15-letter words containing u, p, r, a
- proscenium arch — the arch separating the stage from the auditorium
- protospatharius — (of the Byzantine empire) a high-ranking official in the imperial guard
- pseudepigraphon — any book of the Pseudepigrapha
- pseudo-artistic — conforming to the standards of art; satisfying aesthetic requirements: artistic productions.
- pseudo-critical — inclined to find fault or to judge with severity, often too readily.
- pseudo-dramatic — of or relating to the drama.
- pseudo-military — of, for, or pertaining to the army or armed forces, often as distinguished from the navy: from civilian to military life.
- pseudo-romantic — of, relating to, or of the nature of romance; characteristic or suggestive of the world of romance: a romantic adventure.
- pseudoarthrosis — a joint formed by fibrous tissue bridging the gap between the two fragments of bone of an old fracture that have not united
- pseudoparalysis — the inability to move a part of the body owing to factors, as pain, other than those causing actual paralysis.
- pseudopregnancy — Pathology, Veterinary Pathology. false pregnancy.
- pseudotripteral — having an arrangement of columns suggesting a tripteral structure but without the inner colonnades.
- public lavatory — a public toilet
- puerperal fever — a systemic bacterial infection of the endometrium characterized by fever, rapid heartbeat, uterine tenderness, and malodorous discharge, chiefly occurring in women after childbirth, usually as the result of unsterile obstetric procedures.
- puerto ayacucho — a city in S Venezuela, on the Orinoco River.
- puerto vallarta — a city in W Mexico.
- pulmobranchiate — possessing a pulmobranch
- pulmonary valve — a semilunar valve between the pulmonary artery and the right ventricle of the heart that prevents the blood from flowing back into the right ventricle.
- purchase ledger — a record of a company's purchases of goods and services showing the amounts paid and due
- pure and simple — sheer, utter
- pure land sects — Mahayana Buddhist sects venerating the Buddha as the compassionate saviour
- purslane family — the plant family Portulacaceae, characterized by chiefly herbaceous plants having simple, often fleshy leaves, sometimes showy flowers, and capsular fruit, and including bitterroot, purslane, red maids, rose moss, and spring beauty.
- put a damper on — To put a damper on something means to have an effect on it which stops it being as enjoyable or as successful as it should be.
- put years on sb — If you say that something such as an experience or a way of dressing has put years on someone, you mean that it has made them look or feel much older.
- quadripartition — A division into four parts.
- quadruple bucky — Obsolete. 1. On an MIT space-cadet keyboard, use of all four of the shifting keys (control, meta, hyper, and super) while typing a character key. 2. On a Stanford or MIT keyboard in raw mode, use of four shift keys while typing a fifth character, where the four shift keys are the control and meta keys on *both* sides of the keyboard. This was very difficult to do! One accepted technique was to press the left-control and left-meta keys with your left hand, the right-control and right-meta keys with your right hand, and the fifth key with your nose. Quadruple-bucky combinations were very seldom used in practice, because when one invented a new command one usually assigned it to some character that was easier to type. If you want to imply that a program has ridiculously many commands or features, you can say something like: "Oh, the command that makes it spin the tapes while whistling Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is quadruple-bucky-cokebottle." See double bucky, bucky bits, cokebottle.
- quadruplication — one of four copies or identical items, especially copies of typewritten material.
- quarter pounder — A quarter pounder is a hamburger that weighs four ounces before it is cooked. Four ounces is a quarter of a pound.
- quasi-permanent — existing perpetually; everlasting, especially without significant change.
- quasi-spherical — having the form of a sphere; globular.
- queen's pattern — a pattern of ceramic decoration consisting of bands of swirling radial lines, white on blue alternating with red on white.
- query expansion — (information science) Adding search terms to a user's search. Query expansion is the process of a search engine adding search terms to a user's weighted search. The intent is to improve precision and/or recall. The additional terms may be taken from a thesaurus. For example a search for "car" may be expanded to: car cars auto autos automobile automobiles. The additional terms may also be taken from documents that the user has specified as being relevant; this is the basis for the "more like this" feature of some search engines. The extra terms can have positive or negative weights.
- radioautography — autoradiography.
- radiophosphorus — phosphorus 32.
- rape of lucrece — a narrative poem (1594) by Shakespeare.
- reconceptualize — to form into a concept; make a concept of.
- reduplicatively — in a reduplicative manner
- refugee capital — money from abroad invested, esp for a short term, in the country offering the highest interest rate
- refuse disposal — the act of disposing of rubbish and waste
- regular premium — A regular premium is money paid to buy insurance coverage in installments at particular time intervals, such as monthly or annually.
- renal corpuscle — Malpighian body (sense 2)
- repeating group — (database) Any attribute that can have multiple values associated with a single instance of some entity. For example, a book might have multiple authors. Such a "-to-many" relationship might be represented in an unnormalised relational database as multiple author columns in the book table or a single author(s) column containing a string which was a list of authors. Converting this to "first normal form" is the first step in database normalisation. Each author of the book would appear in a separate row along with the book's primary key. Later nomalisation stages would move the book-author relationship into a separate table to avoid repeating other book attibutes (e.g. title, publisher) for each author.
- reported clause — A reported clause is a subordinate clause that indicates what someone said or thought. For example, in 'She said that she was hungry', 'she was hungry' is a reported clause.
- ruby grapefruit — a grapefruit with red flesh
- rudyard kipling — (Joseph) Rudyard [ruhd-yerd] /ˈrʌd yərd/ (Show IPA), 1865–1936, English author: Nobel Prize 1907.
- rump parliament — the remnant of the Long Parliament established by the expulsion of the Presbyterian members in 1648, dismissed by force in 1653, and restored briefly in 1659–60.
- running repairs — repairs, as to a machine or vehicle, that are minor and can be made with little or no interruption in the use of the item
- sale of produce — the selling of something that is produced, esp agricultural products
- salisbury plain — a plateau in S England, N of Salisbury: the site of Stonehenge.
- samuel prescott — Samuel, 1751–77, U.S. patriot during the American Revolution: rode with Paul Revere and William Dawes to warn Colonists that British troops were marching from Boston, April 18, 1775.