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17-letter words containing s, m, o

  • peterloo massacre — an incident at St Peter's Fields, Manchester, in 1819 in which a radical meeting was broken up by a cavalry charge, resulting in about 500 injuries and 11 deaths
  • phase of the moon — Used humorously as a random parameter on which something is said to depend. Sometimes implies unreliability of whatever is dependent, or that reliability seems to be dependent on conditions nobody has been able to determine. "This feature depends on having the channel open in mumble mode, having the foo switch set, and on the phase of the moon." See also heisenbug. True story: Once upon a time there was a bug that really did depend on the phase of the moon. There was a little subroutine that had traditionally been used in various programs at MIT to calculate an approximation to the moon's true phase. GLS incorporated this routine into a Lisp program that, when it wrote out a file, would print a timestamp line almost 80 characters long. Very occasionally the first line of the message would be too long and would overflow onto the next line, and when the file was later read back in the program would barf. The length of the first line depended on both the precise date and time and the length of the phase specification when the timestamp was printed, and so the bug literally depended on the phase of the moon! The first paper edition of the Jargon File (Steele-1983) included an example of one of the timestamp lines that exhibited this bug, but the typesetter "corrected" it. This has since been described as the phase-of-the-moon-bug bug.
  • phlebotomus fever — sandfly fever.
  • photo-composition — any method of composition using photography, as composition by means of a photocomposer.
  • photoluminescence — luminescence induced by the absorption of infrared radiation, visible light, or ultraviolet radiation.
  • plains of abraham — a high plain adjoining the city of Quebec, Canada: battlefield where the English under Wolfe defeated the French under Montcalm in 1759.
  • plateau's problem — the problem in the calculus of variations of finding the surface with the least area bounded by a given closed curve in space.
  • ploughman's lunch — a light lunch consisting of bread and cheese, and sometimes pickled onions.
  • poor man's orange — a grapefruit
  • postage due stamp — a stamp that is affixed to mail at a post office when prepayment of postage is insufficient, to indicate the amount that must be collected from the addressee.
  • postimpressionism — a varied development of Impressionism by a group of painters chiefly between 1880 and 1900 stressing formal structure, as with Cézanne and Seurat, or the expressive possibilities of form and color, as with Van Gogh and Gauguin.
  • postmillennialism — the doctrine or belief that the second coming of Christ will follow the millennium.
  • poststructuralism — a variation of structuralism, often seen as a critique, emphasizing plurality of meaning and instability of concepts that structuralism uses to define society, language, etc.
  • potassium acetate — a white, crystalline, deliquescent, water-soluble powder, KC 2 H 3 O 2 , used chiefly as a reagent in analytical chemistry.
  • potassium bromate — a white, crystalline, water-soluble powder, KBrO 3 , used chiefly as an oxidizing agent and as an analytical reagent.
  • potassium bromide — a white, crystalline, water-soluble powder, KBr, having a bitter saline taste: used chiefly in the manufacture of photographic papers and plates, in engraving, and in medicine as a sedative.
  • potassium cyanide — a white, granular, water-soluble, poisonous powder, KCN, having a faint almondlike odor, used chiefly in metallurgy and photography.
  • potassium nitrate — a crystalline compound, KNO 3 , produced by nitrification in soil, and used in gunpowders, fertilizers, and preservatives; saltpeter; niter.
  • potassium oxalate — a colorless, crystalline, water-soluble, poisonous solid, K 2 C 2 O 4 ⋅H 2 O, used chiefly as a bleaching agent and in medical tests as an anticoagulant.
  • potassium sulfate — a crystalline, water-soluble solid, K 2 SO 4 , used chiefly in the manufacture of fertilizers, alums, and mineral water, and as a reagent in analytical chemistry.
  • poulter's measure — a metrical pattern using couplets having the first line in iambic hexameter, or 12 syllables, and the second in iambic heptameter, or 14 syllables.
  • pre-manifestation — an act of manifesting.
  • pre-modifications — an act or instance of modifying.
  • precision bombing — aerial bombing in which bombs are dropped, as accurately as possible, on a specific, usually small, target.
  • premonstratensian — a member of a religious order founded at Prémontré in N France in 1120 by St Norbert (about 1080–1134)
  • presentationalism — a style of production in which the audience is addressed directly with songs, skits, exposition, etc., and no attempt is made at realism.
  • primary processes — the generally unorganized mental activity characteristic of the unconscious and occurring in dreams, fantasies, and related processes.
  • prismatic compass — a hand compass equipped with sights and prisms to permit aiming the instrument at a point and at the same time reading the compass direction of the point.
  • production system — (programming)   A production system consists of a collection of productions (rules), a working memory of facts and an algorithm, known as forward chaining, for producing new facts from old. A rule becomes eligible to "fire" when its conditions match some set of elements currently in working memory. A conflict resolution strategy determines which of several eligible rules (the conflict set) fires next. A condition is a list of symbols which represent constants, which must be matched exactly; variables which bind to the thing they match and "<> symbol" which matches a field not equal to symbol. Example production systems are OPS5, CLIPS, flex.
  • professional army — an army of trained soldiers
  • program statement — a single instruction in a computer program
  • property mistress — a female member of the stage crew in charge of the stage properties
  • protective system — protectionism (def 1).
  • proton microscope — a powerful type of microscope that uses a beam of protons, giving high resolution and sharp contrast
  • pseudo-democratic — pertaining to or of the nature of democracy or a democracy.
  • pseudo-humanistic — a person having a strong interest in or concern for human welfare, values, and dignity.
  • pseudo-moralistic — a person who teaches or inculcates morality.
  • psychometric test — a test designed to test a person's mental state, personality and thought processes
  • quasi-competitive — of, pertaining to, involving, or decided by competition: competitive sports; a competitive examination.
  • radioluminescence — luminescence induced by nuclear radiation.
  • recoil escapement — anchor escapement.
  • reconstructionism — a 20th-century movement among U.S. Jews, founded by Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan, advocating that Judaism, being a culture and way of life as well as a religion, is in sum a religious civilization requiring constant adaptation to contemporary conditions so that Jews can identify more readily and meaningfully with the Jewish community.
  • recursion formula — a formula for determining the next term of a sequence from one or more of the preceding terms.
  • recursive acronym — (convention)   A hackish (and especially MIT) tradition is to choose acronyms and abbreviations that refer humorously to themselves or to other acronyms or abbreviations. The classic examples were two MIT editors called EINE ("EINE Is Not Emacs") and ZWEI ("ZWEI Was EINE Initially"). More recently, there is a Scheme compiler called LIAR (Liar Imitates Apply Recursively), and GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix!" - and a company with the name CYGNUS, which expands to "Cygnus, Your GNU Support". See also mung.
  • reformed spelling — a revised orthography intended to simplify the spelling of English words, especially to eliminate unpronounced letters, as by substituting thru for through, tho for though, slo for slow, etc.
  • reiter's syndrome — a disease of unknown cause, occurring primarily in adult males, marked by urethritis, conjunctivitis, and arthritis.
  • renaissance woman — a woman who has acquired profound knowledge or proficiency in more than one field.
  • request programme — a programme on the radio where listeners can request certain songs or tracks
  • rhodope mountains — a mountain range in SE Europe, in the Balkan Peninsula extending along the border between Bulgaria and Greece. Highest peak: Golyam Perelik (Bulgaria), 2191 m (7188 ft)
  • roman catholicism — the faith, practice, and system of government of the Roman Catholic Church.
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