12-letter words containing p, a, i, l
- picture rail — bar from which pictures are hung
- pied wagtail — a British songbird, Motacilla alba yarrellii, with a black throat and back, long black tail, and white underparts and face: family Motacillidae (wagtails and pipits)
- pig islander — a New Zealander
- pig launcher — A pig launcher is a device which starts a pig moving without interrupting flow.
- pigtail hook — a screw hook having an eye in the form of a spiral for holding a loop, chain link, etc., at any angle.
- pilot jacket — a type of leather jacket associated with U.S. Army pilots in World War II
- pilot ladder — Jacob's ladder (def 2a).
- pilot signal — a signal, as a flag or light, used to request a pilot.
- piltdown man — a hypothetical early modern human, assigned to the genus Eoanthropus, whose existence was inferred from skull fragments that were allegedly found at Piltdown, England, in 1912 but were exposed as fraudulent through chemical analysis in 1953.
- pimelic acid — a crystalline compound, C 7 H 1 2 O 4 , soluble in alcohol and ether: used in polymers and as a plasticizer.
- pine warbler — a warbler, Dendroica pinus, inhabiting pine forests of the southeastern U.S.
- pineal gland — a small, cone-shaped endocrine organ in the posterior forebrain, secreting melatonin and involved in biorhythms and gonadal development.
- pinealectomy — a surgical operation to remove the pineal gland
- pipe cleaner — a short length of twisted flexible wires covered with tufted fabric, used to clean the stem of a smoker's pipe and for various handicrafts.
- piperacillin — a broad-spectrum semisynthetic penicillin, C 2 3 H 2 6 N 5 NaO 7 , used against certain susceptible Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria and certain anaerobes, especially P. aeruginosa.
- piss-elegant — displaying a contrived, often pretentious, sophistication, opulence, etc.
- pitch a tale — to tell a story, usually of a fantastic nature
- placentation — Anatomy, Zoology. the formation of a placenta. the manner of placement or construction of a placenta.
- placentiform — shaped like a placenta, with a flat rounded form
- plagiarising — to take and use by plagiarism.
- plagiaristic — an act or instance of using or closely imitating the language and thoughts of another author without authorization and the representation of that author's work as one's own, as by not crediting the original author: It is said that he plagiarized Thoreau's plagiarism of a line written by Montaigne. Synonyms: appropriation, infringement, piracy, counterfeiting; theft, borrowing, cribbing, passing off.
- plagioclimax — the climax stage of a community, influenced by man or some other outside factor
- plagiohedral — (of a crystal) having faces arranged obliquely in a helix.
- plagiotropic — growing more or less divergent from the vertical.
- plaid screen — [XEROX PARC] A "special effect" that occurs when certain kinds of memory smashes overwrite the control blocks or image memory of a bit-mapped display. The term "salt and pepper" may refer to a different pattern of similar origin. Though the term as coined at PARC refers to the result of an error, some of the X demos induce plaid-screen effects deliberately as a display hack.
- plain as day — obvious
- plain people — the Mennonites, Dunkers, and Amish people
- plain turkey — a bustard
- plain-spoken — candid; frank; blunt.
- plainclothes — Plainclothes police officers wear ordinary clothes instead of a police uniform.
- plane strain — Plane strain is a two-dimensional state of strain in which all the shape changes of a material happen on a single plane.
- plane ticket — entitlement to travel by aircraft
- planetesimal — one of the small celestial bodies that, according to one theory (planetesimal hypothesis) were fused together to form the planets of the solar system.
- planing hull — a hull that tends to rise from the water when under way so that no significant amount of water is displaced beyond a certain speed.
- planographic — the art or technique of printing from a flat surface directly or by offset.
- plasteriness — the state of being made of or resembling plaster
- plastic arts — arts producing works or effects that are three-dimensional, as sculpture or ceramics
- plastic bomb — a bomb made of plastic explosive.
- plastic flow — deformation of a material that remains rigid under stresses of less than a certain intensity but that behaves under severer stresses approximately as a Newtonian fluid.
- plastic foam — expanded plastic.
- plastic wrap — a very thin, transparent sheet of plastic, usually packaged in rolls and often having the ability to cling to other substances, used especially to wrap and store food and for microwave cooking.
- plastination — a technique for embalming bodies by impregnating whole organs with silicon polymers
- plastocyanin — a blue protein found in green plants and in some bacteria
- plate girder — an iron or steel beam built up from plates and shapes welded or riveted together, usually including a plate or plates for a web, four angle irons forming two flanges, and a pair of plates to reinforce the flanges.
- platitudinal — platitudinous.
- platonically — of, relating to, or characteristic of Plato or his doctrines: the Platonic philosophy of ideal forms.
- plausibility — having an appearance of truth or reason; seemingly worthy of approval or acceptance; credible; believable: a plausible excuse; a plausible plot.
- play chicken — to engage in a test of courage in which, typically, two vehicles are driven directly toward one another in order to see which driver will swerve away first
- play it cool — If you play it cool, you deliberately behave in a calm, unemotional way because you do not want people to know you are enthusiastic or angry about something.
- play it cozy — to act cautiously so as to avoid risk