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West Yorkshire

(Encyclopedia)West Yorkshire, former metropolitan county, N central England. Created in the 1974 local government reorganization, the county largely embraced the Leeds conurbation and comprised five metropolitan di...

Beaufort West

(Encyclopedia)Beaufort West bōˈfərt [key], town and local municipality, Western Cape prov., S South Africa, in ...

Head, Edith

(Encyclopedia)Head, Edith, 1907–81, American costume designer, b. Los Angeles, Calif. She began to design costumes for the motion pictures in the early 1930s, working at Paramount for most of her career and movin...

life preserver

(Encyclopedia)life preserver, a personal flotation device (PFD) intended to keep the wearer afloat, particularly in case of shipwreck. A Type I PFD will keep even unconscious people afloat in a face–up position; ...

Dutch West Indies

(Encyclopedia)Dutch West Indies: see Netherlands Antilles. ...

Danish West Indies

(Encyclopedia)Danish West Indies: see Virgin Islands of the United States. ...

Field, Cyrus West

(Encyclopedia)Field, Cyrus West, 1819–92, American merchant, promoter of the first Atlantic cable, b. Stockbridge, Mass.; brother of David Dudley Field and Stephen J. Field. As head of a paper business, he accumu...

French West Africa

(Encyclopedia)French West Africa, former federation of eight French overseas territories. The constituent territories were Dahomey (now Benin), French Guinea (now Guinea), French Sudan (now Mali), Côte d'Ivoire, M...

French West Indies

(Encyclopedia)French West Indies: see West Indies. ...

North West Company

(Encyclopedia)North West Company, fur-trading organization in North America in the late 18th and early 19th cent.; it was composed of Montreal trading firms and fur traders. After 1810 the rivalry between the Nor...