18-letter words containing s, t, e, v
- passive euthanasia — a form of euthanasia in which medical treatment that will keep a dying patient alive for a time is withdrawn
- passive resistance — opposition to a government or to specific governmental laws by the use of noncooperation and other nonviolent methods, as economic boycotts and protest marches.
- pennsylvania dutch — the descendants of 17th- and 18th-century settlers in Pennsylvania from southwest Germany and Switzerland.
- physical inventory — To carry out a physical inventory is to count all the stock on hand.
- pitt-rivers museum — a museum in Oxford that houses a major anthropological collection of tools and weapons assembled by Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers
- positively charged — having a positive charge
- post-revolutionary — of, pertaining to, characterized by, or of the nature of a revolution, or a sudden, complete, or marked change: a revolutionary junta.
- postviral syndrome — debilitating condition occurring as a sequel to viral illness
- 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.
- 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.
- 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').
- private enterprise — free enterprise (def 1).
- protective custody — detention of a person by the police solely as protection against a possible attack or reprisal by someone.
- provascular tissue — procambium.
- provision merchant — a person or company in the business of retailing food and other provisions
- pseudo-competitive — of, pertaining to, involving, or decided by competition: competitive sports; a competitive examination.
- psychogalvanometer — a type of galvanometer for detecting and measuring psychogalvanic currents.
- quality of service — (communications, networking) (QoS) The performance properties of a network service, possibly including throughput, transit delay, priority. Some protocols allow packets or streams to include QoS requirements.
- quantity surveying — the action or profession of a person who estimates the cost of the materials and labour necessary for a construction job
- queen's university — A Canadian University. Source of GVL, NIAL, Pasqual, Q'NIAL and TXL.
- radioactive series — a succession of elements initiated in the radioactive decay of a parent, as thorium or uranium, each of which decays into the next until a stable element, usually lead, is produced.
- recursive function — a function defined in terms of the repeated application of a number of simpler functions to their own values, by specifying a base clause and a recursion formula
- reduction division — the first division of meiosis in which the number of chromosomes is reduced to half the original number.
- representativeness — a person or thing that represents another or others.
- research-intensive — focusing financial and other resources on research and development as opposed to capital and labor; noting or pertaining to a high ratio of expenditure on research in relation to the value of net output.
- restrictive clause — a relative clause that identifies the antecedent and that is usually not set off by commas in English. In The year that just ended was bad for crops, the clause that just ended is a restrictive clause.
- reverse angle shot — Movies. reverse shot.
- reverse the charge — to make a telephone call at the recipient's expense
- revolutionary wars — American Revolution.
- russian revolution — Also called February Revolution. the uprising in Russia in March, 1917 (February Old Style), in which the Czarist government collapsed and a provisional government was established.
- saint vitus' dance — chorea (def 2).
- seasonal variation — season-related variation
- second triumvirate — the coalition and joint rule of the Roman Empire by Antony, Lepidus, and Octavian, begun in 43 bc
- selective abortion — the aborting of particular embryos for medical or social reasons
- selective breeding — the raising of animals with particular genetic traits through careful choice of parents
- self-advertisement — a paid announcement, as of goods for sale, in newspapers or magazines, on radio or television, etc.
- service department — a repair shop
- sesto san giovanni — a city in Lombardy, N Italy: a suburb of Milan.
- set priority level — (SPL) The way traditional Unix kernels implement mutual exclusion by running code at high interrupt priority levels and thus blocking lower level interrupts.
- seven-league boots — mythical boots that allowed the wearer to travel seven leagues (a former unit of measurement), ie a great length, at each step
- silver certificate — a former paper currency first issued in 1878 by the U.S. federal government for circulation, equal to and redeemable for silver to a stated value.
- silvery spleenwort — a fern, Diplazium pycnocarpon, of eastern North America, having fronds from 20 to 30 inches (50.8 to 76.2 cm) long on yellowish-green stalks.
- social environment — the environment developed by humans as contrasted with the natural environment; society as a whole, especially in its relation to the individual.
- solvent extraction — Solvent extraction is the separation of a particular substance from a mixture by dissolving that substance in a solvent that will dissolve it, but which will not dissolve any other substance in the mixture.
- special relativity — the state or fact of being relative.
- specific viscosity — a measure of the resistance to flow of a fluid, expressed as the ratio of the absolute viscosity of the fluid to that of a reference fluid (usually water in the case of liquids)
- split-level cooker — a cooker that is designed with a separate oven and hob so that they can be fitted wherever is most convenient in the kitchen
- st. lawrence river — a river in SE Canada, flowing NE from Lake Ontario, forming part of the boundary between New York and Ontario, and emptying into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. 760 miles (1225 km) long.
- standard deviation — a measure of dispersion in a frequency distribution, equal to the square root of the mean of the squares of the deviations from the arithmetic mean of the distribution.
- stick-to-itiveness — persistence, tenacity