17-letter words containing s, p, e, a
- parcplace systems — (company) A company spun-off from Xerox PARC that developed the original version of VisualWorks.
- parents anonymous — (in Britain) an association of local voluntary self-help groups offering help through an anonymous telephone service to parents who fear they will injure their children, or who have other problems in managing their children
- parker house roll — a soft dinner roll made by folding a flat disk of dough in half.
- parmesan (cheese) — a very hard, dry cheese orig. of Italy, made from skimmed cow's milk and usually grated for sprinkling on pasta, soups, etc.
- partially sighted — unable to see properly so that even with corrective aids normal activities are prevented or seriously hindered
- particle kinetics — Particle kinetics is the study of the movement of particles and the forces that cause this movement.
- parts of kesteven — an area in E England constituting a former administrative division of Lincolnshire
- parts per million — the number of units (of a substance) present in a million units of another substance
- pascal's triangle — a triangular arrangement of the binomial coefficients of the expansion (x + y) n for positive integral values of n.
- passenger station — a station used by passengers
- passenger traffic — number of passengers
- passive obedience — unquestioning obedience to authority
- passive restraint — a safety device, as an air bag or special seat belt, that is activated automatically to protect an automobile passenger at the moment of impact when a collision occurs.
- past life therapy — a form of hypnosis or meditation based on the belief that an individual's present problems are rooted in events that occurred before birth in this life
- pasteur institute — an organization in Paris that was founded in 1887. It does research on micro-organisms and diseases
- pasteur treatment — Pasteur's method of preventing certain diseases, esp. rabies, by increasing the strength of successive inoculations with a specific weakened or attenuated virus
- pastoral theology — the branch of theology dealing with the responsibilities of members of the clergy to the people under their care.
- pate de foie gras — See under foie gras.
- paternalistically — the system, principle, or practice of managing or governing individuals, businesses, nations, etc., in the manner of a father dealing benevolently and often intrusively with his children: The employees objected to the paternalism of the old president.
- pay someone's way — to pay someone's share of the expenses
- paymaster general — a government minister responsible for making payments by government departments
- peaches and cream — If you say that a woman or a girl has a peaches and cream complexion, you mean that she has very clear, smooth, pale skin.
- peloponnesian war — a war between Athens and Sparta, 431–404 b.c., that resulted in the transfer of hegemony in Greece from Athens to Sparta.
- penalty shoot-out — In football, a penalty shoot-out is a way of deciding the result of a game that has ended in a draw. Players from each team try to score a goal in turn until one player fails to score and their team loses the game.
- penitential psalm — any of the Psalms (the 6th, 32nd, 38th, 51st, 102nd, 130th, and 143rd) that give expression to feelings of penitence and that are used in various Christian liturgical services.
- pere david's deer — a medium-sized, reddish-gray deer, Elaphurus davidianus, of which stocks were obtained in Peking in 1865 and brought to parks in Europe before the remaining Chinese deer were killed in 1900: the species is sustained in captivity.
- performance bonus — a monetary bonus paid to staff who have performed well in their job
- performance drugs — the drugs that are taken illegally by athletes to enhance their sporting performance
- peripheral vision — all that is visible to the eye outside the central area of focus; side vision.
- permanent address — a fixed address
- pernicious anemia — Pernicious anemia is a very severe blood disease.
- perpetual spinach — a variety of spinach that keeps producing edible leaves
- persona non grata — a person who is not welcome: He has become persona non grata in our club since his angry outburst.
- personal computer — a compact computer that uses a microprocessor and is designed for individual use, as by a person in an office or at home or school, for such applications as word processing, data management, financial analysis, or computer games. Abbreviation: PC.
- personal distance — personal space.
- personal equation — the tendency to personal bias that accounts for variation in interpretation or approach and for which allowance must be made.
- personal property — an estate or property consisting of movable articles both corporeal, as furniture or jewelry, or incorporeal, as stocks or bonds (distinguished from real property).
- personality clash — friction between two people who have different personalities or points of view
- personnel carrier — a vehicle used for transporting troops
- personnel manager — head of Human Resources department
- perspicaciousness — having keen mental perception and understanding; discerning: to exhibit perspicacious judgment.
- perth and kinross — a council area of N central Scotland, corresponding mainly to the historical counties of Perthshire and Kinross-shire: part of Tayside Region from 1975 until 1996: chiefly mountainous, with agriculture, tourism, and forestry. Administrative centre: Perth. Pop: 135 990 (2003 est). Area: 5321 sq km (2019 sq miles)
- 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
- petrarchan sonnet — a sonnet form popularized by Petrarch, consisting of an octave with the rhyme scheme abbaabba and of a sestet with one of several rhyme schemes, as cdecde or cdcdcd.
- 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.
- phenyl isocyanate — a liquid reagent, C 7 H 5 NO, having an unpleasant, irritating odor: used chiefly for identifying alcohols and amines.
- photo-respiration — the oxidation of carbohydrates in many higher plants in which they get oxygen from light and then release carbon dioxide, somewhat different from photosynthesis.
- phototherapeutics — the branch of therapeutics that deals with the curative use of light rays.
- physical exercise — movements and activities done to keep your body healthy or make it stronger
- physical medicine — the branch of medicine dealing with the diagnosis and treatment of disease and injury by means of physical agents, as manipulation, massage, exercise, heat, or water.