Encyclopædia Britannica Australia -

Encyclopedias since 1768

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vizsla ... Vojvodina

vizsla: breed of sporting dog whose ancestors were probably brought to Hungary by the Magyars more than 1,000 years ago. The vizsla can generally work both as a pointer and a retriever. Developed on the open plains of Hungary, it was ...
Vlaardingen: gemeente (commune), Zuid-Holland provincie, southwestern Netherlands. It lies along the Nieuwe Waterweg, just west of Rotterdam. An early Dutch naval victory was won nearby when Dirk IV defeated Emperor Henry III in 1037; the victories of Count William V (1351) ...
Vlach: member of a European people constituting the major element in the populations of Romania and Moldova, as well as smaller groups located throughout the Balkan Peninsula, south and west of the Danube River. Although their Slav neighbours gave them the ...
Vladikavkaz: city and capital of North Ossetia republic, southwestern Russia. It lies along the Terek River and on the northern slopes of the Caucasus Mountains. Founded in 1784, Vladikavkaz was designed as the key fortress to hold the Georgian Military Highway ...
Vladimir: city and administrative centre of Vladimir oblast (province), western Russia, situated on the Klyazma River. Vladimir was founded in 1108 by Vladimir II Monomakh, grand prince of Kiev. The community became the centre of a princedom, deriving importance from trade ...
Vladimir: oblast (province), western Russia. It is centred on Vladimir city and lies east of Moscow in the basin of the Oka River. The greater part is a low plain, with extensive swamps in the south. The oblast has spruce, pine, ...
Vladimir I: in full Vladimir Svyatoslavich, byname Saint Vladimir, or Vladimir The Great, Russian Svyatoy Vladimir, or Vladimir Veliky grand prince of Kiev and first Christian ruler in Kievan Rus, whose military conquests consolidated the provinces of Kiev and Novgorod into a ...
Vladimir II Monomakh: grand prince of Kiev from 1113 to 1125.
Vladimir-Suzdal school: school of Russian medieval mural and icon painting that flourished in the 12th and 13th centuries around the neighbouring cities of Vladimir and Suzdal in the Suzdal region of northeastern Russia. Vladimir-Suzdal, along with the city of Novgorod in northwestern ...
Vladimirescu, Tudor: national revolutionary hero, leader of the popular uprising of 1821 in Walachia.
Vladislas II: king of Bohemia from 1471 and of Hungary from 1490 who achieved the personal union of his two realms.
Vladivostok: seaport and administrative centre of Primorsky kray ("territory"), extreme southeastern Russia. It is located around Zolotoy Rog ("Golden Horn Bay") on the western side of a peninsula that separates Amur and Ussuri bays on the Sea of Japan. The town ...
Vlaminck, Maurice de: French painter who was one of the creators of the painting style known as Fauvism.
Vlasov, Andrey Andreyevich: anti-Stalinist military commander who, captured by the Germans early in World War II, became a turncoat and fought with the Germans against the Soviet Union.
Vlissingen: gemeente (commune), Zeeland provincie, southwestern Netherlands. It is situated on the southern coast of Walcheren Island, at the mouth of the western Schelde (Scheldt) estuary. A medieval trading town with emphasis on herring fishing, its importance lay in its position ...
Vlore: town that is the second seaport of Albania. It lies at the head of Vlores Bay, which is protected by the mountainous Karaburun (peninsula) and the island of Sazan (Italian Saseno, ancient Saso). Of ancient origin, it was founded as ...
Vlore proclamation: (Nov. 28, 1912), declaration of Albanian independence from Ottoman rule. After the Turkish government adopted a policy of administrative centralization for the Ottoman Empire (1908), Albanian nationalist leaders led a series of revolts (1909-12) demanding the unification of the empire's ...
Vltava River: river, the longest in the Czech Republic, flowing 270 miles (435 km). Its drainage basin is 10,847 square miles (28,093 square km). The river rises in southwestern Bohemia from two headstreams in the Bohemian Forest, the Tepla Vltava and the ...
Vo Chi Cong: strongly anti-French Communist revolutionary who was among the earliest fighters for Vietnam's independence. He held key positions in South Vietnam's National Liberation Front (NLF) and the Provisional Revolutionary Government-both political arms of the Viet Cong guerrillas-during the Vietnam War.
Vo Nguyen Giap: Vietnamese military and political leader whose perfection of guerrilla as well as conventional strategy and tactics led to the Viet Minh victory over the French (and to the end of French colonialism in Southeast Asia) and later to the North ...
vocal cord: either of two folds of mucous membrane that extend across the interior cavity of the larynx and are primarily responsible for voice production. Sound is produced by the vibration of the folds in response to the passage between them of ...
vocal fry: in phonetics, a speech sound or quality used in some languages, produced by vibrating vocal cords that are less tense than in normal speech, which produces local turbulence in the airstream resulting in a compromise between full voice and whisper. ...
vocal music: any of the genres for solo voice and voices in combination, with or without instrumental accompaniment. It includes monophonic music (having a single line of melody) and polyphonic music (consisting of more than one simultaneous melody). This article deals with ...
vocal pouch: in frogs and toads (amphibians of the order Anura), a sac that serves as a resonating chamber. Its opening into the floor of the mouth is partially closed by vocal cords; air forced past the cords into the pouch produces ...
vocal-instrumental concerto: musical composition of the early Baroque era (late 16th and early 17th centuries) in which choirs, solo voices, and instruments are contrasted with one another. Although sometimes employing secular texts, the genre is particularly associated with sacred music and is ...
vocalization: any sound produced through the action of an animal's respiratory system and used in communication. Vocal sound, which is virtually limited to frogs, crocodilians and geckos, birds, and mammals, is sometimes the dominant form of communication. In many birds and ...
vocational education: instruction intended to equip persons for industrial or commercial occupations. It may be obtained either formally in trade schools, technical secondary schools, or in on-the-job training programs or, more informally, by picking up the necessary skills on the job.
Vocklabruck: town, Bundesland Oberosterreich (federal province of Upper Austria), north central Austria, on the Vockla River southwest of Wels. The fine town square has two old gate towers and a Baroque facade, and there are two 15th-century churches and the Church ...
Vocontii: a Celtic tribe of the Gallic province of Narbonensis; its members probably lived in the western foothills of the Alps. Subjugated by the Romans (125-124 BC), they were a civitas foederata ("allied state") with two capitals-Vasio (Vaison-la-Romaine) and Lucus Augusti ...
Vodafone: telecommunications company based in the United Kingdom with interests in Europe and the United States. It originated as part of Racal, a British radar and electronics firm founded in 1950. Racal founded its Vodafone subsidiary in 1983 and won the ...
vodka: distilled liquor, clear in colour and without definite aroma or taste, ranging in alcoholic content from about 40 to 55 percent. Because it is highly neutral, with flavouring substances mainly eliminated during processing, it can be made from a mash ...
Vodou: an official religion of Haiti (together with Roman Catholicism). Vodou is a creolized religion forged by descendents of Dahomean, Kongo, Yoruba, and other African ethnic groups who had been enslaved and brought to colonial Saint-Domingue (as Haiti was known then) ...
vodyanoy: in Slavic mythology, the water spirit. The vodyanoy is essentially an evil and vindictive spirit whose favourite sport is drowning humans. Anyone bathing after sunset, on a holy day, or without having first made the sign of the cross risks ...
Voegelin, Eric: German-American political scientist and interdisciplinary scholar known for his studies of modern political thought and for his efforts to create a comprehensive philosophy of man, society, and history.
Voetius, Gisbertus: Dutch Reformed theologian, scholar in Semitic languages, and educator who upheld uncompromising Calvinist views on predestination and condemned as atheistic the rationalist thought of the 17th-century French philosopher Rene Descartes.
Voevodsky, Vladimir: Russian mathematician who won the Fields Medal in 2002 for having made one of the most outstanding advances in algebraic geometry in several decades. (See the table of Fields Medalists.)
Vogel, Hermann Karl: German astronomer who discovered spectroscopic binaries-double-star systems that are too close for the individual stars to be discerned by any telescope but, through the analysis of their light, have been found to be two individual stars rapidly revolving around one ...
Vogel, Sir Julius: New Zealand statesman, journalist, and businessman known for his bold project to regenerate New Zealand's economy in the 1870s through large-scale public works financed by British loans.
Voghera: town, Pavia province, Lombardia (Lombardy) region, northern Italy. Voghera is located on the Staffora River, just southwest of Pavia. Probably the site of Iria, a Roman colony, it was fortified by the Visconti family, whose castle there dates from 1372. ...
Vogt, Johan Herman Lie: Norwegian geologist and petrologist who pioneered in the use of physical-chemical methods in the study of the origin of igneous rocks and ores.
Vogt, Nils Collett: Norwegian novelist and poet who dealt with the conflict between the generations and the struggle for intellectual freedom.
Vogtland: physical and cultural region of southwestern Saxony Land (state), southeastern Germany, lying between Bavaria Land and the Czech Republic. A wooded, hilly plateau drained northward by the upper Weisse Elster River, Vogtland is cradled by the higher ranges of the ...
Vohu Manah: (Avestan: "Good Mind"), in Zoroastrianism, one of the six amesha spentas ("beneficent immortals") created by Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord, to assist him in furthering good and destroying evil. According to Zoroastrian doctrine, because the prophet Zoroaster was, in a ...
voice: in grammar, form of a verb indicating the relation between the participants in a narrated event (subject, object) and the event itself. Common distinctions of voice found in languages are those of active, passive, and middle voice. These distinctions may ...
voice: in phonetics, the sound that is produced by the vibration of the vocal cords. All vowels are normally voiced, but consonants may be either voiced or voiceless (i.e., uttered without vibration of the vocal cords). The liquid consonant l and ...
voice identification: police technique for identifying individuals by the time, frequency, and intensity of their speech-sound waves. A sound spectrograph is employed to record these waves in the form of a graph that may be compared to graphs of other individuals and ...
Voice of America: radio broadcasting network of the U.S. government, a unit of the United States Information Agency (USIA). Its first broadcast, in German, took place on Feb. 24, 1942, and was intended to counter Nazi propaganda among the German people. By the ...
voir dire: in law, process of questioning by which members of a jury are selected from a large panel, or venire, of prospective jurors. The veniremen are questioned by the judge or by the attorneys for the respective parties. The voir dire ...
Voit, Carl von: German physiologist whose definitive measurements of gross metabolism in mammals, including humans, helped establish the study of the physiology of metabolism and laid much of the foundation for modern nutritional science.
Voiture, Vincent: French poet, letter writer, and animating spirit of the group that gathered at the salon of the marquise de Rambouillet.
Vojvodina: autonomous province in the republic of Serbia, Serbia and Montenegro. It is the northernmost part of Serbia and Montenegro, bordered by Croatia to the west, Hungary to the north, and Romania to the east. The Vojvodina includes the historic regions ...