19-letter words containing f, o, i, a
- intentional fallacy — (in literary criticism) an assertion that the intended meaning of the author is not the only or most important meaning; a fallacy involving an assessment of a literary work based on the author's intended meaning rather than on actual response to the work.
- 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.
- interfacial tension — the surface tension at the interface of two liquids.
- interferometrically — By means of interferometry.
- invasion of privacy — an encroachment upon the right to be let alone or to be free from publicity.
- isle of shoals boat — a sailing boat formerly used in Ipswich Bay, Massachusetts, rigged with two spritsails or gaff sails.
- islet of langerhans — any of several masses of endocrine cells in the pancreas that secrete insulin, somatostatin, and glucagon.
- isthmus of san blas — the narrowest part of the Isthmus of Panama. Width: about 50 km (30 miles)
- 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
- judicial conference — a conference of judges held to discuss improvements in methods or judicial procedure through court rules or otherwise.
- kingdom of lorraine — an early medieval kingdom on the Meuse, Moselle, and Rhine rivers: later a duchy
- ladies-of-the-night — plural of lady-of-the-night.
- lady of the evening — a prostitute.
- lagrangian function — kinetic potential.
- land of opportunity — Arkansas (used as a nickname).
- languages of choice — C and Lisp. Nearly every hacker knows one of these, and most good ones are fluent in both. Smalltalk and Prolog are also popular in small but influential communities. There is also a rapidly dwindling category of older hackers with Fortran, or even assembler, as their language of choice. They often prefer to be known as Real Programmers, and other hackers consider them a bit odd (see "The Story of Mel"). Assembler is generally no longer considered interesting or appropriate for anything but HLL implementation, glue, and a few time-critical and hardware-specific uses in systems programs. Fortran occupies a shrinking niche in scientific programming. Most hackers tend to frown on languages like Pascal and Ada, which don't give them the near-total freedom considered necessary for hacking (see bondage-and-discipline language), and to regard everything even remotely connected with COBOL or other traditional card walloper languages as a total and unmitigated loss.
- lay one's finger on — to indicate, identify, or locate accurately
- leading coefficient — the coefficient of the term of highest degree in a given polynomial. 5 is the leading coefficient in 5 x 3 + 3 x 2 − 2 x + 1.
- left-luggage office — a checkroom for baggage.
- level of attainment — one of ten groupings, each with its own attainment criteria based on pupil age and ability, within which a pupil is assessed
- library of congress — one of the major library collections in the world, located in Washington, D.C., and functioning in some ways as the national library of the U.S. although not officially designated as such: established by Congress in 1800 for service to its members, but now also serving government agencies, other libraries, and the public.
- lift the curtain on — to begin
- line of demarcation — a separation between things deemed to be distinct
- line-of-battle ship — ship of the line.
- 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
- loss-of-containment — Loss-of-containment happens when a fluid which is usually contained somewhere escapes from that place.
- love at first sight — instant romantic attraction to sb
- lymphoproliferation — (medicine) the excessive production of lymphocytes.
- lymphoproliferative — Characterized by lymphoproliferation.
- lyon office of arms — Heralds' Office.
- magnetomotive force — a scalar quantity that is a measure of the sources of magnetic flux in a magnetic circuit. Abbreviation: mmf.
- make a pig's ear of — to ruin disastrously
- make the best of it — cope
- malice aforethought — a predetermination to commit an unlawful act without just cause or provocation (applied chiefly to cases of first-degree murder).
- malicious falsehood — a lie told by someone who knows the lie is false or knows it will do harm to the person it is concerning
- means of production — resources: equipment, workers
- midafternoon prayer — the fifth of the seven canonical hours; none
- mine of information — source of great knowledge
- minimum iron fabric — cloth used to make clothes that require little ironing
- 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.
- municipal bond fund — a mutual fund that invests in municipal bonds.
- nasty piece of work — malicious person
- 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-confidentiality — spoken, written, acted on, etc., in strict privacy or secrecy; secret: a confidential remark.
- non-confrontational — tending toward or ready for confrontation: They came to the meeting with a confrontational attitude.