22-letter words containing p, a, n, s
- keep a person guessing — to let a person remain in a state of uncertainty
- landscape architecture — the art of arranging or modifying the features of a landscape, an urban area, etc., for aesthetic or practical reasons.
- last call optimisation — (programming) (Or "tail call optimisation") Discarding the immediate calling context (call stack frame) when the last action of a function or procedure, A, is to call another function or procedure, B. B will then return directly to A's caller, or possibly further up the call stack if the optimisation has been applied to several consecutive calls. Last call optimisation allows arbitrarily deep nesting of procedure calls without consuming memory to store useless environments. This is particularly useful in the special case of tail recursion optimisation, where a procedure's last action is to call itself (possibly indirectly).
- lesser prairie chicken — either of two North American gallinaceous birds of western prairies, Tympanuchus cupido (greater prairie chicken) or T. pallidicinctus (lesser prairie chicken) having rufous, brown, black, and white plumage.
- lethargic encephalitis — sleeping sickness (def 2).
- little st bernard pass — a pass over the Savoy Alps, between Bourg-Saint-Maurice, France, and La Thuile, Italy: 11th-century hospice. Height: 2187 m (7177 ft)
- love-hate relationship — If you have a love-hate relationship with someone or something, your feelings towards them change suddenly and often from love to hate.
- magnetic pole strength — Electricity. a measure of the force exerted by one face of a magnet on a face of another magnet when both magnets are represented by equal and opposite poles. Symbol: m.
- make one's flesh creep — to move slowly with the body close to the ground, as a reptile or an insect, or a person on hands and knees.
- make/prove one's point — If you make your point or prove your point, you prove that something is true, either by arguing about it or by your actions or behaviour.
- mind one's p's and q's — to be careful to behave correctly and use polite or suitable language
- miscellaneous expenses — small expenses of various kinds
- missing persons bureau — the part of the Police Force dealing with tracing missing people
- monoammonium phosphate — a white, crystalline, moderately water-soluble compound, NH 4 H 2 PO 4 , used as fertilizer, in fire extinguishers, etc.
- mozilla public license — Open source license
- multiplicative inverse — reciprocal (def 9).
- non-hodgkin's lymphoma — Pathology. any of several malignancies of the lymphatic system in which the cells characteristic of Hodgkin's disease are absent.
- non-maskable interrupt — (NMI) An IRQ 7 on the PDP-11 or 680x0 or the NMI line on an 80x86. In contrast with a priority interrupt (which might be ignored, although that is unlikely), an NMI is *never* ignored.
- nonrepresentationalism — not resembling or portraying any object in physical nature: a nonrepresentational painting.
- nonspecular reflection — the diffuse reflection of sound or light waves
- north rhine-westphalia — a state in W Germany; formerly a part of Rhine province. 13,154 sq. mi. (34,070 sq. km). Capital: Düsseldorf.
- not be sb's department — If you say that a task or area of knowledge is not your department, you mean that you are not responsible for it or do not know much about it.
- oak processionary moth — a moth, (Thaumetopoea processionea), of the family Thaumetopoeidae, the larvae of which leave the communal shelter nightly for food in a V-shaped procession
- object-oriented pascal — Object Pascal
- occupational therapist — professional who assists with rehabilitation
- oceanic whitetip shark — whitetip shark (def 2).
- on the part of someone — as far as someone is concerned
- open source initiative — (body) (OSI) An organisation dedicated to managing and promoting the Open Source Definition for the good of the community.
- open-market operations — the purchase and sale on the open market of government securities by the Bank of England for the purpose of regulating the supply of money and credit to the economy
- operating instructions — instructions on how to use something (such an electrical appliance, etc)
- operation desert storm — the codename for the US-led UN operation to liberate Kuwait from Iraq (1991)
- operational data store — (database) (ODS) A group of integrated databases designed to support the monitoring of operations. Unlike function oriented databases, an ODS contains subject-oriented, dynamic, current enterprise-wide information that is continually updated to show the current state of operations.
- outline specifications — preliminary specifications or plans on which later plans are based
- outside awareness port — (humour) (OAP) A humorous IBM term for a window (the glass kind) rather than the GUI kind.
- paddle one's own canoe — any of various slender, open boats, tapering to a point at both ends, propelled by paddles or sometimes sails and traditionally formed of light framework covered with bark, skins, or canvas, or formed from a dug-out or burned-out log or logs, and now usually made of aluminum, fiberglass, etc.
- parallel server option — Oracle Parallel Server
- paranoid schizophrenia — severe psychiatric disorder
- parker morris standard — (in Britain) a set of minimum criteria for good housing construction, design, and facilities, recommended by the 1961 report of the Central Housing Advisory Committee chaired by Sir Parker Morris. Subsequent governments have urged private and local authority house-builders to achieve these standards
- partnerships for peace — a subsidiary organization of NATO, comprising former Warsaw Pact countries that wish to be allied with NATO but have not been granted full NATO membership: established in 1994
- peanut-butter sandwich — a sandwich with a filling of peanut-butter
- percussive maintenance — (jargon) The fine art of whacking a device to get it working, possibly using a fine adjuster.
- personal rapid transit — a short system of small, self-propelled, automated, rubber-tired vehicles that usually run on elevated concrete tracks and allow a passenger a limited selection of routes, as in an amusement park or at an airport. Abbreviation: PRT.
- personal relationships — relationships between people, especially those between friends, lovers and family members
- phase alternating line — (television) (PAL) The video signal format used in the UK [where else?]. PAL uses Amplitude Modulation for the video information, and Frequency Modulation for the audio information. The phase of the colour subcarrier is reversed on alternate lines which (together with the use of a delay line) allows the receiver to cancel any phase errors introduced in the path between the studio and the end-user's receiver. Such phase errors are quite common and would cause the displayed colours to shift in hue. The US equivalent, NTSC, does not have this feature and thus requires a user control to correct for transmission phase errors, hence the mis-expansion "Never Twice the Same Colour".
- phenolsulfonephthalein — a bright to dark red crystalline compound, C 1 9 H 1 4 O 5 S, slightly soluble in water, alcohol, and acetone: used as an acid-base indicator and as a diagnostic reagent in medicine.
- philip the magnanimous — 1504–67, German prince; landgrave of Hesse (1509–67). He helped to crush (1525) the Peasants' Revolt and formed (1531) the League of Schmalkaden, an alliance of German Protestant rulers
- philosophical analysis — linguistic analysis.
- physiographic province — a geographic region in which climate and geology have given rise to an array of landforms different from those of surrounding regions.
- planck's radiation law — the law that energy associated with electromagnetic radiation, as light, is composed of discrete quanta of energy, each quantum equal to Planck's constant times the corresponding frequency of the radiation: the fundamental law of quantum mechanics.
- planetary transmission — A planetary transmission is a special form of geared drive in which the input and output shafts are on the same axis.