16-letter words containing l, i, o, n
- libation-bearers — Choëphori.
- liberal unionist — a Liberal who opposed Gladstone's policy of Irish Home Rule in 1886 and after
- lick one's chops — Usually, chops. the jaw.
- liebig condenser — a laboratory condenser consisting of a glass tube surrounded by a glass envelope through which cooling water flows
- light adaptation — the reflex adaptation of the eye to bright light, consisting of an increase in the number of functioning cones, accompanied by a decrease in the number of functioning rods (opposed to dark adaptation).
- lightbulb moment — a moment of sudden inspiration, revelation, or recognition
- lighthouse point — a city in NW Florida.
- lightning stroke — a discharge of lightning between a cloud and the earth, esp one that causes damage
- lignin sulfonate — a brown powder consisting of a sulfonate salt made from waste liquor of the sulfate pulping process of soft wood: used in concrete, leather tanning, as an additive in oil-well drilling mud, and as a source of vanillin.
- like cat and dog — quarrelling savagely
- lily-of-the-nile — a plant, Agapanthus africanus, of the amaryllis family, native to Africa, having large umbels of blue flowers.
- limited monarchy — a monarchy that is limited by laws and a constitution.
- limited-monarchy — a limited train, bus, etc.
- lincoln reckoner — An interactive mathematics program including matrix operations, written about 1965. It ran on the TX-2.
- line composition — type produced on a linecaster
- line of business — profession, trade: field
- line of latitude — an imaginary line on a globe, map, etc, indicating latitude
- line of position — a line connecting all the possible positions of a ship or aircraft, as determined by a single observation. Abbreviation: LOP.
- linguistic stock — a parent language and all its derived dialects and languages.
- linux user group — (body, operating system) (LUG) Any organisation of Linux users in a local area, university, etc., that offers mutual technical support, companionship with people of similar interests and promotes the use of Linux among computer users generally. LUGs often hold Install Fests for the general public, in which experienced Linux users explain and supervise the installation of Linux on new users' systems.
- listen to reason — be persuaded
- little brown bat — any of several small to medium-sized common bats of the genera Myotis and Eptesicus, found worldwide in caves, trees, and buildings, including M. lucifugus (little brown bat) and E. fuscus (big brown bat) a widespread North American species.
- live on the edge — take risks
- loan translation — the process whereby a compound word or expression is created by literal translation of each of the elements of a compound word or expression in another language, as marriage of convenience from French mariage de convenance.
- lobe-finned fish — any fish that has rounded scales and lobed fins, as the coelacanth.
- lodgepole (pine) — a Rocky Mountain pine (Pinus contorta) used for lumber, poles, etc.
- logical constant — one of the connectives of a given system of formal logic, esp those of the sentential calculus, not, and, or, and if … then …
- logical relation — A relation R satisfying f R g <=> For all a, b, a R b => f a R g b This definition, by Plotkin, can be used to extend the definition of a relation on the types of a and b to a relation on functions.
- logical unit 6.2 — (networking) (LU6.2) A type of logical unit that governs peer-to-peer SNA communications. LU6.2 supports general communication between programs in a distributed processing environment. LU6.2 is characterised by a peer relationship between session partners, efficient use of a session for multiple transactions, comprehensive end-to-end error processing and a generic application program interface consisting of structured verbs that are mapped into a product inplementation. LU6.2 is used by IBM's TPF operating system.
- loire-atlantique — a department in NW France. 2695 sq. mi. (6980 sq. km). Capital: Nantes.
- long time no see — I haven't seen you for a long time
- long-established — having a long history; old
- long-tail claims — Long-tail claims are claims that are made or settled a long time after the insurance policy has expired.
- long-wire aerial — a travelling-wave aerial consisting of one or more conductors, the length of which usually exceeds several wavelengths
- longicorn beetle — any beetle of the family Cerambycidae, having a long narrow body, long legs, and long antennae
- lookout mountain — a mountain ridge in Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama: a battle of the Civil War fought here, near Chattanooga, Tenn. 1863; highest point, 2126 feet (648 meters).
- loop combination — A program transformation where the bodies of two loops are merged into one thus reducing the overhead of manipulating and testing the control variable and branching. Further optimisation of the merged code may then become possible. In horizontal loop combination the bodies of the loops are largely independent so only the loop overhead is saved. Vertical loop combination applies where the results of the first loop are used by the second. Combining the two allows the intermediate results to be used immediately (in registers) rather than requiring them to be stored in an array. The functional equivalent of horizontal and vertical loop combination are tupling and fusion.
- loose connection — an imperfect electrical connection, as in a plug or car engine
- lord chamberlain — (in Britain) the chief official of the royal household
- lord howe island — an island in the S Pacific, E of Australia: a dependency of New South Wales. 5 sq. mi. (13 sq. km).
- lords-and-ladies — (used with a singular verb) cuckoopint.
- lose one's shirt — a long- or short-sleeved garment for the upper part of the body, usually lightweight and having a collar and a front opening.
- lose one's voice — If you lose your voice, you cannot speak for a while because of an illness.
- lost river range — a mountain range in E central Idaho. Highest peak, Borah Peak (also highest in the state), 12,662 feet (3862 meters).
- louisiana french — French as spoken in Louisiana; Cajun. Abbreviation: LaF.
- lower california — Baja California.
- lower palatinate — See under Palatinate (def 1).
- luminosity class — a classification of stars of a given spectral type according to their luminosity, breaking them down into dwarfs, giants, and supergiants.
- lymphangiography — x-ray visualization of lymph vessels and nodes following injection of a contrast medium.
- lz77 compression — The first algorithm to use the Lempel-Ziv substitutional compression schemes, proposed in 1977. LZ77 compression keeps track of the last n bytes of data seen, and when a phrase is encountered that has already been seen, it outputs a pair of values corresponding to the position of the phrase in the previously-seen buffer of data, and the length of the phrase. In effect the compressor moves a fixed-size "window" over the data (generally referred to as a "sliding window"), with the position part of the (position, length) pair referring to the position of the phrase within the window. The most commonly used algorithms are derived from the LZSS scheme described by James Storer and Thomas Szymanski in 1982. In this the compressor maintains a window of size N bytes and a "lookahead buffer", the contents of which it tries to find a match for in the window: while (lookAheadBuffer not empty) { get a pointer (position, match) to the longest match in the window for the lookahead buffer; if (length > MINIMUM_MATCH_LENGTH) { output a (position, length) pair; shift the window length characters along; } else { output the first character in the lookahead buffer; shift the window 1 character along; } } Decompression is simple and fast: whenever a (POSITION, LENGTH) pair is encountered, go to that POSITION in the window and copy LENGTH bytes to the output. Sliding-window-based schemes can be simplified by numbering the input text characters mod N, in effect creating a circular buffer. The sliding window approach automatically creates the LRU effect which must be done explicitly in LZ78 schemes. Variants of this method apply additional compression to the output of the LZSS compressor, which include a simple variable-length code (LZB), dynamic Huffman coding (LZH), and Shannon-Fano coding (ZIP 1.x), all of which result in a certain degree of improvement over the basic scheme, especially when the data are rather random and the LZSS compressor has little effect. An algorithm was developed which combines the ideas behind LZ77 and LZ78 to produce a hybrid called LZFG. LZFG uses the standard sliding window, but stores the data in a modified trie data structure and produces as output the position of the text in the trie. Since LZFG only inserts complete *phrases* into the dictionary, it should run faster than other LZ77-based compressors. All popular archivers (arj, lha, zip, zoo) are variations on LZ77.