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14-letter words containing a, s, o, r, t

  • road stability — the extent to which a motor vehicle is stable and does not skid, esp at high speeds, or on sharp bends or wet roads
  • road transport — transport by road
  • robusta coffee — a coffee tree, Coffea canephora, native to western tropical Africa and cultivated in warm regions of the Old World.
  • 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.
  • roller-skating — the act of moving on roller skates
  • 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.
  • rosario strait — a strait in the San Juan Islands, Washington, linking the Strait of Georgia and Juan de Fuca Strait. 25 miles (40 km) long.
  • rostral column — a memorial column having sculptures representing the rams of ancient ships.
  • 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.
  • rotary shutter — a camera shutter consisting of a rotating disk pierced with a slit that passes in front of the lens to expose the film or plate.
  • rotating stock — Rotating stock is a system used especially in food stores and to reduce wastage, in which the oldest stock is moved to the front of shelves and new stock is added at the back.
  • roundaboutness — the characteristic of being roundabout
  • royal standard — a flag bearing the arms of the British sovereign, flown only when she (or he) is present
  • 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.
  • run out of gas — to go quickly by moving the legs more rapidly than at a walk and in such a manner that for an instant in each step all or both feet are off the ground.
  • rutting season — a recurrent period of sexual excitement and reproductive activity in certain male ruminants, such as the deer, that corresponds to the period of oestrus in females
  • saccharomycete — a single-celled yeast of the family Saccharomycetaceae, having no mycelium.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • saigo takamori — 1828–77, Japanese samurai, who led (1868) the coup that restored imperial government. In 1877 he reluctantly led a samurai rebellion, committing suicide when it failed
  • saint francois — a river in S Quebec, Canada, flowing generally W to the St. Lawrence River. 165 miles (266 km) long.
  • saint george's — one of the Windward Islands, in the E West Indies.
  • saint gotthard — a mountain range in S Switzerland; a part of the Alps; highest peak, 10,490 feet (3195 meters).
  • sale or return — an arrangement by which a retailer pays only for goods sold, returning those that are unsold to the wholesaler or manufacturer
  • 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
  • salt dome trap — A salt dome trap is an area where oil has been trapped underground by salt pushing upward.
  • salvation army — an international Christian organization founded in England in 1865 by William Booth, organized along quasi-military lines and devoted chiefly to evangelism and to providing social services, especially to the poor.
  • sanitary towel — sanitary napkin.
  • sansculotterie — the characteristics of sansculottes
  • saone-et-loire — a department in E France. 3331 sq. mi. (8625 sq. km). Capital: Mâcon.
  • saratoga trunk — a type of large traveling trunk used mainly by women during the 19th century.
  • satisfactorily — giving or affording satisfaction; fulfilling all demands or requirements: a satisfactory solution.
  • sauropterygian — any of various Mesozoic marine reptiles of the superorder Sauropterygia, including the suborder Plesiosauria.
  • scalar product — inner product (def 1).
  • 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.
  • scholar's mate — a simple mate by the queen on the f7 square, achievable by white's fourth move
  • school of arts — a public building in a small town, originally one used for adult education
  • sclerotization — the state of being sclerotized.
  • 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.
  • scrutinization — to examine in detail with careful or critical attention.
  • scsi initiator — (hardware)   A device that begins a SCSI transaction by issuing a command to another device (the SCSI target), giving it a task to perform. Typically a SCSI host adapter is the initiator but targets may also become initiators.
  • seaside resort — coastal holiday town
  • 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
  • segregationist — one who favors, encourages, or practices segregation, especially racial segregation.
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