18-letter words containing p, a, g, n, o, l
- palaeoanthropology — the branch of anthropology concerned with primitive man
- parallel computing — parallel processing
- parallel importing — the importing of certain goods, esp pharmaceutical drugs, by dealers who undersell local manufacturers
- parathyroid glands — any of several small oval glands usually lying near or embedded in the thyroid gland.
- passing modulation — a modulation of a temporary nature.
- pathologic anatomy — the branch of pathology dealing with the morphologic changes in tissues.
- 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.
- personal bodyguard — a person employed to protect a particular person
- personal organizer — a small notebook with sections for personal information, as dates and addresses.
- phantasmagorically — having a fantastic or deceptive appearance, as something in a dream or created by the imagination.
- phytohemagglutinin — a lectin, obtained from the red kidney bean, that binds to the membranes of T cells and stimulates metabolic activity, cell division, etc.
- 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.
- plate-glass window — a window that has glass which has been formed by rolling
- 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.
- pontifical college — the chief body of priests in ancient Rome.
- population figures — population totals; statistics relating to the size of populations
- 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.
- principal diagonal — a diagonal line or plane.
- programme planning — the act of creating plans or schedules, esp in relation to your occupation
- programming skills — the skills required to write a program so that data may be processed by a computer
- psychogalvanometer — a type of galvanometer for detecting and measuring psychogalvanic currents.
- publishing company — a firm which publishes books
- 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.
- reprocessing plant — a plant where materials are treated in order to make them reusable
- 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.
- segmental phonemes — phonemes consisting of sound segments; hence, the vowel, consonant, and semivowel sounds of a language
- sleeping policeman — a bump built across roads, esp in housing estates, to deter motorists from speeding
- spackling compound — spackle
- stepping-off place — jumping-off place (def 2).
- super giant slalom — a slalom race in which the course is longer and has more widely spaced gates than in a giant slalom.
- telephone exchange — a telecommunications facility to which subscribers' telephones connect, that switches calls among subscribers or to other exchanges for further routing.
- to scrape a living — If you say that someone scrapes a living or scratches a living, you mean that they manage to earn enough to live on, but it is very difficult. In American English, you say they scrape out a living or scratch out a living.
- to take the plunge — If you take the plunge, you decide to do something that you consider difficult or risky.
- unit magnetic pole — the unit of magnetic pole strength equal to the strength of a magnetic pole that repels a similar pole with a force of one dyne, the two poles being placed in a vacuum and separated by a distance of one centimeter.
- universal coupling — a coupling between rotating shafts set at an angle to one another, allowing for rotation in three planes.