16-letter words containing p, r, i, s
- isopropylbenzene — cumene.
- janet ip service — (networking) (JIPS) Joint Academic NETwork Internet Protocol. E-mail: <[email protected]>.
- josquin des prés — Josquin [zhuhs-kan;; French zhaws-kan] /ˈʒʌs kæn;; French ʒɔsˈkɛ̃/ (Show IPA), c1445–1521, Flemish composer.
- josquin des prez — 1440?-1521; Fr. composer
- kaposi's sarcoma — a form of skin cancer found in Africans and more recently in victims of AIDS
- keep on a string — to have control or a hold over (someone), esp emotionally
- khakass republic — a constituent republic of S central Russia, formerly in Krasnoyarsk Territory: formed in 1930. Capital: Abakan. Pop: 546 100 (2002). Area: 61 900 sq km (23 855 sq miles)
- kidney corpuscle — Malpighian corpuscle.
- kipp's apparatus — a laboratory apparatus for producing a gas, usually hydrogen sulphide, by the action of a liquid on a solid without heating
- kleptoparasitism — The parasitic theft of captured prey, nest material, etc. from animals of the same or another species.
- ladies'-eardrops — lady's-earrings.
- laparoscopically — By means of laparoscopy.
- laserdisc player — a device that plays laserdiscs
- laurentides park — a national park in SE Canada, in Quebec province between the St. Lawrence and Lake St. John.
- law of parsimony — a principle according to which an explanation of a thing or event is made with the fewest possible assumptions.
- learner's permit — A learner's permit is a license that allows you to drive a vehicle before you have passed your driving test.
- learning process — a process of learning
- left parenthesis — (character) "(". ASCII character 40. Common names: left paren; left parenthesis; left; open; paren (")" = thesis); open paren; open parenthesis; left parenthesis; left banana. Rare: so (")" = already); lparen; ITU-T: opening parenthesis; open round bracket, left round bracket, INTERCAL: wax (")" = wane); parenthisey (")" = unparenthisey); left ear. Paired with right parenthesis (")").
- legal separation — judicial separation.
- leptosporangiate — (of ferns) having each sporangium developing from a single cell, rather than from a group, and normally with specialized explosive spore dispersal
- levallois-perret — a suburb of Paris, in N France, on the Seine.
- level descriptor — one of a set of criteria used to assess the performance of a pupil in a particular subject
- library pictures — a caption used to alert viewers that footage being broadcast is from an earlier time and is not happening now
- light microscope — microscope (def 1).
- lines per minute — (unit) (lpm) A unit used to measure line printer throughput.
- linux user group — (body, operating system) (LUG) Any organisation of Linux users in a local area, university, etc., that offers mutual technical support, companionship with people of similar interests and promotes the use of Linux among computer users generally. LUGs often hold Install Fests for the general public, in which experienced Linux users explain and supervise the installation of Linux on new users' systems.
- liver of sulphur — a mixture of potassium sulphides used as a fungicide and insecticide and in the treatment of skin diseases
- lizard peninsula — a promontory in SW England, in SW Cornwall: the southernmost point in Great Britain
- lz77 compression — The first algorithm to use the Lempel-Ziv substitutional compression schemes, proposed in 1977. LZ77 compression keeps track of the last n bytes of data seen, and when a phrase is encountered that has already been seen, it outputs a pair of values corresponding to the position of the phrase in the previously-seen buffer of data, and the length of the phrase. In effect the compressor moves a fixed-size "window" over the data (generally referred to as a "sliding window"), with the position part of the (position, length) pair referring to the position of the phrase within the window. The most commonly used algorithms are derived from the LZSS scheme described by James Storer and Thomas Szymanski in 1982. In this the compressor maintains a window of size N bytes and a "lookahead buffer", the contents of which it tries to find a match for in the window: while (lookAheadBuffer not empty) { get a pointer (position, match) to the longest match in the window for the lookahead buffer; if (length > MINIMUM_MATCH_LENGTH) { output a (position, length) pair; shift the window length characters along; } else { output the first character in the lookahead buffer; shift the window 1 character along; } } Decompression is simple and fast: whenever a (POSITION, LENGTH) pair is encountered, go to that POSITION in the window and copy LENGTH bytes to the output. Sliding-window-based schemes can be simplified by numbering the input text characters mod N, in effect creating a circular buffer. The sliding window approach automatically creates the LRU effect which must be done explicitly in LZ78 schemes. Variants of this method apply additional compression to the output of the LZSS compressor, which include a simple variable-length code (LZB), dynamic Huffman coding (LZH), and Shannon-Fano coding (ZIP 1.x), all of which result in a certain degree of improvement over the basic scheme, especially when the data are rather random and the LZSS compressor has little effect. An algorithm was developed which combines the ideas behind LZ77 and LZ78 to produce a hybrid called LZFG. LZFG uses the standard sliding window, but stores the data in a modified trie data structure and produces as output the position of the text in the trie. Since LZFG only inserts complete *phrases* into the dictionary, it should run faster than other LZ77-based compressors. All popular archivers (arj, lha, zip, zoo) are variations on LZ77.
- lz78 compression — A substitutional compression scheme which works by entering phrases into a dictionary and then, when a reoccurrence of that particular phrase is found, outputting the dictionary index instead of the phrase. Several algorithms are based on this principle, differing mainly in the manner in which they manage the dictionary. The most well-known Lempel-Ziv scheme is Terry Welch's Lempel-Ziv Welch variant of LZ78.
- mach's principle — the proposition that there is no absolute space and that the inertia and acceleration of a body are determined by all of the matter of the universe.
- magnetic pyrites — Mineralogy. pyrrhotite.
- malpractice suit — a lawsuit brought against a professional accused of illegal or unethical practices or neglect of duty
- manic depression — bipolar disorder.
- manic-depressive — suffering from bipolar disorder.
- marseille prolog — (language) One of the two main dialects of Prolog, the other being Edinburgh Prolog. The difference is largely syntax. The original Marseille Interpreter (1973) was written in Fortran.
- marsupialization — (surgery) The surgical technique of cutting a slit into a cyst and suturing its edges to form a continuous surface from the exterior to the interior of the cyst, allowing it to drain freely.
- matthew of paris — c1200–59, English chronicler.
- megacorporations — Plural form of megacorporation.
- megasporogenesis — the formation and development of megaspores.
- menippean satire — a form of satire that is indirect and nonrealistic in approach and that consists typically of a loosely organized narrative incorporating a series of dialogues between representatives of various points of view
- menstrual period — the bleeding from the womb that occurs approximately monthly in nonpregnant women of reproductive age
- metamorphosising — Present participle of metamorphosise.
- microencapsulate — (transitive) To embed by means of microencapsulation.
- microenterprises — Plural form of microenterprise.
- microphotographs — Plural form of microphotograph.
- microsporophylls — Plural form of microsporophyll.
- microstethoscope — a stethoscope containing an apparatus that greatly amplifies the sounds heard.
- mineral deposits — amounts of minerals that occur naturally in particular areas
- misanthropically — In a misanthropic manner.