Encyclopædia Britannica Australia -

Encyclopedias since 1768

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West Malaysia ... Western European Union

West Malaysia: wing of the 13-state federation of Malaysia. It occupies the southern half of the Malay Peninsula and is separated from East Malaysia by the South China Sea. Formerly the Federation of Malaya (1948-63), it contains the bulk of Malaysia's population ...
West Memphis: city, Crittenden county, eastern Arkansas, U.S. It lies along the west bank of the Mississippi River opposite Memphis, Tennessee (with which it is linked by bridges). It was founded in 1910 as a logging camp, near the site of Fort ...
West Midlands: metropolitan county of England, comprising seven metropolitan boroughs: the city of Birmingham (England's second largest city), the city of Coventry, and the boroughs of Dudley, Sandwell, Solihull, Walsall, and Wolverhampton. The metropolitan county incorporates parts of three historic counties. In ...
West New York: town, Hudson county, northeastern New Jersey, U.S. It lies along the Hudson River, adjacent to Weehawken. The area, originally settled by the Dutch in 1790, was alternately a part of Guttenberg and North Bergen until 1898, when it was detached ...
West Nile virus: virus belonging to the family Flaviviridae, related to viruses that can cause yellow fever and dengue and more closely to viruses that can cause encephalitis (inflammation of the brain). Predominantly an infection of birds, West Nile virus is highly fatal ...
West Orange: township (town), Essex county, northeastern New Jersey, U.S., about 4 miles (6 km) northwest of Newark. It was part of Orange until set off in 1863 as the township of Fairmount (later renamed West Orange). The town is widely known ...
West Oxfordshire: district, administrative and historic county of Oxfordshire, south-central England, encompassing a mainly rural area in the western part of the county. The Cotswold Hills extend into the northwest, and the clay valley predominates in the rest of the district and ...
West Palm Beach: city, seat (1909) of Palm Beach county, southeastern Florida, U.S. It is situated along the western shore of Lake Worth (part of the Intracoastal Waterway), a lagoon separated from the Atlantic Ocean to the east by a barrier island, about ...
West Plains: city, seat (1858) of Howell county, south-central Missouri, U.S. It is situated in the Ozark Mountains, near the Arkansas state line, about 100 miles (160 km) east-southeast of Springfield. Laid out in 1858, it developed as a trade centre for ...
West Point: city, seat (1874) of Clay county, eastern Mississippi, U.S., 47 miles (76 km) south of Tupelo. With Columbus and Starkville it forms the Golden Triangle industrial region. It was developed on land known as "the Granary of Dixie," which was ...
West Scotia Basin: submarine trough of the Scotia Sea, an arm of the South Atlantic Ocean, about 500 miles (800 km) southeast of Tierra del Fuego, South America. Its mean depth is about 9,800 feet (3,000 m), and it is some 700 miles ...
West Seneca: town (township), Erie county, western New York, U.S. It lies immediately southeast of Buffalo, in the lee of Lake Erie. It was settled in 1842 by the Ebenezer Society Amana colonies, a German religious sect that purchased 5,000 acres (2,000 ...
West Siberian Plain: one of the world's largest regions of continuous flatland, central Russia. It occupies an area of nearly 1,200,000 square miles (3,000,000 square km) between the Ural Mountains in the west and the Yenisey River Valley in the east. On the ...
West Somerset: district, administrative and historic county of Somerset, southwestern England, on the southern shore of the Bristol Channel. West Somerset district is an elevated area of moors and wooded hills including the Quantock Hills, the Brendon Hills, and Exmoor, except for ...
West Spitsbergen: largest island of the Spitsbergen group of islands in the Arctic Ocean, and part of Norway. The Spitsbergen group (area 23,641 square miles [61,230 square km]) is itself the main group of the Svalbard archipelago.
West Springfield: town (township), Hampden county, southwestern Massachusetts, U.S. It lies along the Westfield and Connecticut rivers opposite Springfield and Chicopee. It was settled about 1660 and incorporated in 1774. The town's common, where insurgents drilled during Shays's Rebellion (1786-87) of dissident ...
West Sussex: administrative county of southern England, bordering the English Channel. West Sussex lies within the historic county of Sussex, except for a small area in the north around Gatwick Airport, which belongs to the historic county of Surrey. It comprises seven ...
West Vancouver: district municipality forming a suburb of Vancouver, southwestern British Columbia, Canada. It lies on the north side of the entrance to Burrard Inlet, across from the city of Vancouver. West Vancouver is an almost exclusively residential community adjacent to North ...
West Virginia: constituent state of the United States of America. Admitted to the Union as the 35th state in 1863, it is a relatively small state, with an area of 24,232 square miles (62,761 square kilometres). It is bordered by Pennsylvania to ...
West Virginia University: public, coeducational institution of higher learning, one of the two state universities of West Virginia, U.S.; the other is Marshall University. West Virginia University, a land-grant college, is located on two campuses in Morgantown. The university was established in 1867 ...
West Wiltshire: district, administrative and historic county of Wiltshire, southern England, in the west-central part of the county, some 15 miles (24 km) southeast of Bristol. West Wiltshire consists of chalk uplands at elevations of more than 600 feet (185 metres). The ...
West Wyalong: town, south-central New South Wales, Australia, in the fertile Riverina district. Founded as a gold-mining settlement in 1895, it was originally known as Main Camp to distinguish it from Wyalong (3 miles [5 km] away). Proclaimed a town in 1900, ...
West Yorkshire: metropolitan county of northern England, comprising five metropolitan boroughs: Calderdale, Kirklees, and the city of Bradford in the west and the cities of Leeds and Wakefield in the east. From 1974 to 1986 West Yorkshire was an administrative unit. In ...
West, Benjamin: American-born painter of historical, religious, and mythological subjects who had a profound influence on the development of historical painting in Britain. He was historical painter to George III (1772-1801) and a founder of the Royal Academy (1768), of which in ...
West, Cornel: American philosopher, scholar of African American studies, and political activist. His influential book Race Matters (1993) lamented what he saw as the spiritual impoverishment of the African American underclass and critically examined the "crisis of black leadership" ...
West, Dame Rebecca: British journalist, novelist, and critic, who was perhaps best known for her reports on the Nurnberg trials of war criminals (1945-46).
West, Dorothy: American writer who explored the aspirations and conflicts of middle-class African Americans in many of her works and was one of the last surviving members of the prominent group of black artists, writers, and musicians who flourished in New York ...
West, Jessamyn: American writer, a master of the short story and an accomplished novelist, who wrote with particular sensitivity about mother-daughter relationships. She is perhaps best remembered for The Friendly Persuasion (1945), which gathered stories that reflect her Quaker ...
West, Mae: American stage and film actress, a sex symbol whose frank sensuality, languid postures, and blase wisecracking became her trademarks. She usually portrayed women who accepted their lives of dubious virtue with flippant good humour.
West, Morris: Australian novelist noted for such best-sellers as The Devil's Advocate (1959) and The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963).
West, Nathanael: American writer best known for satiric novels of the 1930s.
West, The: region, western U.S., mostly west of the Great Plains and including, by federal-government definition, Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. Virtually every part of the United States except the Eastern Seaboard has ...
Westbury: town ("parish"), West Wiltshire district, administrative and historic county of Wiltshire, southern England. It was noted as "Westberie a royal manor" in Domesday Book (1086), the record of the land survey ordered by William the Conqueror. The first mention of ...
Westchester: county, southeastern New York state, U.S., lying just north of New York City. It consists of a hilly region bounded to the east by Connecticut, to the southeast by Long Island Sound, and to the west by the Hudson River.
Westcott, Brooke Foss: Anglican bishop of Durham, Eng., and biblical scholar who collaborated with Fenton J.A. Hort on an influential critical edition of the Greek text of the New Testament.
Westcott, Edward Noyes: American novelist and banker whose posthumously published novel David Harum: A Story of American Life (1898) was immensely popular.
Westdeutsche Landesbank Girozentrale: major German commercial and investment bank. Its owners (guarantors) are the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, the Regional Associations of the Rhineland and Westphalia-Lippe, and the Savings Banks and Giro Associations of the Rhineland and Westphalia-Lippe. Its headquarters are in Dusseldorf.
Westerbork: small Jewish transit camp in World War II, located near the village of Westerbork in the rural northeastern Netherlands. The Dutch government originally set up the camp in 1939 to accommodate Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, but after the Germans ...
Westerly: town (township), Washington county, southwestern Rhode Island, U.S. It lies along the Pawcatuck River across from Pawcatuck, Connecticut. The state's westernmost town-hence the name-it includes the villages of Westerly, Bradford, White Rock, and Potter Hill and the resorts of Weekapaug, ...
Westermann, Diedrich: German scholar of African languages and culture who refined and extended the work of Carl Meinhof, his teacher. Westermann specialized in the languages of an enormously complex linguistic region extending from the Senegal River eastward to the upper reaches of ...
Westermarck, Edward: Finnish sociologist, philosopher, and anthropologist who denied the widely held view that early humans had lived in a state of promiscuity and instead theorized that the original form of human sexual attachment had been monogamy. He asserted that primitive marriage ...
western: a genre of novels and short stories, motion pictures, and television and radio shows that are set in the American West, usually in the period from the 1850s to the end of the 19th century. Though basically an American creation, ...
Western Africa: region lying south of the Sahara and east and north of the Atlantic Ocean. It is latitudinally divided into two parallel belts of land: the western portion of the Sudan, a geographic area that stretches across the entire width of ...
western Africa, history of: history of the region from the 11th century to the present.
Western Air Lines, Inc.: former American airline that was first incorporated in 1925 as Western Air Express, Inc., reincorporated in 1928 as Western Air Express Corp., and renamed Western Air Lines in 1941. The airline was acquired by Delta Air Lines, Inc. (q.v.), in ...
Western Australia: state of western Australia, occupying that part of the continent most isolated from the major cultural centres of the east. Western Australia is bounded on the north by the Timor Sea, on the northwest and west by the Indian Ocean, ...
Western Cape: province, Republic of South Africa, situated in the southern extremity of the African continent. The provincial capital, Cape Town, is also the nation's legislative capital. Western Cape province was part of former Cape of Good Hope province until 1994. Coastline ...
Western Chin: a phase of the Chin dynasty, ruling China from AD 265 to 317. See Chin dynasty.
Western Dvina River: major river of Latvia and northern Belarus. It rises in the Valdai Hills and flows 632 miles (1,020 km) in a great arc south and southwest through Russia and Belarus and then turns northwest prior to crossing Latvia. It discharges ...
Western Electric Company Inc.: American telecommunications manufacturer that throughout most of its history was under the control of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T). The company was dissolved as a separate subsidiary in 1983 with the breakup of AT&T, though the Western Electric ...
Western European Union: association of 10 countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom) that operates as a forum for the coordination of matters of European security and defense. It contributed to the creation of the ...