Columbia Encyclopedia

Search results

500 results found

magpie

(Encyclopedia)magpie, common name for certain birds of the family Corvidae (crows and jays). The black-billed magpie, Pica pica or P. hudsonia, of W North America has iridescent black plumage, white wing patches an...

turnip

(Encyclopedia)turnip, garden vegetable of the same genus of the family Cruciferae (or Brassicaceae; mustard family) as the cabbage; native to Europe, where it has been long cultivated. The two principal kinds are t...

Warner, Sylvia Townsend

(Encyclopedia)Warner, Sylvia Townsend, 1893–1978, English novelist and poet. Her first published work was poetry, The Espalier (1925), but she became more generally known with two novels of gentle fantasy, Lolly ...

water moccasin

(Encyclopedia)water moccasin or cottonmouth, highly venomous snake, Ancistrodon piscivorus, of the swamps and bayous of the S United States. Like the closely related copperhead, it is a pit viper and has a heat-sen...

Venda

(Encyclopedia)Venda vĕndˈə [key], former black “homeland” and nominal republic, NE South Africa. It comprised two connected areas near the Zimbabwe border in what is now Limpopo prov. Kruger National Park bo...

Tower of London

(Encyclopedia)Tower of London, ancient fortress in London, England, just east of the City and on the north bank of the Thames, covering about 13 acres (5.3 hectares). Now used mainly as a museum, it was a royal res...

Ross, Harold Wallace

(Encyclopedia)Ross, Harold Wallace, 1892–1951, American editor, b. Aspen, Colo. He founded the New Yorker in 1925 and was its influential managing editor until his death. Ross quit school at the age of 14 to work...

right whale

(Encyclopedia)right whale, name for whales of the family Balaenidae. They were so named by whalers, who for centuries considered them “the right whales” to hunt, because they float when killed and because they ...

Great Northern Peninsula

(Encyclopedia)Great Northern Peninsula or Petit Nord Peninsula, comprising NW Newfoundland island, Canada, extending 170 mi (274 km) NE from Bonne Bay on the west to Cape Bauld at the tip; White Bay borders it on t...

Milk, Harvey

(Encyclopedia)Milk, Harvey, 1931–78, U.S. politician and gay-rights activist. When elected (1977) to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, he was the first acknowledged homosexual to win high local office in th...