19-letter words containing i, n, f, e
- lady of the evening — a prostitute.
- 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 aircraftman — the rank above aircraftman
- 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.
- 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
- level playing field — a state of equality; an equal opportunity.
- 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
- lift up one's voice — to speak out loudly
- limit of resolution — the capacity of an optical system to resolve point objects as separate images.
- line of demarcation — a separation between things deemed to be distinct
- line-of-battle ship — ship of the line.
- live one's own life — If you live your own life, you live in the way that you want to and accept responsibility for your actions and decisions, without other people's advice or interference.
- 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.
- look (like) oneself — to appear to be in normal health, spirits, etc.
- lose in the shuffle — to leave out or disregard in the confusion of things
- loss-of-containment — Loss-of-containment happens when a fluid which is usually contained somewhere escapes from that place.
- low insertion force — (hardware) (LIF) PGA/SPGA sockets with no handle. The integrated circuit is simply pushed into the socket, and levered out to remove. Most motherboard processor sockets are now ZIF rather than LIF.
- luminous efficiency — the perceived brightness of light as a ratio of the total luminous flux to total radiant flux of the source; a measure of brightness obtained by dividing the source's luminous flux by the consumption of its energy.
- lymphoproliferation — (medicine) the excessive production of lymphocytes.
- 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.
- mail transfer agent — Message Transfer Agent
- manned space flight — space travel in vehicles with a human crew
- means of production — resources: equipment, workers
- mediterranean fever — brucellosis.
- membership function — fuzzy subset
- menominee whitefish — round whitefish.
- mid-autumn festival — a Chinese festival that is held to celebrate the end of the summer harvest, when the crops have been gathered.
- midafternoon prayer — the fifth of the seven canonical hours; none
- mine of information — source of great knowledge
- ministry of defence — the government department responsible for the country's military measures or resources
- missing fundamental — a tone, not present in the sound received by the ear, whose pitch is that of the difference between the two tones that are sounded
- 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.
- moving spirit/force — The moving spirit or moving force behind something is the person or thing that caused it to start and to keep going, or that influenced people to take part in it.
- 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".
- network file system — (networking, operating system) (NFS) A protocol developed by Sun Microsystems, and defined in RFC 1094, which allows a computer to access files over a network as if they were on its local disks. This protocol has been incorporated in products by more than two hundred companies, and is now a de facto standard. NFS is implemented using a connectionless protocol (UDP) in order to make it stateless. See Nightmare File System, WebNFS.
- non-confidentiality — spoken, written, acted on, etc., in strict privacy or secrecy; secret: a confidential remark.
- non-transferability — to convey or remove from one place, person, etc., to another: He transferred the package from one hand to the other.
- nonforfeiture value — any benefit, as cash or other form of insurance, available to a life-insurance policyholder who discontinues premium payments on the policy.
- nordrhein-westfalen — German name of North Rhine-Westphalia.
- norfolk island pine — a coniferous evergreen tree, Araucaria heterophylla (or A. excelsa), having whorled branches and needlelike foliage, widely cultivated as a houseplant.
- north pacific ocean — the northern part of the Pacific Ocean, extending from the equator to the Arctic Ocean.
- north-west frontier — the area roughly equivalent to the present North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, which is the days of the British Raj was regarded as one of the most remote and dangerous outposts of the British Empire
- not care/give a fig — If you say that someone doesn't care a fig or doesn't give a fig about something, you are emphasizing that they think it is unimportant or that they are not interested in it.
- nothing of the kind — not that