rack

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun A framework or stand in or on which to hold, hang, or display various articles.
• noun Games A triangular frame for arranging billiard or pool balls at the start of a game.
• noun A receptacle for livestock feed.
• noun A frame for holding bombs in an aircraft.
• noun A bunk or bed.
• noun Sleep.
• noun A toothed bar that meshes with a gearwheel, pinion, or other toothed machine part.
• noun A state of intense anguish.
• noun A cause of intense anguish.
• noun An instrument of torture on which the victim's body was stretched.
• noun A pair of antlers.
• noun Vulgar Slang A woman's breasts.
• transitive verb To place (billiard balls, for example) in a rack.
• transitive verb To cause great physical or mental suffering to: synonym: afflict.
• transitive verb To torture by means of the rack.
• idiom (off the rack) Ready-made. Used of clothing.
• idiom (on the rack) Under great stress.
• idiom (rack (one's) brains/brain) To try hard to remember or think of something.
• noun A fast, flashy, four-beat gait of a horse in which each foot touches the ground separately and at equal intervals.
• intransitive verb To go or move at a rack.
• transitive verb To drain (wine or cider) from the dregs.
• noun A thin mass of wind-driven clouds.
• noun A wholesale rib cut of lamb or veal between the shoulder and the loin.
• noun A retail rib cut of lamb or veal, prepared for roasting or for rib chops.
• noun The neck and upper spine of mutton, pork, or veal.

from The Century Dictionary.

• To drive; move; go forward rapidly; stir.
• To drive, as flying clouds.
• To stretch; stretch out; strain by force or violence; extend by stretching or straining.
• To strain so as to rend; wrench by strain or jar; rend; disintegrate; disjoint: as, a racking cough; to rack a ship to pieces by slanting shot.
• To torture by violent stretching; stretch on a frame by means of a windlass; subject to the punishment of the rack. See rack, n., 2 .
• Hence To put in torment; affect with great pain or distress; torture in anyway; disturb violently.
• To strain with anxiety, eagerness, curiosity, or the like; subject to strenuous effort or intense feeling; worry; agitate: as, to rack one's invention or memory.
• To stretch or draw out of normal condition or relation; strain beyond measure or propriety; wrest; warp; distort; exaggerate; overstrain: chiefly in figurative uses.
• To exact or obtain by rapacity; get or gain in excess or wrongfully. See rack-rent.
• To subject to extortion; practise rapacity upon; oppress by exaction.
• In mining, to wash on the rack. See rack, n., 5 .
• To place on or in a rack or frame made for the purpose, either for storage or for temporary need, as for draining, drying, or the like.
• To form into or as if into a rack or grating; give the appearance of a rack to.
• Nautical, to seize together with cross-turns, as two ropes.
• noun A distaff; a rock.
• To move with the gait called a rack.
• noun A bar.