rack1
/rak
/- Plenty of magazines line the racks in the grocery stores.
- Knowing your store has a magazine rack with a fresh selection of popular titles gives your customers yet another reason to stop by.
- This autumn you will have to wade through Harris Tweed fashion features in the top style magazines and on the racks of the most expensive designer stores.
Synonyms
- ‘Where is the Line’ is a mishmash of ideas, sounding like a fight between a choir and a rack of effects boxes, with neither winning.
- There were none of the backing tapes, racks of digital effects and other complex electronic gadgetry of which Tony is so fond.
- Stalls should be equipped with a rack for hay, a trough or box for grain, and a water pail holder.
- We found that placing a bale rack inside the tank keeps cows and calves out of the tank.
- It's been done out rather stylishly, but still feels rustic, with original limewashed stone walls, and the stalls and hay rack are still there.
- Engines had a cogged pinion wheel that engaged the rack, helping them climb the slopes.
- The steering rack on a car without power steering has just two pieces: the rack and the pinion gear.
- Coupling rods from this main axle also provide power to the two pairs of carrying wheels, through which the power is transmitted where the rack is not in use.
- One is not bound to regard torture as only present in a mediaeval dungeon where the appliances of rack and thumbscrew or similar devices were employed.
- Confessions were extracted and signed on the rack, and used in the place of truth.
- The balls are gathered in the triangle rack with the black eight-ball in the middle.
- I've seen Don run over 40 racks in nine ball, says Fred Whalen.
- I ran three racks, missed one ball, and got beat five to four.
- Bulls and cows in the Tsaatan herd grow velvety racks of antlers.
- Such skulls, with their enormous racks of antlers, adorn the walls of castles and hunting lodges throughout Ireland.
- An adjoining room is littered with mementos of more recent island history: a rack of antlers, a rusty plow, and an old dentist's chair.
- One morning during a heavy rain we shoved our racks to the bulkheads and turned our barracks into a mini-drill-field and practiced close order drill.
- The very instant he touched it, his whole body was wracked by pain.
- He blinked as pain wracked his body and paralyzed him momentarily.
- The anguish that she felt came pouring out and she cried, shuddering as the sobs wracked her body.
Synonyms
- But here, the storage space is maximised with a built in rail and an ingenious shoe racking system.
- She racked the mike and went back to where Riley lay pale and still on the wet tarmac.
- Hey, I have a record out, too, and they rack it in the same rack.
Usage
The relationship between the forms rack and wrack is complicated. The most common noun sense of rack, ‘a framework for holding and storing things’, is always spelled rack, never wrack. In the phrase rack something up the word is also always spelled rack. Figurative senses of the verb, deriving from the type of torture in which someone is stretched on a rack, can, however, be spelled either rack or wrack: thus racked with guilt or wracked with guilt; rack your brains or wrack your brains. In addition, the phrase rack and ruin can also be spelled wrack and ruin.
Phrases
go to rack (or wrack) and ruin
off the rack
on the rack
rack (or wrack) one's brains (or brain)
Phrasal verbs
rack something up
Origin
Middle English: from Middle Dutch rec, Middle Low German rek 'horizontal bar or shelf', probably from recken 'to stretch, reach' (possibly the source of sense 1 of the verb).
The rack is the name of a medieval instrument of torture. It consisted of a frame on which a victim was stretched by turning rollers to which their wrists and ankles were tied. To rack someone was to torture them on this device, and from this we get rack your brains (late 16th century) to mean ‘to make a great effort to think of or remember something’. The rack (Middle English) that you stand things on is related, and both come from German rek ‘horizontal bar or shelf’. This is not, however, the origin of winemaking rack meaning ‘draw off from the sediment’ (Late Middle English). This is from Provençal arracar, from raca ‘stems and husks of grapes, dregs’. Another use of rack (late 16th century) represents yet another word. When something deteriorates through neglect we may say that it is going to rack and ruin. Rack here is a variant spelling of wrack, meaning ‘destruction’ and is related to wreck.
Rhymes
rack2
/rak/- She of course has no memory whatsoever of the entire incident, and tells him to rack off.
- The class was laughing hysterically and Bree whirled around and yelled at them to rack off.
Origin
Mid 16th century: of unknown origin.
rack3
/rak/- Nothing on the list of entrées cracks the $18 mark, despite the presence of sirloin steak, rack of lamb, trout, and salmon dishes.
- One butcher I spoke to said that you simply could not trim a loin of pork like a rack of lamb.
Origin
Late 16th century: of unknown origin.
rack4
/rak/- After, and increasingly before, malolactic fermentation, the wine is racked into barrels made of French oak, often Limousin with the typical Bordeaux barrel being called a barrique.
- All three firms also sell wine refrigeration units and racking systems, which they ship all over the country.
- The firm has demolished an old loading bay and store in preparation for a building to house four fermenting vessels and a barrel racking system.
Origin
Late 15th century: from Provençal arracar, from raca 'stems and husks of grapes, dregs'.
rack5
/rak/Origin
Middle English (denoting a rush or collision): probably of Scandinavian origin; compare with Norwegian and Swedish dialect rak 'wreckage', from reka 'to drive'.