Columbia Encyclopedia

Search results

500 results found

Ribble

(Encyclopedia)Ribble, river, c.75 mi (120 km) long, rising in the Pennines, North Yorkshire, N England, and flowing SW across Lancashire to the Irish Sea through a long, narrow estuary. Its chief tributary is the H...

Brooke, Henry

(Encyclopedia)Brooke, Henry, c.1703–1783, Irish author. Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, he studied law in London before returning to Ireland permanently. In 1735 he published his long philosophical poem, Uni...

Whitney, William Dwight

(Encyclopedia)Whitney, William Dwight, 1827–94, American Sanskrit scholar and lexicographer, b. Northampton, Mass. After studying in Germany, Whitney became professor of Sanskrit and of comparative philology at Y...

Lithuanian

(Encyclopedia)Lithuanian lĭthˌo͞oāˈnēən [key], a language belonging to the Baltic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Baltic languages). The official language of Lithuania since 1918, Lit...

Backus, John Warner

(Encyclopedia)Backus, John Warner, 1924–2007, American computer scientist, b. Philadelphia, grad. Columbia (M.A. 1950). Trained as a mathematician, he was hired (1950) by IBM Corp. as a computer programmer. From ...

Quechua

(Encyclopedia)Quechua, Kechua kēchˈwä [key], linguistic family belonging to the Andean branch of the Andean-Equatorial stock of Native American languages (mainly in South America). Encompassing far more native ...

Occitan

(Encyclopedia)Occitan prôväNsälˈ [key], member of the Romance group of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Romance languages). The language label Provençal is often restricted in...

Fianna Fáil

(Encyclopedia)Fianna Fáil fēˈənə fäl [key], Irish political party, organized in 1926 by opponents of the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921 establishing the Irish Free State and setting up Northern Ireland as part of...

Milesians

(Encyclopedia)Milesians mĭlēˈzhənz [key], in Irish mythology, the ancestors of the present inhabitants of Ireland. The last invaders of ancient Ireland, they were said to have dwelt in Spain before attacking Ir...

Higgins, William

(Encyclopedia)Higgins, William, b. 1762 or 1763, d. 1825, Irish chemist. After study at Oxford he became supervisor of the Royal Dublin Society's mineralogical collection and in 1800 the Society's professor of chem...