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17-letter words starting with p

  • persistent memory — non-volatile storage
  • persona non grata — a person who is not welcome: He has become persona non grata in our club since his angry outburst.
  • personal computer — a compact computer that uses a microprocessor and is designed for individual use, as by a person in an office or at home or school, for such applications as word processing, data management, financial analysis, or computer games. Abbreviation: PC.
  • personal distance — personal space.
  • personal equation — the tendency to personal bias that accounts for variation in interpretation or approach and for which allowance must be made.
  • personal property — an estate or property consisting of movable articles both corporeal, as furniture or jewelry, or incorporeal, as stocks or bonds (distinguished from real property).
  • personality clash — friction between two people who have different personalities or points of view
  • personnel carrier — a vehicle used for transporting troops
  • personnel manager — head of Human Resources department
  • personnel officer — a worker responsible for recruiting employees and dealing with matters relating to them
  • perspicaciousness — having keen mental perception and understanding; discerning: to exhibit perspicacious judgment.
  • perth and kinross — a council area of N central Scotland, corresponding mainly to the historical counties of Perthshire and Kinross-shire: part of Tayside Region from 1975 until 1996: chiefly mountainous, with agriculture, tourism, and forestry. Administrative centre: Perth. Pop: 135 990 (2003 est). Area: 5321 sq km (2019 sq miles)
  • peterloo massacre — an incident at St Peter's Fields, Manchester, in 1819 in which a radical meeting was broken up by a cavalry charge, resulting in about 500 injuries and 11 deaths
  • petit bourgeoisie — The petit bourgeoisie are people in the lower middle class.
  • petite bourgeoise — a woman who belongs to the petite bourgeoisie.
  • petitio principii — a fallacy in reasoning resulting from the assumption of that which in the beginning was set forth to be proved; begging the question.
  • petrarchan sonnet — a sonnet form popularized by Petrarch, consisting of an octave with the rhyme scheme abbaabba and of a sestet with one of several rhyme schemes, as cdecde or cdcdcd.
  • petrol filler cap — a small cover that goes over the hole in a vehicle into which you put petrol
  • petty bourgeoisie — the section of the middle class with the lowest social status, generally composed of shopkeepers, lower clerical staff, etc
  • phantom limb pain — a phenomenon characterized by the experience of pain, discomfort, or other sensation in the area of a missing limb or other body part, as a breast.
  • phantom pregnancy — the occurrence of signs of pregnancy, such as enlarged abdomen and absence of menstruation, when no embryo is present, due to hormonal imbalance
  • pharmacologically — the science dealing with the preparation, uses, and especially the effects of drugs.
  • phase of the moon — Used humorously as a random parameter on which something is said to depend. Sometimes implies unreliability of whatever is dependent, or that reliability seems to be dependent on conditions nobody has been able to determine. "This feature depends on having the channel open in mumble mode, having the foo switch set, and on the phase of the moon." See also heisenbug. True story: Once upon a time there was a bug that really did depend on the phase of the moon. There was a little subroutine that had traditionally been used in various programs at MIT to calculate an approximation to the moon's true phase. GLS incorporated this routine into a Lisp program that, when it wrote out a file, would print a timestamp line almost 80 characters long. Very occasionally the first line of the message would be too long and would overflow onto the next line, and when the file was later read back in the program would barf. The length of the first line depended on both the precise date and time and the length of the phase specification when the timestamp was printed, and so the bug literally depended on the phase of the moon! The first paper edition of the Jargon File (Steele-1983) included an example of one of the timestamp lines that exhibited this bug, but the typesetter "corrected" it. This has since been described as the phase-of-the-moon-bug bug.
  • phenethyl alcohol — a colorless, viscous, slightly water-soluble liquid, C 8 H 1 0 O, having a faint roselike odor: used chiefly in perfumery.
  • phenyl isocyanate — a liquid reagent, C 7 H 5 NO, having an unpleasant, irritating odor: used chiefly for identifying alcohols and amines.
  • phenylacetic acid — a white crystalline, aromatic acid, C 8 H 8 O 2 , used in the manufacture of penicillin and in perfumes.
  • phenylformic acid — benzoic acid.
  • philanthropically — of, pertaining to, engaged in, or characterized by philanthropy; benevolent: a philanthropic foundation.
  • philosopher kings — the Platonic ideal of a ruler, philosophically trained and enlightened.
  • phlebotomus fever — sandfly fever.
  • phonetic alphabet — an alphabet containing a separate character for each distinguishable speech sound.
  • phonological rule — an operation in generative phonology that substitutes one sound or class of sounds for another in a phonological derivation.
  • photo opportunity — a brief period set aside for the media to take photographs of a high government official or celebrity, usually immediately before or after a newsworthy event.
  • photo-composition — any method of composition using photography, as composition by means of a photocomposer.
  • photo-respiration — the oxidation of carbohydrates in many higher plants in which they get oxygen from light and then release carbon dioxide, somewhat different from photosynthesis.
  • photoconductivity — the increase in the electrical conductivity of a substance, often nonmetallic, caused by the absorption of electromagnetic radiation.
  • photodissociation — the dissociation or breakdown of a chemical compound by radiant energy.
  • photofluorography — photography of images produced by a fluoroscopic examination, used in x-ray examination of the lungs of large groups of people.
  • photoluminescence — luminescence induced by the absorption of infrared radiation, visible light, or ultraviolet radiation.
  • photoreactivation — a process that repairs DNA damaged by ultraviolet light using an enzyme that requires visible light.
  • phototherapeutics — the branch of therapeutics that deals with the curative use of light rays.
  • photovoltaic cell — a photocell in which an electromotive force is generated by a photovoltaic effect.
  • phumiphon aduldet — (Phumiphon Aduldet; Bhumibol Adulyadej) born 1927, king of Thailand since 1946.
  • physical activity — sth involving use of the body
  • physical exercise — movements and activities done to keep your body healthy or make it stronger
  • physical handicap — loss of or failure to develop a specific bodily function or functions, whether of movement, sensation, coordination, or speech, but excluding mental impairments or disabilities
  • physical medicine — the branch of medicine dealing with the diagnosis and treatment of disease and injury by means of physical agents, as manipulation, massage, exercise, heat, or water.
  • physical pendulum — any apparatus consisting of a body of possibly irregular shape allowed to rotate freely about a horizontal axis on which it is pivoted (distinguished from simple pendulum).
  • physical training — fitness coaching
  • piccadilly circus — a traffic circle and open square in W London, England: theater and amusement center.
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