15-letter words containing s, e, p, a, l
- parasiticalness — the condition or characteristic of being parasitic
- partial eclipse — astronomy
- pass-the-parcel — a children's game in which a parcel with lots of wrappings is passed round while music plays; each time the music stops the person holding the parcel takes a layer of wrapping off
- passifloraceous — of, relating to, or belonging to the Passifloraceae, a tropical and subtropical family of climbing plants including the passionflowers: the flowers have five petals and threadlike parts forming a dense mass (corona) around the central disc
- passport holder — a person who has a passport
- past participle — a participle with past, perfect, or passive meaning, as fallen, sung, defeated; perfect participle: used in English and other languages in forming the present perfect, pluperfect, and passive and as an adjective.
- pastel-coloured — pale-coloured; in a shade such as pink or pale blue
- pastoral letter — pastoral (defs 11, 12).
- pastoral prayer — the main prayer in a church service.
- paurometabolous — designating or of a group of insect orders, as orthopterans or hemipterans, in which metamorphosis to the adult state from the juvenile state is gradual and without any sudden, radical change of body form
- peachblow glass — an American art glass made in various pale colors and sometimes having an underlayer of milk glass.
- pearly nautilus — nautilus (def 1).
- pectoral muscle — muscle of the chest
- pedestrian mall — A pedestrian mall is the same as a pedestrian precinct.
- penal servitude — imprisonment together with hard labor.
- penshurst place — a 14th-century mansion near Tunbridge Wells in Kent: birthplace of Sir Philip Sidney; gardens laid out from 1560
- pepper-and-salt — composed of a fine mixture of black with white: pepper-and-salt hair.
- perissosyllabic — (of a line of verse) containing more syllables than expected for the metre being used
- personal column — The personal column in a newspaper or magazine contains messages for individual people and advertisements of a private nature.
- personal estate — movable property
- personal friend — a person who is a friend, rather than a colleague or acquaintance
- personal growth — development as an individual
- personal injury — injury to an individual
- personal stereo — A personal stereo is a small cassette or CD player with very light headphones, which people carry round so that they can listen to music while doing something else.
- personalization — to have marked with one's initials, name, or monogram: to personalize stationery.
- peruvian balsam — Peru balsam.
- pessimistically — pertaining to or characterized by pessimism or the tendency to expect only bad outcomes; gloomy; joyless; unhopeful: His pessimistic outlook kept him from applying for jobs for which he was perfectly qualified.
- pheasant coucal — a brown and black, red-eyed Australian bird, Centropus phasianinus, with a pheasantlike tail.
- phenomenalistic — the doctrine that phenomena are the only objects of knowledge or the only form of reality.
- phoenix islands — a group of eight coral islands in the central Pacific: administratively part of Kiribati. Area: 28 sq km (11 sq miles). The islands and surrounding waters form the Phoenix Islands Protected Area, the world's largest marine protected area. Area: 410 500 sq km (158 500 sq miles)
- phosphorylative — of or relating to phosphorylation
- photoelasticity — the phenomenon of double refraction of polarized light by a transparent substance under elastic stress, used to measure strain in elastic, transparent materials.
- physical change — a usually reversible change in the physical properties of a substance, as size or shape: Freezing a liquid is a physical change.
- physical memory — (memory management) The memory hardware (normally RAM) installed in a computer. The term is only used in contrast to virtual memory.
- physicochemical — physical and chemical: the physicochemical properties of an isomer.
- pick-and-shovel — marked by drudgery; laborious: the pick-and-shovel work necessary to get a political campaign underway.
- pilgrim fathers — the Pilgrims (of Plymouth Colony)
- pilgrimage site — a shrine or other sacred place that people travel to as an act of religious devotion
- pilsner glass's — a pale, light lager beer.
- pitch blackness — extreme darkness; lack of light
- plainclothesman — a police officer, especially a detective, who wears ordinary civilian clothes while on duty.
- plane surveying — the surveying of areas of limited size, making no corrections for the earth's curvature
- planet-stricken — believed to be adversely affected mentally or physically by the planets
- plantaginaceous — relating to or belonging to the family Plantaginaceae
- planter's punch — a punch made with rum, lime juice, sugar, and water or soda.
- plasma membrane — cell membrane.
- plastic surgeon — doctor who performs cosmetic surgery
- plastic surgery — the branch of surgery dealing with the repair or replacement of malformed, injured, or lost organs or tissues of the body, chiefly by the transplant of living tissues.
- plate tectonics — a theory of global tectonics in which the lithosphere is divided into a number of crustal plates, each of which moves on the plastic asthenosphere more or less independently to collide with, slide under, or move past adjacent plates.
- platform scales — a weighing machine which has a platform that you put something on to be weighed