17-letter words containing y, r
- railway timetable — a list of railway journeys arranged according to the time when they begin and end
- rapid prototyping — (programming) The creation of a working model of a software module to demonstrate the feasibility and suitability of the function. The prototype is expected to be replaced or refined before inclusion in the final product. Rapid prototyping contrasts with a DIRFT approach which emphasises careful design and implementation to avoid the overheads of debugging and testing prototype code. Rapid prototyping is appropriate when the requirements are unclear or likely to change (which is most of the time).
- raynaud's disease — a vascular disorder of unknown cause, characterized by recurrent episodes of blanching and numbness of the fingers and toes and sometimes the tip of the nose and ears, usually triggered by stress or exposure to cold.
- read-write memory — a type of computer memory that you can write to as well as read from
- ready and waiting — If you want to emphasize that a person is properly prepared for something, or that something can now be used, you can say that they are ready and waiting.
- reality principle — the motivating force or mechanism by which the child, who has previously sought immediate gratification of all wishes, realizes that gratification must sometimes be deferred or forgone.
- recorded delivery — If you send a letter or parcel recorded delivery, you send it using a Post Office service which gives you an official record of the fact that it has been posted and delivered.
- recovery position — a position in which an unconscious person can be lain on the floor, which minimises them from further risk
- recrystallization — to become crystallized again.
- recumbent bicycle — a type of bicycle that is ridden in a reclining position
- recursive acronym — (convention) A hackish (and especially MIT) tradition is to choose acronyms and abbreviations that refer humorously to themselves or to other acronyms or abbreviations. The classic examples were two MIT editors called EINE ("EINE Is Not Emacs") and ZWEI ("ZWEI Was EINE Initially"). More recently, there is a Scheme compiler called LIAR (Liar Imitates Apply Recursively), and GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix!" - and a company with the name CYGNUS, which expands to "Cygnus, Your GNU Support". See also mung.
- reed canary grass — any of various grasses of the genus Phalaris, as P. canariensis, native to the Canary Islands, bearing seed used as food for cage birds, or P. arundinacea (reed canary grass) used throughout the Northern Hemisphere as fodder.
- reference library — A reference library is a library that contains books which you can look at in the library itself but which you cannot borrow.
- refractory period — a short period after a nerve or muscle cell fires during which the cell cannot respond to additional stimulation.
- regent honeyeater — a large brightly-coloured Australian honeyeater, Zanthomiza phrygia
- regulated tenancy — (in Britain) the letting of a dwelling by a nonresident private landlord, usually at a registered fair rent, from which the landlord cannot evict the tenant without a possession order from a court
- reiter's syndrome — a disease of unknown cause, occurring primarily in adult males, marked by urethritis, conjunctivitis, and arthritis.
- relative humidity — the amount of water vapor in the air, expressed as a percentage of the maximum amount that the air could hold at the given temperature; the ratio of the actual water vapor pressure to the saturation vapor pressure. Abbreviation: RH, rh.
- relative majority — the excess of votes or seats won by the winner of an election over the runner-up when no candidate or party has more than 50 per cent
- repertory catalog — a catalog containing bibliographic records that indicate locations of materials in more than one library or in several units of one library.
- repertory company — repertory (def 2).
- repertory society — a group that supports amateur performances of plays by its members
- repertory theater — repertory (def 2).
- republic of yemen — Republic of, a country in S Arabia, formed in 1990 by the merger of the Yemen Arab Republic and the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen. 207,000 sq. mi. (536,130 sq. km). Capital: Aden.
- resource recovery — Resource recovery is when energy, a material, or a product is taken from waste and used.
- respiratory chain — a series of mitochondrial proteins that transport electrons of hydrogen, released in the Krebs cycle, from acetyl coenzyme A to inhaled oxygen to form H 2 O: the energy released in the process is conserved as ATP.
- respiratory tract — the passages through which air enters and leaves the body
- reticulate python — a python, Python reticulatus, of southeastern Asia and the East Indies, sometimes growing to a length of 32 feet (10 meters): usually considered to be the largest snake in the world.
- revealed theology — theology based on the doctrine that all religious truth is derived exclusively from the revelations of God to humans.
- revolutionary war — American Revolution.
- rich site summary — (web, standard) (RSS, blog, feed) A family of standard web document types containing regularly updated, short articles or news items. RSS documents (generally called "RSS feeds", "news feeds" or just "feeds") can be read with an RSS reader like BottomFeeder or Feedly. These are sometimes called "aggregators" because they combine multiple RSS feeds which the user can browse as a single list. The RSS reader tracks which articles the use has read, and is typically set to show only new articles, hence the idea of a "feed" or flow of new items. Most RSS feeds are based on RDF. RDF is a structured document format for describing textual resources such as news articles available on the web. RSS originally stood for "RDF Site Summary" as it was designed to provide short descriptions of (changes to) a website. Because it provides a standard way to deliver, or "syndicate", news or updates from one site to another, RSS is sometimes expanded as "Really Simple Syndication". It is closely associated with blogs, most of which provide an RSS feed of articles.
- rift valley fever — a highly infectious viral disease of humans and animals, transmitted by mosquitoes and other insects, occurring in Africa and characterized in humans by headache, fever, eye discomfort, and muscle aches, progressing in some cases to encephalitis, blindness, or internal bleeding.
- rocket technology — the technology of the design, operation, maintenance, and launching of rockets
- role-playing game — a game in which participants adopt the roles of imaginary characters in an adventure under the direction of a Game Master.
- ross and cromarty — a historic county in NW Scotland.
- rotary cultivator — a machine for breaking up and tilling soil, consisting of a series of blades mounted on a revolving power-driven shaft
- rough puff pastry — a rich flaky pastry made with butter and used for pie-crusts, flans, etc
- royal institution — a British society founded in 1799 for the dissemination of scientific knowledge
- rub the wrong way — to subject the surface of (a thing or person) to pressure and friction, as in cleaning, smoothing, polishing, coating, massaging, or soothing: to rub a table top with wax polish; to rub the entire back area.
- rybinsk reservoir — a vast water reservoir in W central Russia on the River Volga and its tributaries Sheksna and Mologa, formed by Rybinsk Hydroelectric Station dam
- safety in numbers — If you say that there is safety in numbers, you mean that you are safer doing something if there are a lot of people doing it rather than doing it alone.
- safety precaution — a precaution that is taken in order to ensure that something is safe and not dangerous
- san francisco bay — a bay in W California: the harbor of San Francisco; connected with the Pacific by the Golden Gate strait. 50 miles (80 km) long; 3–12 miles (5–19 km) wide.
- sanitary landfill — landfill.
- scheme repository — A collection of free Scheme programs.
- school playground — school's outdoor recreation area
- scientific theory — a coherent group of propositions formulated to explain a group of facts or phenomena in the natural world and repeatedly confirmed through experiment or observation: the scientific theory of evolution.
- seaweed marquetry — marquetry having the form of symmetrical, foliate scrolls, as on English cabinetwork of the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
- secondary battery — storage battery.
- secondary boycott — a boycott by union members against their employer in order to induce the employer to bring pressure on another company involved in a labor dispute with the union.