0%

18-letter words starting with r

  • redevelopment area — an urban area in which all or most of the buildings are demolished and rebuilt
  • reduction division — the first division of meiosis in which the number of chromosomes is reduced to half the original number.
  • reduction strategy — (theory)   An algorithm for deciding which redex(es) to reduce next. Different strategies have different termination properties in the presence of recursive functions or values. See string reduction, normal order reduction, applicative order reduction, parallel reduction
  • redundancy payment — a sum of money given by an employer to an employee who has been made redundant: usually calculated on the basis of the employee's rate of pay and length of service
  • reentering polygon — a polygon having one or more reentering angles.
  • reference counting — (programming)   A garbage collection technique where each memory cell contains a count of the number of other cells which point to it. If this count reaches zero the cell is freed and its pointers to other cells are followed to decrement their counts, and so on recursively. This technique cannot cope with circular data structures. Cells in such structures refer (indirectly) to themselves and so will never have a zero reference count. This means they would never be reclaimed, even when there are no references from outside the structure.
  • reflection density — a measure of the extent to which a surface reflects light or other electromagnetic radiation, equal to the logarithm to base ten of the reciprocal of the reflectance
  • 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.
  • registered charity — official aid organization
  • registered company — a company which has officially registered its business
  • registration plate — a plate mounted on the front and back of a motor vehicle bearing the registration number
  • regression testing — (programming)   Part of the test phase of software development where, as new modules are integrated into the system and the added functionality is tested, previously tested functionality is re-tested to assure that no new module has corrupted the system.
  • 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
  • reinsurance treaty — A reinsurance treaty is a contract that defines the terms of reinsurance business.
  • reinvent the wheel — (jargon)   To design or implement a tool equivalent to an existing one or part of one, with the implication that doing so is silly or a waste of time. This is often a valid criticism. On the other hand, automobiles don't use wooden rollers, and some kinds of wheel have to be reinvented many times before you get them right. On the third hand, people reinventing the wheel do tend to come up with the moral equivalent of a trapezoid with an offset axle.
  • 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
  • remains to be seen — If you say that it remains to be seen whether something will happen, you mean that nobody knows whether it will happen.
  • remanent magnetism — magnetization in minerals induced by a former magnetic field and persisting after the field changes.
  • remembrance sunday — the second Sunday in November, which is the Sunday closest to November 11, the anniversary of the armistice of 1918 that ended World War I, on which the dead of both World Wars are commemorated
  • renter's insurance — Renter's insurance is insurance for renters to insure their property against loss.
  • repayment mortgage — a mortgage that you pay back in monthly repayments which consist of the accrued interest in addition to the original amount borrowed
  • repayment schedule — a document detailing the specific terms of a borrower's loan, such as monthly payment, interest rate, due dates etc
  • repeat performance — sth done again
  • replacement engine — an engine used to replace or substitute an older or broken engine (in a vehicle, etc)
  • report an accident — If you report an accident, you inform an insurer or the police or other authorities that an accident has occurred.
  • reporters' gallery — an area in parliament reserved for journalists and reporters
  • repossession order — If a bank or building society issues a repossession order, they officially tell someone that they are going to repossess their home.
  • representativeness — a person or thing that represents another or others.
  • reprocessing plant — a plant where materials are treated in order to make them reusable
  • reproduction proof — repro proof.
  • resaca de la palma — a locality in S Texas, near Brownsville: battle 1846.
  • rescind a contract — If an insurer rescinds an insurance contract, it terminates it because facts have been concealed or misrepresented by the proposer.
  • research assistant — a graduate who is employed on a temporary or part-time basis to assist the university with academic research
  • research scientist — someone who conducts scientific research or investigation, in order to discover new things, etc
  • research-intensive — focusing financial and other resources on research and development as opposed to capital and labor; noting or pertaining to a high ratio of expenditure on research in relation to the value of net output.
  • 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 fighter — someone who fights (for freedom, etc) against an invader in an occupied country, or against their government, etc, often secretly or illegally
  • 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.
  • respiratory arrest — cessation of breathing
Was this page helpful?
Yes No
Thank you for your feedback! Tell your friends about this page
Tell us why?