17-letter words containing p, r, a, c
- hyperbolic spiral — rθ = a, (where a is a constant)
- hyperchlorination — Chemistry. to combine or treat with chlorine. to introduce chlorine atoms into an organic compound by an addition or substitution reaction.
- hyperexcitability — an excessive reaction to stimuli.
- hyperintellectual — appealing to or engaging the intellect: intellectual pursuits.
- hypochlorous acid — a weak, unstable acid, HOCl, existing only in solution and in the form of its salts, used as a bleaching agent and disinfectant.
- hypocholesteremia — an abnormally low amount of cholesterol in the blood.
- hypochondriacally — In a hypochondriacal manner.
- iambic pentameter — a verse line consisting of five metrical iambs
- ice-cream parlour — a place where people go to eat ice cream
- illegal procedure — a penalty assessed against the offensive team for a technical rules violation, as in assuming an illegal formation.
- immunotherapeutic — (immunology, medicine) Of a pharmaceutical, acting on the immune system to treat disease; used in immunotherapy.
- imperialistically — In an imperialistic manner.
- impersonification — (archaic) the act of impersonating; impersonation.
- impracticableness — The state of being impracticable; impracticability.
- improper fraction — a fraction having the numerator greater than the denominator.
- incubation period — the period between infection and the appearance of signs of a disease.
- indecipherability — Quality of being indecipherable.
- indian rope-trick — the supposed Indian feat of climbing an unsupported rope
- indicator species — See at indicator (def 6).
- inspector general — a comedy (1836) by Gogol.
- inspector-general — a comedy (1836) by Gogol.
- insurance company — company that sells insurance policies
- insurance premium — payment on an insurance policy
- integer specratio — SPECint92
- integrated optics — an assembly of miniature optical elements of a size comparable to those used in electronic integrated circuits.
- intel corporation — (company) A US microelectronics manufacturer. They produced the Intel 4004, Intel 8080, Intel 8086, Intel 80186, Intel 80286, Intel 80386, Intel 486 and Pentium microprocessor families as well as many other integrated circuits and personal computer networking and communications products. Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce founded Intel in 1968 to design, manufacture, and market semiconductor computer memory to replace magnetic core memory, the dominant computer memory at that time. Dr. Andrew S. Grove joined Intel soon after its incorporation. Three years later, in 1971, Intel introduced the world's first microprocessor, the Intel 4004. Intel has design, development, production, and administration facilities throughout the western US, Europe and Asia. In 1995 nearly 75% of the world's personal computers use Intel architecture. Annual revenues are rapidly approaching $10 billion. In March, 1994, "Business Week" named Intel one of the top ten American companies in terms of profit, one of the top 15 market value winners, and 16th out of the magazine's top 1,000 companies overall. Intel invested a record $2.9 billion in capital and R&D in 1993, and expects to increase combined spending on these activities to $3.5 billion in 1994. Quarterly sales were $2770M and profits, $640M in Aug 1994. Address: Santa Clara, CA, USA.
- interdisciplinary — combining or involving two or more academic disciplines or fields of study: The economics and history departments are offering an interdisciplinary seminar on Asia.
- intraspecifically — Between individuals of the same species.
- iontophoretically — By means of iontophoresis.
- isomorphism class — (mathematics) A collection of all the objects isomorphic to a given object. Talking about the isomorphism class (of a poset, say) ensures that we will only consider its properties as a poset, and will not consider other incidental properties it happens to have.
- isopropyl alcohol — a colorless, flammable, water-soluble liquid, C 3 H 8 O, produced from propylene by the action of sulfuric acid and hydrolysis: used chiefly in the manufacture of antifreeze and rubbing alcohol and as a solvent.
- jump trace buffer — (JTB) A feature of some pipelined processors (e.g. Amulet, Pentium?) which stores the source and destination addresses of the last few branch instuctions executed. When a branch instruction is fetched, its source is looked for in the JTB. If found, the next instuction fetch will be from the previous destination of that branch. If it turns out that the branch shouldn't have been taken this time, then the pipeline is flushed. This means that in a tight loop it is not necessary to flush the pipeline every time you jump back to the start.
- jus primae noctis — droit du seigneur.
- karelian republic — a constituent republic of NW Russia between the White Sea and Lakes Onega and Ladoga. Capital: Petrozavodsk. Pop: 716 700 (2002). Area: 172 400 sq km (66 560 sq miles)
- keep your balance — If you keep your balance, for example when standing in a moving vehicle, you remain steady and do not fall over. If you lose your balance, you become unsteady and fall over.
- landscape painter — artist who depicts natural scenery
- landscaped garden — a garden that has been artistically designed
- laplace transform — a map of a function, as a signal, defined especially for positive real values, as time greater than zero, into another domain where the function is represented as a sum of exponentials.
- larmor precession — the precession of charged particles, as electrons, placed in a magnetic field, the frequency of the precession (Larmor frequency) being equal to the electronic charge times the strength of the magnetic field divided by 4π times the mass.
- legal proceedings — court case
- level compensator — an automatic gain control device used in the receivers of telegraphic circuits.
- lexicographically — the writing, editing, or compiling of dictionaries.
- ligurian republic — the republic in NW Italy set up by Napoleon in 1797, incorporated into France in 1805, and united with the Kingdom of Sardinia in 1814.
- lincoln's sparrow — a North American sparrow, Melospiza lincolnii, having a buff breast with black streaks.
- linear dependence — (in linear algebra) the property of a set of elements in a vector space in which at least one of the vectors in the set can be written as a linear combination of the others.
- lipopolysaccaride — a molecule, consisting of lipid and polysaccharide components, that is the main constituent of the cell walls of Gram-negative bacteria
- literacy campaign — a campaign designed to reduce illiteracy and promote literacy in a country, area, etc
- loco primo citato — loc. primo cit.
- loco supra citato — l.s.c.
- logic programming — (artificial intelligence, programming, language) A declarative, relational style of programming based on first-order logic. The original logic programming language was Prolog. The concept is based on Horn clauses. The programmer writes a "database" of "facts", e.g. wet(water). ("water is wet") and "rules", e.g. mortal(X) :- human(X). ("X is mortal is implied by X is human"). Facts and rules are collectively known as "clauses". The user supplies a "goal" which the system attempts to prove using "resolution" or "backward chaining". This involves matching the current goal against each fact or the left hand side of each rule using "unification". If the goal matches a fact, the goal succeeds; if it matches a rule then the process recurses, taking each sub-goal on the right hand side of the rule as the current goal. If all sub-goals succeed then the rule succeeds. Each time a possible clause is chosen, a "choice point" is created on a stack. If subsequent resolution fails then control eventually returns to the choice point and subsequent clauses are tried. This is known as "backtracking". Clauses may contain logic variables which take on any value necessary to make the fact or the left hand side of the rule match a goal. Unification binds these variables to the corresponding subterms of the goal. Such bindings are associated with the choice point at which the clause was chosen and are undone when backtracking reaches that choice point. The user is informed of the success or failure of his first goal and if it succeeds and contains variables he is told what values of those variables caused it to succeed. He can then ask for alternative solutions.