14-letter words containing h, e, r, t, o
- rags to riches — You use rags to riches to describe the way in which someone quickly becomes very rich after they have been quite poor.
- raise the roof — the external upper covering of a house or other building.
- rate of growth — the rate at which an economy grows
- rathke's pouch — an invagination of stomodeal ectoderm developing into the anterior lobe of the pituitary gland.
- rattle through — If you rattle through something, you deal with it quickly in order to finish it.
- reckon without — If you say that you had reckoned without something, you mean that you had not expected it and so were not prepared for it.
- reflectography — a non-destructive technique which uses infrared light to see beneath the painted surface in works of art in order to obtain information about those artworks
- rehabilitation — to restore to a condition of good health, ability to work, or the like.
- rehoboth beach — a town in SE Delaware: beach resort.
- rest of esther — a book of the Old Testament Apocrypha consisting of verses in the Septuagint text of the book of Esther that are not in the Hebrew text
- rhaeto-romance — the group of closely related Romance dialects, including Romansch and Ladin, spoken in SE Switzerland, the Tirol, and N Italy
- rhaeto-romanic — a Romance language consisting of Friulian, Tyrolese, Ladin, and the Romansh dialects.
- rheumatologist — a specialist in rheumatology, especially a physician who specializes in the treatment of rheumatic diseases, as arthritis, lupus erythematosus, and scleroderma.
- rhythm section — band instruments, as drums or bass, that supply rhythm rather than harmony or melody.
- ride at anchor — to be anchored
- ride to hounds — to take part in a fox hunt with hounds
- right of abode — If someone is given the right of abode in a particular country, they are legally allowed to live there.
- right-to-lifer — someone who supports the right to life of the unborn and opposes abortion, experiments on embryos, etc
- rob the cradle — a small bed for an infant, usually on rockers.
- roentgenograph — roentgenogram.
- rogue elephant — a vicious elephant that has been exiled from the herd.
- roman alphabet — Latin alphabet.
- röntgenography — radiography
- 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.
- 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.
- rotten borough — (before the Reform Bill of 1832) any English borough that had very few voters yet was represented in Parliament.
- roulette wheel — spinning part of roulette table
- round the bend — to force (an object, especially a long or thin one) from a straight form into a curved or angular one, or from a curved or angular form into some different form: to bend an iron rod into a hoop.
- rule the roost — a perch upon which birds or fowls rest at night.
- 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
- scented orchid — a slender orchid, Gymnadenia conopsea, with fragrant pink flowers carried in a dense spike and having a three-lobed lip; found in calcareous turf
- 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.
- schlockmeister — a person who deals in or sells inferior or worthless goods; junk dealer.
- scholar's mate — a simple mate by the queen on the f7 square, achievable by white's fourth move
- schoolmistress — a woman who presides over or teaches in a school.
- scorched earth — military policy: destroying enemy crops
- scotch furnace — ore hearth.
- scotch terrier — Scottish terrier.
- scotch verdict — a verdict of not proven: acceptable in certain cases in Scottish criminal law.
- 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.
- secret history — a version of historical events which differs from the official or commonly accepted record and purports to be the true version
- self-righteous — confident of one's own righteousness, especially when smugly moralistic and intolerant of the opinions and behavior of others.
- seventy-fourth — next after the seventy-third; being the ordinal number for 74.
- sheepdog trial — a competition in which sheepdogs are tested in their tasks
- sheva brachoth — the seven blessings said during the marriage service and repeated at the celebration thereafter
- shooting brake — station wagon.
- shooting range — place for practising with guns
- shooting spree — a series of shootings by a mad person