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county

(Encyclopedia)county [Fr., comté,=domain of a count], division of local government in the United States, Great Britain, and many Commonwealth countries. The county developed in England from the shire, a unit of lo...

commando

(Encyclopedia)commando, small, elite military raiding and assault unit or soldier. Although the word was coined in the Boer War (1899–1902), the role is as old as battles themselves. In 1940, when the British org...

Barnard, Frederick Augustus Porter

(Encyclopedia)Barnard, Frederick Augustus Porter, 1809–89, American educator and mathematician, b. Sheffield, Mass., grad. Yale, 1828. After tutoring at Yale and teaching in institutions for the deaf and mute, he...

Nightingale, Florence

(Encyclopedia)Nightingale, Florence, 1820–1910, English nurse, the founder of modern nursing, b. Florence, Italy. Her life was dedicated to the care of the sick and war wounded and to the promotion of her vision ...

Waldheim, Kurt

(Encyclopedia)Waldheim, Kurt ko͝ort vältˈhīm [key], 1918–2007, Austrian diplomat, secretary-general of the United Nations (1972–81) and president of Austria (1986–92). He entered diplomatic service after ...

Taylor, Cecil

(Encyclopedia) Taylor, Cecil, 1929-2018, African-American jazz pianist, composer, and poet, b. Queens, N.Y. A child prodigy on the piano, Taylor studied at the N.Y. ...

aircraft carrier

(Encyclopedia)aircraft carrier, ship designed to carry aircraft and to permit takeoff and landing of planes. The carrier's distinctive features are a upper deck (flight deck) that is flat and sometimes sloped to fu...

Brenner, Sydney

(Encyclopedia)Brenner, Sydney, 1927–2019, British molecular biologist, Ph.D. Oxford, 1954. He was director of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England (1979–86), and director of the MRC Mol...

formula, in chemistry

(Encyclopedia)formula, in chemistry, an expression showing the chemical composition of a compound. Formulas of compounds are used in writing the equations (see chemical equations) that represent chemical reactions....

collective farm

(Encyclopedia)collective farm, an agricultural production unit including a number of farm households or villages working together under state control. The description of the collective farm has varied with time and...