Encyclopædia Britannica Australia -

Encyclopedias since 1768

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bay ... Baza

bay: concavity of a coastline or reentrant of the sea, formed by the movements of either the sea or a lake. The difference between a bay and a gulf is not clearly defined, but the term bay usually refers to a ...
Bay Bridge: complex crossing that spans San Francisco Bay from the city of San Francisco to Oakland via Yerba Buena Island. One of the preeminent engineering feats of the 20th century, it was built during the 1930s under the direction of C.H. ...
Bay City: city, seat (1857) of Bay county, east-central Michigan, U.S. It lies along the Saginaw River near the latter's juncture with Saginaw Bay (Lake Huron), 13 miles (21 km) north of Saginaw. Settled in the 1830s, it was formed in 1857 ...
Bay Islands: group of small islands of northern Honduras. They have an area of 101 square miles (261 square km) and lie about 35 miles (56 km) offshore in the Caribbean Sea. The main islands were first sighted by Christopher Columbus in ...
bay leaf: leaf of the sweet bay tree, Laurus nobilis, an evergreen of the family Lauraceae, indigenous to countries bordering the Mediterranean. A popular spice used in pickling and marinating and to flavour stews, stuffings, and fish, bay leaves are delicately fragrant ...
Bay of Pigs invasion: (April 17, 1961), abortive invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs (Bahia de los Cochinos), on the southwestern coast by some 1,500 Cuban exiles opposed to Fidel Castro. The invasion was financed and directed by the U.S. government.
Bay of Plenty: local government region, eastern North Island, New Zealand. It encompasses the narrow 100-mile- (160-kilometre-) long lowlands fronting the Bay of Plenty and extends from Matakana Island eastward to Cape Runaway. The Rangitaiki, Whakatane, and Motu rivers drain northward into the ...
bay owl: uncommon and atypical Asian owl classified with the barn owls (family Tytonidae). It has a heart-shaped facial disk, which has two earlike extensions that aid sound reception. The bay owl lives in Southeast Asia and is entirely nocturnal and retiring. ...
Bay Psalm Book: (1640), perhaps the oldest book now in existence that was published in British North America. It was prepared by Puritan leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a press set up by Stephen Day, it included ...
Bay Saint Louis: city, seat (1860) of Hancock county, southern Mississippi, U.S. It lies along Mississippi Sound (an embayment of the Gulf of Mexico) at the entrance to St. Louis Bay, 58 miles (93 km) northeast of New Orleans, Louisiana.
bay tree: any of several small trees with aromatic leaves, especially the sweet bay, or bay laurel (Laurus nobilis), source of the bay leaf (q.v.) used in cooking. The California laurel (q.v.; Umbellularia californica) is an ornamental tree also called the bay ...
bay window: window formed as the exterior expression of a bay within a structure, a bay in this context being an interior recess made by the outward projection of a wall. The purpose of a bay window is to admit more light ...
Bay, Josephine Holt Perfect: American financier, the first woman to head a member firm of the New York Stock Exchange.
Bay, Laguna de: lake, the largest inland body of water in the Philippines, on Luzon just southeast of Manila. Probably a former arm or extension of Manila Bay cut off by volcanism, Laguna de Bay (Spanish: "Lake of the Bay") has a normal ...
Bayamo: city, capital of Granma provincia, eastern Cuba. Lying on the Bayamo River, it was founded as San Salvador de Bayamo in 1513. In colonial times it was one of Cuba's most important cities, and it has been the scene of ...
Bayamon: town, northeastern Puerto Rico, part of the metropolitan area of San Juan, 10 miles (16 km) northeast. Puerto Rico's first settlement, Caparra, was founded in the area in 1508 by the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon. Bayamon was established ...
Bayan: powerful Mongol minister in the last years of the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty of China. His anti-Chinese policies heightened discontent among the Chinese, especially the educated, and resulted in widespread rebellion.
Bayar, Celal: third president of the Turkish Republic (1950-60), who initiated etatism, or a state-directed economy, in Turkey in the 1930s and who after 1946, as the leader of the Democrat Party, advocated a policy of private enterprise.
Bayard, Pierre Terrail, seigneur de: French soldier known as le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche ("the knight without fear and without reproach").
Bayard, Thomas Francis: American statesman, diplomat, and lawyer.
Baybars I: most eminent of the Mamluk sultans of Egypt and Syria, which he ruled from 1260 to 1277. He is noted both for his military campaigns against Mongols and crusaders and for his internal administrative reforms. The Sirat Baybars, a folk ...
bayberry: any of several aromatic shrubs and small trees of the genus Myrica in the bayberry family (Myricaceae), but especially M. pennsylvanica, also called candleberry, whose grayish waxy berries, upon boiling, yield the wax used in making bayberry candles. The California ...
Bayda', Al-: town, in south-central Yemen. It is situated on a high plateau and, until the unification of the two Yemen states in 1990, was part of North Yemen (San'a'), though it lay near the disputed frontier with South Yemen (Aden).
Bayer AG: German chemical and pharmaceutical company founded in 1863 by Friedrich Bayer (1825-80), who was a chemical salesman, and Johann Friedrich Weskott (1821-76), who owned a dye company. Company headquarters, originally in Barmen (now Wuppertal), have been in Leverkusen, north of ...
Bayer, Friedrich: German businessman who founded the chemical firm that became the world-famous Bayer AG (q.v.).
Bayer, Herbert: German-American graphic artist, painter, and architect, influential in spreading European principles of advertising in the United States.
Bayer, Johann: German astronomer whose book Uranometria (1603) promulgated a system of identifying all stars visible to the naked eye.
Bayerische Motoren Werke AG: German automaker noted for quality sports sedans and motorcycles. Headquarters are in Munich.
Bayes's theorem: in probability theory, a means for revising predictions in light of relevant evidence, also known as conditional probability or inverse probability. The theorem was discovered among the papers of the English Presbyterian minister and mathematician Thomas Bayes and published posthumously ...
Bayes, Nora: American singer in vogue in the early 1900s in musical revues, notably the Ziegfeld Follies.
Bayes, Thomas: English Nonconformist theologian and mathematician who was the first to use probability inductively and who established a mathematical basis for probability inference (a means of calculating, from the frequency with which an event has occurred in prior trials, the probability ...
Bayeu, Francisco: painter, the brother-in-law of Francisco de Goya and court painter to King Charles III of Spain. Considered by his contemporaries to be the finest Spanish painter of the period, he was greatly influenced by Anton Raphael Mengs and the Italian ...
Bayeux: town, Calvados departement, Basse-Normandie region, northwestern France, on the Aure River, northwest of Caen. As Bajocasses, it was a capital of the Gauls, then, as Augustodurum and, later, Civitas Baiocassium, it was an important Roman city that became a bishopric ...
Bayeux Tapestry: medieval embroidery depicting the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, remarkable as a work of art and important as a source for 11th-century history.
Bayezid I: Ottoman sultan in 1389-1402 who founded the first centralized Ottoman state based on traditional Turkish and Muslim institutions and who stressed the need to extend Ottoman dominion in Anatolia.
Bayezid II: Ottoman sultan (1481-1512) who consolidated Ottoman rule in the Balkans, Anatolia, and the eastern Mediterranean and successfully opposed the Safavid dynasty of Persia.
Bayinnaung: king of the Toungoo dynasty (reigned 1551-81) in Myanmar (Burma). He unified his country and conquered the Shan States and Siam (now Thailand), making Myanmar the most powerful kingdom in mainland Southeast Asia.
Bayle, Pierre: philosopher whose Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; "Historical and Critical Dictionary") was roundly condemned by the French Reformed Church of Rotterdam and by the French Roman Catholic church because of its numerous annotations deliberately designed to destroy orthodox Christian beliefs.
Baylebridge, William: poet and short-story writer considered one of the leading writers of Australia in his day.
Baylis, Lilian Mary: theatrical manager and founder of the Old Vic as a centre of Shakespearean productions.
Bayliss, Sir William Maddock: British physiologist, co-discoverer (with the British physiologist Ernest Starling) of hormones; he conducted pioneer research in major areas of physiology, biochemistry, and physical chemistry.
Baylor University: private, coeducational institution of higher learning located in Waco, Texas, U.S. Baylor, affiliated with the Baptist General Convention of Texas, is the world's largest Baptist university and the oldest college in Texas. The university offers about 160 bachelor's, 75 master's, ...
Baylor, Elgin: U.S. professional basketball player (6 ft 5 in) who is regarded as one of the game's greatest forwards. His graceful style enabled him to score and rebound with seeming ease.
Baynes, Thomas Spencer: man of letters who was editor of the ninth edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica up to and including the 11th volume and who thereafter continued the work in partnership with William Robertson Smith. Bold and progressive in his planning of the ...
bayonet: short, sharp-edged, sometimes pointed weapon, designed for attachment to the muzzle of a firearm and developed, according to tradition, in Bayonne, Fr., early in the 17th century. The Marechal de Puysegur described the earliest bayonets as having a straight, double-edged ...
Bayonne: town, Pyrenees-Atlantiques departement, Aquitaine region, southwestern France, at the confluence of the Nive with the Adour River, 5 miles (8 km) from its mouth. With Biarritz, the noted Atlantic resort, it forms an extended ...
Bayonne: city, Hudson county, northeastern New Jersey, U.S., on a 3-mile (5-km) peninsula between Newark and Upper New York bays, adjacent to Jersey City, New Jersey, and within the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Bayonne is connected with ...
Bayreuth: city, Bavaria Land (state), east-central Germany. It lies on the Roter (Red) Main River between the Fichtelgebirge (mountainous plateau) and the Franconian Jura Mountains, northeast of Nurnberg.
Bayswater: neighbourhood in the Paddington district of Westminster, London. It lies west of Edgware Road and north of Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park.
Baytown: city, Harris county, southeastern Texas, U.S., at the mouth of the San Jacinto River on Galveston Bay, 22 miles (35 km) east of Houston. The area was settled in 1822; in 1864 a Confederate shipyard was built at Goose Creek. ...
Baza: city, Granada province, in the autonomous community (region) of Andalusia, southern Spain, at the foot of the Sierra de Baza, northeast of Granada city. The city contains the ruins of a Moorish fort (alcazaba), and the Gothic collegiate church of ...