Encyclopædia Britannica Australia -

Encyclopedias since 1768

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Kingston ... Kirby, William

Kingston: city, seat (1792) of Frontenac county, southeastern Ontario, Canada, on the north shore of Lake Ontario, at the point where it joins the St. Lawrence River, 135 miles (220 km) northeast of Toronto. Founded in 1673 by Louis de Buade, ...
Kingston: village in South Kingstown town (township), Washington county, southern Rhode Island, U.S. It developed after 1700 at the crossroads of the Pequot Indian Trail and the road to Tower Hill settlement and served as the county seat from 1752 to ...
Kingston: city, seat (1683) of Ulster county, southeastern New York, U.S. It lies on the west bank of the Hudson River (there bridged), at the mouth of Rondout Creek, 54 miles (87 km) south of Albany. A fur-trading post was established ...
Kingston: capital and chief port of Jamaica, sprawling along the southeastern coast of the island, backed by the Blue Mountains. It is famous for its fine natural harbour, which is protected by the Palisadoes, a narrow peninsula that has been developed ...
Kingston: town, southeastern Tasmania, Australia, lying on the Browns River, which flows into the estuary of the Derwent River. First settled in 1804, the area was known as Brown's River. By the time the town was proclaimed in 1866, the name ...
Kingston Trio, the: American folk group that helped spark the folk music revival of the 1960s. The original members were Dave Guard (b. Oct. 19, 1934, San Francisco, Calif., U.S., -d. March 22, 1991, Rollinsford, N.H., ), Bob Shane (b. Feb. 1, 1934, ...
Kingston upon Hull: city and unitary authority, geographic county of East Riding of Yorkshire, historic county of Yorkshire, England. It lies on the north bank of the River Humber estuary at its junction with the River Hull, 22 miles (35 km) from the ...
Kingston upon Thames: royal borough and outer borough of London, part of the historic county of Surrey. It lies on the south bank of the River Thames about 12 miles (19 km) southwest of central London. The borough was established in 1965 by ...
Kingston, Maxine Hong: American writer, much of whose work is rooted in her experience as a first-generation Chinese American.
Kingstown: capital and chief port of Saint Vincent Island of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, in the eastern Caribbean Sea. Located on the southwestern end of the island, the town overlooks Kingstown Harbour and is sheltered by Berkshire Hill on the ...
Kingsville: city, seat (1913) of Kleberg county, southern Texas, U.S. It lies along the coastal plain, 40 miles (64 km) southwest of Corpus Christi and 153 miles (246 km) south of San Antonio. The land for Kingsville was deeded by Henrietta ...
Kingswood: town, unitary authority of South Gloucestershire, historic county of Gloucestershire, England, situated directly east of the city of Bristol. Kingswood was closely associated with the 18th-century Methodist leaders George Whitefield and John Wesley. The town of Kingswood was formerly a ...
Kinguele: waterfall and site of a hydroelectric complex on the Mbei River of Gabon. Kinguele is situated near Kango and is about 95 miles (150 km) by road east of Libreville, the national capital. There are actually two sets of waterfalls. ...
kinkajou: an unusual member of the raccoon family (see procyonid) distinguished by its long, prehensile tail, short muzzle, and low-set, rounded ears. Native to Central America and parts of South America, the kinkajou is an agile denizen of the upper canopy ...
Kinkel, Gottfried: German poet who owes his reputation chiefly to his sympathy with the Revolutions of 1848.
Kinki: chiho (region), west-central Honshu, Japan. It includes the ken (prefectures) of Hyogo, Nara, Shiga, Wakayama, and Mie and the fu (urban prefectures) of Kyoto and Osaka. Its name is derived from the Japanese terms kin ("proximity") and ki ("imperial capital") ...
Kinks, the: influential 1960s British Invasion group who infused their rhythm-and-blues beginnings with sharp social observation and the theatricality of the British music hall, becoming an English archetype. The principal members were Ray Davies (b. June 21, 1944, London, Eng., ), Dave ...
Kinnell, Galway: American poet who examined the primitive bases of existence that are obscured by the overlay of civilization. His poems examine the effects of personal confrontation with violence and inevitable death, attempts to hold death at bay, the plight of the ...
Kinnersley, Ebenezer: British colonial contemporary of Benjamin Franklin in the investigation of electricity and inventor of an electrical air thermometer (c. 1755). He also sought to find ways in which to protect buildings from lightning.
Kinnock, Neil, Baron Kinnock of Bedwellty: British politician who was leader of the Labour Party from 1983 to 1992.
kinnor: ancient Hebrew lyre, the musical instrument of King David. According to the Roman Jewish historian Josephus (1st century AD), it resembled the Greek kithara (i.e., having broad arms of a piece with the boxlike neck), and kinnor was translated as ...
Kino, Eusebio: Jesuit missionary and explorer in Spanish service, founder of numerous missions in the Pimeria Alta region, now divided between the Mexican state of Sonora and the U.S. state of Arizona.
kinorhynch: any of the approximately 100 species of microscopic marine invertebrates of the class Kinorhyncha (Echinodera; phylum Aschelminthes), widely distributed in the world's oceans. Kinorhynchs live mostly in the muddy bottoms of shallow seas and in the sand of seacoasts. They ...
Kinoshita Junji: playwright, a leader in the attempt to revitalize the post-World War II Japanese theatre.
Kinoshita Keisuke: one of Japan's most popular motion-picture directors, known for satirical social comedies.
Kinosternidae: family of turtles, sometimes considered a subfamily of the family Chelydridae (snapping turtles). See also mud turtle; musk turtle.
Kinross: small burgh (town), Perth and Kinross council area, historic county of Kinross-shire, Scotland, located on Loch Leven. The burgh, 30 miles (50 km) north of Edinburgh along the motorway (superhighway) to Perth, is primarily a residential town, with a local ...
Kinross-shire: historic county in central Scotland, which lies entirely within Perth and Kinross council area. It encompasses the basin of the lake known as Loch Leven and the surrounding rim of hills, including part of the Ochil Hills. Kinross-shire is the ...
Kinsale: market town and seaport of County Cork, Ireland. It is situated on Kinsale Harbour, at the estuary of the River Bandon. The present town dates mainly to the 18th century, but earlier it belonged to the De Courcis family. It ...
Kinsella, Thomas: Irish poet whose sensitive lyrics deal with primal aspects of the human experience.
Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction: a nonprofit corporation affiliated with Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, U.S., founded in 1947 under the sponsorship of the zoologist Alfred C. Kinsey, with whose pioneering studies of American sexual behaviour the institute became synonymous. It is dedicated to the ...
Kinsey, Alfred Charles: American zoologist and student of human sexual behaviour.
Kinshasa: largest city and capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It lies about 320 miles (515 km) from the Atlantic Ocean on the south bank of the Congo River. One of the largest cities of sub-Saharan Africa, it is ...
kinship: the socially recognized relationship between people in a culture who are or are held to be biologically related or who are given the status of relatives by marriage, adoption, or other ritual. Kinship systems are universal throughout human society, differing ...
kinship terminology: in anthropology, the system of names applied to categories of kin standing in relationship to one another. The possibilities for such nomenclature would seem limitless, but anthropologists have identified a small number of basic systems, or variants, which are found ...
Kinski, Klaus: intense, eccentric German actor of Polish descent who had a stage and film career of more than 40 years and who was best known for his riveting performances in the films of Werner Herzog.
Kinston: city, seat (1791) of Lenoir county, east-central North Carolina, U.S. It lies at the head of navigation on the Neuse River, about 25 miles (40 km) southeast of Goldsboro. Settled as a planters' trading post in 1740 by William Heritage, ...
Kinta Valley: West Malaysia (Malaya), one of the most productive and easily worked tin regions in the world. Formed by the Sungai (River) Kinta (a tributary of the Sungai Perak), the valley lies between the Keledang (formerly Kledang [west]) and Main (east) ...
Kinugasa Teinosuke: first Japanese motion-picture director to present his story from the point of view of one of the characters and thus create a subjective world in a film. He also pioneered in the use of flashbacks and in the creation of ...
Kinzie, Juliette Augusta Magill: American pioneer and writer, remembered for her accounts of the indigenous peoples and settlers of early Chicago and the Midwest.
kiosk: originally, in Islamic architecture, an open circular pavilion consisting of a roof supported by pillars. The word has been applied to a wide variety of architectural elements. The summer palaces of the sultans of Turkey were called kiosks. A type ...
Kiowa: North American Indian people of Kiowa-Tanoan linguistic stock who are believed to have migrated from southwestern Montana into the southern Great Plains in the 18th century. Numbering some 3,000, they were accompanied by Kiowa Apache, a small southern Athabascan band ...
Kiparissia, Gulf of: broad inlet of the Ionian Sea of the western Peloponnese, Greece, about 35 mi (55 km) in width. Flanking the shallow estuary of the Alpheius, the chief river of the Peloponnese, a series of large lagoons extend southward 15 mi ...
Kipchak: a loosely organized Turkic tribal confederation that by the mid-11th century occupied a vast, sprawling territory in the Eurasian steppe, stretching from north of the Aral Sea westward to the region north of the Black Sea. Some tribes of the ...
Kipling, Rudyard: English short-story writer, poet, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, his tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.
Kipping, Frederic Stanley: British chemist who pioneered in the chemistry of silicones, organic derivatives of silicon.
Kipsikis: largest tribal group of the Southern Nilotic (Kalenjin) language group. They occupy the highlands around the town of Kericho in southwestern Kenya. Like other Nandi speakers, they originated in the highlands north of Lake Rudolf (Lake Turkana) and moved southward ...
kipuka: area of land ranging from several square metres to several square kilometres where existing rock of either volcanic or nonvolcanic origin has been completely surrounded, but not covered, by later lava flows. Surface features of this type are common in ...
Kiraly, Karch: American athlete who was the first volleyball player to win three Olympic gold medals and was considered one of the sport's greatest players, excelling at both indoor and beach volleyball.
Kirby, Rollin: American political cartoonist who gave modern cartooning decisive impetus in the direction of graphic simplicity and high symbolic value.
Kirby, William: writer whose historical novel The Golden Dog (1877, authorized version 1896) is a classic of Canadian literature.