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18-letter words containing p, a, r, i

  • 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.
  • reinforced plastic — plastic with fibrous matter, such as carbon fibre, embedded in it to confer additional strength
  • replacement engine — an engine used to replace or substitute an older or broken engine (in a vehicle, etc)
  • report an accident — If you report an accident, you inform an insurer or the police or other authorities that an accident has occurred.
  • representativeness — a person or thing that represents another or others.
  • reprocessing plant — a plant where materials are treated in order to make them reusable
  • resistance plasmid — any of a group of bacterial plasmids carrying genetic information that provide resistance to antibiotic drugs: some resistance plasmids are able to transfer themselves, and hence resistance, during conjugation
  • respiratory arrest — cessation of breathing
  • respiratory system — the system by which oxygen is taken into the body and an exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide takes place; in mammals the system includes the nasal passages, pharynx, trachea, bronchi, and lungs.
  • resurrection plant — a desert plant, Selaginella lepidophylla, occurring from Texas to South America, having stems that curl inward when dry.
  • retail price index — The retail price index is a list of the prices of typical goods which shows how much the cost of living changes from one month to the next.
  • rhodes scholarship — one of a number of scholarships at Oxford University, established by the will of Cecil Rhodes, for selected students (Rhodes scholars) from the British Commonwealth and the United States.
  • richard p. feynman — (person, computing, architecture)   /fayn'mn/ 1918-1988. A US physicist, computer scientist and author who graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton. Feynmane was a key figure in helping Oppenheimer and team develop atomic bomb. In 1950 he became a professor at Caltech and in 1965 became Nobel Prize Laureate in Physics for QED (quantum electrodynamics). He was a primary figure in "solving" the Challenger disaster O-ring problem. He "rediscovered" the former Soviet Socialist Republic of Tuva. The 2001 film "Infinity" about Feynman's early life featured Matthew Broderick and Patricia Arquette. In 2001, "QED", a play about Feynman's life featuring Alan Alda opened.
  • richard p. gabriel — Richard Gabriel
  • rural municipality — any lightly settled area in Canada lacking a local elected government and administered directly by a provincial government.
  • saint bernard pass — either of two passes over the Alps: the Great St Bernard Pass 2472 m (8110 ft) high, east of Mont Blanc between Italy and Switzerland, or the Little St Bernard Pass 2157 m (7077 ft) high, south of Mont Blanc between Italy and France
  • saint peter's fish — another name for tilapia, taken from a Bible story about Saint Peter catching a fish with a coin in its mouth
  • sampling frequency — sample rate
  • scholarship holder — a person who, because of academic merit, receives financial aid for their studies
  • scissors-and-paste — designating or of a piece of writing that has been assembled from a variety of sources rather than by original research, often in a hasty or uninspired way
  • 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.
  • seasonal promotion — Seasonal promotions are items marketed to customers at the appropriate time of year, such as coats in the winter and bathing suits in the summer.
  • secondary syphilis — the second stage of syphilis, characterized by eruptions of the skin and mucous membrane.
  • self-deprecatingly — in a self-deprecating manner
  • self-disparagement — the act of disparaging.
  • self-preoccupation — the state of being preoccupied.
  • self-tapping screw — a screw designed to tap its corresponding female thread as it is driven.
  • separation anxiety — the normal fear and apprehension expressed by infants when removed from their mothers or approached by strangers.
  • september holidays — a period of time in September when people do not have to go to school, college or work
  • septic sore throat — an acute, toxic, streptococcus infection of the throat producing fever, tonsillitis, and other serious effects.
  • service department — a repair shop
  • sharp-shinned hawk — a North American hawk, Accipiter striatus, having extremely slender legs, a bluish-gray back, and a white, rusty-barred breast.
  • shepherd satellite — a small moon orbiting near a planetary ring, whose gravitational pull helps confine the ring and the ring's extent.
  • shipping container — a large, strong container, usually of metal, used to store goods in during shipment
  • shunting operation — an operation in which rail coaches are manoeuvred
  • sierra blanca peak — a mountain in S New Mexico: highest peak in the Sacramento Mountains. 11,997 feet (3651 meters).
  • simple enumeration — a procedure for arriving at empirical generalizations by haphazard accumulation of positive instances.
  • slow-motion replay — a showing again in slow motion of a sequence of action, esp of part of a sporting contest immediately after it happens
  • soda-lime feldspar — plagioclase.
  • sodium-vapour lamp — a type of electric lamp consisting of a glass tube containing neon and sodium vapour at low pressure through which an electric current is passed to give an orange light. They are used in street lighting
  • solitary sandpiper — a North American sandpiper, Tringa solitaria, of inland wetlands, having a brownish-gray, white-spotted back and whitish underparts.
  • something to spare — a surplus of something
  • special prosecutor — (formerly) an independent counsel.
  • special relativity — the state or fact of being relative.
  • specialist teacher — a teacher with expertise in working with children with special educational needs, such as dyslexia
  • specimen signature — a signature to be compared to an original signature in order to verify someone's identity
  • 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
  • spectropolarimeter — an instrument for determining the extent to which plane-polarized light of various wavelengths is rotated by certain solutions, consisting of a combination of a spectroscope and a polarimeter.
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