26-letter words containing p, o, i, n
- not touch with a bargepole — to refuse to have anything to do with
- obscene publications squad — a division of the police force which deals with illegal books, pictures, or films which are judged obscene because they deal with sex or violence in a way that is considered offensive to the general public
- official production system — (language) (OPS) The first production system (i.e. rule based) programming language, developed at CMU in 1970 and used for building expert systems. OPS was originally written in Franz Lisp and later ported to other LISP dialects.
- on the tip of one's tongue — Anatomy. the usually movable organ in the floor of the mouth in humans and most vertebrates, functioning in eating, in tasting, and, in humans, in speaking.
- open database connectivity — (standard, database) (ODBC) A standard for accessing different database systems. There are interfaces for Visual Basic, Visual C++, SQL and the ODBC driver pack contains drivers for the Access, Paradox, dBase, Text, Excel and Btrieve databases. An application can submit statements to ODBC using the ODBC flavor of SQL. ODBC then translates these to whatever flavor the database understands. ODBC 1.0 was released in September 1992. ODBC is based on Call-Level Interface and was defined by the SQL Access Group. Microsoft was one member of the group and was the first company to release a commercial product based on its work (under Microsoft Windows) but ODBC is not a Microsoft standard (as many people believe). ODBC drivers and development tools are available now for Microsoft Windows, Unix, OS/2, and Macintosh.
- open document architecture — (standard) (ODA) ISO standard (8613) for describing documents. It allows text, graphics, and facsimile documents to be transferred between different systems.
- open the door to something — If someone or something opens the door to a good new idea or situation, they introduce it or make it possible.
- paraconsistent probability — (logic) A notion introduced by Florentin Smarandache: The probability (T, I, F) that an event occurs is calculated from different sources which may be contradictory or may overlap information; here T, I, F are real subsets representing the truth, indeterminacy, and falsity percentages respectively, and n_sup = sup(T)+sup(I)+sup(F) > 100. See neutrosophic probability
- parent teacher association — an organization of teachers and the parents of their students, as within a public school, to promote mutual understanding and to increase the effectiveness of the educational program. Abbreviation: PTA, P.T.A.
- parent-teacher association — an organization of teachers and the parents of their students, as within a public school, to promote mutual understanding and to increase the effectiveness of the educational program. Abbreviation: PTA, P.T.A.
- pellagra-preventive factor — nicotinic acid or its amide, nicotinamide, being the vitamin-B-complex members that serve to prevent pellagra.
- people's republic of china — People's Republic of, a country in E Asia. 3,691,502 sq. mi. (9,560,990 sq. km). Capital: Beijing.
- period-luminosity relation — the relationship between the period of light variation and of the absolute magnitude of Cepheid variable stars.
- personal digital assistant — a handheld computer, often pen-based, that provides especially organizational software, as an appointment calendar, and communications hardware, as a fax modem. Abbreviation: PDA.
- phenylpyruvic oligophrenia — phenylketonuria.
- philosophical anthropology — anthropology (def 4).
- philosophical-anthropology — the science that deals with the origins, physical and cultural development, biological characteristics, and social customs and beliefs of humankind.
- physical transport network — (communications) (PTN) The actual hardware through which data transfer devices are connected.
- physics analysis workbench — (tool) (PAW) A general purpose portable tool for analysis and presentation of physics data.
- pin the tail on the donkey — a children's party game in which a blindfolded player, holding a paper tail, is turned around several times before a large picture of a tailless donkey that the player then attempts to locate in order to pin the tail in place.
- plain old telephone system — Public Switched Telephone Network
- pokémon exception handling — (programming, humour) A humourous term for a try-catch exception handling construct with no constraint on which exceptions will be caught, for when you just "Gotta Catch 'Em All." (a slogan used in the Pokémon media empire). Pokémon is a trademark of the Pokémon Company of Japan.
- political action committee — A political action committee is an organization which campaigns for particular political policies, and that gives money to political parties or candidates who support those policies. The abbreviation PAC is also used.
- portable forth environment — (language) (PFE) A highly portable Forth development system based on the ANSI standard for Forth, by Dirk-Uwe Zoller of FHT, Mannheim, Germany. PFE aims to be correct, complete, usable, and simple but it isn't optimised for speed. It supports all dpANS word sets. It runs on Linux, RS/6000, and HP-UX. E-mail: Guido Draheim <[email protected]>.
- post-and-beam construction — wall construction in which beams rather than studs are used to support heavy posts.
- postprandial thermogenesis — the rate at which food is broken down after a meal and used by your body
- primo de rivera y orbaneja — Miguel [mee-gel] /miˈgɛl/ (Show IPA), 1870–1930, Spanish general and dictator 1923–30.
- prince henry the navigator — Prince, 1394–1460, prince of Portugal.
- principle of superposition — any of several physical laws that the resultant of similar vector quantities at a point is a function of the sum of the individual quantities, especially the law that the displacement at a point in a medium undergoing simple harmonic motion is equal to the sum of the displacements of each individual wave.
- privately held corporation — A privately held corporation is a company whose shares cannot be bought by the general public.
- professional office system — (messaging) (PROFS) An office messaging system from IBM, used worldwide, mainly on IBM mainframes.
- propoxyphene hydrochloride — a white, crystalline, narcotic analgesic, C22H29NO2·HCl, used for the alleviation of moderate pain
- public-service corporation — a private or quasi-private corporation chartered to provide an essential commodity or service to the public.
- pulse repetition frequency — the number of pulses per second in a system of pulse transmission. Abbreviation: PRF.
- pulse-amplitude modulation — modulation of the amplitude of a train of electric pulses used to carry signals (pulse carrier) Abbreviation: PAM.
- purely functional language — (language) A language that supports only functional programming and does not allow functions to have side-effects. Program execution consists of evaluation of an expression and all subexpressions are referentially transparent.
- put a bug in someone's ear — Also called true bug, hemipteran, hemipteron. a hemipterous insect.
- put one's signature to sth — If you put your signature to a document, you sign it as a way of officially showing that you agree with what is written.
- quite apart from something — used to indicate that you are aware of one aspect of a situation, but that you are going to focus on another aspect
- real-time operating system — (operating system) (RTOS) Any operating system where interrupts are guaranteed to be handled within a certain specified maximum time, thereby making it suitable for control of hardware in embedded systems and other time-critical applications. RTOS is not a specific product but a class of operating systems.
- refinery’s own consumption — Refinery's own consumption is the gas and fuel which is burnt to operate the units in a refinery and generate electricity and steam.
- remembrance of things past — a novel (1913–27) by Marcel Proust.
- repetitive strain disorder — overuse strain injury
- replacement cost insurance — Replacement cost insurance is insurance in which the cost of replacing property is calculated without a reduction for depreciation.
- retained object complement — an object complement that is kept in its predicative position following the verb when the verb is transformed into the passive voice, as genius in He was considered a genius from (They) considered him a genius.
- ritz combination principle — the principle that the frequencies of lines in atomic spectra can be represented as differences of a smaller number of terms, all characteristic of the emitting system, interpreted in quantum theory as the emission of exactly one photon in a transition between energy levels.
- round peg in a square hole — a person in a position, situation, etc. for which he or she is unsuited or unqualified
- scintillation spectrometer — a scintillation counter adapted for measuring the energy distribution of particles emitted in radioactive processes.
- search engine optimization — the process of adjusting the content, structure, etc, of a website so that it will be displayed prominently by a search engine
- senior chief petty officer — a noncommissioned officer ranking above a chief petty officer and below a master chief petty officer. Abbreviation: SCPO.