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17-letter words containing o, n, s, m

  • 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
  • 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.
  • photo-composition — any method of composition using photography, as composition by means of a photocomposer.
  • photoluminescence — luminescence induced by the absorption of infrared radiation, visible light, or ultraviolet radiation.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • postmillennialism — the doctrine or belief that the second coming of Christ will follow the millennium.
  • potassium cyanide — a white, granular, water-soluble, poisonous powder, KCN, having a faint almondlike odor, used chiefly in metallurgy and photography.
  • potassium nitrate — a crystalline compound, KNO 3 , produced by nitrification in soil, and used in gunpowders, fertilizers, and preservatives; saltpeter; niter.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • proton microscope — a powerful type of microscope that uses a beam of protons, giving high resolution and sharp contrast
  • pseudo-humanistic — a person having a strong interest in or concern for human welfare, values, and dignity.
  • radioluminescence — luminescence induced by nuclear radiation.
  • recoil escapement — anchor escapement.
  • reconstructionism — a 20th-century movement among U.S. Jews, founded by Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan, advocating that Judaism, being a culture and way of life as well as a religion, is in sum a religious civilization requiring constant adaptation to contemporary conditions so that Jews can identify more readily and meaningfully with the Jewish community.
  • recursion formula — a formula for determining the next term of a sequence from one or more of the preceding terms.
  • recursive acronym — (convention)   A hackish (and especially MIT) tradition is to choose acronyms and abbreviations that refer humorously to themselves or to other acronyms or abbreviations. The classic examples were two MIT editors called EINE ("EINE Is Not Emacs") and ZWEI ("ZWEI Was EINE Initially"). More recently, there is a Scheme compiler called LIAR (Liar Imitates Apply Recursively), and GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix!" - and a company with the name CYGNUS, which expands to "Cygnus, Your GNU Support". See also mung.
  • reformed spelling — a revised orthography intended to simplify the spelling of English words, especially to eliminate unpronounced letters, as by substituting thru for through, tho for though, slo for slow, etc.
  • reiter's syndrome — a disease of unknown cause, occurring primarily in adult males, marked by urethritis, conjunctivitis, and arthritis.
  • renaissance woman — a woman who has acquired profound knowledge or proficiency in more than one field.
  • 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)
  • roman catholicism — the faith, practice, and system of government of the Roman Catholic Church.
  • ross and cromarty — a historic county in NW Scotland.
  • roving commission — authority or power given in a general area, without precisely defined terms of reference
  • sacra romana rota — the official name of the Rota.
  • sacred roman rota — rota1 (def 3).
  • saint elmo's fire — corona discharge.
  • saint-simonianism — the socialist system advocated by the Comte de Saint-Simon
  • samurai tradition — the body of customs, thought, practices, etc belonging to the samurai warrior caste of Japan
  • sanctimoniousness — making a hypocritical show of religious devotion, piety, righteousness, etc.: They resented his sanctimonious comments on immorality in America.
  • sanctum sanctorum — the holy of holies of the Biblical tabernacle and the Temple in Jerusalem.
  • sandringham house — a residence of the royal family, in Sandringham, a village in E England, in Norfolk near the E shore of the Wash
  • sandwich compound — any of a class of organometallic compounds whose molecules have a metal atom or ion bound between two plane parallel organic rings
  • sawatch mountains — range of the Rocky Mountains, in central Colo.: highest peak, Elbert
  • scientific method — a method of research in which a problem is identified, relevant data are gathered, a hypothesis is formulated from these data, and the hypothesis is empirically tested.
  • second-hand smoke — from sb else's cigarette
  • second-in-command — A second-in-command is someone who is next in rank to the leader of a group, and who has authority to give orders when the leader is not there.
  • see someone right — to ensure fair treatment of (someone)
  • self-commendation — the act of commending; recommendation; praise: commendation for a job well done.
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