14-letter words containing p, e, k
- phi beta kappa — a national honor society, founded in 1776, whose members are chosen, for lifetime membership, usually from among college undergraduates of high academic distinction.
- phosphate rock — phosphorite.
- pick one's way — to choose or select from among a group: to pick a contestant from the audience.
- pick's disease — a condition characterized by progressive deterioration of the brain with atrophy of the cerebral cortex, esp. the frontal lobes, and evidenced in loss of memory and emotional instability
- picking ticket — A picking ticket is a list used for gathering items to be shipped from a store or warehouse.
- pickled onions — onions which have been preserved in vinegar or brine
- pie in the sky — pie1 (def 8).
- pink champagne — a sparkling white wine, especially of the Champagne district of France, colored slightly by the grape skins during fermentation or the addition of a small amount of red wine just before the second fermentation.
- pink elephants — a facetious name applied to hallucinations caused by drunkenness
- pinking shears — shears that have notched blades, for cutting and simultaneously pinking fabric or for finishing garments with a notched, nonfraying edge.
- pipeline break — (architecture) (Or "pipeline stall") The delay caused on a processor using pipelines when a transfer of control is taken. Normally when a control-transfer instruction (a branch, conditional branch, call or trap) is taken, any following instructions which have been loaded into the processor's pipeline must be discarded or "flushed" and new instructions loaded from the branch destination. This introduces a delay before the processor can resume execution. "Delayed control-transfer" is a technique used to reduce this effect.
- plain speaking — expressing oneself directly
- play for keeps — to do something seriously and without showing any mercy
- pocket borough — (before the Reform Bill of 1832) any English borough whose representatives in Parliament were controlled by an individual or family.
- pocket edition — pocketbook (def 3).
- poikilothermal — cold-blooded (def 1 .) (opposed to homoiothermal).
- poikilothermia — Medicine/Medical. the inability to regulate core body temperature (as by sweating to cool off or by putting on clothes to warm up), found especially in some spinal cord injury patients and in patients under general anesthesia.
- poikilothermic — cold-blooded (def 1 .) (opposed to homoiothermal).
- poison hemlock — hemlock (defs 1, 3).
- polar outbreak — a vigorous thrust of cold, polar air across temperate regions.
- pop one's cork — the outer bark of an oak, Quercus suber, of Mediterranean countries, used for making stoppers for bottles, floats, etc.
- post-breakfast — the first meal of the day; morning meal: A hearty breakfast was served at 7 a.m.
- potluck dinner — a meal consisting of whatever food happens to be available without special preparation
- practical joke — a playful trick, often involving some physical agent or means, in which the victim is placed in an embarrassing or disadvantageous position.
- pre-earthquake — a series of vibrations induced in the earth's crust by the abrupt rupture and rebound of rocks in which elastic strain has been slowly accumulating.
- printer's mark — a stamp or device, usually found on the copyright page, that identifies a book as the work of a particular printer.
- profit-seeking — attempting to make a profit or financial gains
- promenade deck — an upper deck or part of a deck on a passenger ship where passengers can stroll, often covered with a light shade deck.
- pull up stakes — a stick or post pointed at one end for driving into the ground as a boundary mark, part of a fence, support for a plant, etc.
- purbeck marble — a fossil-rich limestone that takes a high polish: used for building, etc
- purkinje fiber — any of the specialized cardiac muscle fibers forming a network in the ventricular walls that conduct electric impulses responsible for the contractions of the ventricles.
- purple grackle — the eastern subspecies of the common grackle, Quiscalus quiscula, of North America, having an iridescent purple back.
- pyjama cricket — one-day cricket, in which the players wear colourful clothing rather than the traditional whites used in longer forms of the game
- pyramidal peak — a sharp peak formed where the ridges separating three or more cirques intersect; horn
- quick response — fast reaction time
- quick-tempered — easily angered.
- rathke's pouch — an invagination of stomodeal ectoderm developing into the anterior lobe of the pituitary gland.
- reception desk — the front desk in a hotel where guests can books rooms or ask questions
- record-keeping — the maintenance of a history of one's activities, as financial dealings, by entering data in ledgers or journals, putting documents in files, etc.
- rip van winkle — (in a story by Washington Irving) a ne'er-do-well who sleeps 20 years and upon waking is startled to find how much the world has changed.
- roanoke rapids — a city in NE North Carolina.
- rock partridge — the Greek partridge; Alectoris graeca
- sakha republic — an administrative division in E Russia, in NE Siberia on the Arctic Ocean: the coldest inhabited region of the world; it has rich mineral resources. Capital: Yakutsk. Pop: 948 100 (2002). Area: 3 103 200 sq km (1 197 760 sq miles)
- shakespeareana — collected writings or items relating to Shakespeare
- sheepback rock — roche moutonnée.
- shipping clerk — a clerk who attends to the packing, unpacking, receiving, sending out, and recording of shipments.
- shrink-wrapped — A shrink-wrapped product is sold in a tight covering of thin plastic.
- skull practice — a meeting for the purpose of discussion, exchange of ideas, solving problems, etc.
- sock suspender — garter (def 1).
- space sickness — a complex of symptoms including nausea, lethargy, headache, and sweating, occurring among astronauts under conditions of weightlessness.