Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) slang, vernacular vocabulary not generally acceptable in formal usage. It is notable for its liveliness, humor, emphasis, brevity, novelty, and exaggeration. Most slang is faddish and ephemeral, but s...

(Encyclopedia) Prakrit präˈkrĭt [key], any of a number of languages belonging to the Indic group of the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Indo-Iranian). The Prakrits are usually...

(Encyclopedia) Bingham, Hiram, 1789–1869, American Congregationalist missionary, b. Bennington, Vt. In 1819 the American Board of Missions sent him, with others, to found the first Protestant mission in the Hawaii...

(Encyclopedia) Collier, John Payne, 1789–1883, English critic, editor, and forger. The marginal notes and signatures supposedly discovered by him on original documents, especially those concerned with Shakespeare,...

(Encyclopedia) King Horn, probably the earliest English-language romance, written c.1250 and containing about 1,500 lines. It is by an anonymous author and is based on an earlier work in French. Emphasizing action a...

(Encyclopedia) Vulgar Latin, vernacular form of the Latin language spoken in ancient Rome and the Roman Empire, as distinguished from classical or literary Latin. Vulgar Latin, rather than classical Latin, is the tr...

(Encyclopedia) Tibeto-Burman languages, subfamily of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. See Sino-Tibetan languages; Burmese; Tibetan language. ...

(Encyclopedia) Tilak, Bal Gangadhar bäl gŭngˈgədär tēˈläk [key], 1856–1920, Indian nationalist leader. He was a journalist in Pune, and in his newspapers, the Marathi-language Kesari [lion] and the English...

(Encyclopedia) Philistia fĭlĭsˈtyə [key], region of SW ancient Palestine, comprising a coastal strip along the Mediterranean and a portion of S Canaan. The chief cities of Philistia were Gaza, Ashqelon, Ashdod, ...

(Encyclopedia) Kahneman, Daniel, 1934–, Israeli-American psychologist, b. Tel Aviv, Ph.D. Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1961. Born to Lithuanian parents, he spent his youth in France, and immigrated to what soon ...