18-letter words containing p, l, e, n, u
- percussion welding — a form of resistance welding in which the required pressure is provided by a hammerlike blow.
- perlocutionary act — the action of affecting someone by uttering certain words
- perpetual calendar — a calendar devised to be used for many years, as in determining the day of the week on which a given date falls.
- 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
- petroleum engineer — A petroleum engineer is an engineer who is involved in most stages of oil and gas field evaluation, development, and production, whose job is to maximize hydrocarbon recovery and reduce costs and environmental impact.
- physical education — systematic instruction in sports, exercises, and hygiene given as part of a school or college program.
- phytohemagglutinin — a lectin, obtained from the red kidney bean, that binds to the membranes of T cells and stimulates metabolic activity, cell division, etc.
- piperonyl butoxide — a light-brown liquid, C 1 9 H 3 0 O 5 , used chiefly as a synergist in certain insecticides.
- play cat and mouse — Also called cat and rat. a children's game in which players in a circle keep a player from moving into or out of the circle and permit a second player to move into or out of the circle to escape the pursuing first player.
- pleasure principle — an automatic mental drive or instinct seeking to avoid pain and to obtain pleasure.
- plenary indulgence — a remission of the total temporal punishment that is still due to sin after absolution. Compare indulgence (def 6).
- plenum ventilation — a system of mechanical ventilation in which fresh air is forced into the spaces to be ventilated from a chamber (plenum chamber) at a pressure slightly higher than atmospheric pressure, so as to expel foul air.
- 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
- political question — a question regarded by the courts as being a matter to be determined by another department of government rather than of law and therefore one with which they will not deal, as the recognition of a foreign state.
- population balance — A population balance is a model showing particle sizes during a grinding process, which is used when designing a process.
- population density — ratio: inhabitants to area
- population figures — population totals; statistics relating to the size of populations
- portable equipment — Portable equipment is electrical equipment that can easily be moved from one place to another while in operation or while connected to the supply.
- post-revolutionary — of, pertaining to, characterized by, or of the nature of a revolution, or a sudden, complete, or marked change: a revolutionary junta.
- pour cold water on — If someone pours cold water on a plan or idea, they criticize it so much that people lose their enthusiasm for it.
- preantepenultimate — third from the end.
- presidential suite — a suite of rooms, as in a hotel, suitable for a president or other head of state.
- 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.
- principal argument — the radian measure of the argument between −π and π of a complex number. Compare argument (def 8c).
- process scheduling — multitasking
- pseudointellectual — a person exhibiting intellectual pretensions that have no basis in sound scholarship.
- public convenience — a rest room, especially at a large public place, as at a railroad station.
- public examination — an examination, such as a GCSE exam, that is set by a central examining board
- public expenditure — spending by central government, local authorities, and public corporations
- 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.
- pull one's punches — to restrain the force of one's criticisms or actions
- pull someone's leg — either of the two lower limbs of a biped, as a human being, or any of the paired limbs of an animal, arthropod, etc., that support and move the body.
- 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.
- pulp canal therapy — endodontics.
- put a bold face on — to seem bold or confident about
- quartz-iodine lamp — a type of tungsten-halogen lamp containing small amounts of iodine and having a quartz envelope, operating at high temperature and producing an intense light for use in car headlamps, etc
- 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 equipment — Sampling equipment is equipment which is used to remove small amounts of something for analysis and monitoring.
- sampling frequency — sample rate
- scripting language — a language that is used to write scripts, or executable sections of code that automate tasks.
- self-preoccupation — the state of being preoccupied.
- sell someone a pup — to swindle someone by selling him something worthless
- 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.