14-letter words containing a, r
- quarter window — (on a car) a small triangular side window with hinges that can be opened for extra ventilation
- quarterbacking — a back in football who usually lines up immediately behind the center and directs the offense of the team.
- quartermasters — Plural form of quartermaster.
- quartz crystal — a thin plate or rod cut in certain directions from a piece of piezoelectric quartz and accurately ground so that it vibrates at a particular frequency
- quasi contract — an obligation imposed by law in the absence of a contract to prevent unjust enrichment.
- quasi-contract — an obligation imposed by law in the absence of a contract to prevent unjust enrichment.
- quasi-criminal — of the nature of or involving crime.
- quasi-immortal — not mortal; not liable or subject to death; undying: our immortal souls.
- quasi-informal — without formality or ceremony; casual: an informal visit.
- quasi-military — of, for, or pertaining to the army or armed forces, often as distinguished from the navy: from civilian to military life.
- quasi-particle — an object that is similar to a particle, but does not meet the full criteria of a particle
- quasi-periodic — almost periodic
- quasi-personal — of, relating to, or coming as from a particular person; individual; private: a personal opinion.
- quasi-rational — agreeable to reason; reasonable; sensible: a rational plan for economic development.
- quasiparticles — Plural form of quasiparticle.
- quattrocentism — the 15th-century Italian style of art and literature
- quattrocentist — a painter or writer of 15th-century Italy
- query language — the instructions and procedures used to retrieve information from a database
- questionmaster — quizmaster.
- questionnaires — Plural form of questionnaire.
- quinquefarious — consisting of or divided into five lines, sections, etc
- quinquepartite — divided into or consisting of five parts.
- quiz programme — a radio or television programme in which the general or specific knowledge of the players is tested by a series of questions
- quodlibetarian — a person who writes, discusses or engages in quodlibets
- quotation mark — one of the marks used to indicate the beginning and end of a quotation, in English usually shown as “ at the beginning and ” at the end, or, for a quotation within a quotation, of single marks of this kind, as “He said, ‘I will go.’ ” Frequently, especially in Great Britain, single marks are used instead of double, the latter being then used for a quotation within a quotation.
- rabble-rousing — of, relating to, or characteristic of a rabble-rouser.
- rabies vaccine — substance that inoculates against rabies
- race condition — Anomalous behavior due to unexpected critical dependence on the relative timing of events. For example, if one process writes to a file while another is reading from the same location then the data read may be the old contents, the new contents or some mixture of the two depending on the relative timing of the read and write operations. A common remedy in this kind of race condition is file locking; a more cumbersome remedy is to reorganize the system such that a certain processes (running a daemon or the like) is the only process that has access to the file, and all other processes that need to access the data in that file do so only via interprocess communication with that one process. As an example of a more subtle kind of race condition, consider a distributed chat network like IRC, where a user is granted channel-operator privileges in any channel he starts. If two users on different servers, on different ends of the same network, try to start the same-named channel at the same time, each user's respective server will grant channel-operator privileges to each user, since neither will yet have received the other's signal that that channel has been started. In this case of a race condition, the "shared resource" is the conception of the state of the network (what channels exist, as well as what users started them and therefore have what privileges), which each server is free to change as long as it signals the other servers on the network about the changes so that they can update their conception of the state of the network. However, the latency across the network makes possible the kind of race condition described. In this case, heading off race conditions by imposing a form of control over access to the shared resource -- say, appointing one server to be in charge of who holds what privileges -- would mean turning the distributed network into a centralized one (at least for that one part of the network operation). Where this is not acceptable, the more pragmatic solution is to have the system recognize when a race condition has occurred and to repair the ill effects. Race conditions also affect electronic circuits where the value output by a logic gate depends on the exact timing of two or more input signals. For example, consider a two input AND gate fed with a logic signal X on input A and its negation, NOT X, on input B. In theory, the output (X AND NOT X) should never be high. However, if changes in the value of X take longer to propagate to input B than to input A then when X changes from false to true, there will be a brief period during which both inputs are true, and so the gate's output will also be true. If this output is fed to an edge-sensitive component such as a counter or flip-flop then the temporary effect ("glitch") will become permanent.
- race relations — relationships between races
- racing bicycle — a bicycle designed for cycling on roads or taking part in road cycling races
- racing colours — the colours painted on a racing car to represent the nation of the car or driver
- racing cyclist — a cyclist who takes part in bicycle races
- radar operator — someone who operates the equipment used in radar, a method for detecting the position and velocity of a distant object
- radiant energy — energy transmitted in wave motion, especially electromagnetic wave motion.
- radiant heater — a heater that heats a building by radiant heat emitted from panels containing electrical conductors, hot water, etc
- radiation belt — Van Allen belt.
- radicalization — to make radical or more radical, as in politics: young people who are being radicalized by extremist philosophies.
- radio cassette — A radio cassette is a radio and a cassette player together in a single machine.
- radio engineer — an engineer who designs and repairs equipment used for radio broadcasting
- radio operator — a person who operates or controls a radio transmitter
- radio receiver — an apparatus that receives incoming modulated radio waves and converts them into sound
- radio spectrum — the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that includes radio waves.
- radioacoustics — the science and technology of the production, transmission, and reproduction of sounds carried by radio waves.
- radioautograph — autoradiograph.
- radiobroadcast — a broadcast by radio.
- radiochemistry — the chemical study of radioactive elements, both natural and artificial, and their use in the study of chemical processes.
- radiodiagnosis — diagnosis by means of radiography or radioscopy.
- radiofrequency — the frequency of the transmitting waves of a given radio message or broadcast.
- radiographical — the production of radiographs.
- radiologically — of or relating to radiology.