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22-letter words containing p, l

  • employers' association — a body of employers, usually from the same sector of the economy, associated to further the interests of member companies by conducting negotiations with trade unions, providing advice, making representations to other bodies, etc
  • english cocker spaniel — any of a breed of small spaniel, similar to and the progenitor of the cocker spaniel
  • enhanced parallel port — (hardware)   (EPP) A parallel port that confirms to the IEEE's EPP standard. An EPP is actually an expansion bus that can handle 64 disk drives and other peripherals.
  • experimental condition — one of the distinct states of affairs or values of the independent variable for which the dependent variable is measured in order to carry out statistical tests or calculations
  • explosive cyclogenesis — a rapid drop in pressure at the centre of a storm system, causing it to become greatly intensified
  • extra-mural department — a university department that offers courses for part-time students
  • fall prey to something — To fall prey to something bad means to be taken over or affected by it.
  • fallacy of composition — the fallacy of inferring that a property of parts or members of a whole is also a property of the whole (opposed to fallacy of division).
  • family planning clinic — a clinic that provides family planning services
  • federal crop insurance — insurance against the failure of certain crops provided to farmers and producers by the Federal Government
  • ferdinand von zeppelin — Count Ferdinand von [fer-di-nahnt fuh n] /ˈfɛr dɪˌnɑnt fən/ (Show IPA), 1838–1917, German general and aeronaut: designer and manufacturer of the zeppelin.
  • field emission display — (hardware)   (FED) A type of flat panel display in which field emitting cathodes bombard a phosphor coating causing it to emit light. A field emission display is similar to a cathode ray tube but only a few millimeters thick. They use a large array of fine metal tips or carbon nanotubes (which are the most efficient electron emitters known), to emit electrons through a process known as field emission. Many of these are behind each phosphor dot so FEDs do not display dead pixels like LCDs even if 20% of the emitters fail. Sony is researching FED because it is the flat-panel technology that comes closest to matching the picture of a CRT.
  • file transfer protocol — (FTP) A client-server protocol which allows a user on one computer to transfer files to and from another computer over a TCP/IP network. Also the client program the user executes to transfer files. It is defined in STD 9, RFC 959. See also anonymous FTP, FSP, TFTP.
  • flocculent precipitate — a woolly-looking precipitate, as aluminum hydroxide formed by the addition of ammonia to an aluminum-salt solution.
  • forced place insurance — Forced place insurance is insurance taken out by a bank or creditor on an uninsured debtor's behalf on a property that is being used as collateral.
  • full pelt/at full pelt — If you do something full pelt or at full pelt, you do it very quickly indeed.
  • functional programming — (programming)   (FP) A program in a functional language consists of a set of (possibly recursive) function definitions and an expression whose value is output as the program's result. Functional languages are one kind of declarative language. They are mostly based on the typed lambda-calculus with constants. There are no side-effects to expression evaluation so an expression, e.g. a function applied to certain arguments, will always evaluate to the same value (if its evaluation terminates). Furthermore, an expression can always be replaced by its value without changing the overall result (referential transparency). The order of evaluation of subexpressions is determined by the language's evaluation strategy. In a strict (call-by-value) language this will specify that arguments are evaluated before applying a function whereas in a non-strict (call-by-name) language arguments are passed unevaluated. Programs written in a functional language are generally compact and elegant, but have tended, until recently, to run slowly and require a lot of memory. Examples of purely functional languages are Clean, FP, Haskell, Hope, Joy, LML, Miranda, and SML. Many other languages such as Lisp have a subset which is purely functional but also contain non-functional constructs. See also lazy evaluation, reduction.
  • galvanic skin response — a change in the electrical conductivity of the skin caused by an emotional reaction to a stimulus.
  • general public licence — (spelling)   It's spelled "General Public License". (In the UK, "licence" is a noun and "license" is a verb (like "advice"/"advise") but in the US both are spelled "license").
  • general public license — (legal)   (GPL, note US spelling) The licence applied to most software from the Free Software Foundation and the GNU project and other authors who choose to use it. The licences for most software are designed to prevent users from sharing or changing it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee the freedom to share and change free software - to make sure the software is free for all its users. The GPL is designed to make sure that anyone can distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if they wish); that they receive source code or can get it if they want; that they can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that they know they can do these things. The GPL forbids anyone to deny others these rights or to ask them to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for those who distribute copies of the software or modify it. See also General Public Virus.
  • glossopharyngeal nerve — either of the ninth pair of cranial nerves, consisting of motor fibers that innervate the muscles of the pharynx, the soft palate, and the parotid glands, and of sensory fibers that conduct impulses to the brain from the pharynx, the middle ear, and the posterior third of the tongue.
  • government osi profile — (networking, standard)   (GOSIP) A subset of OSI standards specific to US Government procurements, designed to maximize interoperability in areas where plain OSI standards are ambiguous or allow excessive options.
  • graphical display unit — an output device incorporating a cathode ray tube on which both line drawings and text can be displayed. It is usually used in conjunction with a light pen to input or reposition data
  • gravitational collapse — the final stage of stellar evolution in which a star collapses to a final state, as a white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole, when the star's nuclear reactions no longer generate enough pressure to balance the attractive force of gravity.
  • gross national product — the total monetary value of all final goods and services produced in a country during one year. Abbreviation: GNP.
  • happy valley-goose bay — a twin town in SE Labrador in Newfoundland, E Canada, consisting of an air base, Goose Bay, and its adjacent residential town of Happy Valley: used as a fuel stop by some transatlantic airplanes.
  • help a person off with — to assist a person in the removal of (clothes)
  • hold the purse strings — hold the purse strings, to have the power to determine how money shall be spent.
  • horizontal application — An application program common to different business processes, e.g. office automation. Compare vertical application.
  • horn-rimmed spectacles — spectacles with rims made of material resembling horn
  • hospital administrator — a person who works in the management team of a hospital
  • hubble space telescope — U.S. Aerospace. a 7.9-foot (2.4-meter) optical telescope designed for use in orbit around the earth.
  • hybrid multiprocessing — (parallel)   (HMP) The kind of multitasking which OS/2 supports. HMP provides some elements of symmetric multiprocessing, using add-on IBM software called MP/2. OS/2 SMP was planned for release in late 1993.
  • hypothetical syllogism — a hypothetical syllogism has two uses. In propositional logic it expresses one of the rules of inference, while in the history of logic, it is a short-hand for the theory of consequence
  • ice-cream parlor chair — a side chair made of heavy wire with a round wooden seat, especially for use at a table.
  • in the lap of the gods — If you say that a situation is in the lap of the gods, you mean that its success or failure depends entirely on luck or on things that are outside your control.
  • incremental repetition — repetition, with variation, of a refrain or other part of a poem, especially a ballad.
  • initial program loader — (operating system)   (IPL) A bootstrap loader which loads the part of an operating system needed to load the remainder of the operating system.
  • intermetallic compound — a compound of two or more metals.
  • interoperable database — A database front-end which communicates with multiple heterogenous databases and makes them appear as a single homogenous entity with semantic calls. See ODBC.
  • japanese umbrella pine — a single aberrant species of pine, Sciadopitys verticillata, in which the leaves are fused in pairs and the crown is spire-shaped
  • keep a stiff upper lip — either of the two fleshy parts or folds forming the margins of the mouth and functioning in speech.
  • keep one's eyes peeled — to watch vigilantly (for)
  • keep one's own counsel — advice; opinion or instruction given in directing the judgment or conduct of another.
  • landscape architecture — the art of arranging or modifying the features of a landscape, an urban area, etc., for aesthetic or practical reasons.
  • last call optimisation — (programming)   (Or "tail call optimisation") Discarding the immediate calling context (call stack frame) when the last action of a function or procedure, A, is to call another function or procedure, B. B will then return directly to A's caller, or possibly further up the call stack if the optimisation has been applied to several consecutive calls. Last call optimisation allows arbitrarily deep nesting of procedure calls without consuming memory to store useless environments. This is particularly useful in the special case of tail recursion optimisation, where a procedure's last action is to call itself (possibly indirectly).
  • le chatelier principle — the law that if a constraint is applied to a system in equilibrium, the system adjusts to a new equilibrium that tends to counteract the constraint.
  • left-handed compliment — an ambiguous compliment
  • lempel-ziv compression — Substitutional compression schemes proposed by Jakob Ziv and Abraham Lempel in 1977 and 1978. There are two main schemes, LZ77 and LZ78. Lempel-Ziv Welch compression is a variant of LZ78.
  • lesser prairie chicken — either of two North American gallinaceous birds of western prairies, Tympanuchus cupido (greater prairie chicken) or T. pallidicinctus (lesser prairie chicken) having rufous, brown, black, and white plumage.
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