18-letter words containing n, o, p, l, u, s
- population density — ratio: inhabitants to area
- population figures — population totals; statistics relating to the size of populations
- post-revolutionary — of, pertaining to, characterized by, or of the nature of a revolution, or a sudden, complete, or marked change: a revolutionary junta.
- 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.
- presuppositionless — to suppose or assume beforehand; take for granted in advance.
- process scheduling — multitasking
- pseudointellectual — a person exhibiting intellectual pretensions that have no basis in sound scholarship.
- publishing company — a firm which publishes books
- pull one's head in — the upper part of the body in humans, joined to the trunk by the neck, containing the brain, eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.
- pull one's punches — to restrain the force of one's criticisms or actions
- pull someone's leg — either of the two lower limbs of a biped, as a human being, or any of the paired limbs of an animal, arthropod, etc., that support and move the body.
- 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.
- 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.
- resurrection plant — a desert plant, Selaginella lepidophylla, occurring from Texas to South America, having stems that curl inward when dry.
- self-preoccupation — the state of being preoccupied.
- sell someone a pup — to swindle someone by selling him something worthless
- simple enumeration — a procedure for arriving at empirical generalizations by haphazard accumulation of positive instances.
- 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 on the uptake — slow to understand or learn
- southampton island — an island in N Canada, in the Northwest Territories at the entrance to Hudson Bay. 19,100 sq. mi. (49,470 sq. km).
- spackling compound — spackle
- subject complement — a word or a group of words, usually functioning as an adjective or noun, that is used in the predicate following a copula and describes or is identified with the subject of the sentence, as sleepy in The travelers became sleepy.
- super giant slalom — a slalom race in which the course is longer and has more widely spaced gates than in a giant slalom.
- temporal summation — the act or process of summing.
- to pull a fast one — If you say that someone has pulled a fast one on you, you mean that they have cheated or tricked you.
- universal coupling — a coupling between rotating shafts set at an angle to one another, allowing for rotation in three planes.
- up someone's alley — suited to someone's tastes or abilities
- up to one's elbows — the bend or joint of the human arm between upper arm and forearm.