17-letter words containing s, o, a
- lady of the house — the female head of a household (usually preceded by the).
- lagrange's method — a procedure for finding maximum and minimum values of a function of several variables when the variables are restricted by additional conditions.
- lake of the woods — Eldrick [el-drik] /ˈɛl drɪk/ (Show IPA), ("Tiger") born 1975, U.S. professional golfer.
- lake winnipegosis — a lake in S Canada, in W Manitoba. Area: 5400 sq km (2086 sq miles)
- 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.
- lambdoidal suture — the lambda-shaped seam or line of joining between the occipital and two parietal bones at the back part of the skull.
- lame-duck session — (formerly) the December to March session of those members of the U.S. Congress who were defeated for reelection the previous November.
- 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.
- lance of courtesy — a lance having a blunt head to prevent serious injury by a jouster to an opponent.
- landlocked salmon — a variety of the Atlantic Ocean salmon, Salmo salar, confined to the freshwater lakes of New England and adjacent areas of Canada.
- 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.
- laplace transform — a map of a function, as a signal, defined especially for positive real values, as time greater than zero, into another domain where the function is represented as a sum of exponentials.
- 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
- laurent's theorem — the theorem that a function that is analytic on an annulus can be represented by a Laurent series on the annulus.
- lead a dog's life — a domesticated canid, Canis familiaris, bred in many varieties.
- league of nations — an international organization to promote world peace and cooperation that was created by the Treaty of Versailles (1919): dissolved April 1946.
- least fixed point — (mathematics) A function f may have many fixed points (x such that f x = x). For example, any value is a fixed point of the identity function, (\ x . x). If f is recursive, we can represent it as f = fix F where F is some higher-order function and fix F = F (fix F). The standard denotational semantics of f is then given by the least fixed point of F. This is the least upper bound of the infinite sequence (the ascending Kleene chain) obtained by repeatedly applying F to the totally undefined value, bottom. I.e. fix F = LUB {bottom, F bottom, F (F bottom), ...}. The least fixed point is guaranteed to exist for a continuous function over a cpo.
- least upper bound — an upper bound that is less than or equal to all the upper bounds of a particular set. 3 is the least upper bound of the set consisting of 1, 2, 3. Abbr.: lub.
- lebanon mountains — a mountain range extending the length of Lebanon, in the central part. Highest peak, 10,049 feet (3063 meters).
- lee harvey oswald — Lee Harvey, 1939–63, designated by a presidential commission to be the lone assassin of John F. Kennedy.
- legal aid society — an organization providing free legal guidance and service to persons who cannot afford a lawyer.
- legal proceedings — court case
- leibniz mountains — a mountain range on the SW limb of the moon, containing the highest peaks (10 000 metres) on the moon
- leizhou peninsula — a peninsula of SE China, in SW Guangdong province, separated from Hainan Island by Hainan Strait
- letters of marque — a former government document authorizing an individual to make reprisals on the subjects of an enemy nation, specif. to arm a ship and capture enemy merchant ships and cargo
- level compensator — an automatic gain control device used in the receivers of telegraphic circuits.
- 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
- liberal democrats — (in Britain) a political party with centrist policies; established in 1988 as the Social and Liberal Democrats when the Liberal Party merged with the Social Democratic Party; renamed Liberal Democrats in 1989
- librocubicularist — (rare) A person who reads in bed.
- light dawns on sb — If light dawns on you, you begin to understand something after a period of not being able to understand it.
- 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.
- linking consonant — a consonant inserted between two vowels in speech
- lipopolysaccaride — a molecule, consisting of lipid and polysaccharide components, that is the main constituent of the cell walls of Gram-negative bacteria
- lithostratigraphy — the study or character of stratified rocks based solely on their physical and petrographic features.
- livingstone daisy — a gardener's name for various species of Mesembryanthemum, esp M. criniflorum, grown as garden annuals (though several are perennial) for their brightly coloured showy flowers: family Aizoaceae
- load displacement — the weight, in long tons, of a cargo vessel loaded so that the summer load line touches the surface of the water.
- local anaesthesia — the use of anaesthetics that affect a particular area of the body
- local anaesthetic — sth injected to numb a body part for pain relief
- 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.
- lombrosian school — a school of criminology, promulgating the theories and employing the methods developed by Lombroso.
- long island sound — an arm of the Atlantic between Connecticut and Long Island. 90 miles (145 km) long.
- loose-leaf binder — a hard cover with metal rings inside which is used to hold loose pieces of paper
- lose the exchange — to lose a rook in return for a bishop or knight
- louisiana tanager — western tanager.
- luminous efficacy — the quotient of the luminous flux of a radiation and its corresponding radiant flux
- luminous exitance — the ability of a surface to emit light expressed as the luminous flux per unit area at a specified point on the surface