17-letter words containing p, a, t
- intestinal bypass — the surgical circumvention, by anastomosis, of a diseased portion of the intestine; also sometimes used to reduce nutrient absorption in morbidly obese patients.
- intradepartmental — Within a department.
- intraspecifically — Between individuals of the same species.
- inversion therapy — a method used to stretch and align the body, especially the lower back, by suspending the entire body upside down from an apparatus that grips or supports the feet or knees.
- iontophoretically — By means of iontophoresis.
- isthmus of panama — an isthmus linking North and South America, between the Pacific and the Caribbean. Length: 676 km (420 miles). Width (at its narrowest point): 50 km (31 miles)
- japanese chestnut — any of the several deciduous trees constituting the genus Castanea, of the beech family, having toothed, oblong leaves and bearing edible nuts enclosed in a prickly bur, and including C. dentata (American chestnut) which has been virtually destroyed by the chestnut blight, C. sativa (European chestnut) C. mollissima (Chinese chestnut) and C. crenata (Japanese chestnut)
- japanese clematis — a Japanese woody vine, Clematis paniculata, of the buttercup family, having dense clusters of fragrant, white flowers and plumed fruit.
- japanese knotweed — Mexican bamboo.
- japanese wisteria — a wisteria, Wisteria floribunda, of Japan, having violet, violet-blue, pink, red, or white flowers, grown in the U.S. as an ornamental.
- job specification — a detailed description of the qualifications, skills, and experience required for a particular post of employment
- joined at the hip — friends: inseparable
- judgment of paris — the decision by Paris to award Aphrodite the golden apple of discord competed for by Aphrodite, Athena, and Hera.
- jump trace buffer — (JTB) A feature of some pipelined processors (e.g. Amulet, Pentium?) which stores the source and destination addresses of the last few branch instuctions executed. When a branch instruction is fetched, its source is looked for in the JTB. If found, the next instuction fetch will be from the previous destination of that branch. If it turns out that the branch shouldn't have been taken this time, then the pipeline is flushed. This means that in a tight loop it is not necessary to flush the pipeline every time you jump back to the start.
- jurisprudentially — In terms of jurisprudence.
- jus primae noctis — droit du seigneur.
- karitane hospital — a hospital for young babies and their mothers
- kastor and pollux — Castor and Pollux.
- keep mum/stay mum — If you keep mum or stay mum about something, you do not tell anyone about it.
- kensington palace — a royal residence in Kensington Gardens, in the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea; dating from the 17th century, it was improved and extended by Sir Cristopher Wren
- kick in the pants — a reprimand or scolding designed to produce greater effort, enthusiasm, etc, in the person receiving it
- kidney transplant — surgery to replace a kidney
- kinetic potential — the kinetic energy minus the potential energy in a system obeying the principle of conservation of energy. Symbol: L.
- kitchen appliance — a machine intended for use in the kitchen, such as a fridge or a food processor
- l'hospital's rule — the theorem that for the quotient of two functions satisfying certain conditions on a given closed interval, each having infinite limit or zero as limit at a given point, the limit of the quotient at the given point is equal to the limit of the quotient of the derivatives of each function.
- la perouse strait — a strait between S Sakhalin Island, Russia and N Hokkaido Island, Japan connecting the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan. 25 miles (40 km) wide.
- lan kanal adapter — (networking) (LKA) A sort of external LAN interface for a BS200 computer.
- landscape painter — artist who depicts natural scenery
- laplace transform — a map of a function, as a signal, defined especially for positive real values, as time greater than zero, into another domain where the function is represented as a sum of exponentials.
- lares and penates — household gods
- least fixed point — (mathematics) A function f may have many fixed points (x such that f x = x). For example, any value is a fixed point of the identity function, (\ x . x). If f is recursive, we can represent it as f = fix F where F is some higher-order function and fix F = F (fix F). The standard denotational semantics of f is then given by the least fixed point of F. This is the least upper bound of the infinite sequence (the ascending Kleene chain) obtained by repeatedly applying F to the totally undefined value, bottom. I.e. fix F = LUB {bottom, F bottom, F (F bottom), ...}. The least fixed point is guaranteed to exist for a continuous function over a cpo.
- least upper bound — an upper bound that is less than or equal to all the upper bounds of a particular set. 3 is the least upper bound of the set consisting of 1, 2, 3. Abbr.: lub.
- lempert operation — fenestration (def 3c).
- level compensator — an automatic gain control device used in the receivers of telegraphic circuits.
- life of the party — most lively, outgoing person
- liquid petrolatum — mineral oil.
- liquid propellant — a rocket propellant in liquid form.
- literacy campaign — a campaign designed to reduce illiteracy and promote literacy in a country, area, etc
- lithostratigraphy — the study or character of stratified rocks based solely on their physical and petrographic features.
- load displacement — the weight, in long tons, of a cargo vessel loaded so that the summer load line touches the surface of the water.
- loco primo citato — loc. primo cit.
- loco supra citato — l.s.c.
- logical operation — Boolean operation.
- lower paleolithic — See under Paleolithic.
- lumpenproletariat — the lowest level of the proletariat comprising unskilled workers, vagrants, and criminals and characterized by a lack of class identification and solidarity.
- lymphadenopathies — Plural form of lymphadenopathy.
- magnetic monopole — a hypothetical very heavy particle with an isolated magnetic north pole or magnetic south pole.
- maintainer script — (Debian) One of the scripts (preinst, prerm, postinst, postrm) that may be included in a Debian binary package. These scripts may create and/or remove symlinks, files or directories that, for some reason, could not be done directly by dpkg. Maintainer scripts frequently create or update the symlinks in the /etc/rc?.d directories and start, stop, or restart daemons.
- manhattan project — U.S. History. the unofficial designation for the U.S. War Department's secret program, organized in 1942, to explore the isolation of radioactive isotopes and the production of an atomic bomb: initial research was conducted at Columbia University in Manhattan.
- manual typewriter — a keyboard machine, operated entirely by hand, for writing mechanically in characters resembling print