19-letter words containing n, a, f
- 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
- 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.
- loss-of-containment — Loss-of-containment happens when a fluid which is usually contained somewhere escapes from that place.
- 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
- make oneself scarce — insufficient to satisfy the need or demand; not abundant: Meat and butter were scarce during the war.
- manned space flight — space travel in vehicles with a human crew
- manufacturing plant — factory
- maratha confederacy — a loose league of states in central and western India, c1750–1818.
- margaret of navarre — 1492–1549, queen of Navarre 1544–49: patron of literature, author of stories, and poet.
- mary wollstonecraft — Mary (Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin) 1759–97, English author and feminist (mother of Mary Shelley).
- master of foxhounds — the person responsible for the conduct of a fox hunt and to whom all members of the hunt and its staff are responsible. Abbreviation: M.F.H.
- means of production — resources: equipment, workers
- mediterranean fever — brucellosis.
- 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
- minimum iron fabric — cloth used to make clothes that require little ironing
- 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
- more often than not — usually
- 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.
- mother-of-thousands — strawberry geranium.
- municipal bond fund — a mutual fund that invests in municipal bonds.
- mutual fund company — a company that sells and manages mutual funds
- 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".
- nerve growth factor — a protein that promotes the growth, organization, and maintenance of sympathetic and some sensory nerve cells. Abbreviation: NGF.
- neufchâtel (cheese) — a soft white cheese prepared from whole milk or skim milk and eaten fresh or cured
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- of one's own accord — to be in agreement or harmony; agree.
- on (or off) camera — so positioned as to be within (or out of) the camera's field of view
- on cue/as if on cue — If you say that something happened on cue or as if on cue, you mean that it happened just when it was expected to happen, or just at the right time.