QUADRANGLE.  At Oxford and Cambridge, Eng., the rectangular courts in which the colleges are constructed.

  Soon as the clouds divide, and dawning day
  Tints the quadrangle with its earliest ray.
    The College, in Blackwood’s Mag., May, 1849.

QUARTER-DAY.  The day when quarterly payments are made.  The day that completes three months.

At Harvard and Yale Colleges, quarter-day, when the officers and instructors receive their quarterly salaries, was formerly observed as a holiday.  One of the evils which prevailed among the students of the former institution, about the middle of the last century, was the “riotous disorders frequently committed on the quarter-days and evenings,” on one of which, in 1764, “the windows of all the Tutors and divers other windows were broken,” so that, in consequence, a vote was passed that “the observation of quarter-days, in distinction from other days, be wholly laid aside, and that the undergraduates be obliged to observe the studying hours, and to perform the college exercises, on quarter-day, and the day following, as at other times.”—­Peirce’s Hist.  Harv.  Univ., p. 216.

QUESTIONIST. In the English universities, a name given to those who are in the last term of their college course, and are soon to be examined for honors or degrees.—­Webster.

In the “Orders agreed upon by the Overseers, at a meeting in Harvard College, May 6th, 1650,” this word is used in the following sentence:  “And, in case any of the Sophisters, Questionists, or Inceptors fail in the premises required at their hands,... they shall be deferred to the following year”; but it does not seem to have gained any prevalence in the College, and is used, it is believed, only in this passage.

QUILLWHEEL.  At the Wesleyan University, “when a student,” says a correspondent, “‘knocks under,’ or yields a point, he says he quillwheels, that is, he acknowledges he is wrong.”

R.

RAG.  This word is used at Union College, and is thus explained by a correspondent:  “To rag and ragging, you will find of very extensive application, they being employed primarily as expressive of what is called by the vulgar thieving and stealing, but in a more extended sense as meaning superiority.  Thus, if one declaims or composes much better than his classmates, he is said to rag all his competitors.”

The common phrase, “to take the rag off,” i.e. to excel, seems to be the form from which this word has been abbreviated.

RAKE.  At Williams and at Bowdoin Colleges, used in the phrase “to rake an X,” i.e. to recite perfectly, ten being the number of marks given for the best recitation.

RAM.  A practical joke.

  ——­ in season to be just too late
  A successful ram to perpetrate.
    Sophomore Independent, Union Coll., Nov. 1854.