18-letter words containing o, r, g, e, l
- oil of wintergreen — methyl salicylate.
- on delicate ground — in a situation requiring tact
- on the danger list — critically ill in hospital
- optical brightener — an additive that dyes and brightens fabric or paper
- organized religion — institutionalized religion, usually with a hierarchical clergy and rules to govern the means by which adherents participate
- over the long term — in the future
- overgeneralization — the act or process of overgeneralizing.
- overnight telegram — a type of domestic telegram sent at a reduced rate with a minimum charge for 10 words or less and accepted until midnight for delivery the following day.
- owen stanley range — a mountain range in SE New Guinea. Highest peak: Mount Victoria, 4073 m (13 363 ft)
- palaeoanthropology — the branch of anthropology concerned with primitive man
- palmer archipelago — a group of islands in the South Atlantic Ocean, off the NW coast of the Antarctic Peninsula.
- parallel computing — parallel processing
- parallel importing — the importing of certain goods, esp pharmaceutical drugs, by dealers who undersell local manufacturers
- parallelogram rule — a rule for finding the resultant of two vectors by constructing a parallelogram with two adjacent sides representing the magnitudes and directions of the vectors, the diagonal through the point of intersection of the vectors representing their resultant
- people trafficking — the practice of bringing immigrants into a country illegally
- percussion flaking — a method of forming a flint tool by striking flakes from a stone core with another stone or a piece of bone or wood.
- percussion welding — a form of resistance welding in which the required pressure is provided by a hammerlike blow.
- personal bodyguard — a person employed to protect a particular person
- personal organizer — a small notebook with sections for personal information, as dates and addresses.
- petroleum engineer — A petroleum engineer is an engineer who is involved in most stages of oil and gas field evaluation, development, and production, whose job is to maximize hydrocarbon recovery and reduce costs and environmental impact.
- physical geography — the branch of geography concerned with natural features and phenomena of the earth's surface, as landforms, drainage features, climates, soils, and vegetation.
- pilgrim's progress — an allegory (1678) by John Bunyan.
- plains grasshopper — a large, destructive short-horned grasshopper, Brachystola magna, of the western U.S., marked by pinkish hind wings.
- plane trigonometry — the branch of trigonometry dealing with plane triangles.
- plight one's troth — to make a promise of marriage
- point d'angleterre — a bobbin lace in which the design is worked out with either a needle or bobbin.
- point-bearing pile — a pile depending on the soil or rock beneath its foot for support.
- population figures — population totals; statistics relating to the size of populations
- portage la prairie — a city in S Manitoba, in S central Canada, W of Winnipeg.
- positively charged — having a positive charge
- postal storage car — a railroad car for transporting unsorted mail.
- postmaster general — the executive head of the postal system of a country.
- potential gradient — the rate of change of potential with respect to distance in the direction of greatest change.
- precedence lossage — /pre's*-dens los'*j/ A misunderstanding of operator precedence resulting in unintended grouping of arithmetic or logical operators when coding an expression. Used especially of mistakes in C code due to the nonintuitively low precedence of "&", "|", "^", "<<" and ">>". For example, the following C expression, intended to test the least significant bit of x, x & 1 == 0 is parsed as x & (1 == 0) which is always zero (false). Some lazy programmers ignore precedence and parenthesise everything. Lisp fans enjoy pointing out that this can't happen in *their* favourite language, which eschews precedence entirely, requiring one to use explicit parentheses everywhere.
- prerelease showing — a showing of a film before it goes on general release
- primate of england — a title of the archbishop of Canterbury.
- process scheduling — multitasking
- programme planning — the act of creating plans or schedules, esp in relation to your occupation
- psychogalvanometer — a type of galvanometer for detecting and measuring psychogalvanic currents.
- racial segregation — social policy: separation of races
- range of stability — the angle to the perpendicular through which a vessel may be heeled without losing the ability to right itself.
- reentering polygon — a polygon having one or more reentering angles.
- refrigerated lorry — a lorry which is chilled in the back as for storing food
- reggio di calabria — a seaport in S Italy, on the Strait of Messina: almost totally destroyed by an earthquake 1908.
- reggio nell'emilia — a city in N Italy.
- regional enteritis — Crohn's disease.
- 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.
- regular hexahedron — a solid cube with six square faces
- relational algebra — (database, theory) A family of algebra with a well-founded semantics used for modelling the data stored in relational databases, and defining queries on it. The main operations of the relational algebra are the set operations (such as union, intersection, and cartesian product), selection (keeping only some lines of a table) and the projection (keeping only some columns). The relational data model describes how the data is structured.