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18-letter words containing pr

  • primate of england — a title of the archbishop of Canterbury.
  • prime-ministership — the principal minister and head of government in parliamentary systems; chief of the cabinet or ministry: the British prime minister.
  • primus inter pares — (of males) first among equals.
  • prince of darkness — Satan.
  • principal argument — the radian measure of the argument between −π and π of a complex number. Compare argument (def 8c).
  • principal diagonal — a diagonal line or plane.
  • principal meridian — a meridian line accurately laid out to serve as the reference meridian in land survey
  • priority interrupt — (jargon)   Any stimulus compelling enough to yank one right out of hack mode. Classically used to describe being dragged away by an SO for immediate sex, but may also refer to more mundane interruptions such as a fire alarm going off in the near vicinity. Also called an NMI (non-maskable interrupt), especially in PC-land.
  • priority inversion — (parallel)   The state of a concurrent system where a high priority task is waiting for a low priority task which is waiting for a medium priority task. The system may become unstable and crash under these circumstances. In an operating system that uses multiple tasks, each task (or context) may be given a priority. These priorities help the scheduler decide which task to run next. Consider tasks, L, M, and H, with priorities Low, Medium, and High. M is running and H is blocked waiting for some resource that is held by L. So long as any task with a priority higher than L is runable, it will prevent task L, and thus task H, from running. Priority inversion is generally considered either as a high-level design failure or an implementation issue to be taken into account depending on who is talking. Most operating systems have methods in place to prevent or take inversion into account. Priority inheritance is one method. The most public instance of priority inversion is the repeated 'fail-safe' rebooting of the Mars Pathfinder. base station ('Sagan Memorial Station').
  • prism spectrometer — an optical device for measuring wavelengths, deviation of refracted rays, and angles between faces of a prism, especially an instrument (prism spectrometer) consisting of a slit through which light passes, a collimator, a prism that deviates the light, and a telescope through which the deviated light is viewed and examined.
  • prison authorities — the people in charge of running a prison
  • prison rustic work — rustication having a deeply pitted surface.
  • prisoner's dilemma — (in game theory) a scenario in which the outcome of one person's decision is determined by the simultaneous decisions of the other participants, resulting in a bad outcome for all of them if all act in their own self-interest.
  • private enterprise — free enterprise (def 1).
  • probability theory — the theory of analyzing and making statements concerning the probability of the occurrence of uncertain events. Compare probability (def 4).
  • process identifier — (operating system)   (PID) An integer used by the Unix kernel to uniquely identify a process. PIDs are returned by the fork system call and can be passed to wait() or kill() to perform actions on the given process.
  • process scheduling — multitasking
  • processionary moth — a moth of the family Thaumetopoeidae, esp the oak processionary moth (Thaumetopoea processionea), the larvae of which leave the communal shelter nightly for food in a V-shaped procession
  • 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
  • product life cycle — the four stages (introduction, growth, maturity, and decline) into one of which the sales of a product fall during its market life
  • production company — an organization which produces, films, plays, television or radio programmes
  • production control — the planning and supervision of manufacturing activities to ensure that goods will be produced on time at the lowest possible cost.
  • production manager — a supervisor of the budget, crew and other details in the production of a film or play
  • productivity bonus — an extra payment made to workers for being more productive or yielding more favourable results than normal
  • programme of study — the prescribed syllabus that pupils must be taught at each key stage in the National Curriculum
  • programme planning — the act of creating plans or schedules, esp in relation to your occupation
  • programmer's cheer — (humour)   "Shift to the left! Shift to the right! Pop up, push down! Byte! Byte! Byte!" [Origin?]
  • programming skills — the skills required to write a program so that data may be processed by a computer
  • progressive coding — (graphics, file format, algorithm)   (Or "interlacing") An aspect of a graphics storage format or transmission algorithm that treats bitmap image data non-sequentially in such a way that later data adds progressively greater resolution to an already full-size image. This contrasts with sequential coding. Progressive coding is useful when an image is being sent across a slow communications channel, such as the Internet, as the low-resolution image may be sufficient to allow the user to decide not to wait for the rest of the file to be received. In an interlaced GIF89 image, the pixels in a row are stored sequentially but the rows are stored in interlaced order, e.g. 0, 8, 4, 12, 2, 6, 8, 10, 14, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15. Each vertical scan adds rows in the middle of the gaps left by the previous one. Interlacing is also supported by other formats. JPEG supports a functionally similar concept known as Progressive JPEG. [How does the algorithm differ?] See also progressive/sequential coding.
  • progressive dinner — a dinner party in which each successive course is prepared and eaten at the residence of a different participant.
  • project management — leadership of a task or programme
  • projection machine — an apparatus that projects motion pictures; projector.
  • projection printer — enlarger.
  • prometheus unbound — a drama in verse (1820) by Shelley.
  • promotion campaign — a campaign designed to encourage the sale of (a product) by advertising or securing financial support
  • propaganda machine — the group of people, publications, etc, such as of a government, country etc, responsible for the organized dissemination of information, allegations, etc, to assist or damage the cause of a government, movement, etc
  • property developer — person: deals in real estate
  • property insurance — insurance coverage for land and housing
  • proportional limit — elastic limit.
  • proprietary colony — any of certain colonies, as Maryland and Pennsylvania, that were granted to an individual or group by the British crown and that were granted full rights of self-government.
  • proprietary rights — rights of ownership
  • protease inhibitor — a drug that inhibits the action of protease, especially any of a class of antiviral drugs that prevent the cleavage and replication of HIV proteins.
  • protective colloid — a lyophilic colloid added to a lyophobic sol to lessen its sensitivity to the precipitating effect of an electrolyte.
  • protective custody — detention of a person by the police solely as protection against a possible attack or reprisal by someone.
  • protein deficiency — a lack or insuffiency of protein
  • protocol converter — (networking)   A device or program to translate between different protocols which serve similar functions (e.g. TCP and TP4). Some call this a "gateway", though others use that term for other kinds of internetworking device.
  • 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.
  • proton synchrotron — a synchrotron used for accelerating protons.
  • provably difficult — The set or property of problems for which it can be proven that no polynomial-time algorithm exists, only exponential-time algorithms.
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