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omen
omen sign or augury believed to foreshadow the future. Almost any occurrence can be interpreted as an omen. The typical omen was a natural phenomenon, such as a meteor, an eclipse, or the flight of birds. Among the Greeks and Romans the interpretation of omens was a major part of religious life and...
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Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing 1919-, British novelist, b. Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran) as Doris May Tayler. Largely self-educated, she was brought up on a farm in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and in 1949 went to England, where her first novel, The Grass Is Singing (1950), was published. Widely regarded as ...
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scalar
scalar quantity or number possessing only sign and magnitude, e.g., the real numbers (see number ), in contrast to vectors and tensors ; scalars obey the rules of elementary algebra. Many physical quantities have scalar values, e.g., length, area, mass, energy, and electric charge. Such quantit...
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wildcat
wildcat common name of Old World cats ( Felis sylvestris ) of Europe, Asia, and Africa. The wildcat resembles a large domestic tabby cat with a heavy tail; its fur is brownish to gray, with a pattern of light stripes. It can and does interbreed with domestic cats. The five subspecies are the Euro...
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Dust Bowl
Dust Bowl the name given to areas of the U.S. prairie states that suffered ecological devastation in the 1930s and then to a lesser extent in the mid-1950s. The problem began during World War I, when the high price of wheat and the needs of Allied troops encouraged farmers to grow more wheat by plo...
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hurricane
hurricane tropical cyclone in which winds attain speeds greater than 74 mi (119 km) per hr. Wind speeds reach over 190 mi (289 km) per hr in some hurricanes. The term is often restricted to those storms occurring over the N Atlantic Ocean; the identical phenomenon occurring over the W Pacific Oce...
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Alexander III
Alexander III 1241-86, king of Scotland (1249-86), son and successor of Alexander II . He married a daughter of Henry III of England and quarreled with Henry, and later Henry's son Edward I , over the old English claims to overlordship in Scotland. The great achievement of Alexander was his fin...
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cat
cat name applied broadly to the carnivorous mammals constituting the family Felidae, and specifically to the domestic cat, Felis catus. The great roaring cats, the lion , tiger , and leopard are anatomically very similar to one another and constitute the genus Panthera, which also includes ...
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Hattiesburg
Hattiesburg city (1990 pop. 41,882), seat of Forrest co., SE Miss., on the Leaf River; inc. 1884. It is the rail, trade, and industrial center of a farm and timber area. Once a great lumbering city, Hattiesburg now produces sand and gravel, steel, lumber, industrial machinery, signs, resins, furnit...
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wind
wind flow of air relative to the earth's surface. A wind is named according to the point of the compass from which it blows, e.g., a wind blowing from the north is a north wind.
Wind Direction and Velocity
The direction of wind is usually indicated by a thin strip of wood, metal, or plast...
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