18-letter words containing a, p, u, n
- primus inter pares — (of males) first among equals.
- principal argument — the radian measure of the argument between −π and π of a complex number. Compare argument (def 8c).
- prison authorities — the people in charge of running a prison
- 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 manager — a supervisor of the budget, crew and other details in the production of a film or play
- 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 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
- publicity campaign — an effort to convey information to the public
- publishing company — a firm which publishes books
- 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.
- 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.
- pulp canal therapy — endodontics.
- punishment beating — a form of corporal punishment carried out by a paramilitary organization on a member of another sectarian organization, usually in Northern Ireland
- purchasing officer — the member of staff in an organization who is responsible for buying goods or products
- put a bold face on — to seem bold or confident about
- puvis de chavannes — Puvis de [py-vee duh] /püˈvi də/ (Show IPA), Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre.
- pyramus and thisbe — (in Greek legend) two lovers of Babylon: Pyramus, wrongly supposing Thisbe to be dead, killed himself and she, encountering him in his death throes, did the same
- 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.
- redundancy payment — a sum of money given by an employer to an employee who has been made redundant: usually calculated on the basis of the employee's rate of pay and length of service
- 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.
- repayment schedule — a document detailing the specific terms of a borrower's loan, such as monthly payment, interest rate, due dates etc
- resurrection plant — a desert plant, Selaginella lepidophylla, occurring from Texas to South America, having stems that curl inward when dry.
- room occupancy tax — Room occupancy tax is a tax that guests at a hotel have to pay in order to stay there.
- rural municipality — any lightly settled area in Canada lacking a local elected government and administered directly by a provincial government.
- russo-japanese war — the war (1904–1905) between Russia and Japan.
- sampling equipment — Sampling equipment is equipment which is used to remove small amounts of something for analysis and monitoring.
- sampling frequency — sample rate
- scripting language — a language that is used to write scripts, or executable sections of code that automate tasks.
- self-preoccupation — the state of being preoccupied.
- sell someone a pup — to swindle someone by selling him something worthless
- shunting operation — an operation in which rail coaches are manoeuvred
- simple enumeration — a procedure for arriving at empirical generalizations by haphazard accumulation of positive instances.
- slow on the uptake — slow to understand or learn
- sound spectrograph — an electronic device for recording a sound spectogram.
- southampton island — an island in N Canada, in the Northwest Territories at the entrance to Hudson Bay. 19,100 sq. mi. (49,470 sq. km).
- spackling compound — spackle
- spaghetti junction — an interchange, usually between motorways, in which there are a large number of underpasses and overpasses and intersecting roads used by a large volume of high-speed traffic
- spanish succession — War of thea war (1701-14) between European powers disputing the succession to the Spanish throne