racket

noun

1. (countable)An implement with a handle connected to a round frame strung with wire, sinew, or plastic cords, and used to hit a ball, such as in tennis or a shuttlecock in badminton.

   “He bought a new tennis racket two days ago.”

   “Ivor had acquired more than a mile of fishing rights with the house ; he was not at all a good fisherman, but one must do something ; one generally, however, banged a ball with a squash-racket against a wall.”

2. (Canada)A snowshoe formed of cords stretched across a long and narrow frame of light wood.
3. A broad wooden shoe or patten for a man or horse, to allow walking on marshy or soft ground.
4. A loud noise.

   “Power tools work quickly, but they sure make a racket.”

   “With all the racket they're making, I can't hear myself think!”

   “What's all this racket?”

   “Vast flights of starlings, fleeing the racket, beat across the sky at high speed, like Squall-clouds,— Evening at Noon-tide.”

5. An illegal scheme for profit; a fraud or swindle; or both coinstantiated.

   “prostitution and gambling controlled by rackets”

   “They had quite a racket devised to relieve customers of their money.”

   “War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives... Of course, it isn't put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and "we must all put our shoulders to the wheel," but the profits... skyrocket—and are safely pocketed.”

   “In six decades he had spotted all the rackets, smelled all the rats, and he was tired of being the absolute and sick master and boss of the inner self.”

6. (informal)Any industry or enterprise.

   “They dropped out of the acting racket in 1953 and soon took up writing.”

7. (dated, slang)A carouse; any reckless dissipation.
8. (dated, slang)Something taking place considered as exciting, trying, unusual, etc. or as an ordeal.

verb

1. To strike with, or as if with, a racket.

   “Poor man [is] racketed from one temptation to another.”

2. (intransitive)To make a clattering noise.
3. (dated, intransitive)To be dissipated; to carouse.

name

1. A general-purpose, multiparadigm programming language descended from Scheme.