English Words: P
46,516 words · Page 498 of 931
Acute infection by the poliovirus, especially of the motor neurons in the spinal cord and brainstem, leading to muscle weakness, paralysis and sometimes deformity.
The art of siege warfare, namely, that of conducting or resisting a siege; siegecraft.
To work on a time-consuming and ultimately pointless or impossible task; to try to perfect what is inherently bad.
A notation for arithmetic (and logical) formulae in which operations (respectively, quantifiers and operands) are written immediately before their operands, used to avoid the need for parentheses; for example, 3 * (4 + 7) is written as * 3 + 4 7 and A AND B is written as AND A B.
To finish completely, especially a food (polish the plate with one's tongue) or liquor.
A medical condition resulting from deficient hair care in which the uncombed hair becomes irreversibly entangled, forming a matted mass, which can become malodorous and encrusted or sticky.
The governing council and chief policymaking body of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and other Marxist-Leninist political systems.
A social scenario in which all participants are aware of a truth, but pretend to believe in some alternative version of events to avoid conflict or embarrassment.
Civility, politeness, courtesy or gallantry; genteel politeness or an instance of this.
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English alphabetical index for the letter P contains 46,516 headwords drawn from our Wiktionary-derived dictionary table. At 50 entries per page the browse splits into 931 pages, and you are currently viewing page 498. Every row above is a dictionary-backed entry with a canonical slug, and each links through to a full definition page with pronunciation, senses, etymology, and related-word data where available.
On this page 50 of 50 entries carry a part-of-speech tag and 50 carry at least one stored definition. Coverage varies across letters because Wiktionary volunteers build entries at different speeds for different parts of the alphabet, letters with common starting sounds (S, C, T, P) usually have the densest coverage, while less frequent starters (X, Q, Z) tend to have shorter but more specialised lists. PlainSpell surfaces whatever data is present and links back to the source when a definition is not yet recorded.
For readers using this index as a spelling reference, the guarantee is that every form you see on the list is a documented English headword, not a guess, not a derived inflection lacking a lemma row. If a word you expected to find is absent from the "P" list, it usually means the form exists only as an inflection of another lemma (e.g. a past participle stored under the infinitive) or the entry has not yet been imported from Wiktionary. Use the search bar or the misspelling lookup to resolve these cases.