Columbia Encyclopedia

Search results

500 results found

sod house

(Encyclopedia)sod house, house with walls made of strips of sod laid horizontally in courses like bricks. Sod houses were common in the frontier days on the western plains of the United States, where wood and stone...

settlement house

(Encyclopedia)settlement house, neighborhood welfare institution generally in an urban slum area, where trained workers endeavor to improve social conditions, particularly by providing community services and promot...

chapter house

(Encyclopedia)chapter house, a building in which the chapter of the clergy meets. Its plan varies, the simplest being a rectangle. At Worcester, England, the Norman builders created a circular chapter house (c.1100...

White, Richard Grant

(Encyclopedia)White, Richard Grant, 1821–85, American journalist, writer, and Shakespearean scholar, b. New York City. He had a varied career and was at different times music critic and coeditor (1851–59) of th...

Hull House

(Encyclopedia)Hull House: see Addams, Jane.

house sparrow

(Encyclopedia)house sparrow: see English sparrow. ...

Osborne House

(Encyclopedia)Osborne House, a favorite residence of Queen Victoria, near East Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, S England. The queen died there in 1901. The state apartments are open to the public. ...

white dwarf

(Encyclopedia)white dwarf, in astronomy, a type of star that is abnormally faint for its white-hot temperature (see mass-luminosity relation). Typically, a white dwarf star has the mass of the sun and the radius of...

white lead

(Encyclopedia)white lead, heavy, white substance, poisonous, insoluble in water, extensively used as a white pigment and base in paints. It is one of the oldest paint pigments used by humans. Chemically, it is basi...

white-eye

(Encyclopedia)white-eye, common name for warblerlike, arboreal birds, including 85 species in the family Zosteropidae, and for certain species of ducks. The members of Zosteropidae, with the exception of a few spec...

Browse by Subject