Columbia Encyclopedia

Search results

500 results found

Klaipeda

(Encyclopedia)Klaipeda māˈməl [key], city (1993 pop. 206,400), W Lithuania, on the Baltic Sea, at the entrance to the Courland Lagoon. An ice-free seaport and an industrial center, it has shipyards and industrie...

heatstroke

(Encyclopedia)heatstroke, profound disturbance of the heat-regulating mechanism of the body, also known as sunstroke. It is characterized by extremely high body temperatures and sometimes by convulsions and coma. T...

Tippett, Sir Michael

(Encyclopedia)Tippett, Sir Michael, 1905–98, English composer, b. London. Tippett studied at the Royal College of Music. During World War II he was briefly imprisoned as a conscientious objector. His strongly hel...

skin diving

(Encyclopedia)skin diving, act of swimming freely underwater. It is done with the aid of a face mask, swimming fins for the feet, and either a snorkel breathing tube or scuba [acronym for self-contained underwater ...

snow

(Encyclopedia) CE5 Snow occurs in many different forms. Among the various recognized classes of forms are (A) needles; (B) columns and groups of columns; (C) plates; (D) branched, or dendritic, plates; (E) combin...

Vadsø

(Encyclopedia)Vadsø vädˈsö [key], town (1995 pop. 6,410), capital of Finnmark co., NE Norway, an ice-free arctic port on the Varangerfjord. It is a fishing and fish-processing center and a trade center for rein...

Columbia, river, Canada and the United States

(Encyclopedia)Columbia, river, c.1,210 mi (1,950 km) long, rising in Columbia Lake, SE British Columbia, Canada. It flows first NW in the Rocky Mt. Trench, then hooks sharply about the Selkirk Mts. to flow S throug...

Thule , town, Greenland

(Encyclopedia)Thule känäkˈ [key], town (1995 pop. 627), N Greenland, on the north side of Inglefield Gulf. The name of Thule was originally attached to the main settlement for the Thule Eskimos, founded in 1910 ...

Graves, Michael

(Encyclopedia)Graves, Michael, 1934–2015, American architect, b. Indianapolis, Ind., educated at the Univ. of Cincinnati and Harvard. He taught at Princeton from 1962 to 2002. Graves was a member of the New York ...

Paterno, Joe

(Encyclopedia)Paterno, Joe (Joseph Vincent Paterno) pətûrˈnō [key], 1926–2012, American football coach, b. Brooklyn, N.Y. A former quarterback at Brown Univ., he joined (1950) the coaching staff at Pennsylvan...
 

Browse by Subject