12-letter words containing w, p, l
- palm warbler — a North American wood warbler, Dendroica palmarum, brown above and whitish or yellowish below.
- parallelwise — in a parallel manner
- pascal's law — the law that an external pressure applied to a fluid in a closed vessel is uniformly transmitted throughout the fluid.
- pasch flower — pasqueflower
- pasqueflower — an Old World plant, Anemone pulsatilla, of the buttercup family, having purple, crocuslike flowers blooming about Easter.
- patrol wagon — an enclosed truck or van used by the police to transport prisoners.
- pearly white — white and lustrous as a pearl.
- pelton wheel — a high-pressure impulse water turbine in which one or more free jets of water are directed against the buckets of the rotor.
- pennywhistle — a cheap toy whistle orig. sold for a penny
- people power — community action
- periodic law — the law that the properties of the elements are periodic functions of their atomic numbers.
- phonetic law — a statement of some regular pattern of sound change in a specific language, as Grimm's law or Verner's law.
- pickerelweed — any American plant of the genus Pontederia, especially P. cordata, having spikes of blue flowers, common in shallow fresh water.
- pied wagtail — a British songbird, Motacilla alba yarrellii, with a black throat and back, long black tail, and white underparts and face: family Motacillidae (wagtails and pipits)
- pillow block — a cast-iron or steel block for supporting a journal or bearing.
- pillow fight — a mock fight in which participants thump each other with pillows
- pillow sword — a straight sword of the 17th century.
- piltdown man — a hypothetical early modern human, assigned to the genus Eoanthropus, whose existence was inferred from skull fragments that were allegedly found at Piltdown, England, in 1912 but were exposed as fraudulent through chemical analysis in 1953.
- pine warbler — a warbler, Dendroica pinus, inhabiting pine forests of the southeastern U.S.
- pit dwelling — a primitive dwelling consisting of a pit excavated in the earth and roofed over.
- planck's law — the law that energy associated with electromagnetic radiation, as light, is composed of discrete quanta of energy, each quantum equal to Planck's constant times the corresponding frequency of the radiation: the fundamental law of quantum mechanics.
- planet wheel — any of the gears in an epicyclic train surrounding and engaging with the sun gear.
- plastic flow — deformation of a material that remains rigid under stresses of less than a certain intensity but that behaves under severer stresses approximately as a Newtonian fluid.
- plastic wrap — a very thin, transparent sheet of plastic, usually packaged in rolls and often having the ability to cling to other substances, used especially to wrap and store food and for microwave cooking.
- plate warmer — a device for warming plates
- pleased with — satisfied or content with
- ploughwright — a person who makes ploughs
- polar wander — the movement of the earth's magnetic poles with respect to the geographic poles
- police power — the power of a nation, within the limits of its constitution, to regulate the conduct of its citizens in the interest of the common good.
- polish wheat — a wheat, Triticum polonicum, grown chiefly in S Europe, N Africa, and Turkestan.
- poll watcher — a representative of a political party or of an organization running a candidate who is assigned to the polls on an election day to watch for violations of the laws that regulate voting, campaigning, etc.
- positive law — customary law or law enacted by governmental authority (as distinguished from natural law).
- pot-walloper — (in some boroughs before the Reform Bill of 1832) a man who qualified as a householder, and therefore a voter, by virtue of ownership of his own fireplace at which to boil pots.
- powder flask — a small flask of gunpowder formerly carried by soldiers and hunters.
- power shovel — any self-propelled shovel for excavating earth, ore, or coal with a dipper that is powered by a diesel engine or electric motor. Compare shovel (def 2).
- power supply — power supply unit
- powerbuilder — (tool, database) A graphical user interface development tool from Powersoft for developing client-server database applications. It runs under MS-DOS(?) and Microsoft Windows. There are also versions for Microsoft Windows, Windows NT, Macintosh, and Unix. Applications can be built by creating windows, controls (such as listboxes and buttons), and menus within the PowerBuilder development environment. The language used to program PowerBuilder, PowerScript, is loosely based on BASIC. PowerBuilder supports programming on many database backends including Sybase and Oracle. It also has added support for ODBC database drivers. PowerBuilder also comes with a built-in database backend (WATCOM SQL 32-bit relational database).
- powerfulness — having or exerting great power or force.
- powerlifting — a competition or sport involving three tests of strength: the bench press, squat, and two-handed dead lift.
- powerwalking — a form of exercise that involves rapid walking with arms bent and swinging naturally.
- prairie fowl — prairie chicken.
- prairie wolf — coyote (def 1).
- prayer shawl — a tallith.
- prayer wheel — a wheel or cylinder inscribed with or containing prayers, used chiefly by Buddhists of Tibet.
- primary wall — the wall of a plant cell that is formed first around the protoplast, composed of cellulose microfibrils aligned at all angles and held together by hydrogen bonds.
- property law — the branch of law dealing with issues relating to land and houses
- public works — government-funded construction
- pussy willow — a small willow, Salix discolor, of eastern North America, having silky catkins.
- pussy-willow — a small willow, Salix discolor, of eastern North America, having silky catkins.
- saw palmetto — a shrublike palmetto, Serenoa repens, of the palm family, native to the southern U.S., having green or blue leafstalks set with spiny teeth.