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15-letter words containing p, a, r, l

  • pure and simple — sheer, utter
  • pure land sects — Mahayana Buddhist sects venerating the Buddha as the compassionate saviour
  • purslane family — the plant family Portulacaceae, characterized by chiefly herbaceous plants having simple, often fleshy leaves, sometimes showy flowers, and capsular fruit, and including bitterroot, purslane, red maids, rose moss, and spring beauty.
  • pyramid selling — Pyramid selling is a method of selling in which one person buys a supply of a particular product direct from the manufacturer and then sells it to a number of other people at an increased price. These people sell it on to others in a similar way, but eventually the final buyers are only able to sell the product for less than they paid for it.
  • pyramidal tract — any of four tracts of descending motor fibers that extend in pairs down each side of the spinal column and function in voluntary movement.
  • pyrocrystalline — crystallized from a molten magma or highly heated solution.
  • pyrogallic acid — pyrogallol
  • pyrogallic-acid — a white, crystalline, water-soluble, poisonous, solid, phenolic compound, C 6 H 3 (OH) 3 , obtained by heating gallic acid and water: used chiefly as a developer in photography, as a mordant for wool, in dyeing, and in medicine in the treatment of certain skin conditions.
  • pyrotechnically — in a pyrotechnical manner
  • quadruple bucky — Obsolete. 1. On an MIT space-cadet keyboard, use of all four of the shifting keys (control, meta, hyper, and super) while typing a character key. 2. On a Stanford or MIT keyboard in raw mode, use of four shift keys while typing a fifth character, where the four shift keys are the control and meta keys on *both* sides of the keyboard. This was very difficult to do! One accepted technique was to press the left-control and left-meta keys with your left hand, the right-control and right-meta keys with your right hand, and the fifth key with your nose. Quadruple-bucky combinations were very seldom used in practice, because when one invented a new command one usually assigned it to some character that was easier to type. If you want to imply that a program has ridiculously many commands or features, you can say something like: "Oh, the command that makes it spin the tapes while whistling Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is quadruple-bucky-cokebottle." See double bucky, bucky bits, cokebottle.
  • quadruplication — one of four copies or identical items, especially copies of typewritten material.
  • quasi-spherical — having the form of a sphere; globular.
  • radar telescope — (in radar astronomy) a very large radar antenna used to study planetary bodies in the solar system.
  • radio telephone — A radio telephone is a telephone which carries sound by sending radio signals rather than by using wires. Radio telephones are often used in cars.
  • radio telescope — a system consisting of an antenna, either parabolic or dipolar, used to gather radio waves emitted by celestial sources and bring them to a receiver placed in the focus.
  • radio-telephone — a telephone in which sound or speech is transmitted by means of radio waves instead of through wires or cables.
  • radiotelegraphy — the constructing or operating of radiotelegraphs.
  • random sampling — a method of selecting a sample (random sample) from a statistical population in such a way that every possible sample that could be selected has a predetermined probability of being selected.
  • range paralysis — Marek's disease.
  • rape of lucrece — a narrative poem (1594) by Shakespeare.
  • real programmer — (job, humour)   (From the book "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche") A variety of hacker possessed of a flippant attitude toward complexity that is arrogant even when justified by experience. The archetypal "Real Programmer" likes to program on the bare metal and is very good at it, remembers the binary op codes for every machine he has ever programmed, thinks that high-level languages are sissy, and uses a debugger to edit his code because full-screen editors are for wimps. Real Programmers aren't satisfied with code that hasn't been bummed into a state of tenseness just short of rupture. Real Programmers never use comments or write documentation: "If it was hard to write", says the Real Programmer, "it should be hard to understand." Real Programmers can make machines do things that were never in their spec sheets; in fact, they are seldom really happy unless doing so. A Real Programmer's code can awe with its fiendish brilliance, even as its crockishness appals. Real Programmers live on junk food and coffee, hang line-printer art on their walls, and terrify the crap out of other programmers - because someday, somebody else might have to try to understand their code in order to change it. Their successors generally consider it a Good Thing that there aren't many Real Programmers around any more. For a famous (and somewhat more positive) portrait of a Real Programmer, see "The Story of Mel". The term itself was popularised by a 1983 Datamation article "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" by Ed Post, still circulating on Usenet and Internet in on-line form.
  • reception class — A reception class is a class that children go into when they first start school at the age of four or five.
  • recoil-operated — employing the recoil force of an explosive projectile to prepare the firing mechanism for the next shot.
  • reconceptualize — to form into a concept; make a concept of.
  • recycling plant — a factory for processing used or abandoned materials
  • reduplicatively — in a reduplicative manner
  • refugee capital — money from abroad invested, esp for a short term, in the country offering the highest interest rate
  • refuse disposal — the act of disposing of rubbish and waste
  • regular premium — A regular premium is money paid to buy insurance coverage in installments at particular time intervals, such as monthly or annually.
  • relapsing fever — one of a group of fevers characterized by relapses, occurring in many tropical countries, and caused by several species of spirochetes transmitted by several species of lice and ticks.
  • release therapy — psychotherapy in which the patient finds emotional release in the expression of hostilities and emotional conflicts.
  • renal corpuscle — Malpighian body (sense 2)
  • rendering plant — a factory where waste products and livestock carcasses are converted into industrial fats and oils (such as tallow, used to make soap) and other products (such as fertilizer)
  • reported clause — A reported clause is a subordinate clause that indicates what someone said or thought. For example, in 'She said that she was hungry', 'she was hungry' is a reported clause.
  • retail politics — a political strategy or campaign style of meeting and speaking directly to as many voters as possible: New Hampshire is a state where retail politics are decisive. Not every candidate is good at retail politics.
  • retirement plan — a systematic plan made and kept by an individual for setting aside income for his or her future retirement.
  • retroperitoneal — of or relating to the area behind the abdominal lining, where organs such as the kidneys and bladder are located
  • rheinland-pfalz — German name of Rhineland-Palatinate.
  • rhombencephalon — the hindbrain.
  • ridgefield park — a town in NE New Jersey.
  • río de la plata — Rí·o de la [ree-aw th e lah] /ˈri ɔ ðɛ lɑ/ (Show IPA) an estuary on the SE coast of South America between Argentina and Uruguay, formed by the Uruguay and Paraná rivers, about 185 miles (290 km) long.
  • rocket airplane — an airplane propelled wholly or mainly by a rocket engine.
  • room-and-pillar — noting a means of extracting coal or other minerals from underground deposits by first cutting out rooms, then robbing the pillars between them; pillar-and-breast.
  • royal poinciana — a tree, Delonix regia, of the legume family, native to Madagascar, having showy clusters of brilliant scarlet flowers and long, flat, woody pods.
  • rudyard kipling — (Joseph) Rudyard [ruhd-yerd] /ˈrʌd yərd/ (Show IPA), 1865–1936, English author: Nobel Prize 1907.
  • rump parliament — the remnant of the Long Parliament established by the expulsion of the Presbyterian members in 1648, dismissed by force in 1653, and restored briefly in 1659–60.
  • sale of produce — the selling of something that is produced, esp agricultural products
  • sales promotion — the methods or techniques for creating public acceptance of or interest in a product, usually in addition to standard merchandising techniques, as advertising or personal selling, and generally consisting of the offer of free samples, gifts made to a purchaser, or the like.
  • salisbury plain — a plateau in S England, N of Salisbury: the site of Stonehenge.
  • salt and pepper — pepper-and-salt.
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