A-Z Browse

  • Aduatuci (people)
    ...France and in Flanders lived the Morini; to the north of them, between the Schelde River and the sea, the Menapii; in Artois, the Nervii; between the Schelde and the Rhine, the Eburones and the Aduatuci; and, in what is now Luxembourg, the Treveri. North of the Rhine, the Frisii (Frisians) were the principal inhabitants, although the arrival of the Romans brought about a number of......
  • ʿAḍud ad-Dawlah (Būyid ruler)
    greatest ruler (949–983) of the Iranian Būyid dynasty....
  • ʿAḍud al-Dawla Abū Shujaʿ Muḥammad ibn Dāʾūd Chaghribeg (Seljuq sultan)
    second sultan of the Seljuq Turks (1063–72), who inherited the Seljuq territories of Khorāsān and western Iran and went on to conquer Georgia, Armenia, and much of Asia Minor (won from the Byzantines)....
  • ʿAḍud al-Dawlah (Būyid ruler)
    greatest ruler (949–983) of the Iranian Būyid dynasty....
  • adularia (mineral)
    a feldspar mineral and potassium aluminosilicate (KAlSi3O8). It commonly forms colourless, glassy, prismatic, twinned crystals in low-temperature veins of felsic plutonic rocks and in cavities in crystalline schists. Typical occurrences include the schists of the Alps. Some adularia show an opalescent play of colours and are called moonstone....
  • Adulis (ancient city, East Africa)
    ...the Red Sea region. Its people spoke Geʿez, a Semitic language, and they mostly worshiped Middle Eastern gods, although here and there a traditional African deity survived. Its port of Adulis received a continuous stream of merchants who offered textiles, glassware, tools, precious jewelry, copper, iron, and steel in return for ivory, tortoiseshell, rhinoceros horn, gold, silver,......
  • ʿAdullam (ancient city, Israel)
    ancient city and modern development region, in the upper part of Ha-Shefela, central Israel. The mound of Tel ʿAdullam, or H̱orbat (“Ruins of”) ʿAdullam (Arabic: Tall Ash-Shaykh Madhkūr), 22.5 miles (36 km) southwest of Jerusalem, is generally accepted as the site of the ancient city. The earliest reference to ʿAdullam is in the book of Genesis, wh...
  • ʿAdullam (region, Israel)
    In modern Israel the name ʿAdullam is given to the planned development region in the former (1949–67) “Jerusalem corridor,” west of the capital. This hilly area, on the boundary of Ha-Shefela and the Yehuda (Judaean) Mountains, includes the ancient site. Settlement commenced in 1958; several agricultural villages and rural subcentres were established. No main regional.....
  • ʿAdullam, Tel (ancient city, Israel)
    ancient city and modern development region, in the upper part of Ha-Shefela, central Israel. The mound of Tel ʿAdullam, or H̱orbat (“Ruins of”) ʿAdullam (Arabic: Tall Ash-Shaykh Madhkūr), 22.5 miles (36 km) southwest of Jerusalem, is generally accepted as the site of the ancient city. The earliest reference to ʿAdullam is in the book of Genesis, wh...
  • Adullamite (English politics)
    member of a group of English politicians who rebelled against their leaders in the Liberal Party and defeated the Reform Bill of 1866. Their name was derived from the biblical reference to the caves of ʿAdullam (1 Samuel 22:1), which served as a refuge for the discontented. The Liberal politician John Bright applied the term to party rebels who opposed the extension of the franchise propos...
  • adult
    the period in the human lifespan in which full physical and intellectual maturity have been attained. Adulthood is commonly thought of as beginning at age 20 or 21 years. Middle age, commencing at about 40 years, is followed by old age at about 60 years....
  • adult education
    any form of learning undertaken by or provided for mature men and women. In a 1970 report, the National Institute of Adult Education (England and Wales) defined adult education as “any kind of education for people who are old enough to work, vote, fight and marry and who have completed the cycle of continuous education, [if any] commenced in childhood.” Adult education comprehends su...
  • adult insect (biology)
    ...especially among those forms that undergo metamorphosis, a radical physical change. Butterflies, for instance, have a caterpillar stage (larva), a dormant chrysalis stage (pupa), and an adult stage (imago). One remarkable aspect of this development is that, during the transition from caterpillar to adult, most of the caterpillar tissue disintegrates and is used as food, thereby providing energy...
  • adult learning
    any form of learning undertaken by or provided for mature men and women. In a 1970 report, the National Institute of Adult Education (England and Wales) defined adult education as “any kind of education for people who are old enough to work, vote, fight and marry and who have completed the cycle of continuous education, [if any] commenced in childhood.” Adult education comprehends su...
  • adult stem cell (biology)
    Some tissues in the adult body, such as the epidermis of the skin, the lining of the small intestine, and bone marrow, undergo continuous cellular turnover. They contain stem cells, which persist indefinitely, and a much larger number of “transit amplifying cells,” which arise from the stem cells and divide a finite number of times until they become differentiated. The stem cells......
  • adult-onset diabetes (medical disorder)
    Diabetes mellitus is a public health threat that rivals HIV/AIDS in its reach and deadly toll. The International Diabetes Federation (IDF), an alliance of diabetes associations in more than 160 countries, has described diabetes mellitus as a “global epidemic with devastating humanitarian, social, and economic consequences.” The most prevalent for...
  • adultery (sexual behaviour)
    sexual relations between a married person and someone other than the spouse. Written or customary prohibitions or taboos against adultery constitute part of the marriage code of virtually every society. Indeed, adultery seems to be as universal and, in some instances, as common as marriage....
  • Adultery and Other Choices (work by Dubus)
    ...became his specialty. His first collection of stories, Separate Flights (1975), is praised for its craft, strong sympathy with its characters, and detailed evocation of setting, as is Adultery and Other Choices (1977). “Andromache,” from the latter collection, is cited as the best of his many stories about the Marine Corps. Especially concerned with the strain and......
  • adulthood
    the period in the human lifespan in which full physical and intellectual maturity have been attained. Adulthood is commonly thought of as beginning at age 20 or 21 years. Middle age, commencing at about 40 years, is followed by old age at about 60 years....
  • Adūnīs (Lebanese poet and literary critic)
    Lebanese poet and literary critic who was a leader of the modernist movement in Arabic poetry in the second half of the 20th century....
  • Adur (district, England, United Kingdom)
    district, administrative county of West Sussex, historic county of Sussex, England. It is named for the River Adur, which cuts through the chalk ridge of the South Downs via an impressive water gap before entering the English Channel at Shoreham-by-Sea. The district is small and occupies the lower valley of the river between the urban areas of Worthing to the ...
  • Adur, River (river, England, United Kingdom)
    port in Adur district, administrative county of West Sussex, historic county of Sussex, England. It lies along the English Channel at the mouth of the River Adur, between the seaside resorts of Hove to the east and Worthing to the west. The river’s mouth is used as a port for coastal traffic, including timber, cement, and materials for Shoreham’s gas works and electric power station....
  • Ādur-Anāhīd (Iranian fire temple)
    The ancestors of Ardashīr had played a leading role in the rites of the fire temple at Istakhr, known as Ādur-Anāhīd, the Anāhīd Fire. With the new dynasty having these priestly antecedents, it seems only natural that there would have been important developments in the Zoroastrian religion during the Sāsānian period. In fact, the evolution of...
  • Adusei, Barima Kwaku (Ghanaian lawyer and king of Ashanti people)
    Ghanaian barrister who in 1970 became the 15th Asantehene, or king of the Ashanti people, and thereafter ruled over the everyday spiritual and cultural life of the ancient kingdom (b. Nov. 30, 1919, Kumasi, Ghana—d. Feb. 26, 1999, Kumasi)....
  • ʿadūw (Islam)
    in Islam, the personal name of the devil, probably derived from the Greek diabolos. Iblīs, the counterpart of the Jewish and Christian Satan, is also referred to as ʿadūw Allāh (enemy of God), ʿadūw (enemy), or, when he is portrayed as a tempter, ash-Shayṭān (demon)....
  • ʿadūw Allāh (Islam)
    in Islam, the personal name of the devil, probably derived from the Greek diabolos. Iblīs, the counterpart of the Jewish and Christian Satan, is also referred to as ʿadūw Allāh (enemy of God), ʿadūw (enemy), or, when he is portrayed as a tempter, ash-Shayṭān (demon)....
  • Advaita (school of Hindu philosophy)
    (Sanskrit: “Nondualism,” or “Monism”), most influential of the schools of Vedānta, an orthodox philosophy of India. While its followers find its main tenets already fully expressed in the Upaniṣads and systematized by the Vedānta-sūtras, it has its historical beginning with the 7th-century thinker Gauḍapāda, autho...
  • Advaita (Hindu religious leader)
    Caitanya was neither a theologian nor a writer, and organization of his followers was initially left up to his close companions, Nityānanda and Advaita. These three are called the three masters (prabhū), and their images are established in temples of the sect....
  • Advance Australia Fair (Australian national anthem)
    national anthem of Australia, adopted on April 19, 1984. It was first officially proposed in 1974 to replace “God Save the Queen,” which had been the national anthem from 1788 to 1974 and which, in 1984, was designated the royal anthem, to be played at public appearances of members of the British royal family....
  • Advance Publications Inc. (American publishing company)
    ...With the profits he made from the Advance, he bought other small, undistinguished, unprofitable newspapers in New York and New Jersey and turned them around. In 1949 he renamed his company Advance Publications Inc....
  • advance-slope method (tunneling)
    ...to fill any voids and to establish full contact between lining and ground. The method usually produces progress in the range of 40 to 120 feet per day. In the 1960s there was a trend toward an advancing-slope method of continuous concreting, as originally devised for embedding the steel cylinder of a hydropower penstock. In this procedure, several hundred feet of forms are initially set,......
  • advanced bony fish (fish infraclass)
    any member of the infraclass Teleostei, a large and extremely diverse group of ray-finned fishes. Along with the chondrosteans and the holosteans, they are one of the three major subdivisions of the class Actinopterygii, the most advanced of the bony fishes. The teleosts include virtually all of the world’s important sport and commercial fishes, as well as a much larger n...
  • advanced ceramics (ceramics)
    substances and processes used in the development and manufacture of ceramic materials that exhibit special properties....
  • Advanced Development Projects (American company)
    ...continuous production throughout the war. In 1943, under the leadership of the aircraft engineer and designer Clarence L. (“Kelly”) Johnson, Lockheed established a highly secret section, Advanced Development Projects (ADP), to design a fighter around a British De Havilland jet engine. The result was the P-80 Shooting Star, the first American jet aircraft to enter operational servi...
  • Advanced Encryption Standard (cryptology)
    ...necessity of entering a PIN to initiate the transaction. Smart cards are in widespread use throughout Europe, much more so than the “dumb” plastic cards common in the United States. The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES; see History of cryptology), approved as a secure communications standard by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2000, is comp...
  • advanced gas-cooled reactor (engineering)
    The advanced gas-cooled reactor (AGR) was developed in Britain as the successor to reactors of the Calder Hall class, which combined plutonium production and power generation. Calder Hall was the first nuclear station to feed an appreciable amount of power into a civilian network. It was fueled with slugs of natural uranium metal canned in aluminum, cooled with carbon dioxide, and employed a......
  • advanced information processing (computer science)
    Applied AI, also known as advanced information processing, aims to produce commercially viable “smart” systems—for example, “expert” medical diagnosis systems and stock-trading systems. Applied AI has enjoyed considerable success, as described in the section Expert systems....
  • advanced mobile phone system (telecommunications)
    During this time the American cellular radio system, known as the advanced mobile phone system, or AMPS, was developed primarily by AT&T and Motorola, Inc. AMPS was based on 666 paired voice channels, spaced every 30 kilohertz in the 800-megahertz region. The system employed an analog-modulation approach—frequency modulation, or FM—and was designed from the outset to support.....
  • Advanced Photon Source (particle accelerator)
    ...houses several major research facilities that are available for collaborative and interdisciplinary use by government, academic, and industrial scientists. Four of these facilities—the Advanced Photon Source (APS), the Intense Pulsed Neutron Source (IPNS), the Argonne Tandem Linear Accelerator System (ATLAS), and the High-Voltage Electron Microscope- (HVEM-) Tandem......
  • Advanced Research Projects Agency (United States government)
    U.S. government agency created in 1958 to facilitate research in technology with potential military applications. Most of DARPA’s projects are classified secrets, but many of its military innovations have had great influence in the civilian world, particularly in the areas of electronics, telecommunications, and computer science. It is perhaps best known for ARPANET, an early network of tim...
  • Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (United States defense program)
    Early in 1967 Engelbart’s laboratory became the second site on the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the primary precursor to the Internet. On December 9, 1968, at a computer conference in San Francisco, Engelbart demonstrated a working real-time collaborative computer system known as NLS (oNLine System). Using NLS, he and English (back at Stanford) worked on a shared......
  • advanced structural ceramics
    ceramic materials that demonstrate enhanced mechanical properties under demanding conditions. Because they serve as structural members, often being subjected to mechanical loading, they are given the name structural ceramics. Ordinarily, for structural applications ceramics tend to be expensive replacements for other materials, such as metals, polymers, and composites. For especially erosive, corr...
  • Advanced Study, Institute for (institution, Princeton, New Jersey, United States)
    ...Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Digital Computing Instrument, produced by a group working under the direction of mathematician John von Neumann of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. The IAS paper, as von Neumann’s document became known, articulated the concept of the stored program—a concept that has been called the...
  • Advanced Technology Bomber (aircraft)
    ...was effectively undetectable by the air defense radar systems of the time. Late 20th-century efforts to evade increasingly sophisticated radar early-warning systems culminated in the United States’ B-2 Advanced Technology Bomber. This craft used “stealth” materials and shapes to reduce its radar reflectivity, but its enormous cost (and the end of the Cold War) raised anew t...
  • Advanced Train Control System
    ...is more difficult than in Europe, because block sections are much longer. To overcome the problem, the principal railroads of the United States and Canada combined in the 1980s to develop an Advanced Train Control Systems (ATCS) project, which would integrate the potential of the latest microelectronics and communications technologies. In fully realized ATCS, trains would continuously......
  • Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, Center for
    ...(later the Institute of Design) in Chicago. He moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge in 1946, where he taught visual design until 1974. In 1967 Kepes founded the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, a community that would unite the work of artists and designers with that of architects, engineers, city planners, and scientists; he served as director......
  • Advanced X-Ray Astrophysics Facility (United States satellite)
    U.S. satellite, one of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) fleet of “Great Observatories” satellites, which is designed to make high-resolution images of celestial X-ray sources. In operation since 1999, it is named in honour of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, a pioneer of the field of stellar evolution....
  • Advancement of Learning (work by Bacon)
    ...the Rosicrucians’ magical and mystical beliefs. For him, this period was a time of hope for a revolution in science. The English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626), in Advancement of Learning (1605), had earlier proposed a new science of observation and experiment to replace the traditional Aristotelian science, as Descartes himself did later....
  • advancing longwall method (mining)
    ...method, is the most commonly used in the United States. In this method the block is developed to its boundary first, and then the block is mined back toward the main haulage tunnel. In the advancing longwall method, which is more common in Europe, development of the block takes place only 30 to 40 metres ahead of the mining of the block, and the two operations proceed together to the......
  • Advani, Lal Kishanchand (Indian politician)
    ...of the mosque, which Muslims considered one of their oldest and most sacred places. India’s police were thus ordered to stop the more than one million Hindus marching toward Ayodhya, including Advani himself, who rode in a chariot such as King Rama might have used. On October 23, the day that Advani was stopped and arrested, Singh lost his Lok Sabha majority, as the BJP withdrew its......
  • advantageous heterozygosity (biology)
    In heterozygous form, with no adverse influence on the individual who carries them, recessive alleles retain the potential of causing future deaths from inherited disease. In effect, the death of the infant offspring of consanguineous parents purges the gene pool and reduces the possibility that recessive disease genes will be expressed in succeeding generations. The principle of deliberate......
  • advection (atmospheric science)
    in atmospheric science, change in a property of a moving mass of air because the mass moves to a region where the property has a different value (e.g., the change in temperature when a warm air mass moves into a cool region). Advection can refer to either the horizontal or vertical components of the motion....
  • advection fog (meteorology)
    Advection fog is formed by the slow passage of relatively warm, moist, stable air over a colder wet surface. It is common at sea whenever cold and warm ocean currents are in close proximity and may affect adjacent coasts. A good example is provided by the frequent dense fogs formed off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland in summer, when winds from the warm Gulf Stream blow over the cold Labrador......
  • advection frost (meteorology)
    Two types of frost are recognized: (1) radiation frost, which occurs on clear nights with little or no wind when the outgoing radiation is excessive and the air temperature is not necessarily at the freezing point, and (2) wind, or advection, frost, which occurs at any time, day or night, regardless of cloud cover, when wind moves air in from cold regions. Both types may occur simultaneously.......
  • Advent (Christianity)
    (from Latin adventus, “coming”), in the Christian church calendar, the period of preparation for the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ at Christmas and also of preparation for the Second Coming of Christ. It begins on the Sunday nearest to November 30 (St. Andrew’s Day) and is the beginning of the new church year. The date when the season was first observed is un...
  • Advent calendar (calendar)
    ...a fir wreath with 24 candles (the 24 days before Christmas, starting December 1), but the awkwardness of having so many candles on the wreath reduced the number to four. An analogous custom is the Advent calendar, which provides 24 openings, one to be opened each day beginning December 1. According to tradition, the calendar was created in the 19th century by a Munich housewife who tired of......
  • Advent Christian Church (religion)
    one of several Adventist churches that evolved from the teachings in the late 1840s of William Miller. It was organized in 1860. Doctrinal emphasis is placed on the anticipated Second Coming of Christ and on the Last Judgment, after which the wicked will be destroyed and the chosen will be resurrected to live in a restored paradise on Earth. The church is congregational in polity and, unlike the ...
  • Adventists (Protestant group)
    member of any one of a group of Protestant Christian churches that trace their origin to the United States in the mid-19th century and that are distinguished by their emphasis on the belief that the personal, visible return of Christ in glory (i.e., the Second Coming) is close at hand, a belief shared by many Christians. W...
  • adventitia (anatomy)
    The wall of the ureter has three layers, the adventitia, or outer layer; the intermediate, muscular layer; and the lining, made up of mucous membrane. The adventitia consists of fibroelastic connective tissue that merges with the connective tissue behind the peritoneum. The muscular coat is composed of smooth (involuntary) muscle fibres and, in the upper two-thirds of the ureter, has two......
  • adventitious root (plant anatomy)
    The second type of root system, the adventitious root system, differs from the primary variety in that the primary root is short-lived and is replaced within a short time by many roots that form from the stem. Most monocotyledons have adventitious roots; examples include orchids, bromeliads, and many other epiphytic plants in the tropics. Grasses (family Poaceae) and many other......
  • adventitious shoot (plant anatomy)
    An extreme example of adventitious shoot formation is found in Begonia phyllomaniaca after shock. In this instance, small plantlets develop spontaneously in incredible numbers from the superficial cell layers of the leaf blades, petioles, and stems. The adventitious shoots do not arise from preformed buds but develop from cells at the base of hairs and especially from certain glands......
  • Adventure (electronic game by Crowther)
    The defining “text adventure” was Adventure, written by Will Crowther, probably in 1975, if not earlier. Crowther combined his experiences exploring Kentucky’s Mammoth and Flint Ridge caves and playing Dungeons and Dragons-style role-playing games with fantasy themes reminiscent of J.R.R. Tolkien...
  • Adventure (British ship)
    On Capt. Samuel Wallis’ westerly-directed circumnavigation in the Royal Navy ship “Dolphin” (1766–68), Furneaux was among the first Europeans to reach Tahiti. As commander of the “Adventure,” he took part in Capt. James Cook’s second voyage to the Pacific (1771–75). Sailing eastward from the Cape of Good Hope, the “Adventure” be...
  • adventure bay pine (plant)
    (species Phyllocladus asplenifolius), slow-growing ornamental and timber conifer of the family Phyllocladaceae (placed in the Podocarpaceae family by some botanists), native to temperate rain forests of Tasmania at elevations from sea level to 750 metres (2,500 feet). The tree is shrubby at high elevations but may grow to 18 metres (60 feet) and occasionally 30 metres (100 feet) in lower ar...
  • adventure playground
    A more recent trend in playground design is the “adventure” playground. Inspired by Scandinavian and British playground reformers, this design attempts to allow for a child-oriented perspective in play; children are, for instance, encouraged in these playgrounds to build their own appropriate play structures. This shift in philosophy can also be seen in the name change of the......
  • Adventurer, The (British periodical)
    During the course of one year starting in March 1753, Johnson contributed 29 essays to his friend John Hawkesworth’s periodical The Adventurer, written in imitation of The Rambler. Johnson purposely (and ineffectively) lightened his style in order to hide his authorship. He wanted his essays unrecognized, for he had given them to...
  • Adventures du baron de Faeneste (work by Aubigné)
    ...dedicated to Cardinal Duperron, of the tortuous explanations offered by Protestants who followed Henry IV’s example of abjuration. His comment on life and manners ranges more widely in the Adventures du baron de Faeneste (1617), in which the Gascon Faeneste represents attachment to outward appearances (le paraître) while honest squire Énay, embodying the......
  • Adventures in Radioisotope Research (work by Hevesy)
    ...After fleeing Nazi-occupied Denmark in 1943, Hevesy began working in a laboratory at the Institute of Research in Organic Chemistry, Stockholm. His published works include the two-volume Adventures in Radioisotope Research (1962)....
  • Adventures of a Younger Son (work by Trelawny)
    ...from which he ran away. At age 13 he entered the Royal Navy, and he was discharged in 1812. Trelawny wrote of his experiences as a midshipman in his semiautobiographical novel Adventures of a Younger Son (1831)....
  • Adventures of Augie March, The (novel by Bellow)
    ...a significant number of contemporary novelists were reluctant to abandon Social Realism, which they pursued in much more personal terms. In novels such as The Victim (1947), The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Herzog (1964), Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), and Humboldt’s Gift (1975), Saul Bellow tapped into the buoyan...
  • Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The (work by Raspe)
    Hanoverian storyteller, some of whose tales were the basis for the collection The Adventures of Baron Munchausen....
  • Adventures of David Simple, The (novel by Fielding)
    ...these five giants was accompanied by experiments from a number of other novelists. Sarah Fielding, for instance, Henry’s sister, wrote penetratingly and gravely about friendship in The Adventures of David Simple (1744, with a sequel in 1753). Charlotte Lennox in The Female Quixote (1752) and Richard Graves in The Spiritu...
  • Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom, The (novel by Smollett)
    The Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom (now, with The History and Adventures of an Atom, the least regarded of his novels) appeared in 1753. It sold poorly, and Smollett was forced into borrowing from friends and into further hack writing. In June 1753 he visited Scotland for the first time in 15 years; his mother, it is said, recognized him only because of his “roguish......
  • Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (work by Morier)
    English diplomat and writer whose fame depends on The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824), a picaresque romance of Persian life that long influenced English ideas of Persia; its Persian translation (1905) led to the development of the modern Persian novel of social criticism. The first of a series of novels written by Morier after he retired, Hajji Baba drew on the......
  • Adventures of Harry Richmond, The (novel by Meredith)
    ...and, in the 1880s, by growing public recognition. The next two novels, Rhoda Fleming (1865) and a sequel to Emilia, entitled Vittoria, added nothing to his reputation. With The Adventures of Harry Richmond (1871), however, Meredith returned to what was his forte—romantic comedy. Once more he wrote a close study of a father–son relationship, only this......
  • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The (novel by Twain)
    ...preceded Tom Sawyer by seven years, offered a model for many later stories of small-town bad boys, and is a fair example of the second-class classic. But it took Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn to change the course of American writing and give the first deeply felt vision of boyhood in juvenile literature....
  • Adventures of Ideas (work by Whitehead)
    ...survey the world with a large generality of understanding, an end toward which his great trilogy, Science and the Modern World (1925), Process and Reality (1929), and Adventures of Ideas (1933), was directed....
  • Adventures of Master F. J. (work by Gascoigne)
    ...reader by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in English imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprisi...
  • Adventures of Mottel, the Cantor’s Son (work by Sholem Aleichem)
    ...(14 vol., 1908–14) include Jewish Children, translated by Hannah Berman, 3rd ed. (1937); The Old Country, translated by Julius and Frances Butwin, 3rd ed. (1954); and Adventures of Mottel, the Cantor’s Son, translated by Tamara Kahana (1953). He was the first to write in Yiddish for children. Adaptations of his work were important in the founding of the......
  • Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, The (novel by Smollett)
    ...the ode as his favourite poetic form, Akenside was more than willing to consider himself the English Pindar, one of several aspects of his character that was satirized in Tobias Smollett’s novel The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, in which Akenside appears as the physician in scenes set on the European continent....
  • Adventures of Prince Achmed, The (animated cartoon)
    ...the shadow puppet theatre of Thailand, Germany’s Lotte Reiniger employed animated silhouettes to create elaborately detailed scenes derived from folktales and children’s books. Her The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) may have been the first animated feature; it required more than two years of patient work and earned her the nickname “The Mistress...
  • Adventures of Robin Hood, The (film by Curtiz and Keighley [1938])
    ...W.P. Lipscomb for PygmalionOriginal Story: Eleanore Griffin and Dore Schary for Boys TownCinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg for The Great WaltzArt Direction: Carl J. Weyl for The Adventures of Robin HoodOriginal Score: Erich Wolfgang Korngold for The Adventures of Robin HoodScoring: Alfred Newman for Alexander’s Ragtime BandSong:......
  • Adventures of Roderick Random, The (novel by Smollett)
    In 1748 Smollett published his novel The Adventures of Roderick Random, in part a graphic account of British naval life at the time, and also translated the great picaresque romance Gil Blas from the French of Alain-René Lesage. In 1750 he obtained the degree of M.D. from Marischal College, Aberdeen. Later in the year he was in Paris, searching out material for The......
  • Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves, The (novel by Smollett)
    ...being sentenced to a fine of £100 and three months’ imprisonment in the King’s Bench Prison. He seems to have lived there in some comfort and drew on his experiences for his novel The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (1762), which was serialized in The British Magazine, of which Smollett became editor in 1760....
  • Adventures of the Borrowers (work by Norton)
    The third of these classic secondary worlds is in a sense not a creation of fantasy. The four volumes (1952–61) about the Borrowers, with their brief pendant, Poor Stainless (1971), ask the reader to accept only a single impossibility, that in a quiet country house, under the grandfather clock, live the tiny Clock family: Pod, Homily, and their daughter Arrietty. All that follows......
  • Adventures of the Ten Princes, The (work by Daṇḍin)
    Indian Sanskrit writer of prose romances and expounder on poetics. Scholars attribute to him with certainty only two works: the Daśakumāracarita, translated in 1927 as The Adventures of the Ten Princes, and the Kāvyādarśa (“Mirror of Poetry”)....
  • Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The (novel by Twain)
    ...just as funny today as a century ago, perfect nonsense produced in a non-nonsensical era; and Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s Story of a Bad Boy (1870). This, it is often forgotten, preceded Tom Sawyer by seven years, offered a model for many later stories of small-town bad boys, and is a fair example of the second-class classic. But it took Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry......
  • Adventurous Simplicissimus, The (novel by Grimmelshausen)
    German novelist, whose Simplicissimus series is one of the masterworks of his country’s literature. Satiric and partially autobiographical, it is a matchless social picture of the often grotesque Thirty Years’ War (1618–48)....
  • adverb (grammar)
    Originally a compounding process, the most common method of forming adverbs from adjectives (suffixing of Latin mente ‘mind’) has become in most languages a morphological process, although Spanish and Portuguese retain traces of the earlier stage in phrases such as severa e (y) cruelmente ‘severely and cruelly.’...
  • adversary procedure (law)
    in law, one of the two methods of exposing evidence in court (the other being the inquisitorial procedure)....
  • adversary system (law)
    in law, one of the two methods of exposing evidence in court (the other being the inquisitorial procedure)....
  • adverse possession (law)
    in Anglo-American property law, holding of property under some claim of right with the knowledge and against the will of one who has a superior ownership interest in the property. Its legal significance is traced back to the English common-law concept known as seisin, a possession of land by one who owns the property at least for the period of his life, having a complete right ...
  • “Adversus haereses” (work by Irenaeus)
    ...the work of a god inferior to the God of Jesus and accepted from the nascent New Testament only those portions that he took to be uninfected by Judaism. Bishop Irenaeus of Lyon, in Against the Heresies, ranked Marcion with the “Gnostics,” because at least one facet of Marcion’s error was his depreciation of the material creation. The Gnostics invent...
  • Adversus Hermogenem (treatise by Tertullian)
    ...problems against specific opponents: Adversus Marcionem (“Against Marcion,” an Anatolian heretic who believed that the world was created by the evil god of the Jews), Adversus Hermogenem (“Against Hermogenes,” a Carthaginian painter who claimed that God created the world out of preexisting matter), Adversus Valentinianos (“Against......
  • Adversus Jovinianum (work by Saint Jerome)
    ...Men”), was written in 392/393 to counter pagan pride in pagan culture. Against the monk Jovinian, who asserted the equality of virginity and marriage, he wrote a polemical diatribe Adversus Jovinianum (393) that was frequently brilliant but needlessly crude, excessively influenced by the 2nd- and 3rd-century theologian Tertullian, whose writings were at times unnecessarily......
  • Adversus Marcionem (treatise by Tertullian)
    ...areas of life and thought. Like his contemporaries, he wrote works in defense of the faith (e.g., Apologeticum) and treatises on theological problems against specific opponents: Adversus Marcionem (“Against Marcion,” an Anatolian heretic who believed that the world was created by the evil god of the Jews), Adversus Hermogenem (“Against......
  • Adversus mathematicos (work by Sextus Empiricus)
    ...(suspense of judgment). The Pyrrhonian attitude is preserved in the writings of one of its last leaders, Sextus Empiricus (2nd or 3rd century ad). In his Outlines of Pyrrhonism and Adversus mathematicos, Sextus presented the tropes developed by previous Pyrrhonists. The 10 tropes attributed to Aenesidemus showed the difficulties to be encountered in ascertaining the ...
  • Adversus nationes (work by Arnobius)
    ...which maintained a millenarian outlook—predicting the 1,000-year reign of Christ at the end of history—and was clumsy in style. Arnobius the Elder (converted by 300) sought in his Adversus nationes (“Against the Pagans”), like Tertullian and Cyprian before him, to free Christianity from the charge of having caused all the evils plaguing the empire, but ended u...
  • Adversus Praxean (work by Tertullian)
    ...but in reference to His appearance in humanity is called the Son.” It was taught by Praxeas, a priest from Asia Minor, in Rome c. 206 and was opposed by Tertullian in the tract Adversus Praxean (c. 213), an important contribution to the doctrine of the Trinity. See also Sabellianism; Adoptionism. ...
  • Advertisements for Myself (work by Mailer)
    In 1959, when Mailer was generally dismissed as a one-book author, he made a bid for attention with the book Advertisements for Myself, a collection of unfinished stories, parts of novels, essays, reviews, notebook entries, or ideas for fiction. The miscellany’s naked self-revelation won the admiration of a younger generation seeking alternative styles of life and art. Mailer...

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