18-letter words containing x, l, i
- 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.
- retail price index — The retail price index is a list of the prices of typical goods which shows how much the cost of living changes from one month to the next.
- self-extinguishing — to put out (a fire, light, etc.); put out the flame of (something burning or lighted): to extinguish a candle.
- sexual intercourse — genital contact, especially the insertion of the penis into the vagina followed by orgasm; coitus; copulation.
- sexual orientation — one's natural preference in sexual partners; predilection for homosexuality, heterosexuality, or bisexuality.
- single-lens reflex — See under reflex camera. Abbreviation: SLR.
- sixth-form college — (in England and Wales) a college offering A-level and other courses to pupils over sixteen from local schools, esp from those that do not have sixth forms
- 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.
- submaxillary gland — submandibular gland.
- telephone sex line — a telephone line operated by a phone-sex worker that offers phone sex to paying customers
- therese de lisieux — Saint (Marie Françoise Thérèse Martin"the Little Flower") 1873–97, French Carmelite nun.
- tick all the boxes — to satisfy all of the apparent requirements for success
- unix international — (body) (UI) A consortium including Sun, AT&T and others formed to promote an open environment based on Unix System V, including the Open Look windowing system.
- xenon hexafluoride — a colorless, crystalline compound, XeF 6 , that melts at 50°C to a yellow liquid, and boils at 75°C.