Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia)  CE5 Valerian, Valeriana officinalis valerian, common name for some members of the Valerianaceae, a family chiefly of herbs and shrubs of temperate and colder regions of the Northern Hemisphere; a ...

(Encyclopedia) Jupiter jo͞oˈpətər [key], in astronomy, 5th planet from the sun and largest planet of the solar system. Astronomers have discovered 79 satellites orbiting Jupiter, but five of those, small sate...

(Encyclopedia) bighorn or Rocky Mountain sheep, wild sheep, Ovis canadensis, of W North America, formerly plentiful in mountains from SW Canada to N Mexico. Indiscriminate hunting, disease, and scarcity of food enor...

(Encyclopedia) America, in music, a patriotic hymn of the United States. The words (beginning “My country, 'tis of thee”) were written in 1832 by Samuel Francis Smith while he was a theological student in Andove...

(Encyclopedia) tang, common name for certain members of the Acanthuridae, a family of mostly small, mainly reef-dwelling tropical fishes with compressed bodies and small mouths and teeth. Other members of the family...

(Encyclopedia) spring, in mechanics, any of several elastic devices used variously to store and to furnish energy, to absorb shock, to sustain the pressure between contacting surfaces, and to resist tensional or com...

(Encyclopedia)  CE5 Foot foot, in anatomy, terminal part of the land vertebrate leg. The term is also applied to any invertebrate appendage used either for locomotion or attachment, e.g., the legs of insects and ...

(Encyclopedia) snake, common name for an elongated, limbless reptile of the order Squamata, which also includes the xlizards. Most snakes live on the ground, but some are burrowers, arboreal, or aquatic; one group i...

(Encyclopedia) phoenix, fabulous bird that periodically regenerated itself, used in literature as a symbol of death and resurrection. According to legend, the phoenix lived in Arabia; when it reached the end of its ...

(Encyclopedia) voice, grammatical category according to which an action is referred to as done by the subject (active, e.g., men shoot bears) or to the subject (passive, e.g., bears are shot by men). In Latin, voice...