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23-letter words containing p, a, i, l, o

  • haleakala national park — a national park on Maui, Hawaii: site of 21-mile (34-km) diameter volcanic crater. 43 sq. mi. (111 sq. km).
  • hate-driven development — (programming, humour)   A play on test-driven development for use when a piece of code is not necessarily broken but you hate the way it is written so much that you feel compelled to rewrite it.
  • higher national diploma — a work-related higher education qualification, taking two years full-time.
  • hypobetalipoproteinemia — (pathology) A low level of betalipoprotein (low-density lipoprotein) in the bloodstream.
  • hypothetical imperative — (esp in the moral philosophy of Kant) any conditional rule of action, concerned with means and ends rather than with duty for its own sake
  • implementation language — (language)   (IMP) An extension of B with floating-point operations, developed by W. Davidsen at General Electric in 1970 for the GE 600. It was also cross-compiled to VAX and Intel 8080.
  • industrial psychologist — a person who studies human behaviour and cognitive processes in relation to the working environment
  • initial public offering — An initial public offering is the first offering of stock when a company goes public.
  • lingual protrusion lisp — a speech defect consisting in pronouncing s and z like or nearly like the th- sounds of thin and this, respectively.
  • liquefied petroleum gas — a mixture of various petroleum gases, esp propane and butane, stored as a liquid under pressure and used as an engine fuel
  • locally euclidean space — a topological space in which each point has a neighborhood that is homeomorphic to an open set in a Euclidean space of specified dimension.
  • lossy audio compression — (audio, compression)   Any audio compression algorithm which does not retain every bit of data but only reproduces a signal that sounds more or less like the original. Examples are MP1, MP2, MP3, AAC.
  • lymphoblastic leukaemia — a severe blood disorder in which abnormal leukocytes are identified as immature forms of lymphocytes
  • maximal free expression — (MFE) A free expression is sub-expression of a lambda abstraction not containing the bound variable. A maximal free expression is a free expression not contained within any other free expression. See full laziness.
  • meaningful relationship — a romantic relationship based upon mutual respect and supportiveness and marked by a sense of commitment and fulfillment.
  • micropachycephalosaurus — A very small pachycephalosaurid, ornithischian dinosaur of the genus Micropachycephalosaurus.
  • mpeg-4 aac main profile — (compression, standard, algorithm)   A successor of MP3 allowing transparent coding at data rates of 70-75% of that of MP3. It is very different from MP3, only used MDCT, no subband coding. It is much more complex that MP3 and MPEG-2 AAC Low Profile.
  • multimedia compact disc — (storage)   (MMCD) A CD-ROM standard for storing 4.7 GB of data including video. MMCD is being developed by a large numer of computer manufacturers and is expected to be shipped in late 1996 or early 1997. Initially it will be aimed at the consumer market, then perhaps in CD-ROM format for computers, and maybe later on erasble CD.
  • national superannuation — a means-related pension paid to elderly people
  • north ossetian republic — a constituent republic of S Russia, on the N slopes of the central Caucasus Mountains. Capital: Vladikavkaz. Pop: 709 900 (2002). Area: about 8000 sq km (3088 sq miles)
  • not a hair out of place — If you say that someone has not a hair out of place, you are emphasizing that they are extremely smart and neatly dressed.
  • occupational psychology — the study of human behaviour at work, including ergonomics, selection procedures, and the effects of stress
  • on-line data processing — the storing or processing of data on a computer using the internet
  • parametric polymorphism — Polymorphism was first identified by Christopher Strachey in 1967 and developed by Hindley and Milner. For example we could specify that the argument of the "head" function was a list without specifying a type for the elements of the list. In Haskell we would write: head :: [a] -> a meaning head has type function from "list of a" to "a" where "a" is a type variable). This is known as parametric polymorphism. Polymorphic typing allows strong type checking as well as generic functions. ML in 1976 was the first language with polymorphic typing. See also generic type variable.
  • parasexual reproduction — reproduction by recombination of genes from genetically dissimilar nuclei within binucleate or multinucleate cells, as in filamentous fungi.
  • parkinson's law of data — "Data expands to fill the space available for storage"; buying more memory encourages the use of more memory-intensive techniques. It has been observed over the last 10 years that the memory usage of evolving systems tends to double roughly once every 18 months. Fortunately, memory density available for constant dollars also tends to double about once every 12 months (see Moore's Law); unfortunately, the laws of physics guarantee that the latter cannot continue indefinitely.
  • parliamentary democracy — a system of government in which people elect representatives to a parliament to make laws, for example Canada and the UK
  • partial differentiation — the process of finding one of the partial derivatives of a function of several variables.
  • patient confidentiality — the law that a doctor or medical practitioner cannot reveal anything said to them by their patients during consultation or treatment
  • pentachloronitrobenzene — a crystalline compound, C 6 Cl 5 NO 2 , used as an herbicide and insecticide. Abbreviation: PCNB.
  • peroxymonosulfuric acid — persulfuric acid (def 1).
  • pharmaceuticals company — a company specialising in developing and marketing pharmaceuticals
  • philadelphia pepper pot — pepper pot (def 1).
  • photoelectric magnitude — the magnitude of a star determined using a photometer plus a filter to select light or other radiation of the desired wavelength
  • phyletic classification — classification of organisms based on their assumed evolutionary histories and relationships.
  • physical memory address — physical address
  • physiological phonetics — the branch of phonetics that deals with the motive processes, anatomical measurements, spirometric properties, muscle and membrane tone, and kinetic aspects of the production of speech and with related aspects of the reception of speech.
  • plain old documentation — (text)   (pod, occasionally "POD") A simple markup language used to embed documentation, literate programming-style, in Perl programs. Pod readers and converters are part of the standard Perl distribution and the documentation provided with Perl is all in pod format.
  • plan position indicator — a radarscope on which an object reflecting radar waves shows its bearing and distance from the radar detector by causing a spot of light to appear on a screen that represents a map of the area around the detector. Abbreviation: PPI.
  • planetesimal hypothesis — one of the small celestial bodies that, according to one theory (planetesimal hypothesis) were fused together to form the planets of the solar system.
  • play by electronic mail — (games)   A kind of game where the players use electronic mail to communicate. This may be done via a human moderator or an automatic mailing list exploder on some central machine or it may be fully distributed with each player just addressing his mail to all other players. This is a natural extension of "play by mail" games conducted via snail mail.
  • polish lowland sheepdog — a strongly-built medium-sized sheepdog of a Polish breed with a long thick shaggy coat that covers the eyes
  • political incorrectness — Political incorrectness is the attitude or policy shown by someone who does not care if they 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.
  • polybrominated biphenyl — PBB.
  • portable tool interface — (programming, standard)   (PTI) A standard such as PCTE, allowing interworking between different software tools via defined interfaces to the user and to the repository or object management system.
  • precautionary principle — the precept that an action should not be taken if the consequences are uncertain and potentially dangerous
  • preferred provider plan — A preferred provider plan is a health insurance plan in the U.S. written by an organization of hospitals and physicians who provide services to clients of a particular insurance company.
  • presidential government — a system of government in which the powers of the president are constitutionally separate from those of the legislature.
  • price escalation clause — a clause in a contract allowing the seller to raise prices if the cost of inputs increases
  • printer access protocol — (networking, protocol, printer)   (PAP) A protocol used in Mac OS Appletalk to provide bi-directional communication between PostScript printers and the client computer.
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