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Central Michigan University ... Cephisodotus The Elder

Central Michigan University: public, coeducational institution of higher learning in Mount Pleasant, Mich., U.S. The university is composed of the colleges of Arts and Sciences, Business, Technology, Education, Health and Human Services, and Graduate Studies. The graduate school offers master's degree programs in ...
Central Oklahoma, University of: public, coeducational institution of higher learning in Edmond, Oklahoma, U.S. It consists of the colleges of Arts, Media, and Design; Business Administration; Education; Liberal Arts; and Mathematics and Science. The graduate college offers master's degree programs in most fields of ...
Central Pacific Basin: major submarine basin of the central part of the north Pacific Ocean, between the Line Islands to the east and the Marshall Islands to the west. It occupies a large area of the north Pacific and extends westward to a ...
Central Pacific Railroad: American railroad company founded in 1861 by a group of California merchants known later as the "Big Four" (Collis P. Huntington, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker); they are best remembered for having built part of the first American ...
Central Park: largest and most important public park in Manhattan, New York City. It occupies an area of 840 acres (340 hectares) and extends between 59th and 110th streets (about 2.5 miles [4 km]) and between Fifth and Eighth avenues (about 0.5 ...
Central Powers: World War I coalition that consisted primarily of the German Empire and Austria-Hungary, the "central" European states that were at war from August 1914 against France and Britain on the Western Front and against Russia on the Eastern Front. The ...
central processing unit: principal part of any digital computer system, generally composed of the main memory, control unit, and arithmetic-logic unit. It constitutes the physical heart of the entire computer system; to it is linked various peripheral equipment, including input/output devices and auxiliary ...
Central Region Plateau: largest continuous tableland in Malawi. Its area of 9,000 square miles (23,310 square km) is bordered by the Chimaliro Hills and Viphya Mountains on the north, the Great Rift Valley on the east, the Dwangwa River on the west, and ...
Central Russian Upland: large upland area of the Russian Plain, in the central part of European Russia. It stretches in a north-south direction from the Oka River to the Donets River and the Donets Ridge. The upland has a total north-south length of ...
Central Siberian Plateau: vast upland area, north-central Siberia, Russia. The plateau occupies an area of 600,000 square miles (1,500,000 square km). It is situated in Krasnoyarsk kray (region), Sakha, and in Irkutsk oblast (province). It is bounded ...
Central Sudanic languages: a group of more than 30 languages that form a subbranch of the Nilo-Saharan language family. The Central Sudanic languages are spoken in the Central African Republic, Chad, The Sudan, Uganda, and Congo (Kinshasa). Although this division is not universally ...
Central Treaty Organization: mutual security organization dating from 1955 to 1979 and composed of Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom. Until March 1959 the organization was known as the Middle East Treaty Organization, included Iraq, and had its headquarters in Baghdad.
Central University Botanical Garden: state-supported tropical garden occupying a 65-hectare (160-acre) site in Caracas, Venez. The garden has excellent collections of palms, cacti, aroids, bromeliads, pandanuses, and other groups of tropical plants of considerable botanical interest; also important is a large, untouched tract of ...
Central Valley: structural depression in central Chile between the Western Cordillera of the Andes and the coastal range, extending for about 400 miles (650 km) from the Chacabuco Range in the north to the river Bio-Bio in the south. The valley is ...
Central Valley: valley, California, U.S. Extending from Shasta county in the north to Kern county in the south, it covers about 18,000 square miles (47,000 square km) and parallels the Pacific coast for about 450 miles (725 km). Averaging about 40 miles ...
Central Washington University: public, coeducational institution of higher learning in Ellensburg, Washington, U.S. It is one of six such institutions sponsored by the state of Washington. The university consists of colleges of arts and humanities, business, sciences, and education and professional studies and ...
Central, Cordillera: mountain range in western Dominican Republic. The core of its highlands rises just west of Santo Domingo, the national capital, and extends northwestward to the Haitian border; from it flow the headstreams of the nation's three chief river systems-the Yuna, ...
Central, Cordillera: limestone mountain range that forms the interior of Puerto Rico island. It consists of three parts. The Cordillera Central proper occupies the west-central part of the island, extending about 50 miles (80 km) from San German in the west to ...
central-place theory: in geography, an element of location theory (q.v.) concerning the size and distribution of central places (settlements) within a system. Central-place theory attempts to illustrate how settlements locate in relation to one another, the amount of market area a central ...
Centralia: city, Marion and Clinton counties, south-central Illinois, U.S. It lies about 60 miles (100 km) east of St. Louis, Missouri. Centralia was founded in 1853 by the Illinois Central Railroad (from which its name derives), and railroad shops and fruit ...
Centralia: city, Lewis county, southwest Washington, U.S., near the confluence of the Chehalis and Skookumchuck rivers. It lies midway between Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington. The town site, then in Oregon Territory, was founded in 1852 by J.G. Cochran and George ...
Centre: region of France encompassing the central departements of Cher, Indre, Indre-et-Loire, Loir-et-Cher, Loiret, and Eure-et-Loir. Centre is bounded by the regions of Haute-Normandie and Ile-de-France to the north, Burgundy (Bourgogne) to ...
Centre: industrial district in Hainaut province, southwestern Belgium. It lies in the upper valley of the Haine River and is centred on the town of La Louviere between Mons and Charleroi. The coal mines that gave rise to the district are ...
Centre: county, central Pennsylvania, U.S., located in both the Allegheny Plateau and the Appalachian Ridge and Valley regions and roughly bisected by the Allegheny Mountains. Centre county, named for its location as the geographic centre of the state, is bounded to ...
Centre Party: in Germany, political party active in the Second Reich from the time of Otto von Bismarck in the 1870s to 1933. It was the first party of imperial Germany to cut across class and state lines, but because it represented ...
centrifugal force: a fictitious force, peculiar to a particle moving on a circular path, that has the same magnitude and dimensions as the force that keeps the particle on its circular path (the centripetal force) but points in the opposite direction.
centrifugal pump: device for moving liquids and gases. The two major parts of the device are the impeller (a wheel with vanes) and the circular pump casing around it. In the most common type, called the volute centrifugal pump, fluid enters the ...
centrifuge: any device that applies a sustained centrifugal force; that is, a force due to rotation. Effectively, the centrifuge substitutes a similar, stronger, force for that of gravity. Every centrifuge contains a spinning vessel; there are many configurations, depending on use. ...
centripetal acceleration: property of the motion of a body traversing a circular path. The acceleration is directed radially toward the centre of the circle and has a magnitude equal to the square of the body's speed along the curve divided by the ...
centumviri: in ancient Rome, court of civil jurisdiction that gained distinction for its hearing of inheritance claims, through which it influenced succession. The court, instituted in c. 150 BC, was composed of three men from each tribe, a total of 105 ...
centurion: the principal professional officer in the armies of ancient Rome and its empire. The centurion was the commander of a centuria, which was the smallest unit of a Roman legion. A legion was nominally composed of 6,000 soldiers, and each ...
Centuripe: town, Enna provincia, east-central Sicily, Italy. The town lies at an elevation of 2,402 feet (732 m) on a ridge between the Simeto and Dittaino rivers, northwest of Catania. The ancient Centuripae, which the Greek historian Thucydides called a city ...
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia: dictionary of American English that is generally regarded as one of the greatest ever produced. The first edition (1889-91) contained six volumes; a supplementary Cyclopedia of Names, including personal and geographic names, famous works of art and literature, and the ...
century plant: member of the agave family of flowering plants. See Agavaceae.
Centwine: king of the West Saxons, or Wessex (from 676), son of King Cynegils and brother of King Cenwalh. His reign was marked by renewed victories over the Welsh. Centwine was described by the contemporary writer Aldhelm as a strong king ...
Cenu: Indians of the northern lowlands of Colombia who became extinct under Spanish rule. The Cenu were a tropical-forest people who spoke a Cariban language. They were agriculturists, and their chief crops were probably corn (maize), sweet manioc (yuca), and sweet ...
Cenwalh: king of the West Saxons, or Wessex (from 643), son of Cynegils. Though his father became a Christian, Cenwalh himself long remained a pagan. Soon after his succession he discarded his wife, sister of King Penda of Mercia, who retaliated ...
Cenwulf: Anglo-Saxon king of the Mercians from 796 who preserved the Mercian supremacy established by King Offa (reigned 757-796). During a Kentish rebellion against Mercian suzerainty, he tried to move the chief English see from Canterbury to London. He abandoned this ...
Ceol: king of the West Saxons, or Wessex. Ceol was the son of Cutha, who was brother of King Ceawlin. After his victory over his uncle Ceawlin at Wodnesbeorg (Wiltshire) in 592, he reigned for five years. He was succeeded by ...
Ceolnoth: 17th archbishop of Canterbury, who played a conciliatory role during the invasions of England by the Danish Vikings.
ceorl: the free peasant who formed the basis of society in Anglo-Saxon England. His free status was marked by his right to bear arms, his attendance at local courts, and his payment of dues directly to the king. His wergild, the ...
Cepeda, battles of: (1820, 1859), two engagements fought at Cepeda, in the Buenos Aires province of Argentina, during the decades of disunity following the declaration in 1816 of Argentine independence.
Cephalaspis: extinct genus of very primitive jawless, fishlike vertebrates found in Early Devonian rocks (the Devonian Period lasted from 408 to 360 million years ago) in Europe and North America. Cephalaspis, one of an early group of vertebrates called ostracoderms, possessed ...
cephalization: the differentiation of the anterior (front) end of an organism into a definite head. Considered an evolutionary advance, cephalization is accompanied by a concentration of nervous tissue (cephalic ganglion or brain) in the head region that serves to integrate the ...
Cephallenia: island, largest of the Ionian Islands, west of the Gulf of Patraikos. With the island of Ithaca (Ithaki) and smaller nearby islands, it forms the nomos (department) of Kefallinia in modern Greece. The island, with an area ...
cephalochordate: any member of the subphylum Cephalochordata of the phylum Chordata. Small, fishlike marine invertebrates, they probably are the closest living relatives of the vertebrates. There are about 20 species in two families, each with a single genus. Branchiostoma was formerly ...
cephalopod: any member of the class Cephalopoda, of the phylum Mollusca, a small group of highly advanced and organized, exclusively marine animals. The octopus, squid (see ), cuttlefish, and chambered nautilus are familiar representatives. The extinct forms outnumber the living, the ...
cephalosporin: any of a group of beta-lactam antibiotics that inhibit the synthesis of a structural component of the bacterial cell wall. The cephalosporins were first isolated from cultures of the fungus Cephalosporium acremonium. Modifications of the beta-lactam ring have resulted in ...
Cephalus: legendary ancestor of an Attic family, traditionally a great hunter. He was beloved by the goddess Dawn (Eos, or Aurora). With his hound, Laelaps (Hurricane), he overcame the vixen of Teumessus that had ravaged Boeotia. The most popular tale about ...
Cepheid variable: one of a class of variable stars whose periods (i.e., the time for one cycle) of variation tend to be proportional to their luminosity and that are therefore useful in measuring interstellar and intergalactic distances. Most are spectral type F ...
Cephisodotus The Elder: Greek sculptor, assumed to be the father of Praxiteles. He made certain statues for the city of Megalopolis, founded in 370 BC.