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14-letter words containing a, c, e, s, o, r

  • rhizocephalous — belonging to the Rhizocephala, a group of degenerate hermaphrodite crustaceans that are parasitic chiefly on crabs.
  • robusta coffee — a coffee tree, Coffea canephora, native to western tropical Africa and cultivated in warm regions of the Old World.
  • rock mechanics — the study of the mechanical behaviour of rocks, esp their strength, elasticity, permeability, porosity, density, and reaction to stress
  • roller-coaster — to go up and down like a roller coaster; rise and fall: a narrow road roller-coastering around the mountain; a light boat roller-coastering over the waves.
  • rorschach test — a test for revealing the underlying personality structure of an individual by the use of a standard series of 10 inkblot designs to which the subject responds by telling what image or emotion each design evokes.
  • rostrocarinate — a chipped flint with a beaklike shape found in the late Tertiary sediments of Suffolk, England, once thought to have been worked by humans but now known to have been shaped by natural nonhuman agencies.
  • rsa encryption — (cryptography, algorithm)   A public-key cryptosystem for both encryption and authentication, invented in 1977 by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman. Its name comes from their initials. The RSA algorithm works as follows. Take two large prime numbers, p and q, and find their product n = pq; n is called the modulus. Choose a number, e, less than n and relatively prime to (p-1)(q-1), and find its reciprocal mod (p-1)(q-1), and call this d. Thus ed = 1 mod (p-1)(q-1); e and d are called the public and private exponents, respectively. The public key is the pair (n, e); the private key is d. The factors p and q must be kept secret, or destroyed. It is difficult (presumably) to obtain the private key d from the public key (n, e). If one could factor n into p and q, however, then one could obtain the private key d. Thus the entire security of RSA depends on the difficulty of factoring; an easy method for factoring products of large prime numbers would break RSA.
  • sacchariferous — containing or yielding sugar.
  • saccharomycete — a single-celled yeast of the family Saccharomycetaceae, having no mycelium.
  • sacred college — the collective body of the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church
  • sacred history — history that is retold with the aim of instilling religious faith and which may or may not be founded on fact
  • sacred monster — a celebrity whose eccentricities or indiscretions are easily forgiven by admirers.
  • sacrilegiously — pertaining to or involving sacrilege: sacrilegious practices.
  • sacrococcygeal — relating to the sacrum and the coccyx
  • safety officer — The safety officer in a company or an organization is the person who is responsible for the safety of the people who work or visit there.
  • sales director — a professional responsible for directing and managing the sales department of a company
  • sales forecast — a prediction of future sales of a product, either judgmental or based on previous sales patterns
  • sansculotterie — the characteristics of sansculottes
  • saxifragaceous — belonging to the plant family Saxifragaceae.
  • scapulohumeral — of, relating to, or involving the scapula and humerus.
  • scaremongering — a person who creates or spreads alarming news.
  • schafer method — a method of artificial respiration in which the patient is placed face downward, pressure then being rhythmically applied with the hands to the lower part of the thorax.
  • schlaer-mellor — An object-oriented analysis (OOA), design and modelling method that addresses the integration of structural and behavioural properties. It also allows an animation of the design.
  • scholar's mate — a simple mate by the queen on the f7 square, achievable by white's fourth move
  • sclerotization — the state of being sclerotized.
  • sconcheon arch — an archway that includes the sconcheons of a door or window.
  • scorched earth — military policy: destroying enemy crops
  • scotch furnace — ore hearth.
  • scrape through — only just succeed
  • scratch monkey — (humour)   As in "Before testing or reconfiguring, always mount a scratch monkey", a proverb used to advise caution when dealing with irreplaceable data or devices. Used to refer to any scratch volume hooked to a computer during any risky operation as a replacement for some precious resource or data that might otherwise get trashed. This term preserves the memory of Mabel, the Swimming Wonder Monkey, star of a biological research program at the University of Toronto. Mabel was not (so the legend goes) your ordinary monkey; the university had spent years teaching her how to swim, breathing through a regulator, in order to study the effects of different gas mixtures on her physiology. Mabel suffered an untimely demise one day when a DEC engineer troubleshooting a crash on the program's VAX inadvertently interfered with some custom hardware that was wired to Mabel. It is reported that, after calming down an understandably irate customer sufficiently to ascertain the facts of the matter, a DEC troubleshooter called up the field circus manager responsible and asked him sweetly, "Can you swim?" Not all the consequences to humans were so amusing; the sysop of the machine in question was nearly thrown in jail at the behest of certain clueless droids at the local "humane" society. The moral is clear: When in doubt, always mount a scratch monkey. A corespondent adds: The details you give are somewhat consistent with the version I recall from the Digital "War Stories" notesfile, but the name "Mabel" and the swimming bit were not mentioned, IIRC. Also, there's a very detailed account that claims that three monkies died in the incident, not just one. I believe Eric Postpischil wrote the original story at DEC, so his coming back with a different version leads me to wonder whether there ever was a real Scratch Monkey incident.
  • second chamber — the parliament of the Netherlands, consisting of an upper chamber (First Chamber) and a lower chamber (Second Chamber)
  • second reading — the stage in the consideration of a legislative bill that provides an opportunity for debate and amendment.
  • secondary beam — a beam of particles of one kind selected from the group of particles produced when a beam of particles from an accelerator (primary beam) strikes a target.
  • secondary cell — storage cell.
  • secondary gain — any advantage, as increased attention, disability benefits, or release from unpleasant responsibilities, obtained as a result of having an illness (distinguished from primary gain).
  • secondary road — a road less important than a main road or highway.
  • secondary wall — the innermost part of a plant cell wall, deposited after the wall has ceased to increase in surface area.
  • secondary wave — a transverse earthquake wave that travels through the interior of the earth and is usually the second conspicuous wave to reach a seismograph.
  • secularization — to make secular; separate from religious or spiritual connection or influences; make worldly or unspiritual; imbue with secularism.
  • securitization — the use of such securities as eurobonds to enable investors to lend directly to borrowers with a minimum of risk but without using banks as intermediaries
  • semi-nocturnal — active at night (opposed to diurnal): nocturnal animals.
  • semicommercial — of, relating to, or characterized by limited marketing of an experimental product
  • serbo-croatian — a Slavic language spoken in Serbia and Croatia, usually written with Cyrillic letters in Serbia but with Roman letters in Croatia.
  • sericitization — the process of transforming into sericite
  • serodiscordant — pertaining to a relationship with one HIV-positive partner and one HIV-negative partner.
  • service a room — If you service a room, you clean it and change the towels and bed linen in it.
  • servomechanism — an electronic control system in which a hydraulic, pneumatic, or other type of controlling mechanism is actuated and controlled by a low-energy signal.
  • settle a score — to avenge a wrong
  • share of voice — the proportion of the total audience or readership commanded by a media group across its full range of publishing and broadcasting activities
  • sheepback rock — roche moutonnée.
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