Encyclopædia Britannica Australia -

Encyclopedias since 1768

0-9

advertising ... Aepinus, Franz Maria Ulrich Theodor Hoch

advertising: the techniques and practices used to bring products, services, opinions, or causes to public notice for the purpose of persuading the public to respond in a certain way toward what is advertised. Most advertising involves promoting a good that is ...
advertising coloration: in animals, the use of biological coloration to make an organism unique and highly visible as compared with the background, thereby providing easily perceived information as to its location, identity, and movement. Such advertisement may serve the function of attracting ...
advisory opinion: in law, the opinion of a judge, a court, or a law official, such as an attorney general, upon a question of law raised by a public official or legislative body. Advisory opinions adjudicate nothing and are not binding, though ...
advocate: in law, a person who is professionally qualified to plead the cause of another in a court of law. As a technical term, advocate is used mainly in those legal systems that derived from the Roman law. In Scotland the ...
Advocate of Moral Reform: American periodical that, between 1835 and about 1845, campaigned to rescue women who were victims of moral and physical corruption and to reassert woman's centrality to family life.
Advocates, Faculty of: the members of the bar of Scotland. Barristers are the comparable group in England. The faculty grew out of the Scots Act of 1532, which established the Court of Session in Scotland. The advocates had, and still have, the sole ...
Adwa: town, northern Ethiopia. Adwa lies on the east-west highway between Aksum and Adi Grat at its junction with the road north to Asmara (Asmera), in Eritrea. Adwa is a market centre (grains, honey, hides, coffee) for the Tigray people. The ...
Adwa, Battle of: (March 1, 1896), military clash at Adwa, in north-central Ethiopia, between the Ethiopian army of King Menilek II and Italian forces. The decisive Ethiopian victory checked Italy's attempt to build an empire in Africa.
Adwick le Street: town, Doncaster metropolitan borough, metropolitan county of South Yorkshire, historic county of Yorkshire, England. The town derives its name from the great north British Roman routeway, Ermine Street. The earliest references to the town are found in Domesday Book (1086), ...
Ady, Endre: one of Hungary's greatest lyric poets.
Adygea: republic, southwestern Russia. It extends from the Kuban River south to the Caucasus foothills. Adygea was established as an oblast (province) in 1922 for the Adyghian people, one of two major branches of the Circassians (Cherkess), who ...
adynaton: a kind of hyperbole in which the exaggeration is so great that it refers to an impossibility, as in the following lines from Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress":Had we but world enough, and timeThis coyness, lady, were no crime.We ...
adz: hand tool for shaping wood. One of the earliest tools, it was widely distributed in Stone Age cultures in the form of a handheld stone chipped to form a blade. By Egyptian times it had acquired a wooden haft, or ...
Adzope: town, southeastern Cote d'Ivoire. A traditional market centre for the Attie people, it sends coffee, bananas, cocoa, and timber (mahogany, sipo) to Abidjan, 55 miles (89 km) south, for export. Adzope is the site of Roman Catholic and Protestant missions, ...
AE: poet and mystic, a leading figure in the Irish literary renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Russell took his pseudonym from a proofreader's query about his earlier pseudonym, "AEon."
Aeacus: in Greek mythology, son of Zeus and Aegina, the daughter of the river god Asopus. His mother was carried off by Zeus to the island of Oenone, afterward called by her name. Aeacus was celebrated for justice and in Attic ...
Aechmea: genus of epiphytes (plants that are supported by other plants and have aerial roots exposed to the humid atmosphere) of the pineapple family (Bromeliaceae), with more than 140 species distributed in South America. Spiny-edged leaves, usually about 30 to 60 ...
aecium: a cluster-cup or fruiting body of certain rust fungi (order Uredinales, division Mycota). Yellow to orange in colour, aecia develop after fertilization and bear one-celled spores (aeciospores, or aecidiospores). Aecia are usually found on lower leaf surfaces of plants.
Aedesius: Greek philosopher whose ideas had their roots in Neoplatonism, a school of philosophy that grew out of the Idealism of Plato.
aedile: (from Latin aedes, "temple"), magistrate of ancient Rome who originally had charge of the temple and cult of Ceres. At first the aediles were two officials of the plebeians, created at the same time as the tribunes (494 BC), whose ...
Aedon: in Greek mythology, a daughter of Pandareus of Ephesus. According to Homer, she was the wife of Zethus, the king of Thebes. She had only two children and envied her sister-in-law, Niobe, who had many. She planned to murder Niobe's ...
Aedui: Celtic tribe of central Gaul (occupying most of what was later Burgundy), chiefly responsible for the diplomatic situation exploited by Julius Caesar when he began his conquests in that region in 58 BC. The Aedui had been supported by Rome ...
AEG AG: former German electronics and electrical-equipment company. As one of Germany's leading industrial companies through much of the 19th and 20th centuries, AEG manufactured products for industrial and domestic use.
Aegean civilizations: the Stone and Bronze Age civilizations that arose and flourished in the area of the Aegean Sea in the periods, respectively, about 7000-3000 BC and about 3000-1000 BC.
Aegean Sea: an arm of the Mediterranean Sea, located between the Greek peninsula on the west and Asia Minor on the east. About 380 miles (611 km) long and 186 miles (299 km) wide, it has a total area of some 83,000 ...
Aegilops: genus of grasses (order Cyperales) that has become an agricultural contaminant. Members of the genus grow with wheat, mature at the same time, and, unless care is taken, are harvested along with it. One Aegilops species was an ancestor of ...
Aegina: island, one of the largest in the Saronic group of Greece, about 16 miles (26 km) south-southwest of Piraeus. With an area of about 32 square miles (83 square km), it is an eparkhia (eparchy) of the ...
aegirine: a pyroxene mineral, sodium and iron silicate (NaFe⁺³Si₂O₆), that is commonly found in alkaline igneous rocks, particularly in syenites and syenite pegmatites. It also occurs in crystalline schists. Aegirine forms a continuous chemical series with aegirinaugite, in which calcium replaces ...
aegis: in ancient Greece, leather cloak or breastplate generally associated with Zeus, the king of the gods, and thus thought to possess supernatural power. Zeus's daughter Athena adopted the aegis for ordinary dress. Occasionally, another god used it-e.g., Apollo in the ...
Aegithalidae: songbird family that includes the long-tailed tits (or titmice) of the Old World and the bushtits of North America. Both groups are sometimes considered subfamilies of the family Paridae (order Passeriformes). The eight species are small, arboreal insect eaters with ...
Aegospotami, Battle of: (405 BC), naval victory of Sparta over Athens, final battle of the Peloponnesian War. The fleets of the two Greek rival powers faced each other in the Hellespont for four days without battle, until on the fifth day the Spartans ...
Aehrenthal, Aloys, Count Lexa von: foreign minister (1906-12) of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy, whose direction of the latter's annexation of Bosnia and Hercegovina (1908) provoked an international crisis. (See Bosnian crisis of 1908.)
Aelfheah, Saint: archbishop of Canterbury who was venerated as a martyr after his murder by the Danes.
Aelfric: Anglo-Saxon prose writer, considered the greatest of his time. He wrote both to instruct the monks and to spread the learning of the 10th-century monastic revival. His Catholic Homilies, written in 990-992, provided orthodox sermons, based on the Church Fathers. ...
Aelia Capitolina: city founded in AD 135 by the Romans on the ruins of Jerusalem, which their forces, under Titus, had destroyed in AD 70. The name was given, after the Second Jewish Revolt (132-135), in honour of the emperor Hadrian (whose ...
Aelian: Roman author and teacher of rhetoric, who spoke and wrote so fluently in Greek-in which language his works were written-that he was nicknamed "Meliglottos" ("Honey-tongued").
Aelianus: Greek military writer residing in Rome whose manual of tactics influenced Byzantine, Muslim, and post-15th-century European methods of warfare.
Aelle: Anglo-Saxon ruler who is credited with the foundation of the kingdom of the South Saxons, or Sussex. Aelle is said to have landed near Selsey Bill (in modern West Sussex, Eng.) in 477. He immediately made war on the Britons, ...
Aelle: first king of Deira in northern England, whose people threw off the Bernician overlordship upon the death of Ida, king of Bernicia. Aelle became king in 559, while Ida's descendants continued to reign in the northern kingdom. On Aelle's death ...
Aelred of Rievaulx, Saint: writer, historian, and outstanding Cistercian abbot who influenced monasticism in medieval England, Scotland, and France.
Aemilian: Roman emperor for three months in 253.
Aeneas: mythical hero of Troy and Rome, son of the goddess Aphrodite and Anchises. Aeneas was a member of the royal line at Troy and cousin of Hector. He played a prominent part in the war to defend his city against ...
Aenesidemus: philosopher and dialectician of the Greek Academy who revived the Pyrrhonian principle of "suspended judgment" (epoche) as a practical solution to the vexing and "insoluble" problem of knowledge. In his Pyrrhonian Discourses Aenesidemus formulated 10 tropes in defense of Skepticism, ...
Aeolian harp: (from Aeolus, the Greek god of the winds), stringed musical instrument played by the wind. It is made of a wooden sound box about 3 feet by 5 inches by 3 inches (1 m by 13 cm by 8 cm) ...
Aeolic dialect: in Asiatic Aeolis, including the island of Lesbos, where Aeolian colonists from the mainland founded their cities. West Thessalian and especially Boeotian varieties of Aeolic were influenced by the neighbouring West Greek (Doric) dialects, whereas Asiatic Aeolic was influenced by ...
aeolipile: steam turbine invented in the 1st century AD by Heron of Alexandria and described in his Pneumatica. The aeolipile was a hollow sphere mounted so that it could turn on a pair of hollow tubes that provided steam to the ...
Aeolis: group of ancient cities on the west coast of Anatolia, which were founded at the end of the 2nd millennium BC by Greeks speaking an Aeolic dialect. The earliest settlements, located on the islands of Lesbos and Tenedos and on ...
Aeolus: in Greek mythology, mythical king of Magnesia in Thessaly, the son of Hellen (the eponymous ancestor of the true Greeks, or Hellenes) and father of Sisyphus (the "most crafty of men"). Aeolus' daughter Canace and son Macareus committed incest and ...
Aeolus: in the works of Homer, controller of the winds and ruler of the floating island of Aeolia. In the Odyssey he gave Odysseus a favourable wind and a bag in which the unfavourable winds were confined. Odysseus' companions opened the ...
aeon: (Greek: "age," or "lifetime"), in Gnosticism and Manichaeism, one of the orders of spirits, or spheres of being, that emanated from the Godhead and were attributes of the nature of the absolute; an important element in the cosmology that developed ...
Aepinus, Franz Maria Ulrich Theodor Hoch: physicist whose Tentamen theoriae electricitatis et magnetismi (1759; "An Attempt at a Theory of Electricity and Magnetism") was the first work to apply mathematics to the theory of electricity and magnetism.