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21-letter words containing o, p, i, a, t, e

  • ophthalmia neonatorum — inflammation of the eyes of a newborn child due to an infectious disease, as gonorrhea, contracted during birth from the infected mother.
  • opposite-sex marriage — (broadly) any of the diverse forms of interpersonal union established in various parts of the world to form a familial bond that is recognized legally, religiously, or socially, granting the participating partners mutual conjugal rights and responsibilities and including, for example, opposite-sex marriage, same-sex marriage, plural marriage, and arranged marriage: Anthropologists say that some type of marriage has been found in every known human society since ancient times. See Word Story at the current entry.
  • optical double (star) — double star (sense 2)
  • orthogonal projection — a two-dimensional graphic representation of an object in which the projecting lines are at right angles to the plane of the projection. Also called orthogonal projection. Compare isometric (def 5).
  • painter and decorator — a person who paints and decorates houses as a trade
  • paradoxical intention — (in psychotherapy) the deliberate practice of a neurotic habit or thought, undertaken in order to remove it
  • part of the furniture — If you describe someone or something as part of the furniture, you are suggesting that they have been somewhere such as their place of work for such a long time that it is hard to imagine that place without them.
  • partial reinforcement — the process of randomly rewarding an organism for making a response on only some of the occasions it makes it
  • partially ordered set — a set in which a relation as “less than or equal to” holds for some pairs of elements of the set, but not for all.
  • partition coefficient — the ratio of the concentrations of a substance in two heterogenous phases in equilibrium with each other
  • path coverage testing — (testing)   Testing a program by examining which lines of executable code are visited (as in code coverage testing) and also the ways of getting to each line of code and the subsequent sequence of execution. Path coverage testing is the most comprehensive type of testing that a test suite can provide. It can find more bugs, especially those that are caused by data coupling. However, path coverage is hard and usually only used for small and/or critical sections of code.
  • pathfinder prospectus — a prospectus regarding the flotation of a new company that contains only sufficient details to test the market reaction
  • payload assist module — a U.S. solid-propellant rocket used to boost a medium-weight spacecraft from a circular low-earth orbit to an elliptical transfer orbit for later insertion into a geosynchronous orbit. Abbreviation: PAM.
  • peephole optimisation — (compiler)   A kind of low-level code optimisation that considers only a few adjacent machine code instructions at a time and looks for certain combinations which can be replaced with more efficient sequences. E.g. ADD R0, #1 ADD R0, #1 (add one to register R0) could be replaced by ADD R0, #2 as long as there were no jumps to the second instruction.
  • peephole optimization — peephole optimisation
  • pellitory-of-the-wall — an urticaceous plant, P. diffusa, of the S and W European genus Parietaria, which grows in crevices and has long narrow leaves and small pink flowers
  • performance indicator — a quantitative or qualitative measurement, or any other criterion, by which the performance, efficiency, achievement, etc of a person or organization can be assessed, often by comparison with an agreed standard or target
  • personality inventory — a questionnaire designed to measure personality types or characteristics.
  • piezoelectric ceramic — any ceramic that exhibits piezoelectric properties.
  • piezoelectric crystal — a crystal, such as quartz, that produces a potential difference across its opposite faces when under mechanical stress
  • place of articulation — the location at which two speech organs approach or come together in producing a speech sound, as in the contact of the tongue and the teeth to form a dental sound. Also called point of articulation. Compare articulator (def 2).
  • play russian roulette — take a foolish risk
  • political correctness — Political correctness is the attitude or policy of being extremely careful not to offend or upset any group of people in society who have a disadvantage, or who have been treated differently because of their sex, race, or disability.
  • politically incorrect — not politically correct; potentially offensive to a particular group of people: politically incorrect jokes.
  • politically motivated — If an act of violence is politically motivated, it is carried out in the interests of a particular government or political party.
  • polygenic inheritance — the heredity of complex characters that are determined by a large number of genes, each one usually having a relatively small effect.
  • pomp and circumstance — ceremony
  • populist shop steward — a shop steward who operates in a delegate role, putting the immediate interests of his members before union principles and policies
  • portrait photographer — a photographer who specializes in portraits
  • posterior probability — the probability assigned to some parameter or to an event on the basis of its observed frequency in a sample, and calculated from a prior probability by Bayes' theorem
  • postpartum depression — Postpartum depression is a mental state involving feelings of anxiety and sudden mood swings which some women experience after they have given birth.
  • potassium bicarbonate — a white, crystalline, slightly alkaline, salty-tasting, water-soluble powder, KHCO 3 , produced by the passage of carbon dioxide through an aqueous potassium carbonate solution: used in cookery as a leavening agent and in medicine as an antacid.
  • potassium diphosphate — any of the three orthophosphates of potassium ((potassium monophosphate) (K 2 HPO 4), (potassium diphosphate) (KH 2 PO 4), and (tripotassium phosphate) (K 3 PO 4) )
  • potassium thiocyanate — a colorless, crystalline, hygroscopic, water-soluble solid, KSCN, used chiefly in the manufacture of chemicals, dyes, and drugs.
  • poweropen association — An independent body established to promote, and test conformance with, the PowerOpen Environment (POE).
  • powersoft corporation — (company)   A leading vendor of client/server application development tools. In February 1994, Watcom became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Powersoft Corporation which merged with Sybase on 13 February 1995. In April 1995, the new company is the fastest growing top-ten software company and the seventh largest software company in the world. Headquarters: Concord, Massachusetts, USA.
  • preacquisition profit — the retained profit of a company earned before a takeover and therefore not eligible for distribution as a dividend to the shareholders of the acquiring company
  • premature ejaculation — a male psychosexual disorder in which ejaculation occurs soon after the commencement of sexual intercourse.
  • printed circuit board — a circuit in which the interconnecting conductors and some of the circuit components have been printed, etched, etc., onto a sheet or board of dielectric material (PC board, printed-circuit board)
  • production department — the department of a business or organization responsible for manufacturing products
  • profit-sharing scheme — a scheme employing profit-sharing; a system in which a portion of the net profit of a business is distributed to its employees, usually in proportion to their wages or their length of service
  • program temporary fix — (programming)   (PTF) (Colloquially: Probably This Fixes) An IBM sanctioned patch, often implemented using ZAP or SUPERZAP.
  • progressive education — any of various reformist educational philosophies and methodologies since the late 1800s, applied especially to elementary schools, that reject the rote recitation and strict discipline of traditional, single-classroom teaching, favoring instead more stimulation of the individual pupil as well as group discussion, more informality in the classroom, a broader curriculum, and use of laboratories, gymnasiums, kitchens, etc., in the school.
  • promoter of the faith — devil's advocate (def 2).
  • propantheline bromide — a substance, C 2 3 H 3 0 BrNO 3 , used in the treatment of peptic ulcers.
  • protective coloration — coloration or anything likened to it that eliminates or reduces visibility or conspicuousness.
  • protest demonstration — a manifestation of protest by public rally, parade, etc
  • protestant work ethic — work ethic.
  • pseudohermaphroditism — an individual having internal reproductive organs of one sex and external sexual characteristics resembling those of the other sex or being ambiguous in nature. Compare hermaphrodite (def 1).
  • psychopathic disorder — (in England, according to the Mental Health Act 1983) a persistent disorder or disability of mind which results in abnormally aggressive or seriously irresponsible conduct on the part of the person concerned
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