19-letter words containing a, r, t, i, f
- indefinite integral — a representation, usually in symbolic form, of any function whose derivative is a given function.
- index of refraction — a number indicating the speed of light in a given medium as either the ratio of the speed of light in a vacuum to that in the given medium (absolute index of refraction) or the ratio of the speed of light in a specified medium to that in the given medium (relative index of refraction) Symbol: n.
- index-tracking fund — an investment fund that is administered so that its value changes in line with a given share index
- infantile paralysis — poliomyelitis.
- inflationary spiral — Geometry. a plane curve generated by a point moving around a fixed point while constantly receding from or approaching it.
- informal settlement — a squatter camp
- information algebra — Theoretical formalism for DP, never resulted in a language. Language Structure Group of CODASYL, ca. 1962. Sammet 1969, 709.
- information content — the amount of information in something
- information highway — information superhighway
- information officer — someone whose job is to give information to people
- information science — the study of the nature, collection, and management of information and of its uses, especially involving computer storage and retrievals.
- information service — a service which provides information
- information warfare — the use of electronic communications and the internet to disrupt a country's telecommunications, power supply, transport system, etc
- interactive fiction — an adventure or mystery story, usually presented as a video game or book, in which the player or reader is given choices as to how the storyline is to develop or the mystery is to be solved.
- interesterification — transesterification.
- interface architect — An interface builder for Motif distributed by Hewlett-Packard (see UIMX).
- interfacial tension — the surface tension at the interface of two liquids.
- interferometrically — By means of interferometry.
- islet of langerhans — any of several masses of endocrine cells in the pancreas that secrete insulin, somatostatin, and glucagon.
- italian east africa — a former Italian territory in E Africa, formed in 1936 by the merging of Eritrea and Italian Somaliland with newly conquered Ethiopia: taken by the British Imperial forces 1941.
- jacques montgolfier — Jacques Étienne [zhahk ey-tyen] /ʒɑk eɪˈtyɛn/ (Show IPA), 1745–99, and his brother Joseph Michel [zhaw-zef mee-shel] /ʒɔˈzɛf miˈʃɛl/ (Show IPA) 1740–1810, French aeronauts: inventors of the first practical balloon 1783.
- joseph of arimathea — a wealthy disciple who provided a tomb for Jesus' body: Matt. 27:57-60
- juan de fuca strait — strait between Vancouver Island and NW Wash.: c. 100 mi (161 km) long
- lagrangian function — kinetic potential.
- land of opportunity — Arkansas (used as a nickname).
- landrum-griffin act — an act of Congress (1959) outlawing secondary boycotts, requiring public disclosure of the financial records of unions, and guaranteeing the use of secret ballots in union voting.
- leading aircraftman — the rank above aircraftman
- lift the curtain on — to begin
- line of demarcation — a separation between things deemed to be distinct
- load-bearing printf — (programming, humour) The kind of bug present in a program which works correctly when producing debug output but fails when the debugging is turned off. The expression combines load-bearing wall and printf as used in debugging by printf.
- logical shift right — logical shift
- love at first sight — instant romantic attraction to sb
- lymphoproliferation — (medicine) the excessive production of lymphocytes.
- lymphoproliferative — Characterized by lymphoproliferation.
- magnetomotive force — a scalar quantity that is a measure of the sources of magnetic flux in a magnetic circuit. Abbreviation: mmf.
- mail transfer agent — Message Transfer Agent
- malice aforethought — a predetermination to commit an unlawful act without just cause or provocation (applied chiefly to cases of first-degree murder).
- manufacturing plant — factory
- means of production — resources: equipment, workers
- medical certificate — a document stating the result of a satisfactory medical examination
- mediterranean fever — brucellosis.
- midafternoon prayer — the fifth of the seven canonical hours; none
- mine of information — source of great knowledge
- miracle of st. mark — a painting (1548) by Tintoretto.
- most favored nation — a nation to which privileges of trade are extended under a government policy of giving the same privileges to all nations that are given to any one of them, sometimes depending on whether certain conditions, as of reciprocity, are met
- most-favored-nation — of or relating to the status, treatment, terms, etc., that are embodied in or conferred by a most-favored-nation clause.
- nasty piece of work — malicious person
- neats vs. scruffies — (artificial intelligence, jargon) The label used to refer to one of the continuing holy wars in artificial intelligence research. This conflict tangles together two separate issues. One is the relationship between human reasoning and AI; "neats" tend to try to build systems that "reason" in some way identifiably similar to the way humans report themselves as doing, while "scruffies" profess not to care whether an algorithm resembles human reasoning in the least as long as it works. More importantly, neats tend to believe that logic is king, while scruffies favour looser, more ad-hoc methods driven by empirical knowledge. To a neat, scruffy methods appear promiscuous, successful only by accident and not productive of insights about how intelligence actually works; to a scruffy, neat methods appear to be hung up on formalism and irrelevant to the hard-to-capture "common sense" of living intelligences.
- negation by failure — An extralogical feature of Prolog and other logic programming languages in which failure of unification is treated as establishing the negation of a relation. For example, if Ronald Reagan is not in our database and we asked if he was an American, Prolog would answer "no".
- non-confrontational — tending toward or ready for confrontation: They came to the meeting with a confrontational attitude.