Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) manor house, dwelling house of the feudal lord of a manor, occupied by him only on occasional visits if he held many manors. Although not built specifically for fortification as castles were, many man...

(Encyclopedia) Rupert House, village, W Que., Canada, on the Rupert River east of its mouth on James Bay. It was founded in 1668 as Charles Fort by the trader des Groseilliers, whose success there led to the incorpo...

(Encyclopedia) white dwarf, in astronomy, a type of star that is abnormally faint for its white-hot temperature (see mass-luminosity relation). Typically, a white dwarf star has the mass of the sun and the radius of...

(Encyclopedia) white lead, heavy, white substance, poisonous, insoluble in water, extensively used as a white pigment and base in paints. It is one of the oldest paint pigments used by humans. Chemically, it is basi...

(Encyclopedia) Holland House, residence of the Holland family in Kensington, London, made famous in the first 40 years of the 19th cent. by the hospitality of Henry Fox, 3d Baron Holland, and his wife. Built in 1606...

(Encyclopedia) white-eye, common name for warblerlike, arboreal birds, including 85 species in the family Zosteropidae, and for certain species of ducks. The members of Zosteropidae, with the exception of a few spec...

(Encyclopedia) sod house, house with walls made of strips of sod laid horizontally in courses like bricks. Sod houses were common in the frontier days on the western plains of the United States, where wood and stone...

(Encyclopedia) settlement house, neighborhood welfare institution generally in an urban slum area, where trained workers endeavor to improve social conditions, particularly by providing community services and promot...

(Encyclopedia) White Mountains, part of the Appalachian system, N N.H. and SW Maine, rising to 6,288 ft (1,917 m) at Mt. Washington in the Presidential Range and to 5,249 ft (1,600 m) at Mt. Lafayette in the Francon...

(Encyclopedia) White River. 1 River, c.690 mi (1,110 km) long, rising in the Boston Mts., NW Ark., and flowing first N into SW Missouri, then generally SE through NE Arkansas to the Mississippi River. Its chief trib...