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17-letter words containing l, o, a, r

  • librocubicularist — (rare) A person who reads in bed.
  • 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.
  • life of the party — most lively, outgoing person
  • 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 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.
  • 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.
  • lipopolysaccaride — a molecule, consisting of lipid and polysaccharide components, that is the main constituent of the cell walls of Gram-negative bacteria
  • liquid petrolatum — mineral oil.
  • liquid propellant — a rocket propellant in liquid form.
  • literary executor — a person entrusted with the publishable works and other papers of a deceased author.
  • lithium carbonate — a colorless crystalline compound, Li 2 CO 3 , slightly soluble in water: used in ceramic and porcelain glazes, pharmaceuticals, and luminescent paints.
  • lithostratigraphy — the study or character of stratified rocks based solely on their physical and petrographic features.
  • litigation friend — a person acting on behalf of an infant or other person under legal disability
  • loco primo citato — loc. primo cit.
  • loco supra citato — l.s.c.
  • loggerhead shrike — a common, North American shrike, Lanius ludovicianus, gray above and white below with black wings, tail, and facial mask.
  • loggerhead turtle — a sea turtle, Caretta caretta, having a large head: now greatly reduced in number.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • lower paleolithic — See under Paleolithic.
  • lumpenproletariat — the lowest level of the proletariat comprising unskilled workers, vagrants, and criminals and characterized by a lack of class identification and solidarity.
  • lymphangiographic — Relating to lymphangiography.
  • lyon king of arms — the chief herald of Scotland
  • macdonnell ranges — a mountain system of central Australia, in S central Northern Territory, extending about 160 km (100 miles) east and west of Alice Springs. Highest peak: Mount Zeil, 1531 m (5024 ft)
  • machado y morales — Gerardo [he-rahr-th aw] /hɛˈrɑr ðɔ/ (Show IPA), 1871–1939, president of Cuba 1925–33.
  • 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.
  • maison de moliere — Comédie Française.
  • maladministration — to administer or manage badly or inefficiently: The mayor was a bungler who maladministered the city budget.
  • malay archipelago — an extensive island group in the Indian and Pacific oceans, SE of Asia, including the Greater and Lesser Sunda Islands, the Moluccas, and the Philippines.
  • manchester school — a school of economists in England in the first half of the 19th century, devoted to free trade and the repeal of the Corn Law, led by Richard Cobden and John Bright.
  • manpower planning — a procedure used in organizations to balance future requirements for all levels of employee with the availability of such employees
  • margaret hamilton — (person)   (born 1936-08-17) A computer scientist, systems engineer and business owner, credited with coining the term software engineering. Margaret Hamilton published over 130 papers, proceedings and reports about the 60 projects and six major programs in which she has been involved. In 1965 she became Director of Software Programming at MIT's Charles Stark Draper Laboratory and Director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for the Apollo space program. At NASA, Hamilton pioneered the Apollo on-board guidance software that navigated to and landed on the Moon and formed the basis for software used in later missions. At the time, programming was a hands-on, engineering descipline; computer science and software engineering barely existed. Hamilton produced innovations in system design and software development, enterprise and process modelling, development paradigms, formal systems modelling languages, system-oriented objects for systems modelling and development, automated life-cycle environments, software reliability, software reuse, domain analysis, correctness by built-in language properties, open architecture techniques for robust systems, full life-cycle automation, quality assurance, seamless integration, error detection and recovery, man-machine interface systems, operating systems, end-to-end testing and life-cycle management. She developed concepts of asynchronous software, priority scheduling and Human-in-the-loop decision capability, which became the foundation for modern, ultra-reliable software design. The Apollo 11 moon landing would have aborted when spurious data threatened to overload the computer, but thanks to the innovative asynchronous, priority based scheduling, it eliminated the unnecessary processing and completed the landing successfully. In 1986, she founded Hamilton Technologies, Inc., developed around the Universal Systems Language and her systems and software design paradigm of Development Before the Fact (DBTF).
  • marital relations — a euphemistic term for sexual intercourse between married partners
  • mayflower compact — an agreement to establish a government, entered into by the Pilgrims in the cabin of the Mayflower on November 11, 1620.
  • mean proportional — (between two numbers a and b) a number x for which a/x = x/b : The number 3 is a mean proportional between 1 and 9.
  • mechanoelectrical — Describing the production of electricity by mechanical motion; especially in a transducer.
  • medical procedure — A medical procedure is a medical treatment or operation.
  • medicochirurgical — pertaining to medicine and surgery.
  • meech lake accord — the agreement reached in 1987 at Meech Lake, Quebec, at a Canadian federal-provincial conference that accepted Quebec's conditions for signing the Constitution Act of 1982. The Accord lapsed when the legislatures of two provinces, Newfoundland and Quebec, failed to ratify it by the deadline of June 23, 1990
  • megaelectron volt — million electron volts.
  • meissen porcelain — Dresden china.
  • memetic algorithm — (algorithm)   A genetic algorithm or evolutionary algorithm which includes a non-genetic local search to improve genotypes. The term comes from the Richard Dawkin's term "meme". One big difference between memes and genes is that memes are processed and possibly improved by the people that hold them - something that cannot happen to genes. It is this advantage that the memetic algorithm has over simple genetic or evolutionary algorithms. These algorithms are useful in solving complex problems, such as the "Travelling Salesman Problem," which involves finding the shortest path through a large number of nodes, or in creating artificial life to test evolutionary theories. Memetic algorithms are one kind of metaheuristic. (07 July 1997)
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