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19-letter words containing p, r, i, e

  • beauty preparations — the cosmetics, creams etc used to improve someone's beauty
  • benefit performance — a theatrical or musical performance in aid of charity
  • bernoulli principle — (Or "air foil principle", after Swiss mathematician Daniel Bernoulli, 1700-1782) The law that pressure in a fluid decreases with the rate of flow. It has been applied to a class of hard disk drives. See Bernoulli Box.
  • binomial experiment — an experiment consisting of a fixed number of independent trials each with two possible outcomes, success and failure, and the same probability of success. The probability of a given number of successes is described by a binominal distribution
  • bird's-eye primrose — a Eurasian primrose, Primula farinosa, having clusters of purplish flowers with yellow centres
  • bit-paired keyboard — (hardware)   (Obsolete, or "bit-shift keyboard") A non-standard keyboard layout that seems to have originated with the Teletype ASR-33 and remained common for several years on early computer equipment. The ASR-33 was a mechanical device (see EOU), so the only way to generate the character codes from keystrokes was by some physical linkage. The design of the ASR-33 assigned each character key a basic pattern that could be modified by flipping bits if the SHIFT or the CTRL key was pressed. In order to avoid making the thing more of a Rube Goldberg kluge than it already was, the design had to group characters that shared the same basic bit pattern on one key. Looking at the ASCII chart, we find: high low bits bits 0000 0001 0010 0011 0100 0101 0110 0111 1000 1001 010 ! " # $ % & ' ( ) 011 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 This is why the characters !"#$%&'() appear where they do on a Teletype (thankfully, they didn't use shift-0 for space). This was *not* the weirdest variant of the QWERTY layout widely seen, by the way; that prize should probably go to one of several (differing) arrangements on IBM's even clunkier 026 and 029 card punches. When electronic terminals became popular, in the early 1970s, there was no agreement in the industry over how the keyboards should be laid out. Some vendors opted to emulate the Teletype keyboard, while others used the flexibility of electronic circuitry to make their product look like an office typewriter. These alternatives became known as "bit-paired" and "typewriter-paired" keyboards. To a hacker, the bit-paired keyboard seemed far more logical - and because most hackers in those days had never learned to touch-type, there was little pressure from the pioneering users to adapt keyboards to the typewriter standard. The doom of the bit-paired keyboard was the large-scale introduction of the computer terminal into the normal office environment, where out-and-out technophobes were expected to use the equipment. The "typewriter-paired" standard became universal, "bit-paired" hardware was quickly junked or relegated to dusty corners, and both terms passed into disuse.
  • blue-ringed octopus — a highly venomous octopus, Octopus maculosus, of E Australia which exhibits blue bands on its tentacles when disturbed
  • box-office receipts — the money earned from ticket sales for a film or play
  • breathing apparatus — an apparatus, usually consisting of tanks of air or oxygen and a mouthpiece, that enables the wearer to breath in difficult conditions such as a smoke-filled building
  • brightline spectrum — the spectrum of an incandescent substance appearing on a spectrogram as one or more bright lines against a dark background.
  • bring into the open — to make evident or public
  • brush-tailed possum — any of several widely-distributed Australian possums of the genus Trichosurus
  • calculate a premium — If you calculate a premium, you decide how much a policyholder has to pay for insurance cover.
  • campernelle jonquil — a narcissus, Narcissus odorus, of the amaryllis family, having clusters of two to four fragrant yellow flowers.
  • canterbury pilgrims — the pilgrims whose stories are told in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
  • cape york peninsula — large peninsula in NE Australia, part of Queensland, between the Gulf of Carpentaria & the Coral Sea
  • capital expenditure — expenditure on acquisitions of or improvements to fixed assets
  • captains courageous — a novel (1897) by Rudyard Kipling.
  • carbon steel piping — Carbon steel piping is pipes made of steel with carbon as the main alloying component, used for transporting fluids.
  • caterpillar tractor — a tractor powered by a Caterpillar track
  • cathodic protection — a technique for protecting metal structures, such as steel ships and pipelines, from electrolytic corrosion by making the structure the cathode in a cell, either by applying an electromotive force directly or by putting it into contact with a more electropositive metal
  • cerebral hemisphere — either half of the cerebrum
  • cerebrospinal fluid — the clear colourless fluid in the spaces inside and around the spinal cord and brain
  • chain-reacting pile — nuclear reactor
  • chamber of deputies — the lower house of the legislature of certain countries, as Italy.
  • champigny-sur-marne — a suburb of Paris, on the River Marne. Pop: 75 556 (2006)
  • chemical processing — Chemical processing is a way of making changes to chemical compounds.
  • chemolithoautotroph — (biology) A chemoautotroph or lithoautotroph.
  • chief petty officer — the senior naval rank for personnel without commissioned or warrant rank
  • chinese finger trap — a child's toy, consisting of a small cylinder of woven straw or paper into which the forefingers are placed, one in each end: the harder one pulls, the more securely the fingers are held.
  • chlorobromide paper — a relatively fast printing paper coated with an emulsion of silver chloride and silver bromide.
  • christmas pantomime — pantomime (def 5).
  • cinematographically — a motion-picture projector.
  • clinical depression — depression in a patient that meets defined criteria and that is deemed to merit treatment
  • clockwork precision — regularity
  • colonial experience — experience of farming, etc, gained by a young Englishman in colonial Australia
  • columnar epithelium — epithelium consisting of one or more layers of elongated cells of cylindrical or prismatic shape.
  • combination therapy — a therapy that combines two or more drugs, or two or more treatments
  • command interpreter — (operating system)   A program which reads textual commands from the user or from a file and executes them. Some commands may be executed directly within the interpreter itself (e.g. setting variables or control constructs), others may cause it to load and execute other files. When an IBM PC is booted BIOS loads and runs the MS-DOS command interpreter into memory from file COMMAND.COM found on a floppy disk or hard disk drive. The commands that COMMAND.COM recognizes (e.g. COPY, DIR, PRN) are called internal commands, in contrast to external commands which are executable files.
  • community programme — (in Britain) a former government scheme to provide temporary work for people unemployed for over a year
  • compact disc player — a machine for playing compact discs
  • compact disc writer — (storage)   (CD burner) A device that can write data to Compact Disc Recordable (CD-R) or Compact Disc Rewritable (CD-RW) discs. Now both these CD formats are often combined with a DVD writer.
  • compact disk player — a device for playing compact disks.
  • complete fertilizer — a fertilizer containing nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, the three principal elements required for plant nutrition.
  • complimentary close — the part of a letter that by convention immediately precedes the signature, as “Very truly yours,” “Cordially,” or “Sincerely yours.”.
  • compound microscope — an instrument for magnifying small objects, consisting of a lens of short focal length for forming an image that is further magnified by a second lens of longer focal length
  • compression molding — a method of molding thermosetting plastic by closing a mold on it, forming the material by heat and pressure.
  • compromise solution — a solution to a problem reached by compromise
  • computer dictionary — Free On-line Dictionary of Computing
  • computer peripheral — a device that is attached to and controlled by a computer, such as a scanner, printer, or external hard drive
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