18-letter words containing l, a, r
- ragtag and bobtail — the riffraff; rabble: The ragtag and bobtail of every nation poured into the frontier in search of gold.
- rail rapid transit — a system of rail transit within an urban area that has exclusive right of way either below, above, or on the ground and so is capable of relatively high operating speed. Abbreviation: RRT.
- random walk theory — the theory that the future movement of share prices does not reflect past movements and therefore will not follow a discernible pattern
- range of stability — the angle to the perpendicular through which a vessel may be heeled without losing the ability to right itself.
- rare-earth element — any of a group of closely related metallic elements, comprising the lanthanides, scandium, and yttrium, that are chemically similar by virtue of having the same number of valence electrons.
- rational operation — any of the mathematical operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
- rattlesnake master — any of various plants of the genus Eryngium, especially E. yuccifolium, having spiny leaves and dense, rounded flower heads.
- real-estate office — the place where a real-estate agent works
- real-time computer — a computer that can process data or information almost immediately
- rear its ugly head — the upper part of the body in humans, joined to the trunk by the neck, containing the brain, eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.
- redevelopment area — an urban area in which all or most of the buildings are demolished and rebuilt
- refrigerated lorry — a lorry which is chilled in the back as for storing food
- reggio di calabria — a seaport in S Italy, on the Strait of Messina: almost totally destroyed by an earthquake 1908.
- reggio nell'emilia — a city in N Italy.
- regional enteritis — Crohn's disease.
- registration plate — a plate mounted on the front and back of a motor vehicle bearing the registration number
- regular expression — 1. (text, operating system) (regexp, RE) One of the wild card patterns used by Perl and other languages, following Unix utilities such as grep, sed, and awk and editors such as vi and Emacs. Regular expressions use conventions similar to but more elaborate than those described under glob. A regular expression is a sequence of characters with the following meanings (in Perl, other flavours vary): An ordinary character (not one of the special characters discussed below) matches that character. A backslash (\) followed by any special character matches the special character itself. The special characters are: "." matches any character except newline; "RE*" (where RE is any regular expression and the "*" is called the "Kleene star") matches zero or more occurrences of RE. If there is any choice, the longest leftmost matching string is chosen. "^" at the beginning of an RE matches the start of a line and "$" at the end of an RE matches the end of a line. (RE) matches whatever RE matches and \N, where N is a digit, matches whatever was matched by the RE between the Nth "(" and its corresponding ")" earlier in the same RE. Many flavours use \(RE\) instead of just (RE). The concatenation of REs is a RE that matches the concatenation of the strings matched by each RE. RE1 | RE2 matches whatever RE1 or RE2 matches. \< matches the beginning of a word and \> matches the end of a word. Many flavours use "\b" instead as the special character for "word boundary". RE{M} matches M occurences of RE. RE{M,} matches M or more occurences of RE. RE{M,N} matches between M and N occurences. Other flavours use RE\{M\} etc. Perl provides several "quote-like" operators for writing REs, including the common // form and less common ??. A comprehensive survey of regexp flavours is found in Friedl 1997 (see below). 2. Any description of a pattern composed from combinations of symbols and the three operators: Concatenation - pattern A concatenated with B matches a match for A followed by a match for B. Or - pattern A-or-B matches either a match for A or a match for B. Closure - zero or more matches for a pattern. The earliest form of regular expressions (and the term itself) were invented by mathematician Stephen Cole Kleene in the mid-1950s, as a notation to easily manipulate "regular sets", formal descriptions of the behaviour of finite state machines, in regular algebra.
- regular hexahedron — a solid cube with six square faces
- regular tertiaries — of the third order, rank, stage, formation, etc.; third.
- reinforced plastic — plastic with fibrous matter, such as carbon fibre, embedded in it to confer additional strength
- relational algebra — (database, theory) A family of algebra with a well-founded semantics used for modelling the data stored in relational databases, and defining queries on it. The main operations of the relational algebra are the set operations (such as union, intersection, and cartesian product), selection (keeping only some lines of a table) and the projection (keeping only some columns). The relational data model describes how the data is structured.
- relative frequency — the ratio of the number of times an event occurs to the number of occasions on which it might occur in the same period.
- relative major key — a major key that has the same key signature as a minor key, but a different tonic
- relative minor key — a minor key that has the same key signature as a major key, but a different tonic
- repayment schedule — a document detailing the specific terms of a borrower's loan, such as monthly payment, interest rate, due dates etc
- replacement engine — an engine used to replace or substitute an older or broken engine (in a vehicle, etc)
- reporters' gallery — an area in parliament reserved for journalists and reporters
- reprocessing plant — a plant where materials are treated in order to make them reusable
- resaca de la palma — a locality in S Texas, near Brownsville: battle 1846.
- residential school — (in Canada) a boarding school maintained by the Canadian government for Indian and Inuit children from sparsely populated settlements
- residual magnetism — remanence.
- resistance plasmid — any of a group of bacterial plasmids carrying genetic information that provide resistance to antibiotic drugs: some resistance plasmids are able to transfer themselves, and hence resistance, during conjugation
- resistance welding — welding utilizing pressure and heat that is generated in the pieces to be welded by resistance to an electric current.
- restraining circle — any of three circles on the floor of a basketball court used for jump balls: other players must remain outside the circle during a jump ball
- restrictive clause — a relative clause that identifies the antecedent and that is usually not set off by commas in English. In The year that just ended was bad for crops, the clause that just ended is a restrictive clause.
- resurrection plant — a desert plant, Selaginella lepidophylla, occurring from Texas to South America, having stems that curl inward when dry.
- retail price index — The retail price index is a list of the prices of typical goods which shows how much the cost of living changes from one month to the next.
- reverse angle shot — Movies. reverse shot.
- revolutionary wars — American Revolution.
- rheims-douay bible — Douay Bible.
- rhode island white — one of a dual-purpose American breed of chickens having white feathers and a rose comb.
- rhodes scholarship — one of a number of scholarships at Oxford University, established by the will of Cecil Rhodes, for selected students (Rhodes scholars) from the British Commonwealth and the United States.
- richard p. gabriel — Richard Gabriel
- right-to-work laws — a state law making it illegal to refuse employment to a person for the sole reason that he or she is not a union member.
- rolling resistance — The rolling resistance of a wheel or ball is its resistance to movement caused by friction between it and the surface it is rolling on.
- root canal therapy — endodontics.
- rosebay willowherb — a perennial onagraceous plant, Chamerion (formerly Epilobium) angustifolium, that has spikes of deep pink flowers and is widespread in open places throughout N temperate regions
- rotary clothesline — an apparatus of radiating spokes that support lines on which clothes are hung to dry
- rotational latency — (storage, hardware) The time for the start of the required sector on a disk to appear underneath the read/write head. The worst case is where it has just passed the head when the request is received. For a disk drive with N heads per surface, rotating at R revolutions per minute, the average rotational latency will be L = 30/NR seconds. Rotational latency is one component of access time.
- rotational molding — a method for molding hollow plastic objects by placing finely divided particles in a hollow mold that is rotated about two axes, exposing it to heat and then to cold.