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Alger, Horatio

(Encyclopedia)Alger, Horatio ălˈjər [key], 1834–99, American writer of boys' stories, b. Revere, Mass. He wrote over 100 books for boys, the first, Ragged Dick, being published in 1867. By leading exemplary li...

Waley, Arthur

(Encyclopedia)Waley, Arthur, 1889–1966, English orientalist, b. London as Arthur David Schloss, educated at Cambridge. He was and still is considered one of the world's great Asian scholars. His most important wo...

Menotti, Gian-Carlo

(Encyclopedia)Menotti, Gian-Carlo jänˈ-kärˈlō mānôtˈtē [key], 1911–2007, Italian composer. Menotti was taught music by his mother and composed his first opera at 10. He studied at the Verdi Conservatory,...

Priestley, Joseph

(Encyclopedia)Priestley, Joseph, 1733–1804, English theologian and scientist. He prepared for the Presbyterian ministry and served several churches in England as pastor but gradually rejected orthodox Calvinism a...

inflection

(Encyclopedia)inflection, in grammar. In many languages, words or parts of words are arranged in formally similar sets consisting of a root, or base, and various affixes. Thus walking, walks, walker have in common ...

Progressive party

(Encyclopedia)Progressive party, in U.S. history, the name of three political organizations, active, respectively, in the presidential elections of 1912, 1924, and 1948. At Philadelphia in July, 1948, a new...

Esperanto

(Encyclopedia)Esperanto ĕspəränˈtō [key], an artificial language introduced in 1887 and intended by its inventor, Dr. Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof (1859–1917), a Polish oculist and linguist, to ease communication ...

Catalan language

(Encyclopedia)Catalan language, member of the Romance group of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. It is spoken by about 8 million people in Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearic Islands, and...

pidgin

(Encyclopedia)pidgin pĭjˈən [key], a lingua franca that is not the mother tongue of anyone using it and that has a simplified grammar and a restricted, often polyglot vocabulary. The earliest documented pidgin i...

Abbot, George

(Encyclopedia)Abbot, George, 1562–1633, archbishop of Canterbury. He was one of the collaborators (from the Univ. of Oxford) on the Authorized Version of the Bible and was an authority on geography. He became arc...