18-letter words containing u, p, o, n
- potassium myronate — sinigrin.
- pound the pavement — a paved road, highway, etc.
- pour cold water on — If someone pours cold water on a plan or idea, they criticize it so much that people lose their enthusiasm for it.
- precious moonstone — moonstone (def 1).
- predation pressure — the effect of predation upon a population, resulting in the decrease in size of that population.
- prepare the ground — make conditions ready
- 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.
- 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.
- priority interrupt — (jargon) Any stimulus compelling enough to yank one right out of hack mode. Classically used to describe being dragged away by an SO for immediate sex, but may also refer to more mundane interruptions such as a fire alarm going off in the near vicinity. Also called an NMI (non-maskable interrupt), especially in PC-land.
- prison authorities — the people in charge of running a prison
- prison rustic work — rustication having a deeply pitted surface.
- 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.
- product acceptance — the verification or acceptance that a manufactured item meets required specifications or standards and is usable for its purpose
- production company — an organization which produces, films, plays, television or radio programmes
- production control — the planning and supervision of manufacturing activities to ensure that goods will be produced on time at the lowest possible cost.
- production manager — a supervisor of the budget, crew and other details in the production of a film or play
- productivity bonus — an extra payment made to workers for being more productive or yielding more favourable results than normal
- prometheus unbound — a drama in verse (1820) by Shelley.
- property insurance — insurance coverage for land and housing
- protocol data unit — (PDU) A packet of data passed across a network. The term implies a specific layer of the OSI seven layer model and a specific protocol.
- provincial council — (formerly) a council administering any of the New Zealand provinces
- 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.
- public convenience — a rest room, especially at a large public place, as at a railroad station.
- public corporation — a corporation, owned and operated by a government, established for the administration of certain public programs.
- public examination — an examination, such as a GCSE exam, that is set by a central examining board
- publishing company — a firm which publishes books
- puerto rico trench — a depression in the ocean floor, N of Puerto Rico: includes deepest part of Atlantic Ocean, 28,374 feet (8648 meters).
- 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
- 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 a bold face on — to seem bold or confident about
- put one in mind of — to remind (one) of
- put one's shirt on — to bet all one has on (a horse, etc)
- put the mockers on — stop, thwart
- put your foot down — If someone puts their foot down, they use their authority in order to stop something happening.
- quartz-iodine lamp — a type of tungsten-halogen lamp containing small amounts of iodine and having a quartz envelope, operating at high temperature and producing an intense light for use in car headlamps, etc
- 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.
- reciprocating pump — A reciprocating pump is a pump which uses a backward and forward movement to move a fluid.
- 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.
- reproduction proof — repro proof.
- resurrection plant — a desert plant, Selaginella lepidophylla, occurring from Texas to South America, having stems that curl inward when dry.