Grabov Rat : glossary : P

			glossary : P

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geography : toponym	Pacifica : the city in San Mateo Co., California. On Oct. 29, 1957, the inhabitants of Linda Mar, Sharp Park, Edgemar, Westview, Pacific Manor, Rockaway Beach, Fairway Park, Vallemar, and Pedro Point voted to incorporate as the city of Pacifica, a name indicative of its situation by the shore of the Pacific Ocean.
acronym	PAL : Phase Alternation Line : standard broadcast signal received by televisions in many European countries. The main difference between NTSC, the television standard used in the United States, and PAL is that NTSC delivers 525 lines of resolution at 60 half-frames per second, whereas PAL delivers 625 lines at 50 half-frames per second.	NTSC
botany & gardening	palea (also: palet) : one of the bracts at the base of a floret of a composite flower; also, one of the inner bracts which, together with the lemma, encloses the stamen and pistil in the flower of grasses.
botany & gardening	palmate : (in a leaf) having main veins or lobes radiating from a common center at the base of the leaf blade.
botany & gardening	panicle : a loose, irregularly branched flower cluster (compound inflorescence) with pedicellate flowers, usually of the racemose type, as in oats.
	paradigm : a model, an example, a pattern or a mental pattern; something serving as an example or model of how things should be done. It is the makeup of an individual's, group's or nation's reality, of what their attention is focused on, and it lays out the map of how to get there from here. A paradigm defines what can be perceived, what is acceptable, and what is not acceptable.
	parameter : a variable quantity (if measurable) or quality (if descriptive) which gives a particular property to the object it characterizes. In mathematics and computing, the difference in meaning between a parameter and an argument of a function is that the parameters are part of the function's definition, while arguments are supplied to the function when it is used.
botany & gardening	parenchyma : a soft tissue made of roundish, thin-walled cells, relatively undifferentiated, in plant stem or the pulp of fruits.
botany & gardening	paripinnate (equally pinnate) : pinnate with an even number of leaflets, i.e. pinnate without a terminal leaflet or a tendril, as the leaf of the tuberous vetch.
botany & gardening	parted : cleft clearly, divided almost to the base, as some leaves.
botany & gardening	parthenocarpy : the development of seedless fruit without fertilization.
	parthenogenesis : reproduction by the development of an unfertilized ovum, seed, or spore, as in certain polyzoans, insects, algae, etc.
natural philosophy	particle : a form of matter, properties of which could be attributed to a well constrained space and motion of which could be described by a particle motion formalism.	motion particle motion
natural philosophy	particle motion : a class of formalisms which define particle as a distinctive form of matter through its interactions and mobility in space. For example, particle mechanical motion is formulated in terms of time dependence of two vector physical quantities, position and momentum (quantity of motion, a product of particle mass and particle velocity), and that formalism is summarized in Newton’s laws of motion.
	particulate (substance) : substance in the form of small liquid or solid particles which remain individually dispersed.
	particulates : fine solid particles which remain individually dispersed in gases and stack emissions.
history : Amerindians	Patwin (also Patween, Southern Wintu) : a Wintun people native to the area of Northern California. The Patwin were southern branch of the Wintun group and native inhabitants of California for at least 1,000 years, up to 4,000 years.
game : chess acronym	PCA : Professional Chess Association, founded 1993 by Garry Kasparov and Nigel Short when they refused to play a World Championship match under the jurisdiction of FIDE. Note: The PCA quietly disappeared in the late 1990s.	FIDE
	pearl :a hard, rounded mineraloid produced by certain mollusks, primarily oysters; as a response to an irritating object inside its shell, the mollusk will deposit layers of calcium carbonate (CaCO₃) in the form of the minerals aragonite or calcite (both crystalline forms of calcium carbonate) held together by an organic horn-like compound called conchiolin; valued as a gemstone. Pearls are usually white, sometimes with a creamy or pinkish tinge, but may be tinted with yellow, green, blue, brown, or black (often highly valued because of their rarity).	mineraloid
botany & gardening	pedicel : the stalk of a single flower, especially the small stalks which bear the flowers in a branched inflorescence; an ultimate division of a common peduncle.
botany & gardening	peduncle : the main or primary stalk of a plant; a flower stalk supporting either a cluster or a solitary flower.
botany & gardening	peel : the skin or rind of a fruit, vegetable, etc.
geography : physical	peninsula : an elongated piece of land surrounded by water on three sides (a headland), an extension of land from a larger body.	headland
botany & gardening	pepo : a many-seeded, fleshy fruit with a hard rind, e.g. watermelon, squash, cucumber.
botany & gardening	perianth : the envelope of a flower, especially one in which the calyx and corolla are combined so that they cannot be clearly distinguished from each other, as in many monocotyledonous plants: the tulip, orchid, etc.; the perianth is called single when it consists of one verticil, and double when it consists of both calyx and corolla.
botany & gardening	pericarp : the rind or shell of fruits derived from the wall of the matured ovary; the walls of a ripened ovary or fruit, sometimes consisting of three layers: the epicarp, mesocarp, and endocarp.
botany & gardening	periderm : the outer bark and the layer of soft, growing tissue between the bark and the wood in plants.
botany & gardening	petal : the inner perianth segment when they clearly differ from the outer; any of the component parts, or leaves, forming the corolla of a flower; often brightly colored.
botany & gardening	petiole : the slender stalk of a leaf; the stalk by which a leaf is attached to the stem.
	philistine : an uncultured person, one whose interests are material and commonplace; a person regarded as smugly narrow and conventional in his views and tastes, lacking in and indifferent to cultural and aesthetic values. NOTE: the term comes from Philister (a person who has no university training, the name given by German university students to townspeople), not from Philistine (a member of non-Semitic people who lived in southwestern Palestine).
biology n.pl.	Phocidae : a family of aquatic mammals; the seals.
	phenomenon (pl. phenomena) : an observable event;
metrology : acoustics	phon : a unit of loudness level of sound (apparent, subjective sound level); defined as loudness of 1000 Hz sound at the sound pressure level of 20 µPa. See also: sone.	loudness sound pressure level
linguistics : phonetics noun	phone : an unanalyzed sound of a language, the smallest identifiable unit found in a stream of speech that is able to be transcribed with an IPA symbol; an individual sound unit of speech, pronounced in a defined way, without concern as to whether or not it is a phoneme of some language. Synonyms: sound, speech sound. Compare with phoneme.	phoneme IPA
linguistics : phonetics noun	phoneme : a smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a particular language; a minimal unit that serves to distinguish between meanings of words. Compare with phone. For example, in American English, /p/ and /b/ are distinct phonemes because pat and bat are distinct; however, the two different sounds of /t/ in tick and stick are not distinct in English, even though they are distinct in other languages such as Thai.	phone
	phonetics : the branch of acoustics concerned with speech processes including its production and perception and acoustic analysis.
	physicism : the tendency of the mind toward, or its preoccupation with, physical phenomena; materialism in philosophy and religion.
publishing & printing	pica : the typesetters unit of measurement which equals 12 points, approximately 1/6 of an inch.
	picture : see image
geography : toponym	Piedra : the Spanish word for 'stone' appears in many pace names from Spanish times of the southwestern US, e.g. Piedras Altas (Monterey Co., California) and Piedras Blancas ( San Luis Obispo Co., California).
acronym	PIN : personal identification number
botany & gardening	pinnate : having simple leaflets arranged on both sides of a common stem in a featherlike arrangement, as in a rose leaf.
botany & gardening	pinnatifid : having leaves in a featherlike arrangement, with narrow lobes whose clefts extend more than halfway to the stem.
n.pl.	Pinnipedia : a suborder of aquatic carnivorous mammals, having flippers, including the seals and walruses.
botany & gardening	pistil : the ovule-bearing or seed-bearing female organ of a flower consisting when complete of ovary, style, and stigma; made of one or more carpels.
computing & web	pixel (picture element) : a basic visual element of a raster image; each pixel is assigned a specific location and color value; sometimes abbreviated px or pel (for 'picture element').	raster image
computing & web	pixel depth : see color depth
abbreviation	pl. : plural :
botany	plant : any organism belonging to the kingdom Plantae; generally distinguished by the presence of chlorophyll, a rigid cell wall, and abundant, persistent, active embryonic tissue, and by the absence of the power of locomotion.
botany	plant : botanical name : Latin name of a plant. While each country or region can have their own names for plants, there is only one botanical name for each plant. The genus name is usually a Greek or Roman classical name, or named after a person. The species name is usually a descriptive name: it may reveal the country of origin, or the color of the flower or leaves, or the shape of the plant or leaf, or any peculiarity that the plant has. Often the ending of the name provides the meaning; the following endings are often used: -ensis means 'from a place', e.g. chinensis means 'from China' -folia means 'leaves like another plant', e.g. acerifolia means 'lives like an acer' -oides means 'like another plant', e.g. jasminoides means 'like jasmine'
computing & web	player : a third-party program, in the plug-in or ActiveX format, used to display nonstandard content in a web browser.	ActiveX
Internet lingo	PLS : please
botany & gardening	pod : any of various pericarps or dry seed vessels of plants, which split or burst open at maturity, such as the legume, the loment, the silique, the silicle, the follicle, the conceptacle, and the capsule.
publishing & printing	point : the typesetters basic unit of measurement, which equals 0.0138 inch (approximately 1/72 of an inch).
geography : toponym	Point Reyes (Marin Co., CA) : The Vizcaino expedition passed the point on Jan. 6, 1603, the day of los reyes magos, the 'three holy kings'. Finding shelter in the present Drakes Bay, they named it Puerto de los Reyes, a name that did not stick. The ppoint was probably named at the same time and appears quite regularly as Punta de los Reyes on the maps of the following centuries. NOTE: The cape is probably the one discovered by Cabrillo on Nov. 14, 1542, and named Cabo de Pinos.
botany & gardening	pollen : the fertilizing element of the flowering plants consisting of fine, powdery yellowish grains or spores; formed within the anthers in flowering plants; the male fecundating elements in seed plants.
biology n.pl.	Polyzoa : a class of molluscoid invertebrates, mostly marine, propagated by budding and living in colonies (polyzoaria).
botany & gardening	pome : a fleshy fruit with a papery endocarp forming a core and containing several seeds, e.g. apple, pear, quince; also, to form a compact head as in a lettuce or cabbage.
geography : navigation	portolan charts : navigational maps based on realistic descriptions of harbours and coasts. They were first made in the 14th century in Italy, Portugal and Spain. The word portolan comes from the Italian adjective portolano, meaning "related to ports or harbours."
geography : navigation	portolano (also called rutter) : a descriptive atlas of the Middle Ages, giving sailing directions and providing charts showing rhumb lines and the directions of ports and various coastal features.
natural philosophy	power law : a scaling law describing the relationship between two variables, x and y, as y ~ x^α. Power laws appear as straight lines on a log-log plot since log(y) ~ α*log(x). They have been used under various names to describe regularities observed in different disciplines. For example, Zipf's law describes how the number of times a word w occurs in text is inversely proportional to its rank, f(w) ~ [r(w)]^(-1), while the Pareto distribution characterizes the distribution of income among individuals.
computing & web acronym	ppi : pixels per inch : a measure of a raster picture resolution	raster image
economics acronym	PPP : Purchasing Power Parity : PPP statistics adjust for cost of living differences by replacing normal exchange rates with rates designed to equalize the prices of a standard 'basket' of goods and services; these are used to obtain PPP estimates of gross domestic product per capita (GDPpc).
Latin acronym	PPS : post postscriptum : a later postscript
linguistics	prefix : a word or a syllable (such as co-, ex-, non-, out-, pre-) placed in front of a word to add to or change its meaning.
	prehension : the act of seizing or grasping.
	principle : a basic generalization that is accepted as true and that can be used as a basis for reasoning or conduct. Any particular principle is questionably independent as it is likely to be a part of a certain paradigm or doctrine.	paradigm doctrine
	proboscis (from Greek pro 'before' and boskein 'to feed' or 'to graze') : an elongated appendage from the head of an animal. The most common usage is to refer to the tubular feeding and sucking organ of certain invertebrates like insects, worms (including proboscis worms) and mollusks. The elephant's trunk is also called a proboscis. The term is used for primate organs as well: the Proboscis Monkey is named for its enormous nose and an elongated human nose is sometimes humorously called a proboscis.
economics	production, factors of : the inputs or resources used in the process of production : land, labor and capital are the three main factors used in analysis of production, with entrepreneurship often counted as a fourth.
economics	productivity : the relationship between the output of goods and services and the input of resources used to produce them. Productivity is usually measured by ratios of changes in inputs to changes in outputs using index numbers; for example, changes in labor productivity are measured by an index of man-hours divided into an index of output.	index number
geography : physical	promontory : a prominent mass of land which overlooks lower lying land or a body of water (e.g., a peninsula or headland).	headland peninsula
botany & gardening	pruinose : covered with a white, waxy, powdery secretion or bloom, as through frosted.
Latin abbreviation	PS : postscriptum : postscript
biology	pseudopod (pseudopodium, pl. pseudopodia) : a temporary protrusion of the protoplasm, as of certain protozoans, usually serving as an organ of locomotion or prehension.
acronym	PTA : parent-teachers' association
botany & gardening	pubescent : covered with soft hair, fine short hair; downy.
geography : toponym	Pudding Creek (Mendocino Co., CA) : The Coast Survey charts show Padding River in 1870 and Pudding River in 1871. According to a local story, sailors called Noyo River "Put In Creek" because its mouth provided the only safe anchorage. This name may have been transferred later to a stream north of Fort Bragg and changed to the present form by folk etymology. It is, of course, possible that the name simply arose because of the presence of conglomerate, or pudding stone.
	pun (also known as paronomasia) : a play of words, a figure of speech which consists of a deliberate confusion of similar words within a phrase or phrases for rhetorical effect, whether humorous or serious; the use of a word, or of words, which are formed or sounded alike but have different meaning, in such a way to play on two or more of the possible applications. For example: "Being in politics is just like playing golf: you are trapped in one bad lie after another." (Pun on the two meanings of 'lie' - "a deliberate untruth"/"the position in which something rests").
	puzzle : a problem or a toy purposely designed to test one's knowledge or ingenuity or patience.

UPDATED : 2010-06-14

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