18-letter words containing p, e, r, s, u, l
- pedal steel guitar — an oblong, floor-mounted electrified guitar, usually having ten strings, fretted with a steel bar and producing a wailing sound that is modulated by use of a foot pedal.
- pemphigus vulgaris — a potentially fatal blistering skin disease, characterized by large blisters on the skin, mucous membranes of the mouth, genitals, intestines, etc, which eventually rupture and form painful denuded areas from which critical amounts of bodily protein, fluid, and blood may be lost
- percussion flaking — a method of forming a flint tool by striking flakes from a stone core with another stone or a piece of bone or wood.
- percussion welding — a form of resistance welding in which the required pressure is provided by a hammerlike blow.
- persistent cruelty — conduct causing fear of danger to the life or health of a spouse (used in matrimonial proceedings before magistrates)
- personal bodyguard — a person employed to protect a particular person
- personal insurance — insurance on personal risk, such as car insurance, health insurance or loss of earnings insurance
- play silly buggers — to fool around and waste time
- pleasure principle — an automatic mental drive or instinct seeking to avoid pain and to obtain pleasure.
- plumber's merchant — a shop or business that sells things needed for the job of installing and repairing pipes, fixtures, etc, for water, drainage, and gas
- population figures — population totals; statistics relating to the size of populations
- post-revolutionary — of, pertaining to, characterized by, or of the nature of a revolution, or a sudden, complete, or marked change: a revolutionary junta.
- potassium chlorate — a white or colorless, crystalline, water-soluble, poisonous solid, KClO 3 , used chiefly as an oxidizing agent in the manufacture of explosives, fireworks, matches, bleaches, and disinfectants.
- potassium chloride — a white or colorless, crystalline, water-soluble solid, KCl, used chiefly in the manufacture of fertilizers and mineral water, and as a source of other potassium compounds.
- potassium fluoride — a white, crystalline, hygroscopic, toxic powder, KF, used chiefly as an insecticide, a disinfectant, and in etching glass.
- predicate calculus — predicate logic
- presidential suite — a suite of rooms, as in a hotel, suitable for a president or other head of state.
- pressure altimeter — an aneroid barometer adapted for measuring altitude by converting the indicated atmospheric pressure to altitude according to a standard relationship.
- presumption of law — a presumption based upon a policy of law or a general rule and not upon the facts or evidence in an individual case.
- presuppositionless — to suppose or assume beforehand; take for granted in advance.
- process scheduling — multitasking
- provascular tissue — procambium.
- pseudotuberculosis — an acute, sometimes fatal disease of rodents, birds, and other animals, including humans, caused by the bacterium Yersinia (Pasteurella) pseudotuberculosis, and characterized by the formation of nodules resembling those that result from tuberculosis.
- pulmonary embolism — the blockage of a pulmonary artery, often by a blood clot, that stops the flow of blood to the lungs and which can result in death if untreated
- pulmonic airstream — a current of lung air set in motion by the respiratory muscles in the production of speech.
- purple loosestrife — an Old World plant, Lythrum salicaria, of the loosestrife family, widely naturalized in North America, growing in wet places and having spikes of reddish-purple flowers.
- red cluster pepper — a tropical, woody plant, Capsicum annuum fasciculatum, having erect, very pungent, red fruit in small clusters.
- red-spotted purple — any color having components of both red and blue, such as lavender, especially one deep in tone.
- 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.
- repayment schedule — a document detailing the specific terms of a borrower's loan, such as monthly payment, interest rate, due dates etc
- resurrection plant — a desert plant, Selaginella lepidophylla, occurring from Texas to South America, having stems that curl inward when dry.
- sampling frequency — sample rate
- scripting language — a language that is used to write scripts, or executable sections of code that automate tasks.
- sea-level pressure — the atmospheric pressure, at any elevation, reduced by formula to a value approximating the pressure at sea level.
- self-preoccupation — the state of being preoccupied.
- separate but equal — pertaining to a racial policy, formerly practiced in some parts of the United States, by which black people could be segregated if granted equal opportunities and facilities, as for education, transportation, or jobs.
- simple enumeration — a procedure for arriving at empirical generalizations by haphazard accumulation of positive instances.
- speak for yourself — If you say 'Speak for yourself' when someone has said something, you mean that what they have said is only their opinion or applies only to them.
- special prosecutor — (formerly) an independent counsel.
- spectrofluorimeter — an instrument in which the spectrum of secondarily emitted fluorescent light is used to identify chemical compounds.
- spectrofluorometer — an instrument in which the spectrum of secondarily emitted fluorescent light is used to identify chemical compounds.
- subatomic particle — physics:
- super giant slalom — a slalom race in which the course is longer and has more widely spaced gates than in a giant slalom.
- super middleweight — a boxer weighing up to 168 pounds (75.6 kg), between middleweight and light heavyweight.
- super royal octavo — a book size, 63⁄4 by 101⁄4 inches
- super royal quarto — a book size, 101⁄4 by 131⁄2 inches
- superciliary ridge — browridge.
- supraorbital ridge — browridge.
- surgical appliance — a specialized device used by somebody to relieve a particular medical condition
- temporal summation — the act or process of summing.