17-letter words containing r, i, t, l
- 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.
- lithium hydroxide — a white, crystalline, water-soluble compound, LiOH, used to absorb carbon dioxide, especially in spacesuits.
- 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
- little blue heron — a small heron, Egretta caerulea, of the warmer parts of the Western Hemisphere, having bluish-gray plumage.
- little fork river — a river in N Minnesota, flowing N to the Rainy River on the Canadian border. 132 miles (212 km) long.
- lobster thermidor — a dish of cooked lobster meat placed back in the shell with a cream sauce, sprinkled with grated cheese and melted butter, and browned in the oven.
- loco primo citato — loc. primo cit.
- loco supra citato — l.s.c.
- locomotive driver — an engine driver
- logical operation — Boolean operation.
- lord of the flies — a novel (1954) by William Golding.
- louisiana tanager — western tanager.
- low-hanging fruit — the fruit that grows low on a tree and is therefore easy to reach
- lower forty-eight — the forty-eight conterminous states of the United States
- 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.
- 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.
- mains electricity — electricity supplied to a building through wires
- maladministration — to administer or manage badly or inefficiently: The mayor was a bungler who maladministered the city budget.
- manual typewriter — a keyboard machine, operated entirely by hand, for writing mechanically in characters resembling print
- manufacturability — The condition of being manufacturable.
- 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
- marriage equality — the state of having the same rights and responsibilities of marriage as others, regardless of one's sexual orientation or gender identity.
- materialistically — excessively concerned with physical comforts or the acquisition of wealth and material possessions, rather than with spiritual, intellectual, or cultural values.
- materials science — the study of the characteristics and uses of various materials, as glass, plastics, and metals.
- maternal instinct — motherly urge to protect and nurture
- 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.
- 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)
- mensural notation — a system of musical notation of the 13th to the late 16th centuries, marked by the use of note symbols such as the longa and brevis, the absence of bar lines and ties, and the equivalence in value of one note to either two or three of the next smaller degree.
- mental arithmetic — sums done in your head
- mental impairment — (in England, according to the Mental Health Act 1983) a state of arrested or incomplete development of mind, which includes significant impairment of intelligence and social functioning and is associated with abnormally aggressive or seriously irresponsible conduct
- mentally impaired — with reduced or weakened mental capacity
- mercantile agency — commercial agency.
- mercantile marine — the merchant navy
- mercantile system — a system of political and economic policy, evolving with the modern national state and seeking to secure a nation's political and economic supremacy in its rivalry with other states. According to this system, money was regarded as a store of wealth, and the goal of a state was the accumulation of precious metals, by exporting the largest possible quantity of its products and importing as little as possible, thus establishing a favorable balance of trade.
- messier catalogue — a catalogue of 103 nonstellar objects, such as nebulae and galaxies, prepared in 1781–86. An object is referred to by its number in this catalogue, for example the Andromeda Galaxy is referred to as M31
- metalloproteinase — (enzyme) Any of several proteinases that have a metal atom (often zinc) at their active centre.
- methylidyne group — the trivalent group ≡CH.
- methyltheobromine — caffeine.
- microdistillation — the distillation of minute quantities of material.
- microencapsulated — Encapsulated using microencapsulation.
- microevolutionary — Of or pertaining to microevolution.
- microfilm plotter — a type of incremental plotter that has a film rather than a paper output
- micromanipulation — the technique of performing mechanical operations under high magnification through the use of specialized tools.
- micromanipulators — Plural form of micromanipulator.