Encyclopædia Britannica Australia -

Encyclopedias since 1768

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Derby, Edward Stanley, 14th earl of ... Descartes, Rene

Derby, Edward Stanley, 14th earl of: English statesman, important as leader of the Conservative Party during the long period 1846-68, thrice prime minister, and one of England's greatest parliamentary orators; nevertheless, he has no great political reputation.
Derby, Edward Stanley, 3rd earl of: second son of the 2nd earl, succeeding to the earldom on his father's death in May 1521. During his minority Cardinal Wolsey was his guardian, and as soon as he came of age he began to take part in public ...
Derby, James Stanley, 7th earl of: prominent Royalist commander in the English Civil War, who was executed by the Parliamentarians.
Derby, Thomas Stanley, 1st earl of: a prominent figure in the later stage of England's Wars of the Roses.
Derby, William Stanley, 6th earl of: English writer and patron of the theatre who has been offered by some theorists as the true author of the plays of William Shakespeare.
Derbyshire: administrative, geographic, and historic county in the East Midlands of England. The landscape varies from the bleak moorlands of the northern Peak District to the Trent lowlands in the south, and industry ranges from tourism in the Peak District to ...
Derbyshire Dales: district, administrative and historic county of Derbyshire, England. About half of the district lies within the scenic Peak District National Park.
derebey: (Turkish: "valley lord"), any of several feudal lords in Anatolia who, from the early 18th century, became virtually independent of the Ottoman central government. After these feudatories disappeared in the 19th century, the term came to designate great hereditary landlords ...
Derekh Eretz: (Hebrew: "correct conduct," or "way of the land"), in Judaism, the decorum, dignified behaviour, and gentlemanly conduct that should characterize a Jew at all times. Rabbinic scholars have applied the notion, for example, to all aspects of family life and ...
Deren, Maya: influential director and performer who is often called the "mother" of American avant-garde filmmaking. Her films are not only poetic but instructive, offering insight into the human body and pysche and demonstrating the potential of film to explore these subjects.
Derg, Lough: lake on the River Shannon, situated at the boundary of Counties Tipperary, Galway, and Clare, in Ireland. Lough Derg is 24 miles (39 km) long and 0.5 to 8 miles (1 to 13 km) wide. It is 37 square miles ...
Deringer, Henry: American gunsmith who was the inventor of the Derringer pistol. He was the son of Henry Deringer, Sr., a colonial gunsmith who made Kentucky rifles.
derivation: in descriptive linguistics and traditional grammar, the formation of a word by changing the form of the base or by adding affixes to it. In this sense, derivation is also called "word formation." In historical linguistics, the derivation of a ...
derivative: in mathematics, the rate of change, or instantaneous velocity, of a function with respect to a variable.
dermatitis: an inflammation of the skin usually characterized by redness, swelling, blister formation, and oozing and almost always by itching. The term eczema, which formerly referred to the blistered, oozing state of inflamed skin, has by common usage come to have ...
dermatology: medical specialty dealing with the diagnosis and treatment of diseases of the skin. Dermatology developed as a subspecialty of internal medicine in the 18th century; it was initially combined with the diagnosis and treatment of venereal diseases, because syphilis was ...
dermatomyositis: chronic progressive inflammation of the skin and muscles, particularly the muscles of the shoulders and pelvis.
dermestid beetle: any member of the approximately 700 species of the widely distributed insect family Dermestidae (order Coleoptera). These important household pests are usually brown or black, although some are brightly coloured or patterned. They vary in shape from elongated to oval, ...
dermis: the thicker, deeper layer of the skin underlying the epidermis and made up of connective tissue. It is present in varying degrees of development among various vertebrate groups, being relatively thin and simple in aquatic animals and progressively thicker and ...
Dermot Macmurrough: Irish Diarmaid Macmurchada Irish king of Leinster whose appeal to the English for help in settling an internal dispute led to the Anglo-Norman invasion and conquest of Ireland by England.
Dermout, Maria: Dutch novelist and short-story writer known for her subtle and evocative portraits of colonial life in the Dutch East Indies.
DeRoburt, Hammer: Nauruan politician who was at the centre of political life on the central Pacific island for more than 30 years, notably as the first elected president of Nauru following its independence in 1968.
Derozio, Henry Louis Vivian: poet and assistant headmaster of Hindu College, Calcutta, a radical thinker and one of the first Indian educators to disseminate Western learning and science among the young men of Bengal.
derrick: apparatus with a tackle rigged at the end of a beam for hoisting and lowering. Its name is derived from that of a famous early 17th-century hangman of Tyburn, Eng. In the petroleum industry, a derrick consisting of a framework ...
Derrida, Jacques: French philosopher whose critique of Western philosophy and analyses of the nature of language, writing, and meaning were highly controversial yet immensely influential in much of the intellectual world in the late 20th century.
derringer: pocket pistol produced in the early 19th century by Henry Deringer (q.v.), a Philadelphia gunsmith.
Derry: town (township), Rockingham county, southeastern New Hampshire, U.S., on Beaver Brook just southeast of Manchester. It includes the communities of Derry and East Derry. The town, set off from Londonderry and incorporated in 1827, was settled in the early 18th ...
Deruta ware: outstanding tin-glazed earthenware, or majolica, produced during the first half of the 16th century in the town of Deruta on the Tiber River, near Perugia, Italy. Deruta ware is characterized especially by a unique mother-of-pearl, metallic lustre and by certain ...
dervish: any member of a Sufi (Muslim mystic) fraternity, or tariqa. Within the Sufi fraternities, which were first organized in the 12th century, an established leadership and a prescribed discipline obliged the dervish postulant to serve his sheikh, or master, and ...
Derwent River: river in Tasmania, Australia, rising in Lake St. Clair on the central plateau and flowing 113 miles (182 km) southeast to enter Storm Bay through a 3.5-mile- (5.5-kilometre-) wide estuary. Its major upper-course tributaries, the Jordan, Clyde, Ouse (now draining ...
Derwent Water: lake, administrative county of Cumbria, historic county of Cumberland, England, in the Lake District National Park. It is about 3 miles (5 km) long and from 0.5 to 1.25 miles (0.8 to 2 km) wide, and its maximum depth is ...
Derwent, River: river in North Yorkshire, England, that rises on Fylingdales Moor only 6 miles (10 km) inland from the North Sea but flows 57 miles (92 km) through alternating gorges and vales to its junction with the River Ouse. This peculiar ...
Derwentside: district, administrative and historic county of Durham, northeastern England, located in the north-central part of the county about 12 miles (20 km) southwest of the city of Newcastle upon Tyne. Derwentside was a coal-mining area, historically important to Great Britain, ...
Derzhavin, Gavrila Romanovich: Russia's greatest and most original 18th-century poet, whose finest achievements lie in his lyrics and odes.
Des Moines: city, capital of Iowa, U.S., and seat (1845) of Polk county. The city lies on the Des Moines River at its juncture with the Raccoon River in the south-central part of the state. Situated in the heart of the Corn ...
Des Moines Register, The: morning daily newspaper published in Des Moines, Iowa, one of the most influential regional newspapers in the United States.
Des Moines River: river rising in Lake Shetek in southwestern Minnesota, U.S., near Pipestone, and flowing 525 mi (845 km) in a southeasterly direction to join the Mississippi River 2 mi southwest of Keokuk, Iowa. Above Humboldt, Iowa, the river is known as ...
Des Periers, Bonaventure: French storyteller and humanist who attained notoriety as a freethinker.
Des Plaines: city, Cook county, northeastern Illinois, U.S. Lying on the Des Plaines River, it is a suburb of Chicago, 17 miles (27 km) northwest of downtown. The area was originally inhabited by Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Ojibwa peoples. Settled in 1835 by ...
Des Plaines River: river rising in Kenosha county, southeastern Wisconsin, U.S., and flowing south into Illinois through the northwestern suburbs of Chicago to Lyons. It then continues southwest past Lockport and Joliet, where it joins the Kankakee River after a course of 110 ...
Desai, Anita: English-language Indian novelist and author of children's books, considered India's premier imagist writer. She excelled in evoking character and mood through visual images ranging from the meteorologic to the botanical.
Desai, Morarji: prime minister of India (1977-79), first leader of sovereign India not to represent the long-ruling Congress Party.
Desaix de Veygoux, Louis-Charles-Antoine: French military hero who led forces in the German, Egyptian, and Italian campaigns of the French Revolutionary Wars (from 1792).
desalination: the removal of dissolved salts from seawater and in some cases from the brackish waters of inland seas, highly mineralized groundwaters (e.g., geothermal brines), and municipal waste waters. This process renders such otherwise unusable waters fit for human consumption, irrigation, ...
Desargues's theorem: in geometry, mathematical statement discovered by the French mathematician Girard Desargues in 1639 that motivated the development, in the first quarter of the 19th century, of projective geometry by another French mathematician, Jean-Victor Poncelet. The theorem states that if two ...
Desargues, Girard: French mathematician who figures prominently in the history of projective geometry. Desargues's work was well known by his contemporaries, but half a century after his death he was forgotten. His work was rediscovered at the beginning of the 19th century, ...
Desbordes-Valmore, Marceline: French poet and woman of letters of the Romantic period.
Desborough, John: English soldier, Oliver Cromwell's brother-in-law, who played a prominent part in Commonwealth politics.
descamisado: (Spanish: "shirtless one"), in Argentine history, during the regime of dictator Juan Peron (ruled 1946-55, 1973-74), any of the impoverished and underprivileged Argentine workers who were Peron's chief supporters.
descant: countermelody either composed or improvised above a familiar melody. Descant can also refer to an instrument of higher-than-normal pitch, such as a descant recorder. In late medieval music, discantus referred to a particular style of organum featuring one or more ...
Descartes, Rene: French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher. Because he was one of the first to abandon scholastic Aristotelianism, because he formulated the first modern version of mind-body dualism, from which stems the mind-body problem, and because he promoted the development of a ...