14-letter words containing h, a, c, k, r
- mackerel shark — any of several fierce sharks of the family Lamidae, including the great white shark and the mako.
- marginal hacks — (humour) Margaret Jacks Hall, a building into which the Stanford AI Lab was moved near the beginning of the 1980s (from the D.C. Power Lab).
- marking scheme — a plan or guidelines used in the marking of school children's or students' written work by teaching staff
- mischief-maker — a person who causes mischief, especially one who stirs up discord, as by talebearing.
- ockham's razor — Occam's razor.
- paddock-basher — a vehicle suited to driving on rough terrain
- park chung hee — 1917–79, South Korean politician: president 1963–79 (assassinated).
- phosphate rock — phosphorite.
- rathke's pouch — an invagination of stomodeal ectoderm developing into the anterior lobe of the pituitary gland.
- recklinghausen — a city in NW Rhine-Westphalia, in Germany.
- rock mechanics — the study of the mechanical behaviour of rocks, esp their strength, elasticity, permeability, porosity, density, and reaction to stress
- rough as sacks — uncouth
- sakha republic — an administrative division in E Russia, in NE Siberia on the Arctic Ocean: the coldest inhabited region of the world; it has rich mineral resources. Capital: Yakutsk. Pop: 948 100 (2002). Area: 3 103 200 sq km (1 197 760 sq miles)
- 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.
- shankaracharya — a.d. 789?–821? Hindu Vedantist philosopher and teacher.
- sheepback rock — roche moutonnée.
- shock absorber — a device for damping sudden and rapid motion, as the recoil of a spring-mounted object from shock.
- sickle feather — one of the paired, elongated, sickle-shaped, middle feathers of the tail of the rooster.
- starch blocker — a substance ingested in the belief that it inhibits the body's ability to metabolize starch and thereby promotes weight loss: declared illegal in the U.S. by the FDA.
- straightjacket — to put in or as in a straitjacket: Her ambition was straitjacketed by her family.
- surgical shock — a state of shock that can occur during or after surgery
- tailor's chalk — hardened chalk or soapstone used to make temporary guide marks on a garment that is being altered.
- take the chair — to preside as chairman for a meeting, etc
- the upper back — the part of the back between the shoulders
- the-peacemaker — (Albert Edward"the Peacemaker") 1841–1910, king of Great Britain and Ireland 1901–10 (son of Queen Victoria).
- track lighting — lighting for a room or other area in which individual spotlight fixtures are attached along a narrow, wall- or ceiling-mounted metal track through which current is conducted, permitting flexible positioning of the lights.
- trickle charge — a continuous, slow charge supplied to a storage battery to keep it in a fully charged state.
- white charlock — a related plant, Raphanus raphanistrum, with yellow, mauve, or white flowers and podlike fruits