14-letter words containing r, a, k
- 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.
- ragnar lodbrok — a possibly historical Danish king of the 9th century, the subject of an Old Icelandic saga and of accounts in the Danish history by Saxo Grammaticus: also associated with the story of Sigurd and the Volsungs.
- railroad track — railway line
- railway worker — railroad employee
- raking cornice — either of two straight, sloping cornices on a pediment following or suggesting the slopes of a roof.
- rangeley lakes — chain of lakes in W Me. & NE N.H.
- rank-and-filer — a member of the rank and file.
- rathke's pouch — an invagination of stomodeal ectoderm developing into the anterior lobe of the pituitary gland.
- re-embarkation — the act of boarding a ship or aircraft again
- ready reckoner — reckoner (def 2).
- recklinghausen — a city in NW Rhine-Westphalia, in Germany.
- record-breaker — A record-breaker is someone or something that beats the previous best result in a sport or other activity.
- reefing jacket — a man's short double-breasted jacket of sturdy wool
- reference mark — Surveying. a permanent mark set at a specific distance in a specific direction from a survey station so as to permit accurate reestablishment of the station.
- remarkableness — notably or conspicuously unusual; extraordinary: a remarkable change.
- removable disk — removable hard disk
- retail banking — banking for individual customers
- ringneck snake — any of several small, nonvenomous North American snakes of the genus Diadophis, usually having a conspicuous yellow or orange ring around the neck.
- rip van winkle — (in a story by Washington Irving) a ne'er-do-well who sleeps 20 years and upon waking is startled to find how much the world has changed.
- roanoke island — an island off the NE coast of North Carolina, S of Albemarle Sound: site of Raleigh's unsuccessful colonizing attempts 1585, 1587.
- roanoke rapids — a city in NE North Carolina.
- rock formation — rock that is arranged or formed in a certain way
- rock mechanics — the study of the mechanical behaviour of rocks, esp their strength, elasticity, permeability, porosity, density, and reaction to stress
- rock partridge — the Greek partridge; Alectoris graeca
- roller-skating — the act of moving on roller skates
- 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.
- rough as sacks — uncouth
- rude awakening — If you have a rude awakening, you are suddenly made aware of an unpleasant fact.
- russet burbank — a brown-skinned, oblong potato having a mealy flesh with high starch content.
- ryukyu islands — a chain of 55 islands in the W Pacific, extending almost 650 km (400 miles) from S Japan to N Taiwan: an ancient kingdom, under Chinese rule from the late 14th century, invaded by Japan in the early 17th century, under full Japanese sovereignty from 1879 to 1945, and US control from 1945 to 1972; now part of Japan again. They are subject to frequent typhoons. Chief town: Naha (on Okinawa). Pop: 1 318 220 (2000). Area: 2196 sq km (849 sq miles)
- 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
- 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)
- salary bracket — a given range or bracket of salaries within which the amount of pay earned by someone falls
- saratoga trunk — a type of large traveling trunk used mainly by women during the 19th century.
- 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.
- screen blanker — screen saver
- sergeant baker — a large brightly-coloured fish of the genus Latropiscis, found in temperate reef waters of Australasia
- serial killing — multiple killings or murders carried out by the same person or persons
- serrated wrack — the seaweed Fucus serratus
- shaker heights — a city in NE Ohio, near Cleveland.
- shakespeareana — collected writings or items relating to Shakespeare
- shankaracharya — a.d. 789?–821? Hindu Vedantist philosopher and teacher.
- shark-infested — (of a body of water) known to contain large numbers of sharks, and therefore considered to be dangerous
- sheepback rock — roche moutonnée.
- shock absorber — a device for damping sudden and rapid motion, as the recoil of a spring-mounted object from shock.
- shooting brake — station wagon.
- shrink-wrapped — A shrink-wrapped product is sold in a tight covering of thin plastic.
- siberian husky — one of a Siberian breed of medium-size dogs having a thick, soft coat, raised originally as sled dogs.
- sick and tired — afflicted with ill health or disease; ailing.
- sickle feather — one of the paired, elongated, sickle-shaped, middle feathers of the tail of the rooster.