Encyclopædia Britannica Australia -

Encyclopedias since 1768

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Family, The ... Fardd, Eben

Family, The: millenarian Christian communal group that grew out of the ministry of David Berg (1919-1994) to the hippies who had gathered in Huntington Beach, California, in the late 1960s. It teaches a message of Christian love based on scripture and the ...
fan: in the decorative arts, rigid or folding hand-held device used throughout the world since ancient times; it has been used for cooling, air circulation, or ceremony and as a sartorial accessory.
fan: device for producing a current of air or other gases or vapours. Fans are used for circulating air in rooms and buildings; for cooling motors and transmissions; for cooling and drying people, materials, or products; for exhausting dust and noxious ...
Fan Chung-yen: Chinese scholar-reformer who as minister to the Sung emperor Jen Tsung (reigned 1022/23-1063/64) anticipated many of the reforms of the great innovator Wang An-shih (1021-86). In his 10-point program, Fan attempted to abolish nepotism and corruption, reclaim unused land, equalize ...
Fan Si Pan: highest peak (10,308 ft [3,142 m]) in Vietnam, lying in Hoang Lien Son tinh (province) and forming part of the Fan Si Pan-Sa Phin range, which extends northwest-southeast for nearly 19 mi (30 km) between the Red River (Song Hong) ...
Fan Wen-ch'eng: minister who advised the Manchu forces of Manchuria in their conquest of China and their establishment there of the Ch'ing (Manchu) dynasty (1644-1911/12).
Fan-Tan: card game that may be played by any number of players up to eight. The full pack of 52 cards is dealt out, one card at a time. Thus, some hands may contain one more card than others. All players ...
fan-tan: bank gambling game of Chinese origin, dating back at least 2,000 years and introduced in the western United States in the second half of the 19th century by Chinese immigrant workers.
fana: ' ("to pass away," or "to cease to exist"), the complete denial of self and the realization of God that is one of the steps taken by the Muslim Sufi (mystic) toward the achievement of union with God. Fana may ...
Fana: section of the city of Bergen, Hordaland fylke (county), southwestern Norway, opposite Store Sotra Island. Raune Fjord and its smaller branches, especially Fana Fjord, cut into Fana's irregular coastline. Most of the settlements in Fana date to the early European ...
fancy: the power of conception and representation in artistic expression (such as through the use of figures of speech by a poet). The term is sometimes used as a synonym for imagination, especially in the sense of the ...
fandango: exuberant Spanish courtship dance and a genre of Spanish folk song. The dance, probably of Moorish origin, was popular in Europe in the 18th century and survives in the 20th century as a folk dance in Spain, Portugal, southern France, ...
Fanfani, Amintore: politician and teacher who served as Italy's premier six times. He formed and led the centre-left coalition that dominated Italian politics in the late 1950s and '60s.
fanfare: originally a brief musical formula played on trumpets, horns, or similar "natural" instruments for signal purposes in battles, hunts, and court ceremonies. The term is of obscure derivation.
Fang: Bantu-speaking peoples occupying the southernmost districts of Cameroon south of the Sanaga River, mainland Equatorial Guinea, and the forests of the northern half of Gabon south to the Ogooue River estuary. They numbered about 3,320,000 in the late 20th century.
Fang Lizhi: Chinese astrophysicist and dissident who was held by the Chinese leadership to be partially responsible for the 1989 student rebellion in Tiananmen Square.
Fangio, Juan Manuel: driver who dominated automobile-racing competition in the 1950s, winning the world driving championship in 1951, 1954, 1955, 1956, and 1957. He had won 24 world-championship Grand Prix races when he retired from racing in 1958. Fangio won the world titles ...
fangyi: type of Chinese bronze vessel in the form of a small hut or granary. Square or rectangular in section, its sides slope outward from a low base to a cover in the shape of a hipped roof. The
Fano: island of the North Frisian group, in the North Sea off Esbjerg, southwestern Jutland, Den. Crown property until it was purchased by its inhabitants in 1741, it supported a large fishing fleet in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was ...
Fano: town and episcopal see, Pesaro e Urbino provincia, Marche regione, central Italy. It lies along the Adriatic coast at the mouth of the Metauro River, just southeast of Pesaro. The town occupies the site of the ancient Fanum Fortunae ("Temple ...
Fanon, Frantz: West Indian psychoanalyst and social philosopher, known for his theory that some neuroses are socially generated and for his writings on behalf of the national liberation of colonial peoples.
Fanshawe, Sir Richard, 1st Baronet: English poet, translator, and diplomat whose version of Camoes' Os Lusiadas is a major achievement of English verse translation.
fantail: any of numerous birds of the Old World subfamily Rhipidurinae, family Muscicapidae (q.v.). Some authors retain these birds in the subfamily Muscicapinae. The fantails constitute the genus Rhipidura. Fantails are native to forest clearings, riverbanks, and beaches from southern Asia ...
fantasia: in music, a composition free in form and inspiration, usually for an instrumental soloist; in 16th- and 17th-century England the term was applied especially to fugal compositions (i.e., based on melodic imitation) for consorts of string or wind instruments. Earlier ...
fantasy: imaginative fiction dependent for effect on strangeness of setting (such as other worlds or times) and of characters (such as supernatural or unnatural beings). Examples include William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord ...
Fante: people of the southern coast of Ghana between Accra and Sekondi-Takoradi. They speak a dialect of Akan, a language of the Kwa branch of the Niger-Congo language family. Oral tradition states that the Fante migrated from Techiman (or Tekyiman), in ...
Fante confederacy: historical group of states in what is now southern Ghana. It originated in the late 17th century when Fante people from overpopulated Mankessim, northeast of Cape Coast, settled vacant areas nearby. The resulting Fante kingdoms formed a confederacy headed by ...
Fanti, Manfredo: one of the most capable patriot generals during the mid-19th-century wars of Italian independence; he helped the northern Italian house of Sardinia-Piedmont consolidate Italy under its leadership.
Fantin-Latour, Henri: French painter, printmaker, and illustrator noted for his still lifes with flowers and his portraits, especially group compositions, of contemporary French celebrities in the arts.
fanwort: any of about seven species of aquatic flowering plants constituting the genus Cabomba, of the fanwort or water-shield family (Cabombaceae), native to the New World tropics and subtropics. Water shield (q.v.) is also the common name for Brasenia, the only ...
Far Eastern Economic Review: former weekly news magazine covering general, political, and business and financial news of East and Southeast Asia. It was published in Hong Kong, where it was established in 1946. The magazine carried feature articles on the major developments in the ...
Far Eastern Republic: nominally independent state formed by Soviet Russia in eastern Siberia in 1920 and absorbed into the Soviet Union in 1922. At the time of the Far Eastern Republic's creation, the Bolsheviks controlled Siberia west of Lake Baikal, while Japan held ...
Far'ah, Tall al-: ancient site in southwestern Palestine, located on the Wadi Ghazzah near Tall al-'Ajjul, in modern Israel. The site was excavated between 1928 and 1930 by British archaeologists in Egypt under the direction of Sir Flinders Petrie, who identified the site ...
Farabi, al-: Muslim philosopher, one of the preeminent thinkers of medieval Islam. He was regarded in the Arab world as the greatest philosophical authority after Aristotle.
farad: unit of electrical capacitance (ability to hold an electric charge), in the metre-kilogram-second system of physical units, named in honour of the English scientist Michael Faraday. The capacitance of a capacitor is one farad when one coulomb of electricity changes ...
faraday: unit of electricity, used in the study of electrochemical reactions and equal to the amount of electric charge that liberates one gram equivalent of any ion from an electrolytic solution. It was named in honour of the 19th-century English scientist ...
Faraday effect: in physics, the rotation of the plane of polarization (plane of vibration) of a light beam by a magnetic field. Michael Faraday, an English scientist, first observed the effect in 1845 when studying the influence of a magnetic field on ...
Faraday's law of induction: in physics, a quantitative relationship between a changing magnetic field and the electric field created by the change, developed on the basis of experimental observations made in 1831 by the English scientist Michael Faraday.
Faraday's laws of electrolysis: in chemistry, quantitative laws used to express magnitudes of electrolytic effects, first described by the English scientist Michael Faraday in 1833. The laws state that (1) the amount of chemical change produced by current at an electrode-electrolyte boundary is proportional ...
Faraday, Michael: English physicist and chemist whose many experiments contributed greatly to the understanding of electromagnetism.
Farah: town, southwestern Afghanistan, on the Farah River. Usually identified with the ancient town of Phrada, it was once a centre of agriculture and commerce until destroyed by the Mongols in 1221; it later revived but was sacked in 1837 by ...
Farah River: river in western Afghanistan, rising on the southern slopes of the Band-e Bayan Range, flowing southwest past the town of Farah, and emptying into the Helmand (Sistan) swamps on the Iranian border after a course of 350 miles (560 km). ...
Farah, Nuruddin: Somali writer whose rich imagination and refreshing and often fortuitous use of his adopted language made him the most significant Somali writer in any European language.
Faraj: 26th Mamluk ruler of Egypt and Syria; his reign was marked by a loss of internal control of the Mamluk kingdom, whose rulers were descendants of slaves. Faraj was the victim of forces-including foreign invasion and domestic feuds-that he did ...
Faranah: town, central Guinea, western Africa. The town is located on the Niger River and was founded in the 1890s as a French outpost in the campaign against Samory Toure, the Malinke warrior-leader. It is connected by road with Dabola and ...
farandole: lively and popular chain dance of Provence and Catalonia. It was mentioned as early as the 14th century and, according to tradition, was taken to Marseille from Greece by Phoenician sailors. Performed on feast days, the farandole is danced by ...
Farazdaq, al-: Arab poet famous for his satires in a period when poetry was still a political instrument. With his rival Jarir, he represents the transitional period between Bedouin traditional culture and the new Muslim society that was being forged.
FARC: Marxist guerilla organization in Colombia. Formed in 1964 as the military wing of the Colombian Communist Party, the FARC is the largest of Colombia's rebel groups, estimated to possess some 10,000 to 15,000 armed soldiers and thousands of supporters, largely ...
farce: a comic dramatic piece that uses highly improbable situations, stereotyped characters, extravagant exaggeration, and violent horseplay. The term also refers to the class or form of drama made up of such compositions. Farce is generally regarded as intellectually and aesthetically ...
Fard, Wallace D.: Mecca-born founder of the Nation of Islam (sometimes called Black Muslim) movement in the United States.
Fardd, Eben: Welsh-language poet, the last of the 19th-century bards to contribute works of genuine poetic distinction to the eisteddfods (poetic competitions).