18-letter words containing p, a, l, g, r
- 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.
- principal argument — the radian measure of the argument between −π and π of a complex number. Compare argument (def 8c).
- 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.
- psychopharmacology — the branch of pharmacology dealing with the psychological effects of drugs.
- 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.
- replacement engine — an engine used to replace or substitute an older or broken engine (in a vehicle, etc)
- reporters' gallery — an area in parliament reserved for journalists and reporters
- reprocessing plant — a plant where materials are treated in order to make them reusable
- richard p. gabriel — Richard Gabriel
- sampling frequency — sample rate
- scripting language — a language that is used to write scripts, or executable sections of code that automate tasks.
- 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.
- self-deprecatingly — in a self-deprecating manner
- self-disparagement — the act of disparaging.
- self-tapping screw — a screw designed to tap its corresponding female thread as it is driven.
- shatterproof glass — glass designed to resist shattering
- spectroheliography — the process of obtaining an image of the sun in light of a particular wavelength, such as calcium or hydrogen, showing the distribution of the element over the surface and in the solar atmosphere, using a spectroheliograph
- spherical geometry — the branch of geometry that deals with figures on spherical surfaces.
- spherical triangle — a triangle formed by arcs of great circles of a sphere.
- super giant slalom — a slalom race in which the course is longer and has more widely spaced gates than in a giant slalom.
- superciliary ridge — browridge.
- supraorbital ridge — browridge.
- surgical appliance — a specialized device used by somebody to relieve a particular medical condition
- the general public — the people in a society; people in general
- to plough a furrow — If you say that someone ploughs a particular furrow or ploughs their own furrow, you mean that their activities or interests are different or isolated from those of other people.
- 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.
- universal coupling — a coupling between rotating shafts set at an angle to one another, allowing for rotation in three planes.
- whispering gallery — a space or gallery beneath a dome or broad arch in which low sounds produced at any of certain points are clearly audible at certain other distant points.
- wildlife programme — (esp on television) a documentary whose subject is wild animals in their natural habitat or undomesticated fauna and flora generally