18-letter words containing p, u, r, e
- product life cycle — the four stages (introduction, growth, maturity, and decline) into one of which the sales of a product fall during its market life
- production manager — a supervisor of the budget, crew and other details in the production of a film or play
- programme of study — the prescribed syllabus that pupils must be taught at each key stage in the National Curriculum
- prometheus unbound — a drama in verse (1820) by Shelley.
- property insurance — insurance coverage for land and housing
- protective custody — detention of a person by the police solely as protection against a possible attack or reprisal by someone.
- provascular tissue — procambium.
- pseudo-anarchistic — a person who advocates or believes in anarchy or anarchism.
- pseudotuberculosis — an acute, sometimes fatal disease of rodents, birds, and other animals, including humans, caused by the bacterium Yersinia (Pasteurella) pseudotuberculosis, and characterized by the formation of nodules resembling those that result from tuberculosis.
- psychotherapeutics — psychotherapy.
- public expenditure — spending by central government, local authorities, and public corporations
- puerto rico trench — a depression in the ocean floor, N of Puerto Rico: includes deepest part of Atlantic Ocean, 28,374 feet (8648 meters).
- pulmonary embolism — the blockage of a pulmonary artery, often by a blood clot, that stops the flow of blood to the lungs and which can result in death if untreated
- pulmonic airstream — a current of lung air set in motion by the respiratory muscles in the production of speech.
- pulp canal therapy — endodontics.
- purchasing officer — the member of staff in an organization who is responsible for buying goods or products
- purple loosestrife — an Old World plant, Lythrum salicaria, of the loosestrife family, widely naturalized in North America, growing in wet places and having spikes of reddish-purple flowers.
- puss in the corner — a parlor game for children in which one player in the middle of a room tries to occupy any of the positions along the walls that become vacant as other players dash across to exchange places at a signal.
- put heads together — the upper part of the body in humans, joined to the trunk by the neck, containing the brain, eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.
- put one's shirt on — to bet all one has on (a horse, etc)
- put out to pasture — Also called pastureland [pas-cher-land, pahs-] /ˈpæs tʃərˌlænd, ˈpɑs-/ (Show IPA). an area covered with grass or other plants used or suitable for the grazing of livestock; grassland.
- put the mockers on — stop, thwart
- pyramus and thisbe — (in Greek legend) two lovers of Babylon: Pyramus, wrongly supposing Thisbe to be dead, killed himself and she, encountering him in his death throes, did the same
- pyromucic aldehyde — furfural.
- quarter-wave plate — a crystal thin enough to cause a phase difference of 90° between the ordinary and extraordinary rays of polarized light, thereby converting circularly polarized light into plane polarized light.
- quartz-iodine lamp — a type of tungsten-halogen lamp containing small amounts of iodine and having a quartz envelope, operating at high temperature and producing an intense light for use in car headlamps, etc
- radiation exposure — exposure to radiant energy or to the particles emitted in the transfer of radiant energy, esp the particles and gamma rays emitted in nuclear decay; exposure to radioactive substances
- radiation pressure — the pressure exerted on a surface by electromagnetic radiation or by sound waves.
- real-time computer — a computer that can process data or information almost immediately
- reciprocating pump — A reciprocating pump is a pump which uses a backward and forward movement to move a fluid.
- red cluster pepper — a tropical, woody plant, Capsicum annuum fasciculatum, having erect, very pungent, red fruit in small clusters.
- red-spotted purple — any color having components of both red and blue, such as lavender, especially one deep in tone.
- redundancy payment — a sum of money given by an employer to an employee who has been made redundant: usually calculated on the basis of the employee's rate of pay and length of service
- regular expression — 1. (text, operating system) (regexp, RE) One of the wild card patterns used by Perl and other languages, following Unix utilities such as grep, sed, and awk and editors such as vi and Emacs. Regular expressions use conventions similar to but more elaborate than those described under glob. A regular expression is a sequence of characters with the following meanings (in Perl, other flavours vary): An ordinary character (not one of the special characters discussed below) matches that character. A backslash (\) followed by any special character matches the special character itself. The special characters are: "." matches any character except newline; "RE*" (where RE is any regular expression and the "*" is called the "Kleene star") matches zero or more occurrences of RE. If there is any choice, the longest leftmost matching string is chosen. "^" at the beginning of an RE matches the start of a line and "$" at the end of an RE matches the end of a line. (RE) matches whatever RE matches and \N, where N is a digit, matches whatever was matched by the RE between the Nth "(" and its corresponding ")" earlier in the same RE. Many flavours use \(RE\) instead of just (RE). The concatenation of REs is a RE that matches the concatenation of the strings matched by each RE. RE1 | RE2 matches whatever RE1 or RE2 matches. \< matches the beginning of a word and \> matches the end of a word. Many flavours use "\b" instead as the special character for "word boundary". RE{M} matches M occurences of RE. RE{M,} matches M or more occurences of RE. RE{M,N} matches between M and N occurences. Other flavours use RE\{M\} etc. Perl provides several "quote-like" operators for writing REs, including the common // form and less common ??. A comprehensive survey of regexp flavours is found in Friedl 1997 (see below). 2. Any description of a pattern composed from combinations of symbols and the three operators: Concatenation - pattern A concatenated with B matches a match for A followed by a match for B. Or - pattern A-or-B matches either a match for A or a match for B. Closure - zero or more matches for a pattern. The earliest form of regular expressions (and the term itself) were invented by mathematician Stephen Cole Kleene in the mid-1950s, as a notation to easily manipulate "regular sets", formal descriptions of the behaviour of finite state machines, in regular algebra.
- repayment schedule — a document detailing the specific terms of a borrower's loan, such as monthly payment, interest rate, due dates etc
- reproduction proof — repro proof.
- resurrection plant — a desert plant, Selaginella lepidophylla, occurring from Texas to South America, having stems that curl inward when dry.
- russo-japanese war — the war (1904–1905) between Russia and Japan.
- sampling frequency — sample rate
- scripting language — a language that is used to write scripts, or executable sections of code that automate tasks.
- sea-level pressure — the atmospheric pressure, at any elevation, reduced by formula to a value approximating the pressure at sea level.
- self-preoccupation — the state of being preoccupied.
- semiprecious stone — See at semiprecious.
- separate but equal — pertaining to a racial policy, formerly practiced in some parts of the United States, by which black people could be segregated if granted equal opportunities and facilities, as for education, transportation, or jobs.
- shotgun microphone — a directional microphone with a narrow-angle range of sensitivity.
- shunting operation — an operation in which rail coaches are manoeuvred
- simple enumeration — a procedure for arriving at empirical generalizations by haphazard accumulation of positive instances.
- sound spectrograph — an electronic device for recording a sound spectogram.
- spare-part surgery — surgical replacement of defective or damaged organs by transplant or insertion of artificial devices
- speak for yourself — If you say 'Speak for yourself' when someone has said something, you mean that what they have said is only their opinion or applies only to them.