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18-letter words containing s, n, o, p, e

  • political question — a question regarded by the courts as being a matter to be determined by another department of government rather than of law and therefore one with which they will not deal, as the recognition of a foreign state.
  • polynesian tattler — a sandpiper, H. incanus, native to the Pacific coastal regions
  • polystyrene cement — a purpose-made adhesive for fixing rigid polystyrene
  • population density — ratio: inhabitants to area
  • 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
  • possessive pronoun — See at possessive (def 4a).
  • post-impressionism — 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.
  • 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
  • potassium myronate — sinigrin.
  • 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.
  • prayer of manasses — a book of the Apocrypha.
  • 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.
  • precious moonstone — moonstone (def 1).
  • predation pressure — the effect of predation upon a population, resulting in the decrease in size of that population.
  • preferred position — especially desirable advertising space for which, if it is specifically requested by the advertiser, a publication charges a premium rate.
  • 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
  • present continuous — a verb form consisting of an auxiliary be in the present tense followed by a present participle and used especially to indicate that a present action or event is in progress, being repeated, or of a temporary nature or to express the future.
  • 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).
  • preservation order — In Britain, a preservation order is an official order that makes it illegal for anyone to alter or destroy something such as an old building or an area of countryside.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • price on sb's head — If there is a price on someone 's head, an amount of money has been offered for the capture or killing of that person.
  • prince of darkness — Satan.
  • priority inversion — (parallel)   The state of a concurrent system where a high priority task is waiting for a low priority task which is waiting for a medium priority task. The system may become unstable and crash under these circumstances. In an operating system that uses multiple tasks, each task (or context) may be given a priority. These priorities help the scheduler decide which task to run next. Consider tasks, L, M, and H, with priorities Low, Medium, and High. M is running and H is blocked waiting for some resource that is held by L. So long as any task with a priority higher than L is runable, it will prevent task L, and thus task H, from running. Priority inversion is generally considered either as a high-level design failure or an implementation issue to be taken into account depending on who is talking. Most operating systems have methods in place to prevent or take inversion into account. Priority inheritance is one method. The most public instance of priority inversion is the repeated 'fail-safe' rebooting of the Mars Pathfinder. base station ('Sagan Memorial Station').
  • prison authorities — the people in charge of running a prison
  • 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 identifier — (operating system)   (PID) An integer used by the Unix kernel to uniquely identify a process. PIDs are returned by the fork system call and can be passed to wait() or kill() to perform actions on the given process.
  • process scheduling — multitasking
  • processionary moth — a moth of the family Thaumetopoeidae, esp the oak processionary moth (Thaumetopoea processionea), the larvae of which leave the communal shelter nightly for food in a V-shaped procession
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • prometheus unbound — a drama in verse (1820) by Shelley.
  • property insurance — insurance coverage for land and housing
  • protease inhibitor — a drug that inhibits the action of protease, especially any of a class of antiviral drugs that prevent the cleavage and replication of HIV proteins.
  • provision merchant — a person or company in the business of retailing food and other provisions
  • pseudo-anarchistic — a person who advocates or believes in anarchy or anarchism.
  • pseudoappendicitis — inflammation of the vermiform appendix.
  • pseudointellectual — a person exhibiting intellectual pretensions that have no basis in sound scholarship.
  • psychogalvanometer — a type of galvanometer for detecting and measuring psychogalvanic currents.
  • psychotechnologist — a specialist in psychotechnology
  • ptomaine poisoning — (erroneously) food poisoning thought to be caused by ptomaine.
  • pull one's head in — the upper part of the body in humans, joined to the trunk by the neck, containing the brain, eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.
  • pull one's punches — to restrain the force of one's criticisms or actions
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