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18-letter words containing o, p, s, n, i

  • presuppositionless — to suppose or assume beforehand; take for granted in advance.
  • price on sb's head — If there is a price on someone 's head, an amount of money has been offered for the capture or killing of that person.
  • prince of darkness — Satan.
  • priority inversion — (parallel)   The state of a concurrent system where a high priority task is waiting for a low priority task which is waiting for a medium priority task. The system may become unstable and crash under these circumstances. In an operating system that uses multiple tasks, each task (or context) may be given a priority. These priorities help the scheduler decide which task to run next. Consider tasks, L, M, and H, with priorities Low, Medium, and High. M is running and H is blocked waiting for some resource that is held by L. So long as any task with a priority higher than L is runable, it will prevent task L, and thus task H, from running. Priority inversion is generally considered either as a high-level design failure or an implementation issue to be taken into account depending on who is talking. Most operating systems have methods in place to prevent or take inversion into account. Priority inheritance is one method. The most public instance of priority inversion is the repeated 'fail-safe' rebooting of the Mars Pathfinder. base station ('Sagan Memorial Station').
  • prison authorities — the people in charge of running a prison
  • prison rustic work — rustication having a deeply pitted surface.
  • prisoner's dilemma — (in game theory) a scenario in which the outcome of one person's decision is determined by the simultaneous decisions of the other participants, resulting in a bad outcome for all of them if all act in their own self-interest.
  • process identifier — (operating system)   (PID) An integer used by the Unix kernel to uniquely identify a process. PIDs are returned by the fork system call and can be passed to wait() or kill() to perform actions on the given process.
  • process scheduling — multitasking
  • processionary moth — a moth of the family Thaumetopoeidae, esp the oak processionary moth (Thaumetopoea processionea), the larvae of which leave the communal shelter nightly for food in a V-shaped procession
  • procrustean string — (programming)   A fixed-length string. If a string value is too long for the allocated space, it is truncated to fit; and if it is shorter, the empty space is padded, usually with space characters. This is an allusion to Procrustes, a legendary robber of ancient Attica. He bound his victims to a bed, and if they were shorter than the bed, he stretched their limbs until they would fit; if their limbs were longer, he lopped them off.
  • productivity bonus — an extra payment made to workers for being more productive or yielding more favourable results than normal
  • programming skills — the skills required to write a program so that data may be processed by a computer
  • progressive coding — (graphics, file format, algorithm)   (Or "interlacing") An aspect of a graphics storage format or transmission algorithm that treats bitmap image data non-sequentially in such a way that later data adds progressively greater resolution to an already full-size image. This contrasts with sequential coding. Progressive coding is useful when an image is being sent across a slow communications channel, such as the Internet, as the low-resolution image may be sufficient to allow the user to decide not to wait for the rest of the file to be received. In an interlaced GIF89 image, the pixels in a row are stored sequentially but the rows are stored in interlaced order, e.g. 0, 8, 4, 12, 2, 6, 8, 10, 14, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15. Each vertical scan adds rows in the middle of the gaps left by the previous one. Interlacing is also supported by other formats. JPEG supports a functionally similar concept known as Progressive JPEG. [How does the algorithm differ?] See also progressive/sequential coding.
  • progressive dinner — a dinner party in which each successive course is prepared and eaten at the residence of a different participant.
  • property insurance — insurance coverage for land and housing
  • protease inhibitor — a drug that inhibits the action of protease, especially any of a class of antiviral drugs that prevent the cleavage and replication of HIV proteins.
  • provision merchant — a person or company in the business of retailing food and other provisions
  • pseudo-anarchistic — a person who advocates or believes in anarchy or anarchism.
  • pseudoappendicitis — inflammation of the vermiform appendix.
  • pseudointellectual — a person exhibiting intellectual pretensions that have no basis in sound scholarship.
  • psychotechnologist — a specialist in psychotechnology
  • ptomaine poisoning — (erroneously) food poisoning thought to be caused by ptomaine.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • purchasing officer — the member of staff in an organization who is responsible for buying goods or products
  • puss in the corner — a parlor game for children in which one player in the middle of a room tries to occupy any of the positions along the walls that become vacant as other players dash across to exchange places at a signal.
  • put one's shirt on — to bet all one has on (a horse, etc)
  • qattara depression — a desert basin in the Libyan Desert, in NW Egypt: lowest point is 435 feet (133 meters) below sea level. 6950 sq. mi. (18,000 sq. km).
  • radiation exposure — exposure to radiant energy or to the particles emitted in the transfer of radiant energy, esp the particles and gamma rays emitted in nuclear decay; exposure to radioactive substances
  • radiation pressure — the pressure exerted on a surface by electromagnetic radiation or by sound waves.
  • radical expression — an expression in which radical signs appear.
  • recess appointment — a person appointed to an office by the President of the United States without approval from the Senate because the Senate is in recess
  • registered company — a company which has officially registered its business
  • registration plate — a plate mounted on the front and back of a motor vehicle bearing the registration number
  • 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.
  • reinforced plastic — plastic with fibrous matter, such as carbon fibre, embedded in it to confer additional strength
  • repossession order — If a bank or building society issues a repossession order, they officially tell someone that they are going to repossess their home.
  • reprocessing plant — a plant where materials are treated in order to make them reusable
  • resurrection plant — a desert plant, Selaginella lepidophylla, occurring from Texas to South America, having stems that curl inward when dry.
  • retirement pension — income: no longer at work
  • scissors-and-paste — designating or of a piece of writing that has been assembled from a variety of sources rather than by original research, often in a hasty or uninspired way
  • seafloor spreading — a process in which new ocean floor is created as molten material from the earth's mantle rises in margins between plates or ridges and spreads out.
  • seasonal promotion — Seasonal promotions are items marketed to customers at the appropriate time of year, such as coats in the winter and bathing suits in the summer.
  • secondary syphilis — the second stage of syphilis, characterized by eruptions of the skin and mucous membrane.
  • self-comprehending — to understand the nature or meaning of; grasp with the mind; perceive: He did not comprehend the significance of the ambassador's remark.
  • self-contemplation — the act or process of thinking about oneself or one's values, beliefs, behavior, etc.
  • self-preoccupation — the state of being preoccupied.
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