18-letter words containing p, i, o, u, s

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.
psychotherapeutics — psychotherapy.
publishing company — a firm which publishes books
pull one's head in — the upper part of the body in humans, joined to the trunk by the neck, containing the brain, eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.
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.
purchasing officer — the member of staff in an organization who is responsible for buying goods or products
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.
puss in the corner — a parlor game for children in which one player in the middle of a room tries to occupy any of the positions along the walls that become vacant as other players dash across to exchange places at a signal.
put one's shirt on — to bet all one has on (a horse, etc)
pygmy hippopotamus — a small hippopotamus, Choeropsis liberiensis, of forests and swamps in western Africa.
pyrosulphuric acid — a fuming liquid acid made by adding sulphur trioxide to concentrated sulphuric acid. Formula: H2S2O7
radiation exposure — exposure to radiant energy or to the particles emitted in the transfer of radiant energy, esp the particles and gamma rays emitted in nuclear decay; exposure to radioactive substances
radiation pressure — the pressure exerted on a surface by electromagnetic radiation or by sound waves.
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.
resurrection plant — a desert plant, Selaginella lepidophylla, occurring from Texas to South America, having stems that curl inward when dry.
self-preoccupation — the state of being preoccupied.
semiprecious stone — See at semiprecious.
shipping documents — documents relating to the sending of a shipment of goods, for example containing details of contents, weight, value etc.
shop till you drop — If you shop till you drop, you do a large amount of shopping.
shotgun microphone — a directional microphone with a narrow-angle range of sensitivity.
shunting operation — an operation in which rail coaches are manoeuvred
simple enumeration — a procedure for arriving at empirical generalizations by haphazard accumulation of positive instances.
slip of the tongue — If you describe something you said as a slip of the tongue, you mean that you said it by mistake.
sodium hyposulfite — sodium thiosulfate.
sodium polysulfide — a yellow-brown, water-soluble, granular powder, Na 2 S n , used chiefly in the manufacture of sulfur dyes, insecticides, and synthetic rubber.
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
solubility product — the maximum number of undissociated ions, of an electrolyte in a saturated solution, capable at a given temperature of remaining in equilibrium with the undissolved phase of the solution.
southampton island — an island in N Canada, in the Northwest Territories at the entrance to Hudson Bay. 19,100 sq. mi. (49,470 sq. km).
spackling compound — spackle
spaghetti junction — an interchange, usually between motorways, in which there are a large number of underpasses and overpasses and intersecting roads used by a large volume of high-speed traffic
spanish succession — War of thea war (1701-14) between European powers disputing the succession to the Spanish throne
special prosecutor — (formerly) an independent counsel.
spectrofluorimeter — an instrument in which the spectrum of secondarily emitted fluorescent light is used to identify chemical compounds.
statutory sick pay — the pay an employee is legally entitled to when sick
subatomic particle — physics:
subsidiary company — a company whose controlling interest is owned by another company.
summary proceeding — a mode of trial authorized by statute to be held before a judge without the usual full hearing.
super giant slalom — a slalom race in which the course is longer and has more widely spaced gates than in a giant slalom.
superior vena cava — See under vena cava.
superstring theory — any supersymmetric string theory in which each type of elementary particle is treated as a vibration of a single fundamental string (superstring) at a particular frequency.
supporting actress — an actress playing a supporting role
supportive therapy — any treatment, such as the intravenous administration of certain fluids, designed to reinforce or sustain the physiological well-being of a patient
supraorbital ridge — browridge.
sustaining program — a radio or television program without a commercial sponsor.
temporal summation — the act or process of summing.
thiosulphuric acid — an unstable acid known only in solutions and in the form of its salts. Formula: H2S2O3
to play favourites — to display favouritism
to speak your mind — If you speak your mind, you say firmly and honestly what you think about a situation, even if this may offend or upset people.
to spill your guts — if someone spills their guts, they tell you everything about something secret or private

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