12-letter words containing p, a, i, l
- malapropisms — Plural form of malapropism.
- malimprinted — (of an animal or person) suffering from a defect in the behavioural process of imprinting, resulting in attraction to members of other species, fetishism, etc
- malpositions — Plural form of malposition.
- malpractices — Plural form of malpractice.
- mammaplastic — Of, or pertaining to, mammaplasty.
- manila paper — strong, light-brown or buff paper, originally made from Manila hemp but now also from wood pulp substitutes and various other fibers.
- manipulating — Present participle of manipulate.
- manipulation — the act of manipulating.
- manipulative — influencing or attempting to influence the behavior or emotions of others for one’s own purposes: a manipulative boss.
- manipulators — Plural form of manipulator.
- manipulatory — to manage or influence skillfully, especially in an unfair manner: to manipulate people's feelings.
- mansplaining — (informal, pejorative) The act of condescendingly explaining something, particularly by a man to a female listener in order to appear knowledgable or from a mistaken presumption that she has an inferior understanding of the topic.
- mantelpieces — Plural form of mantelpiece.
- manuscriptal — (obsolete) Of or pertaining to manuscript.
- maple family — the plant family Aceraceae, typified by trees and shrubs having sweet sap, simple opposite leaves usually lobed or toothed, clusters of small flowers, and fruit in the form of a double-winged nutlet, and including maples and the box elder.
- margin plank — a plank forming a border for wooden decking.
- marlinespike — a pointed iron implement used in separating the strands of rope in splicing, marling, etc.
- marlingspike — Alternative spelling of marlinspike.
- matopo hills — the granite hills south of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, where Cecil Rhodes chose to be buried
- media player — Digital Technology. a portable electronic device or a software program that plays and stores digital audio or video files in various formats.
- median plane — a vertical plane that divides an organism into symmetrical halves.
- megacephalic — macrocephalic.
- melanotropin — MSH.
- melliphagous — (of an animal) feeding on honey
- mesocephalic — having a head with a cephalic index between that of dolichocephaly and brachycephaly.
- metal polish — cleaning fluid designed to clean, polish or add shine to metal
- metaleptical — metaleptic
- metaphorical — a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance, as in “A mighty fortress is our God.”. Compare mixed metaphor, simile (def 1).
- metaphysical — pertaining to or of the nature of metaphysics.
- metapolitics — political theory: often used derogatorily
- metempirical — beyond or outside the field of experience.
- metropolitan — of, noting, or characteristic of a metropolis or its inhabitants, especially in culture, sophistication, or in accepting and combining a wide variety of people, ideas, etc.
- microcapsule — a tiny capsule, 20–150 microns in diameter, used for slow-release application of drugs, pesticides, flavors, etc.
- microcephaly — having a head with a small braincase.
- microphallus — The condition of having an abnormally small penis; micropenis.
- microplanner — A subset of PLANNER, implemented in Lisp by Gerald Sussman et al at MIT. Its important features were goal-oriented, pattern-directed procedure invocation, an embedded knowledge base, and automatic backtracking. microPLANNER was superseded by Conniver.
- middle plane — middle distance (def 1).
- milk parsley — a wetland plant belonging to the family Apiaceae
- milliamperes — Plural form of milliampere.
- millilampson — /mil'*-lamp"sn/ A unit of talking speed, abbreviated mL. Most people run about 200 milliLampsons. The eponymous Butler Lampson (a CS theorist and systems implementor highly regarded among hackers) goes at 1000. A few people speak faster. This unit is sometimes used to compare the (sometimes widely disparate) rates at which people can generate ideas and actually emit them in speech. For example, noted computer architect C. Gordon Bell (designer of the PDP-11) is said, with some awe, to think at about 1200 mL but only talk at about 300; he is frequently reduced to fragments of sentences as his mouth tries to keep up with his speeding brain.
- milman parry — Milman, 1902–35, U.S. classical scholar and philologist.
- minimal pair — a pair of words, as pin and bin, or bet and bed, differing only by one sound in the same position in each word, especially when such a pair is taken as evidence for the existence of a phonemic contrast between the two sounds.
- minor planet — asteroid (def 1).
- miracle play — a medieval dramatic form dealing with religious subjects such as Biblical stories or saints' lives, usually presented in a series or cycle by the craft guilds.
- mirror plant — a shrub, Coprosma repens, of the madder family, native to New Zealand and cultivated in warm regions, having glossy, often variegated leaves.
- misappraisal — the act of estimating or judging the nature or value of something or someone.
- misplacement — to put in a wrong place.
- mispleadings — Plural form of mispleading.
- misportrayal — the act of portraying.
- mitteleuropa — Central Europe.