17-letter words containing r, i, s, n
- john of salisbury — c1115–80, English prelate and scholar.
- judgment of paris — the decision by Paris to award Aphrodite the golden apple of discord competed for by Aphrodite, Athena, and Hera.
- jurisprudentially — In terms of jurisprudence.
- jus primae noctis — droit du seigneur.
- karitane hospital — a hospital for young babies and their mothers
- kawasaki syndrome — a syndrome, usually afflicting children, characterized by high fever, swollen lymph nodes in the neck, rashes, irritated eyes and mucous membranes, etc. with possible damage to the cardiovascular system
- kerguelen islands — an archipelago in the S Indian Ocean: a possession of France. 2394 sq. mi. (6200 sq. km).
- key man insurance — Key man insurance is an insurance policy taken out by a small company on the life of a senior executive whose death would create a serious loss.
- kidney transplant — surgery to replace a kidney
- king george's war — a war (1744–48) waged by England and its colonies against France, constituting the North American phase of the War of the Austrian Succession.
- king philip's war — the war (1675–76) between New England colonists and a confederation of Indians under their leader, King Philip.
- lambda expression — (mathematics) A term in the lambda-calculus denoting an unnamed function (a "lambda abstraction"), a variable or a constant. The pure lambda-calculus has only functions and no constants.
- lan administrator — (job) A person who installs and maintains LAN hardware and software. A LAN administrator troubleshoots network usage and computer peripherals. He installs new users, performs system backups and data recovery, and resolves LAN communications problems.
- lancashire heeler — a small sturdy dog of a breed with a short thick black or liver-coloured coat with tan markings, often used for herding cattle
- landscape painter — artist who depicts natural scenery
- langerhans islets — islets of Langerhans
- langmuir isotherm — A Langmuir isotherm is a classical relationship between the concentrations of a solid and a fluid, used to describe a state of no change in the sorption process.
- lanthanide series — the series of rare-earth elements of atomic numbers 57 through 71 (lanthanum through lutetium).
- larmor precession — the precession of charged particles, as electrons, placed in a magnetic field, the frequency of the precession (Larmor frequency) being equal to the electronic charge times the strength of the magnetic field divided by 4π times the mass.
- last-in first-out — stack
- latent strabismus — the tendency, controllable by muscular effort, for one or both eyes to exhibit strabismus.
- latitudinarianism — Tolerance of other people's views, particularly in religious context.
- latter-day saints — a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
- learner's license — a provisional driving licence
- learning-disabled — pertaining to or having a learning disability: a learning-disabled child.
- lebesgue integral — an integral obtained by application of the theory of measure and more general than the Riemann integral.
- legal proceedings — court case
- lesser periwinkle — a Eurasian apocynaceous evergreen plant of the genus Vinca,; V. minor, having trailing stems and blue flowers
- let something rip — If you let something rip, you do it as quickly or as forcefully as possible. You can say 'let it rip' or 'let her rip' to someone when you want them to make a vehicle go as fast as it possibly can.
- lexical insertion — the process in which actual morphemes of a language are substituted either for semantic material or for place-fillers in the course of a derivation of a sentence
- life imprisonment — long-term prison sentence
- 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
- 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.
- luggage insurance — insurance against the loss of luggage while travelling
- lyon king of arms — the chief herald of Scotland
- m-expression lisp — (MLISP) The original "meta-language" syntax of Lisp, designed by John McCarthy in 1962. MLISP was intended for external use in place of the parenthesised S-expression syntax.
- macro-linguistics — a field of study concerned with language in its broadest sense and including cultural and behavioral features associated with language.
- macroinstructions — Plural form of macroinstruction.
- magnetic roasting — roasting of a nonmagnetic ore to render it magnetic so that it can be separated from gangue by means of a magnetic field.
- magnetoresistance — a change in the electrical resistance of a material upon exposure to a magnetic field.
- mains electricity — electricity supplied to a building through wires
- maintainer script — (Debian) One of the scripts (preinst, prerm, postinst, postrm) that may be included in a Debian binary package. These scripts may create and/or remove symlinks, files or directories that, for some reason, could not be done directly by dpkg. Maintainer scripts frequently create or update the symlinks in the /etc/rc?.d directories and start, stop, or restart daemons.
- maison de moliere — Comédie Française.
- majority decision — a decision supported by more than half the people involved
- make conversation — If you make conversation, you talk to someone in order to be polite and not because you really want to.