom race in which the course is longer and has more widely spaced gates than in a giant slalom.
- superior vena cava — See under vena cava.
- superstring theory — any supersymmetric string theory in which each type of elementary particle is treated as a vibration of a single fundamental string (superstring) at a particular frequency.
- supporting actress — an actress playing a supporting role
- surgical appliance — a specialized device used by somebody to relieve a particular medical condition
- sweptwing aircraft — an aircraft which has wings that are swept (usually) backwards
- sympathetic string — a thin wire string, as in various obsolete musical instruments, designed to vibrate sympathetically with the bowed or plucked strings to reinforce the sound.
- system-programming — a program, as an operating system, compiler, or utility program, that controls some aspect of the operation of a computer (opposed to application program).
- systematic phoneme — a phonological unit in generative phonology representing an underlying form that takes into account the relationship between phonological patterns and morphological variation, as the unit underlying the second vowel in both derive and derivative.
- talk between ships — TBS (def 1).
- telephone sex line — a telephone line operated by a phone-sex worker that offers phone sex to paying customers
- television company — a company that broadcasts programmes by television
- temporal summation — the act or process of summing.
- terrestrial planet — inner planet.
- the encyclopedists — the writers of the French Encyclopedia (1751-72) edited by Diderot and d'Alembert, which contained the advanced ideas of the period
- threatened species — a species likely, in the near future, to become an endangered species within all or much of its range.
- to cast aspersions — If you cast aspersions on someone or something, you suggest that they are not very good in some way.