18-letter words containing r, e, n, o, l
- perlocutionary act — the action of affecting someone by uttering certain words
- personal allowance — the amount of money you are allowed to earn each year without paying tax
- personal assistant — aide
- personal bodyguard — a person employed to protect a particular person
- personal exemption — Your personal exemption is the amount of money that is deducted from your gross income before you have to start paying income tax.
- personal insurance — insurance on personal risk, such as car insurance, health insurance or loss of earnings insurance
- personal organizer — a small notebook with sections for personal information, as dates and addresses.
- pescadores-islands — (used with a plural verb) Penghu.
- peter and the wolf — a composition by Sergei Prokofiev written in 1936. It is a children's story with both music and text, spoken by a narrator accompanied by the orchestra
- petroleum engineer — A petroleum engineer is an engineer who is involved in most stages of oil and gas field evaluation, development, and production, whose job is to maximize hydrocarbon recovery and reduce costs and environmental impact.
- phanerocrystalline — (of a rock) having the principal constituents in the form of crystals visible to the naked eye.
- phosphatidylserine — any of a class of phospholipids occurring in biological membranes and fats
- physical inventory — To carry out a physical inventory is to count all the stock on hand.
- piperonyl butoxide — a light-brown liquid, C 1 9 H 3 0 O 5 , used chiefly as a synergist in certain insecticides.
- plains grasshopper — a large, destructive short-horned grasshopper, Brachystola magna, of the western U.S., marked by pinkish hind wings.
- plane polarization — a type of polarization in which the electric vector of waves of light or other electromagnetic radiation is restricted to vibration in a single plane
- plane trigonometry — the branch of trigonometry dealing with plane triangles.
- planned parenthood — an organization that gives out information on the planning of the number and spacing of the births of one's children, as through the use of birth-control measures
- plight one's troth — to make a promise of marriage
- point d'angleterre — a bobbin lace in which the design is worked out with either a needle or bobbin.
- point-bearing pile — a pile depending on the soil or rock beneath its foot for support.
- political prisoner — sb imprisoned for political dissidence
- pollen mother cell — one of the mother cells that produce four microspores by meiosis.
- polynesian tattler — a sandpiper, H. incanus, native to the Pacific coastal regions
- polystyrene cement — a purpose-made adhesive for fixing rigid polystyrene
- polyvinyl chloride — a white, water-insoluble, thermoplastic resin, derived by the polymerization of vinyl chloride: used chiefly for thin coatings, insulation, and pipings.
- population figures — population totals; statistics relating to the size of populations
- portable equipment — Portable equipment is electrical equipment that can easily be moved from one place to another while in operation or while connected to the supply.
- portion-controlled — being a standardized portion of food: The restaurant uses frozen, portion-controlled entrées.
- post-revolutionary — of, pertaining to, characterized by, or of the nature of a revolution, or a sudden, complete, or marked change: a revolutionary junta.
- postmaster general — the executive head of the postal system of a country.
- postmillenarianism — postmillennialism.
- postviral syndrome — debilitating condition occurring as a sequel to viral illness
- potential gradient — the rate of change of potential with respect to distance in the direction of greatest change.
- pour cold water on — If someone pours cold water on a plan or idea, they criticize it so much that people lose their enthusiasm for it.
- power-on self-test — (hardware, testing) (POST) A sequence of diagnostic tests that are run automatically by a device when the power is turned on. In a personal computer a typical POST sequence does the following: - checks that the system board is working - checks that the memory is working - compares the current system configuration with that recorded by the PC's configuration program to see if anything has been added or removed or broken - starts the video operation - checks that the diskette drive, hard disk drive, CD-ROM drive, and any other drives that may be installed are working. When POST is finished, typically it will beep, and then let your operating system start to boot. If POST finds an error, it may beep more than once (or possibly not at all if it is your PC speaker that is broken) and display a POST error message. These messages are often nothing more than a single ominous number. Some common numbers and their meanings are: 161 Dead battery (get a new battery for the system board) 162 Configuration changed (you added some memory or a new card to the PC) 301 Keyboard error (take the book off the corner of the keyboard) Because a successful POST indicates that the system is restored to known state, turning the power off and on is a standard way to reset a system whose software has hung. Compare 120 reset, Big Red Switch, power cycle.
- precedence lossage — /pre's*-dens los'*j/ A misunderstanding of operator precedence resulting in unintended grouping of arithmetic or logical operators when coding an expression. Used especially of mistakes in C code due to the nonintuitively low precedence of "&", "|", "^", "<<" and ">>". For example, the following C expression, intended to test the least significant bit of x, x & 1 == 0 is parsed as x & (1 == 0) which is always zero (false). Some lazy programmers ignore precedence and parenthesise everything. Lisp fans enjoy pointing out that this can't happen in *their* favourite language, which eschews precedence entirely, requiring one to use explicit parentheses everywhere.
- prepositional verb — a combination of verb and preposition, often with idiomatic meaning, differing from other phrasal verbs in that an object must always follow the preposition, as take after in The children take after their mother.
- prerelease showing — a showing of a film before it goes on general release
- presentation layer — (networking) The second highest layer (layer 6) in the OSI seven layer model. Performs functions such as text compression, code or format conversion to try to smooth out differences between hosts. Allows incompatible processes in the application layer to communicate via the session layer. Documents: ITU Rec. X.226 (ISO 8823), ITU Rec. X.216 (ISO 8822).
- presumption of law — a presumption based upon a policy of law or a general rule and not upon the facts or evidence in an individual case.
- presuppositionless — to suppose or assume beforehand; take for granted in advance.
- primate of england — a title of the archbishop of Canterbury.
- prisoner's dilemma — (in game theory) a scenario in which the outcome of one person's decision is determined by the simultaneous decisions of the other participants, resulting in a bad outcome for all of them if all act in their own self-interest.
- process scheduling — multitasking
- programme planning — the act of creating plans or schedules, esp in relation to your occupation
- proprietary colony — any of certain colonies, as Maryland and Pennsylvania, that were granted to an individual or group by the British crown and that were granted full rights of self-government.
- protocol converter — (networking) A device or program to translate between different protocols which serve similar functions (e.g. TCP and TP4). Some call this a "gateway", though others use that term for other kinds of internetworking device.
- psychogalvanometer — a type of galvanometer for detecting and measuring psychogalvanic currents.
- 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