17-letter words containing l, i, a, n
- liability account — A liability account is an account recording a company's liabilities.
- liberal education — an education based primarily on the liberal arts, emphasizing the development of intellectual abilities as opposed to the acquisition of professional skills.
- lie in wait (for) — to wait so as to catch after planning an ambush or trap (for)
- life and/or death — If you say that something is a matter of life and death, you are emphasizing that it is extremely important, often because someone may die or suffer great harm if people do not act immediately.
- lifelong learning — the provision or use of both formal and informal learning opportunities throughout people's lives in order to foster the continuous development and improvement of the knowledge and skills needed for employment and personal fulfilment
- light dawns on sb — If light dawns on you, you begin to understand something after a period of not being able to understand it.
- light in the head — dizzy; giddy
- light machine gun — any air-cooled machine gun having a caliber not greater than 0.30 inches (7.6 mm).
- light mineral oil — a colorless, oily, almost tasteless, water-insoluble liquid, usually of either a standard light density (light mineral oil) or a standard heavy density (heavy mineral oil) consisting of mixtures of hydrocarbons obtained from petroleum by distillation: used chiefly as a lubricant, in the manufacture of cosmetics, and in medicine as a laxative.
- ligurian republic — the republic in NW Italy set up by Napoleon in 1797, incorporated into France in 1805, and united with the Kingdom of Sardinia in 1814.
- limousine liberal — a wealthy left-wing person
- lincoln's sparrow — a North American sparrow, Melospiza lincolnii, having a buff breast with black streaks.
- line of scrimmage — an imaginary line parallel to the goal lines that passes from one sideline to the other through the point of the football closest to the goal line of each team.
- linear assignment — assignment problem
- linear dependence — (in linear algebra) the property of a set of elements in a vector space in which at least one of the vectors in the set can be written as a linear combination of the others.
- linking consonant — a consonant inserted between two vowels in speech
- liquid propellant — a rocket propellant in liquid form.
- lisp machine lisp — (language) An extension of Maclisp, now called Zetalisp.
- listings magazine — a magazine with lists of TV and radio schedules
- literacy campaign — a campaign designed to reduce illiteracy and promote literacy in a country, area, etc
- lithium carbonate — a colorless crystalline compound, Li 2 CO 3 , slightly soluble in water: used in ceramic and porcelain glazes, pharmaceuticals, and luminescent paints.
- litigation friend — a person acting on behalf of an infant or other person under legal disability
- live and let live — be tolerant of others
- livingstone daisy — a gardener's name for various species of Mesembryanthemum, esp M. criniflorum, grown as garden annuals (though several are perennial) for their brightly coloured showy flowers: family Aizoaceae
- load displacement — the weight, in long tons, of a cargo vessel loaded so that the summer load line touches the surface of the water.
- local anaesthesia — the use of anaesthetics that affect a particular area of the body
- local anaesthetic — sth injected to numb a body part for pain relief
- local examination — any of various examinations, such as the GCSE, set by university boards and conducted in local centres, schools, etc
- logic programming — (artificial intelligence, programming, language) A declarative, relational style of programming based on first-order logic. The original logic programming language was Prolog. The concept is based on Horn clauses. The programmer writes a "database" of "facts", e.g. wet(water). ("water is wet") and "rules", e.g. mortal(X) :- human(X). ("X is mortal is implied by X is human"). Facts and rules are collectively known as "clauses". The user supplies a "goal" which the system attempts to prove using "resolution" or "backward chaining". This involves matching the current goal against each fact or the left hand side of each rule using "unification". If the goal matches a fact, the goal succeeds; if it matches a rule then the process recurses, taking each sub-goal on the right hand side of the rule as the current goal. If all sub-goals succeed then the rule succeeds. Each time a possible clause is chosen, a "choice point" is created on a stack. If subsequent resolution fails then control eventually returns to the choice point and subsequent clauses are tried. This is known as "backtracking". Clauses may contain logic variables which take on any value necessary to make the fact or the left hand side of the rule match a goal. Unification binds these variables to the corresponding subterms of the goal. Such bindings are associated with the choice point at which the clause was chosen and are undone when backtracking reaches that choice point. The user is informed of the success or failure of his first goal and if it succeeds and contains variables he is told what values of those variables caused it to succeed. He can then ask for alternative solutions.
- logical operation — Boolean operation.
- lombrosian school — a school of criminology, promulgating the theories and employing the methods developed by Lombroso.
- long island sound — an arm of the Atlantic between Connecticut and Long Island. 90 miles (145 km) long.
- longitudinal wave — a wave in which the direction of displacement is the same as the direction of propagation, as a sound wave.
- loose-leaf binder — a hard cover with metal rings inside which is used to hold loose pieces of paper
- louisiana tanager — western tanager.
- low-hanging fruit — the fruit that grows low on a tree and is therefore easy to reach
- luggage insurance — insurance against the loss of luggage while travelling
- luminous efficacy — the quotient of the luminous flux of a radiation and its corresponding radiant flux
- luminous exitance — the ability of a surface to emit light expressed as the luminous flux per unit area at a specified point on the surface
- lumpenproletariat — the lowest level of the proletariat comprising unskilled workers, vagrants, and criminals and characterized by a lack of class identification and solidarity.
- lymphadenopathies — Plural form of lymphadenopathy.
- lymphangiographic — Relating to lymphangiography.
- lyon king of arms — the chief herald of Scotland
- macro-linguistics — a field of study concerned with language in its broadest sense and including cultural and behavioral features associated with language.
- macroevolutionary — Pertaining to, or as a result of macroevolution.
- madonna and child — a representation of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus.
- magellanic clouds — either of two irregular galactic clusters in the southern heavens that are the nearest independent star system to the Milky Way.
- magnesium sulfate — a white, water-soluble salt, MgSO 4 , used chiefly in medicine and in the processing of leather and textiles.
- magnetic monopole — a hypothetical very heavy particle with an isolated magnetic north pole or magnetic south pole.
- magnetoelasticity — the phenomenon, consisting of a change in magnetic properties, exhibited by a ferromagnetic material to which stress is applied.