Encyclopædia Britannica Australia -

Encyclopedias since 1768

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Delhi Pact ... Deluc, Jean Andre

Delhi Pact: pact made on April 8, 1950, following the state of tension that had arisen between India and Pakistan in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) after economic relations between the two countries had been severed in December 1949. An estimated 1,000,000 people-Hindus ...
Delhi sultanate: principal Muslim sultanate in North India from the 13th to the 16th century. Its creation owed much to the campaigns of Muhammad of Ghur (brother of Sultan Ghiyas-ud-Din of Ghur) and his lieutenant Qutb-ud-Din Aybak between 1175 and 1206 and ...
Delhi Zoological Park: zoo founded in 1957 in New Delhi, India. Its facilities are funded and administered by the national government. More than 1,700 specimens representing at least 185 species are exhibited and bred in the 97-hectare (240-acre) park.
Delhi, University of: state-controlled institution of higher education located at Delhi, India. Founded in 1922 as a residential university, it developed into a teaching and affiliating body and is now designated as one of India's federal universities, with jurisdiction over numerous colleges scattered ...
Delia: ancient quadrennial festival of the Ionians, held on Delos (hence the name) in honour of the Greek god Apollo. The local title was Apollonia, which seems always to have been used for the corresponding yearly festival. It later declined along ...
Delian League: confederacy of ancient Greek states under the leadership of Athens, with headquarters at Delos, founded in 478 BC during the Greco-Persian wars. The original organization of the league, as sketched by Thucydides, indicates that all Greeks were invited to join ...
Delibes, Leo: French opera and ballet composer who was the first to write music of high quality for the ballet. His pioneering symphonic work for the ballet opened up a field for serious composers, and his influence can be traced in the ...
delict: in Roman law, an obligation to pay a penalty because a wrong had been committed. Not until the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD were public crimes separated from private crimes and removed to criminal courts; from that time, civil action ...
Deligne, Pierre Rene: Belgian mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Helsinki, Fin., in 1978 for his work in algebraic geometry.
Delilah: in the Old Testament, the central figure of Samson's last love story (Judges 16). She was a Philistine who, bribed to entrap Samson, coaxed him into revealing that the secret of his strength was his long hair, whereupon she took ...
Delille, Jacques: poet and classicist who enjoyed an impressive reputation in his day as the "French Virgil."
DeLillo, Don: American novelist whose postmodernist works portray the anomie of an America cosseted by material excess and stupefied by empty mass culture and politics.
delinquency: criminal behaviour, especially that carried out by a juvenile. Depending on the nation of origin, a juvenile becomes an adult anywhere between the ages of 15 to 18, although the age is sometimes lowered for murder and other serious crimes. ...
deliquescence: the process by which a substance absorbs moisture from the atmosphere until it dissolves in the absorbed water and forms a solution. Deliquescence occurs when the vapour pressure of the solution that is formed is less than the partial pressure ...
delirium: a mental disturbance marked by disorientation and confused thinking in which the patient incorrectly comprehends his surroundings. The delirious person is drowsy, restless, and fearful of imaginary disasters. He may suffer from hallucinations, seeing terrifying imaginary animals or thinking the ...
Delisle, Guillaume: mapmaker who led the reform of French cartography.
Delisle, Joseph-Nicolas: French astronomer who proposed that the series of coloured rings sometimes observed around the Sun is caused by diffraction of sunlight through water droplets in a cloud. He also worked to find the distance of the Sun from the Earth ...
Delius, Frederick: composer, one of the most distinctive figures in the revival of English music at the end of the 19th century.
Dell, Floyd: novelist and radical journalist whose fiction examined the changing mores in sex and politics among American bohemians before and after World War I.
Della Falls: series of three cascades from Della Lake to the valley of Drinkwater Creek on Vancouver Island, B.C., Can. They are located approximately 37 miles (60 km) northwest of the mill town of Port Alberni and about the same distance southwest ...
Della Robbia, Andrea: Florentine sculptor who was the nephew of Luca Della Robbia and assumed control of the family workshop after his uncle's death in 1482.
Della Robbia, Giovanni: Florentine sculptor, son of Andrea Della Robbia and grandnephew of Luca Della Robbia who, upon the death of his father in 1525, assumed control of the family workshop.
Della Robbia, Luca: sculptor, one of the pioneers of Florentine Renaissance style, who was the founder of a family studio primarily associated with the production of works in enameled terra-cotta.
della Scala family: noted family that ruled Verona during the late 13th and the 14th centuries. Although the family had been prominent in Verona since the 11th century, the founder of the ruling dynasty was Mastino I della Scala (d. 1277), who became ...
Della Valle, Federico: Italian dramatist and poet, recognized in the 20th century as a major literary figure. Little is known of his life at the Savoy court in Turin and in Milan, where in 1628 three of his tragedies were published.
Della-cruscan: any of the members of a late 18th-century school of English writers of pretentious, affected, rhetorically ornate poetry. The school was centred on Robert Merry, who belonged to the Italian Crusca Academy, and was satirized by William Gifford in The ...
Dello Joio, Norman: American composer in the neoclassical style.
Delmarva Peninsula: portion of the Atlantic Coastal Plain of the United States, extending southward between the Chesapeake Bay (west) and the Delaware River, Delaware Bay, and Atlantic Ocean (east). Encompassing parts of the states of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia (hence its name), ...
Delmenhorst: city, Lower Saxony Land (state), northwestern Germany. It lies on the Delme River, just west of Bremen. First mentioned in 1254, Delmenhorst developed around a moated castle belonging to a branch of the family of the dukes ...
Deloney, Thomas: writer of ballads, pamphlets, and prose stories that form the earliest English popular fiction.
Delorme, Marion: celebrated French courtesan.
Delorme, Philibert: one of the great Renaissance architects of the 16th century and, possibly, the first French architect to possess some measure of the universal outlook of the Italian masters but without merely imitating them. Mindful that French architectural requirements differed from ...
Delors, Jacques: French statesman who was president of the European Commission, the executive body of the European Community (EC), from 1985 to 1995.
Delos: island, one of the smallest of the Cyclades, Greece, an ancient centre of religious, political, and commercial life in the Aegean Sea. Now largely uninhabited, it is a rugged granite mass about 1.3 square miles (3.4 square km) in area. ...
Delphi: ancient town and seat of the most important Greek temple and oracle of Apollo. It lay in the territory of Phocis on the steep lower slope of Mount Parnassus, about 6 miles (10 km) from the Gulf of Corinth. Delphi ...
Delphin Classics: an edition of the Latin classics prepared in the reign of Louis XIV of France. The series was supervised by Pierre-Daniel Huet from 1670 to 1680, when he was working with Jacques Bossuet, tutor to Louis XIV's son, the dauphin ...
Delphinium: any of several tall garden flowers often called larkspur (q.v.).
Delray Beach: city, Palm Beach county, southeastern Florida, U.S. It lies along the Atlantic Ocean about 20 miles (30 km) south of West Palm Beach. Settlers from Michigan arrived in 1894 and began farming. Soon after, Japanese settlers arrived and founded the ...
Delta: city, Millard county, west-central Utah, U.S. Delta is one of the few Utah towns to have been founded in the 20th century with little involvement from the Mormon church, which tightly controlled settlement in the region. Originally an agricultural cooperative ...
Delta: district municipality, southwestern British Columbia, Canada. It is situated in the southern Vancouver metropolitan area, between the Fraser River delta and Boundary Bay (an arm of the Strait of Georgia). Though its northern section is primarily residential, much of its ...
Delta: state, southern Nigeria. It is bounded by Edo state to the north, Anambra state to the east, Rivers state to the southeast and south, the Bight of Benin of the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and Ondo state to the ...
Delta: American three-stage space-launch vehicle; its development began in 1959. The first version was capable of placing a 480-pound (220-kilogram) payload into a 300-mile (480-kilometre) orbit. In the early 1960s, Delta launched TIROS weather satellites, Echo 1, and the Telstar, Relay, ...
delta: low-lying plain that is composed of stream-borne sediments deposited by a river at its mouth.
Delta Air Lines, Inc.: American airline incorporated on Dec. 31, 1930, as Delta Air Corporation, which adopted the current name in 1945. Engaged initially in agricultural dusting operations in the southern United States and in Mexico, it progressed, especially after 1934, to transporting passengers ...
Delta Amacuro: estado ("state"), northeastern Venezuela. It is bounded by the Atlantic Ocean on the northeast, Guyana on the southeast, and the Venezuelan states of Bolivar on the south and Monagas on the west. The state consists of the swampy delta through ...
Delta Cephei: prototype star of the class of Cepheid variables, in the constellation Cepheus. Its apparent visual magnitude at minimum is 4.34 and at maximum about 3.6, changing in a regular cycle of about five days and nine hours. Its variations in ...
Delta Project: in the southwestern Netherlands, a giant flood-control project that closed off the Rhine, Maas, and Schelde estuaries with dikes linking the islands of Walcheren, Noord-Beveland, Schouwen, Goeree, and Voorne and created what amounts to several freshwater lakes that are free ...
delta ray: in physics, any atomic electron that has acquired sufficient energy by recoiling from a charged particle passing through matter to force, in turn, some dozens of electrons out of other atoms along its own trajectory.
Deltatheridium: primitive genus of extinct mammals found as fossils in Late Cretaceous rocks (66.4 to 97.5 million years old) of Mongolia. Deltatheridium, a tiny animal, was an insectivore and represents a stage of development from which the modern insectivores and perhaps ...
deltoideus muscle: large, triangular muscle that covers the shoulder and serves mainly to raise the arm laterally. The deltoid, as it is commonly known, originates on the outer front third of the clavicle (collarbone) and the lower margin of the spine of ...
Deluc, Jean Andre: Swiss-born British geologist and meteorologist whose theoretical work was influential on 19th-century writing about meteorology.