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18-letter words containing s, g, r

  • perish the thought — to die or be destroyed through violence, privation, etc.: to perish in an earthquake.
  • personal bodyguard — a person employed to protect a particular person
  • personal organizer — a small notebook with sections for personal information, as dates and addresses.
  • petite bourgeoisie — the portion of the bourgeoisie having the least wealth and lowest social status; the lower middle class.
  • phantasmagorically — having a fantastic or deceptive appearance, as something in a dream or created by the imagination.
  • photomorphogenesis — plant development that is controlled by light.
  • physical geography — the branch of geography concerned with natural features and phenomena of the earth's surface, as landforms, drainage features, climates, soils, and vegetation.
  • pilgrim's progress — an allegory (1678) by John Bunyan.
  • pine tree shilling — a silver coin minted in Massachusetts in the mid to late 17th century, named for the pine tree within a circle shown on the obverse side.
  • plains grasshopper — a large, destructive short-horned grasshopper, Brachystola magna, of the western U.S., marked by pinkish hind wings.
  • play silly buggers — to fool around and waste time
  • plight one's troth — to make a promise of marriage
  • population figures — population totals; statistics relating to the size of populations
  • portuguese guinean — of or relating to Portuguese Guinea, a former name for Guinea-Bissau, or its inhabitants
  • positively charged — having a positive charge
  • postal storage car — a railroad car for transporting unsorted mail.
  • postmaster general — the executive head of the postal system of a country.
  • pragmatic sanction — any one of various imperial decrees with the effect of fundamental law.
  • pre-filled syringe — A pre-filled syringe is a disposable syringe that is supplied already loaded with the substance to be injected.
  • 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.
  • premiere screening — the first screening of a film at a cinema, etc
  • prerelease showing — a showing of a film before it goes on general release
  • press photographer — a photographer who works for a newspaper, magazine, etc
  • prestidigitization — /pres`t*-di"j*-ti:-zay"sh*n/ 1. A term coined by Daniel Klein <[email protected]> for the act of putting something into digital notation via sleight of hand. 2. Data entry through legerdemain.
  • process scheduling — multitasking
  • procrustean string — (programming)   A fixed-length string. If a string value is too long for the allocated space, it is truncated to fit; and if it is shorter, the empty space is padded, usually with space characters. This is an allusion to Procrustes, a legendary robber of ancient Attica. He bound his victims to a bed, and if they were shorter than the bed, he stretched their limbs until they would fit; if their limbs were longer, he lopped them off.
  • programme of study — the prescribed syllabus that pupils must be taught at each key stage in the National Curriculum
  • programmer's cheer — (humour)   "Shift to the left! Shift to the right! Pop up, push down! Byte! Byte! Byte!" [Origin?]
  • programming skills — the skills required to write a program so that data may be processed by a computer
  • progressive coding — (graphics, file format, algorithm)   (Or "interlacing") An aspect of a graphics storage format or transmission algorithm that treats bitmap image data non-sequentially in such a way that later data adds progressively greater resolution to an already full-size image. This contrasts with sequential coding. Progressive coding is useful when an image is being sent across a slow communications channel, such as the Internet, as the low-resolution image may be sufficient to allow the user to decide not to wait for the rest of the file to be received. In an interlaced GIF89 image, the pixels in a row are stored sequentially but the rows are stored in interlaced order, e.g. 0, 8, 4, 12, 2, 6, 8, 10, 14, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15. Each vertical scan adds rows in the middle of the gaps left by the previous one. Interlacing is also supported by other formats. JPEG supports a functionally similar concept known as Progressive JPEG. [How does the algorithm differ?] See also progressive/sequential coding.
  • progressive dinner — a dinner party in which each successive course is prepared and eaten at the residence of a different participant.
  • proprietary rights — rights of ownership
  • psychogalvanometer — a type of galvanometer for detecting and measuring psychogalvanic currents.
  • psychopharmacology — the branch of pharmacology dealing with the psychological effects of drugs.
  • purchasing officer — the member of staff in an organization who is responsible for buying goods or products
  • 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.
  • quantity surveying — the action or profession of a person who estimates the cost of the materials and labour necessary for a construction job
  • racial segregation — social policy: separation of races
  • radius of gyration — the distance from an axis at which the mass of a body may be assumed to be concentrated and at which the moment of inertia will be equal to the moment of inertia of the actual mass about the axis, equal to the square root of the quotient of the moment of inertia and the mass.
  • rain cats and dogs — water that is condensed from the aqueous vapor in the atmosphere and falls to earth in drops more than 1/50 inch (0.5 mm) in diameter. Compare drizzle (def 6).
  • range of stability — the angle to the perpendicular through which a vessel may be heeled without losing the ability to right itself.
  • rear its ugly head — the upper part of the body in humans, joined to the trunk by the neck, containing the brain, eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.
  • red-light district — an area or district in a city in which many houses of prostitution are located.
  • reduction strategy — (theory)   An algorithm for deciding which redex(es) to reduce next. Different strategies have different termination properties in the presence of recursive functions or values. See string reduction, normal order reduction, applicative order reduction, parallel reduction
  • regional enteritis — Crohn's disease.
  • registered charity — official aid organization
  • registered company — a company which has officially registered its business
  • registration plate — a plate mounted on the front and back of a motor vehicle bearing the registration number
  • regression testing — (programming)   Part of the test phase of software development where, as new modules are integrated into the system and the added functionality is tested, previously tested functionality is re-tested to assure that no new module has corrupted the system.
  • 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.
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