18-letter words containing s, u, p, o, e
- presuppositionless — to suppose or assume beforehand; take for granted in advance.
- prison authorities — the people in charge of running a prison
- 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
- prometheus unbound — a drama in verse (1820) by Shelley.
- property insurance — insurance coverage for land and housing
- protective custody — detention of a person by the police solely as protection against a possible attack or reprisal by someone.
- provascular tissue — procambium.
- pseudo-anarchistic — a person who advocates or believes in anarchy or anarchism.
- pseudo-competitive — of, pertaining to, involving, or decided by competition: competitive sports; a competitive examination.
- pseudo-socialistic — of or relating to socialists or socialism.
- pseudo-symptomatic — pertaining to a symptom or symptoms.
- pseudoappendicitis — inflammation of the vermiform appendix.
- pseudointellectual — a person exhibiting intellectual pretensions that have no basis in sound scholarship.
- pseudotuberculosis — an acute, sometimes fatal disease of rodents, birds, and other animals, including humans, caused by the bacterium Yersinia (Pasteurella) pseudotuberculosis, and characterized by the formation of nodules resembling those that result from tuberculosis.
- psychotherapeutics — psychotherapy.
- 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
- pull someone's leg — either of the two lower limbs of a biped, as a human being, or any of the paired limbs of an animal, arthropod, etc., that support and move the body.
- pulmonary embolism — the blockage of a pulmonary artery, often by a blood clot, that stops the flow of blood to the lungs and which can result in death if untreated
- pulmonic airstream — a current of lung air set in motion by the respiratory muscles in the production of speech.
- purchasing officer — the member of staff in an organization who is responsible for buying goods or products
- purple loosestrife — an Old World plant, Lythrum salicaria, of the loosestrife family, widely naturalized in North America, growing in wet places and having spikes of reddish-purple flowers.
- puss in the corner — a parlor game for children in which one player in the middle of a room tries to occupy any of the positions along the walls that become vacant as other players dash across to exchange places at a signal.
- 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.
- put one's shirt on — to bet all one has on (a horse, etc)
- put out to pasture — Also called pastureland [pas-cher-land, pahs-] /ˈpæs tʃərˌlænd, ˈpɑs-/ (Show IPA). an area covered with grass or other plants used or suitable for the grazing of livestock; grassland.
- put the mockers on — stop, thwart
- radiation exposure — exposure to radiant energy or to the particles emitted in the transfer of radiant energy, esp the particles and gamma rays emitted in nuclear decay; exposure to radioactive substances
- radiation pressure — the pressure exerted on a surface by electromagnetic radiation or by sound waves.
- red-spotted purple — any color having components of both red and blue, such as lavender, especially one deep in tone.
- 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.
- resurrection plant — a desert plant, Selaginella lepidophylla, occurring from Texas to South America, having stems that curl inward when dry.
- russo-japanese war — the war (1904–1905) between Russia and Japan.
- self-preoccupation — the state of being preoccupied.
- sell someone a pup — to swindle someone by selling him something worthless
- semiprecious stone — See at semiprecious.
- shipping documents — documents relating to the sending of a shipment of goods, for example containing details of contents, weight, value etc.
- shotgun microphone — a directional microphone with a narrow-angle range of sensitivity.
- shunting operation — an operation in which rail coaches are manoeuvred
- simple enumeration — a procedure for arriving at empirical generalizations by haphazard accumulation of positive instances.
- slip of the tongue — If you describe something you said as a slip of the tongue, you mean that you said it by mistake.
- slow on the uptake — slow to understand or learn
- sodium hyposulfite — sodium thiosulfate.
- sodium polysulfide — a yellow-brown, water-soluble, granular powder, Na 2 S n , used chiefly in the manufacture of sulfur dyes, insecticides, and synthetic rubber.
- sound spectrograph — an electronic device for recording a sound spectogram.
- spaghetti junction — an interchange, usually between motorways, in which there are a large number of underpasses and overpasses and intersecting roads used by a large volume of high-speed traffic
- spanish succession — War of thea war (1701-14) between European powers disputing the succession to the Spanish throne
- speak for yourself — If you say 'Speak for yourself' when someone has said something, you mean that what they have said is only their opinion or applies only to them.