Skip this Advertisement

A-Z Browse

  • real contract (Roman law)
    If an agreement was not clothed in the form of a stipulation, it must, to be valid, fall under one of the types of real or consensual contracts. A real contract was one requiring that something should be transferred from one party to the other and that the obligation arising should be for the return of that thing. Real contracts included loans of money, loans of goods, deposits, and pledges.......
  • Real, Cordillera (mountains, Bolivia)
    major mountain system, the easternmost of the two in Bolivia. It extends generally north-south for about 750 miles (1,200 km) through the length of the country. The Cordillera Real separates the lowlands of the Amazon River basin to the east from the high plateaus of the Altiplano to the west. The Cordillera Real contains within its ranges two characteristic physiographic region...
  • Real, Cordillera (mountains, Colombia)
    ...but rather a succession of parallel and transverse mountain ranges, or cordilleras, and of intervening plateaus and depressions. Distinct eastern and western ranges—respectively named the Cordillera Oriental and the Cordillera Occidental—are characteristic of most of the system. The directional trend of both the cordilleras generally is north-south, but in several places the......
  • real covenant (law)
    in Anglo-American property law, an agreement limiting the use of property. Known to Roman law but little used in England or the United States until the 19th century, restrictive covenants are now widely used. To protect property values and provide neighbourhood stability, residential developments commonly include covenants prohibiting nonresidential uses of th...
  • Real Cuerpo de Minería (Mexican mining guild)
    (Spanish: “Royal Mining Company”), guild of mine owners in the Spanish colonies in the Americas. The guild was set up by royal decree in 1777 in the Viceroyalty of New Spain (Mexico) to reorganize and to provide capital for technological improvements in the mining industry. The guild drew up new mining ordinances that were approved by King Charles III in 1783 and w...
  • real definition
    ...used to discover unchanging forms through the method of dialectic, which Plato inherited from his teacher Socrates. The method involves a process of question and answer designed to elicit a “real definition.” By a real definition Plato means a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that exactly determine the entities to which a given concept applies. The entities to which the....
  • Real del Monte (mine, Mexico)
    ...silver mines are said to have been worked in the area in pre-Columbian times. The Spanish founded the city—one of the first settlements in New Spain—in 1534 and took over the mines. The Real del Monte mine, begun in 1739 and still in operation, is one of the most extensive mining properties in the world. The patio, or Mexican, process of separating silver from the ore by......
  • real earnings (economics)
    The rise of real earnings may be traced by comparing the movements of earnings in money with those of an index number of the prices of the articles on which pay is typically expended. Such comparisons indicate that between 1860 and 1960 the real earnings of manual workers rose fourfold in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom; more than fivefold in the United States; and more than sevenfold......
  • real estate
    a basic division of property in English common law, roughly corresponding to the division between immovables and movables in civil law. At common law most interests in land and fixtures (such as permanent buildings) were classified as real-property interests. Leasehold interests in land, however, together with interests in tangible movables (e.g., goods, animals, or merchandise) and interests in i...
  • real estate agent
    ...other hand, has no possession of the object of sale but is empowered to make contracts for the purchase or sale of personal property on behalf of his principal. More limited are the powers of the real estate agent, who may show the land and state the asking price to the potential buyer without ordinarily being empowered to make further representations. The store salesman is similarly......
  • real evidence (law)
    The remaining form of evidence is so-called real evidence, also known as demonstrative or objective evidence. This is naturally the most direct evidence, since the objects in question are inspected by the judge or jury themselves. Problems arise in this area over who is obliged to present objects for inspection or to actually undergo inspection. The use of the jury system in Anglo-American law......
  • real exchange rate (economics)
    ...do not care about the nominal exchange rate (the official rate set by national governments under a fixed exchange rate or set by the market under floating rates). What matters is the so-called real exchange rate—the nominal exchange rate adjusted by prices at home and abroad. The buyer of Brazilian shoes in England cares only about the cost of the shoes in local currency—that......
  • Real Fábrica de Tapices y Alfombras de Santa Barbara (factory, Pastrana, Spain)
    ...established by Philip IV (1605–65), operated at Pastrana near Madrid. It was not until Philip V (1683–1746) established the Real Fábrica de Tapices y Alfombras de Santa Barbara (Royal Factory of Tapestries and Rugs of St. Barbara) in 1720 at Madrid, however, that important tapestry was produced in Spain. Initially, the weavers and director were Flemings. The first tapestrie...
  • real field (mathematics)
    ...of these theorems is in the introduction of nonstandard analysis, which was originally instituted by other considerations. By using a suitable ultrapower of the structure of the field ℜ of real numbers, a real closed field that is elementarily equivalent to ℜ is obtained that is non-Archimedean—i.e., which permits numbers a and b such that no n.....
  • real image (optics)
    the apparent reproduction of an object, formed by a lens or mirror system from reflected, refracted, or diffracted light waves. There are two kinds of images, real and virtual. In a real image the light rays actually are brought to a focus at the image position, and the real image may be made visible on a screen—e.g., a sheet of paper—whereas a virtual image cannot. Examples....
  • Real IRA (Irish military organization)
    The town came to international attention on Aug. 15, 1998, when a car bomb exploded in a shopping district, killing 29 people and leaving more than 200 injured. The Real Irish Republican Army (Real IRA), an IRA splinter group, claimed responsibility for the bombing, which was the deadliest attack in Northern Ireland since the eruption of violence there in the late 1960s. Pop. (2001) 19,910;......
  • Real Irish Republican Army (Irish military organization)
    The town came to international attention on Aug. 15, 1998, when a car bomb exploded in a shopping district, killing 29 people and leaving more than 200 injured. The Real Irish Republican Army (Real IRA), an IRA splinter group, claimed responsibility for the bombing, which was the deadliest attack in Northern Ireland since the eruption of violence there in the late 1960s. Pop. (2001) 19,910;......
  • Real Life of Domingos Xavier, The (novella by Vieira)
    ...of Portuguese occupation. Many of Vieira’s stories follow the traditional structure of African oral narrative. His political novella A vida verdadeira de Domingos Xavier (1974; The Real Life of Domingos Xavier) portrays the cruelty of white “justice” and the courage of African men and women in preindependent Angola. His other works—am...
  • Real Madrid (Spanish soccer team)
    ...top foreign players. For example, the Welshman John Charles, known as “the Gentle Giant,” remains a hero for supporters of the Juventus club of Turin, Italy, while the later success of Real Madrid was built largely on the play of Argentinian Alfredo Di Stefano and the Hungarian Puskás....
  • Real Matilda, The (book by Dixson)
    Miriam Dixson in The Real Matilda (1976) argued that Australian women had suffered an inferior status, markedly below that of women in Western society at large. Her case was arguable, but the increasing volume of feminist studies more often stressed the achievements of women, though often against great odds, in many sectors of society and culture. Feminists played an......
  • Real McCoys, The (American television program)
    ...Day at Black Rock (1955) and Rio Bravo (1959), Brennan also became a television star when, in 1957, he was cast as mulish West Virginia farmer Amos McCoy on the weekly situation comedy The Real McCoys, which lasted six years and 224 episodes. He went on to star in two additional TV series, Tycoon (1964) and The Guns of Will Sonnett (1967–69). In his fin...
  • real number (mathematics)
    in mathematics, a quantity that can be expressed as an infinite decimal expansion. Real numbers are used in measurements of continuously varying quantities such as size and time, in contrast to the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, …, arising from counting. The word real distinguishes them from the complex numbers involving the symbol i, or −1...
  • real party in interest (law)
    in law, the requirement that a person who brings a suit be a proper party to request adjudication of the particular issue involved. The test traditionally applied was whether the party had a personal stake in the outcome of the controversy presented and whether the dispute touched upon the legal relations of the parties having adverse legal interests....
  • Real Plan (Brazilian economic program)
    Franco appointed as finance minister Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who put forth the Real Plan, a financial program partly inspired by a successful Argentine plan. The program stopped the government from periodically raising prices (a practice known as indexing inflation), introduced a new currency (the real) and an exchange rate that was partially linked to that of the U.S. dollar, and called for......
  • Real Presence (Christian theology)
    ...the 19th and 20th centuries the Roman Catholic Liturgical Movement put new emphasis on the frequency of communion, the participation of the entire congregation in the priestly service, and the real presence of Christ in the church as the fundamental presupposition for the real presence in the Eucharist....
  • real property
    a basic division of property in English common law, roughly corresponding to the division between immovables and movables in civil law. At common law most interests in land and fixtures (such as permanent buildings) were classified as real-property interests. Leasehold interests in land, however, together with interests in tangible movables (e.g., goods, animals, or merchandise) and interests in i...
  • Real Rights of Man, The (work by Spence)
    Spence came of Scottish working class origins. At 25 he presented to the Newcastle Philosophical Society his paper The Real Rights of Man, advocating that land be owned by democratically organized local corporations that would rent it out at moderate rates and distribute the net proceeds to the inhabitants. There would be no need for taxes. Spence maintained that men in their natural......
  • real tennis (sport)
    racket sport that is descended from and almost identical to the medieval tennis game jeu de paume (“game of the palm”). Real tennis has been played since the Middle Ages, but the game has become almost completely obscured by its own descendant, lawn tennis. Although real tennis contributed its name and scoring system to lawn tennis, real tennis is now played at fewer than 30 c...
  • real, the
    Prose that is nonfictional is generally supposed to cling to reality more closely than that which invents stories, or frames imaginary plots. Calling it “realistic,” however, would be a gross distortion. Since nonfictional prose does not stress inventiveness of themes and of characters independent of the author’s self, it appears in the eyes of some moderns to be inferior to w...
  • Real Villa de San Felipe de Austria (Bolivia)
    city, west-central Bolivia. It lies at 12,150 feet (3,702 metres) above sea level in the Altiplano region, 30 miles (48 km) north of Poopó Lake. Founded in 1606 as Real Villa de San Felipe de Austria (“Royal Town of St. Philip of Austria”), Oruro rose to prominence during the Spanish colonial period as the centre of a rich silver-mining region. It lost impor...
  • Real World?, The (play by Tremblay)
    ...saw an impressive growth in Quebec theatre and dramatic writing, with several dozen original plays being performed each year. In Le Vrai Monde? (1987; The Real World?), perhaps his best play, Michel Tremblay explored the ambiguous relationship between life and its representation in art. His libretto for the opera Nelligan (1990)......
  • real yellowwood (tree)
    ...the miro (P. ferrugineus), and the totara (P. totara), all native to New Zealand; kusamaki, or broad-leaved podocarpus (P. macrophyllus), of China and Japan; real yellowwood (P. latifolius), South African yellowwood (P. elongatus), and common, or bastard, yellowwood (P. falcatus) of southern Africa; plum-fir, or plum-fruited, yew......
  • Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (work by Pauly)
    The words “Pauly-Wissowa” are very familiar to a great number of people. August von Pauly (1796–1845), the German classical philologist, began issuing his Real- Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (“Encyclopaedia of Classical Antiquities”) in 1837. The new edition was begun by another German classical philologist, Georg Wisso...
  • Real-Encyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche (work by Herzog)
    The Swiss theologian J.J. Herzog (1805–82) gave religion its first great encyclopaedia with his Real-Encyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche (“Encyclopaedia of the Protestant Theology and Church”; 1854–68). Philip Schaff (1819–93), a Swiss-born American church historian, prepared the abridged English edition (1882–84) fro...
  • real-time echocardiography (medicine)
    ...M-mode echocardiography, however, does not permit effective evaluation of the shape of cardiac structures, nor does it depict lateral motion (i.e., motion perpendicular to the ultrasonic beam). Real-time (cross-sectional or two-dimensional) echocardiography depicts cardiac shape and lateral movement not available in M-mode echocardiography by moving the ultrasonic beam very rapidly, and......
  • real-time operation (computing)
    The design of real-time systems is becoming increasingly important. Computers have been incorporated into cars, aircraft, manufacturing assembly lines, and other applications to control processes as they occur—known as “in real time.” It is not practical in such instances to provide input to the computer, allow it to compute for some indefinite length of time, and then examine...
  • Reale (Italy)
    town and episcopal see, eastern Sicily, Italy, on terraces above the Ionian Sea at the foot of Mount Etna, 7 miles (11 km) northeast of Catania. Known as Aquilia by the Romans, the town was called Reale by Philip IV of Spain in 1642. The first part of its name is derived from the ancient Acis River, which according to legend welled forth at the death of the shepherd Acis, belove...
  • Reales Staats- und Zeitungs-Lexicon (work by Sinold von Schütz)
    ...(“New Scientific and Curious, Sacred-Profane Dictionary”; 1746–51), avoided the subject of history, whereas the German writer Philipp Balthasar Sinold von Schütz’s Reales Staats- und Zeitungs-Lexicon (“Lexicon of Government and News”; 1704) concentrated on geography, theology, politics, and contemporary history and had to be supplemented b...
  • realgar (mineral)
    an important ore of arsenic, a red or orange mineral containing both arsenic and sulfur. Typically it is a minor constituent of ore veins in association with orpiment (into which it disintegrates on long exposure to light). Realgar has been used by the Chinese for carvings, but these also deteriorate under light. It forms prismatic crystals of monoclinic symmetry. For detailed physical properties...
  • reali di Francia, I (work by Andrea da Barberino)
    The material for Andrea’s prose compilation of Charlemagne legends, I reali di Francia (1491; “The Royalty of France,” modern edition by G. Vandelli, 1892–1900), was drawn for the most part from earlier Italian versions, though the author added much pseudohistorical material and invented many exciting amplifications. His epic tale Guerrin meschino (1473;.....
  • realia (education)
    ...such materials as collections of photographs, slides, films and filmstrips, videotapes, and artifacts for work in subjects such as history and mathematics. Some school librarians use the term “realia” to describe these resources....
  • realism (philosophy)
    in philosophy, the viewpoint which accords to things which are known or perceived an existence or nature which is independent of whether anyone is thinking about or perceiving them....
  • realism (art)
    in the arts, the accurate, detailed, unembellished depiction of nature or of contemporary life. Realism rejects imaginative idealization in favour of a close observation of outward appearances. As such, realism in its broad sense has comprised many artistic currents in different civilizations. In the visual arts, for example, realism can be found in ancient Hellenistic Greek sculptures accurately ...
  • realism (political and social science)
    ...conflict resolution and adherence to international law grew more distant from the existing world of aggressive dictatorships, a new approach to the study of international relations, known as realism, increasingly dominated the field. Nevertheless, the scholarly work on world affairs of the early interwar period, despite the decline in its reputation and influence, was extensive and......
  • realism (literature)
    Led by a Realist, Domien Sleeckx, a reaction against Romanticism set in about 1860. Writing became characterized by acute observation, description of local scenery, humour, and, not infrequently, a pervasive pessimism, as could be seen in novels such as Anton Bergmann’s Ernest Staes (1874) and Virginie Loveling’s Een dure eed (1892; “A Solemn Oath...
  • realism, moral
    After the publication of Moore’s Principia Ethica, naturalism in Britain was given up for dead. The first attempts to revive it were made in the late 1950s by Philippa Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe (1919–2001). In response to Hare’s intimation that anything could be a moral principle so long as it satisfied the formal requirement of universalizability in his sense, ...
  • Réalisme, Le (work by Champfleury)
    ...then it was inspired by the painter Courbet’s aesthetic stance. The French journalist Champfleury, who had popularized Courbet’s painting style, transferred the latter’s theories to literature in Le Réalisme (1857). In this influential critical manifesto Champfleury asserted that the hero of a novel should be an ordinary man rather than an exceptional figure. ...
  • Realist Manifesto (Soviet art publication)
    ...constructions—of Vladimir Tatlin. The expatriate Russian sculptors Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo joined Tatlin and his followers in Moscow, and upon publication of their jointly written Realist Manifesto in 1920 they became the spokesmen of the movement. It is from the manifesto that the name Constructivism was derived; one of the directives that it contained was “to......
  • realistic anti-Platonism
    There are two different versions of realistic anti-Platonism, namely, psychologism and physicalism. Psychologism is the view that mathematical theorems are about concrete mental objects of some sort. In this view, numbers and circles and so on do exist, but they do not exist independently of people; instead, they are concrete mental objects—in particular, ideas in people’s heads. As ...
  • realistic art (art)
    in the arts, the accurate, detailed, unembellished depiction of nature or of contemporary life. Realism rejects imaginative idealization in favour of a close observation of outward appearances. As such, realism in its broad sense has comprised many artistic currents in different civilizations. In the visual arts, for example, realism can be found in ancient Hellenistic Greek sculptures accurately ...
  • Realistic Manifesto (work by Pevsner and Gabo)
    ...of 1917, and Pevsner became a professor at Moscow’s school of fine arts. During this period, his paintings became more geometric and abstract. In 1920 the brothers issued the Realistic Manifesto (written by Gabo, and co-signed by Pevsner), in which they rejected Cubism and Futurism and argued that artists should embrace elements of space and time by employin...
  • realistic style (art)
    in the arts, the accurate, detailed, unembellished depiction of nature or of contemporary life. Realism rejects imaginative idealization in favour of a close observation of outward appearances. As such, realism in its broad sense has comprised many artistic currents in different civilizations. In the visual arts, for example, realism can be found in ancient Hellenistic Greek sculptures accurately ...
  • Realistic Theatre (theatre, Moscow, Russia)
    ...in any way impressionistic was condemned as belonging to “abstract art.” One of the most successful directors of the time was Nikolay Pavlovich Okhlopkov, who was put in charge of the Realistic Theatre (formerly one of the Moscow Art Theatre studios) in 1932. There, he tried to find new ways of presenting plays by using multiple stages and generally breaking away from the......
  • realistic thinking
    ...within the human organism that can serve to represent absent events). If such a sequence is aimed at the solution of a specific problem and fulfills the criteria for reasoning, it is called directed thinking. Reasoning is a process of piecing together the results of two or more distinct previous learning experiences to produce a new pattern of behaviour. Directed thinking contrasts with......
  • reality
    Prose that is nonfictional is generally supposed to cling to reality more closely than that which invents stories, or frames imaginary plots. Calling it “realistic,” however, would be a gross distortion. Since nonfictional prose does not stress inventiveness of themes and of characters independent of the author’s self, it appears in the eyes of some moderns to be inferior to w...
  • reality plane (mathematics)
    With Desargues’s provision of infinitely distant points for parallels, the reality plane and the projective plane are essentially interchangeable—that is, ignoring distances and directions (angles), which are not preserved in the projection. Other properties are preserved, however. For instance, two different points have a unique connecting line, and two different lines have a unique...
  • reality principle (psychology)
    ...gratification of one’s major instinctual drives (sex, affection, aggression, self-preservation), the ego functions to set limits on this process. In Freud’s language, as the child grows, the reality principle gradually begins to control the pleasure principle; the child learns that the environment does not always permit immediate gratification. Child development, according to Freu...
  • reality show
    ...but a substitute for it, a wraparound simulated experience that has come to be more real than reality itself. Indeed, beginning in the 1990s, American television was inundated with a spate of “reality” programs, a wildly popular format that employed documentary techniques to examine ‘‘ordinary’’ people placed in unlikely situations, from the game-show s...
  • reality television
    ...but a substitute for it, a wraparound simulated experience that has come to be more real than reality itself. Indeed, beginning in the 1990s, American television was inundated with a spate of “reality” programs, a wildly popular format that employed documentary techniques to examine ‘‘ordinary’’ people placed in unlikely situations, from the game-show s...
  • Really Rosie (work by Sendak)
    In 1975 Sendak wrote and directed Really Rosie, an animated television special based on some of the children in his stories. It was expanded into a musical play in 1978. In addition to creating opera versions of some of his own stories—including Where the Wild Things Are—Sendak designed a number of other works for the stage, notably the city.....
  • realm (ecology)
    ...limits of a region are determined by mapping the distributions of taxa; where the outer boundaries of many taxa occur, a line delimiting a biogeographic region is drawn. Major regions (kingdoms and realms) are still determined as those that have the most endemics or, stated another way, those that share the fewest taxa with other regions. As regions are further broken down into subdivisions,......
  • Realm of Nature, The (work by Mill)
    It was through The Realm of Nature (1891) that he influenced the reform of geography teaching. As director of the British Rainfall Organization (1901–19), editor of British Rainfall and Symons’ Meteorological Magazine, and honorary secretary of the Royal Meteorological Society from 1902 until 1907 (when he became president), he had a profound influence on the......
  • realm, theory of (literature)
    ...1908 he published the first 21 pieces of Renjian cihua (“Notes on Ci Poems in the World”); in this work he first advanced his “theory of realm,” which asserted that a successful poem integrates descriptions of scenery and emotions. When the Chinese Revolution of 1911 broke out, Wang went with Luo Zhenyu to Japan and...
  • Realms of Being (work by Santayana)
    ...(1923) marks an important departure from his earlier philosophy and serves as “a critical introduction” to and résumé of his new system developed in the four-volume Realms of Being (1928, 1930, 1937, 1940), an ontological (nature of being) treatise of great concentration and finish. In these later works Santayana enhanced his stature as a philosopher by......
  • Realpolitik (political philosophy)
    Hastings had a natural gift for realpolitik, but he was tied to a policy of nonaggression. Much of his diplomatic skill was spent repairing the blunders of others. His major work for British India was preserving the company’s dominion against a coalition of country (Indian) powers, virtually unaided from home, at a time when Britain was itself hard pressed both in America and by a European....
  • Realschule (German secondary school)
    German secondary school with an emphasis on the practical that evolved in the mid-18th century as a six-year alternative to the nine-year gymnasium. It was distinguished by its practical curriculum (natural science and chemistry) and use of chemistry laboratories and workshops for wood and glass. The realschule became the model for educational reformers in other countries....
  • realtor
    ...other hand, has no possession of the object of sale but is empowered to make contracts for the purchase or sale of personal property on behalf of his principal. More limited are the powers of the real estate agent, who may show the land and state the asking price to the potential buyer without ordinarily being empowered to make further representations. The store salesman is similarly......
  • Ream, Vinnie (American sculptor)
    American sculptor, who is best remembered for her sculpture of Abraham Lincoln in the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, D.C....
  • ream weight (measurement)
    ...and paperboard products. From the first uses of paper in the printing trades, it has been measured in reams, originally 480 sheets (20 quires) but now more commonly 500 sheets (long reams). The term ream weight commonly signifies the weight of a lot or batch of paper. Since the printing trades use a variety of sheet sizes, there can be numerous ream weights for paper having the same basis......
  • reamer (tool)
    rotary cutting tool of cylindrical or conical shape used for enlarging and finishing to accurate dimensions holes that have been drilled, bored, or cored. A reamer cannot be used to originate a hole. All reamers are provided with longitudinal flutes or grooves (eight are commonly used) that may be straight or helical; cutting may be done on the sides of the tool, using the sharpened edges of the ...
  • reaming (juicing process)
    ...for such fruits as pineapples. In one large class of fruit, citrus fruit, juice extraction and separation from the peel are combined. Two major juice extraction systems for citrus exist. One is a reaming technique, in which the fruit is cut in half and the individual halves reamed to extract both the juice and the inner fruit solids. In the second major system, a hole is punched in the fruit......
  • reaming (tool)
    rotary cutting tool of cylindrical or conical shape used for enlarging and finishing to accurate dimensions holes that have been drilled, bored, or cored. A reamer cannot be used to originate a hole. All reamers are provided with longitudinal flutes or grooves (eight are commonly used) that may be straight or helical; cutting may be done on the sides of the tool, using the sharpened edges of the ...
  • Reamker (Cambodian epic)
    The best-known epic is the Reamker (“Honour of Rama”; Eng. trans. Reamker), the Cambodian version of the Ramayana, one of the great epic poems of India. Surviving texts of the Reamker date from the 16th or 17th century, but bas-reliefs at Angkor Wat show that the Rama.....
  • Reaney, James Crerar (Canadian writer)
    Canadian poet and playwright whose works transform Ontario small-town life into the realm of dream and symbol....
  • reanimation rite (Egyptian religion)
    in Egyptian religion, rite to prepare the deceased for the afterlife, performed on statues of the deceased, the mummy itself, or statues of a god located in a temple. An important element of the ceremony was the ritual “Opening of the Mouth” so the mummy might breathe and eat. The rite, which symbolized the death and regeneration concept of the ...
  • reaper (agriculture)
    any farm machine that cuts grain. Early reapers simply cut the crop and dropped it unbound, but modern machines include harvesters, combines, and binders, which also perform other harvesting operations. A patent for a reaper was issued in England to Joseph Boyce in 1800. In the 1830s Jeremiah Bailey of the United States patented a mower-reaper, and Obed Hussey and Cyrus ...
  • reapportionment (government)
    process by which representation is distributed among the constituencies of a representative assembly. This use of the term apportionment is limited almost exclusively to the United States. In most other countries, particularly the United Kingdom and the countries of the British Commonwealth, the term delimitation is used....
  • rear (military)
    ...three days, and one week-long series of engagements became known as the Seven Days’ Battles. Since modern weapons permitted fighting at longer ranges, gradually a situation was created where the rear areas of armies could be brought under fire just as well as their fronts. Battles, in brief, ceased to be distinct events that could be well defined in time and place and easily identified b...
  • rear projection (photography)
    ...viewing angle increases). They are therefore especially suitable for screenings in small rooms—e.g., for home movies. The glass-beaded screen is made up of many tiny beads on a canvas backing, the lenticular screen of tiny, uniformly spaced, cylindrical lenses....
  • rearmament
    ...integration when the United States, bogged down in Asia, requested a sizable increase in the European contribution to NATO. In 1951 the French and British cabinets both fell over the costly issue of rearmament before a committee managed to work out an acceptable distribution of burdens in October. The obvious solution was German rearmament, something the nervous French refused to countenance......
  • rearrangement, molecular (chemistry)
    6. Reaction with internal sigma base: acid-catalyzed rearrangement of neopentyl alcohol, the electron pair coming from an internal carbon–carbon sigma bond:...
  • rearrangement reaction (chemistry)
    6. Reaction with internal sigma base: acid-catalyzed rearrangement of neopentyl alcohol, the electron pair coming from an internal carbon–carbon sigma bond:...
  • reason
    in philosophy, the faculty or process of drawing logical inferences. The term “reason” is also used in several other, narrower senses. Reason is in opposition to sensation, perception, feeling, desire, as the faculty (the existence of which is denied by empiricists) by which fundamental truths are intuitively apprehended. These fundamental truths are the causes or “reasons...
  • Reason, Age of (European history)
    a European intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries in which ideas concerning God, reason, nature, and man were synthesized into a worldview that gained wide assent and that instigated revolutionary developments in art, philosophy, and politics. Central to Enlightenment thought were the use and the celebration of reason, the power by which man understands the univers...
  • Reason and Establishment of Studies, The (work by Aquaviva)
    ...system of education. The fourth General Congregation, which had elected Aquaviva general, entrusted him with the task of drawing up a practical code of education for its schools. This work, Ratio atque institutio studiorum (“The Reason and Establishment of Studies”), was first published in 1586, at which time it was distributed to Jesuit schools for criticism and......
  • Reason and Existence (work by Jaspers)
    ...of communicating—a method that presupposes that existence and reason are the two poles of man’s being. Reason is possible existence; i.e., existence that, as Jaspers writes in his Vernunft und Existenz (1935; Reason and Existenz, 1955), becomes “manifest to itself and as such real, if, with, through and by another existence, it ar...
  • Reason and Sensuality (work by Lydgate)
    ...poems vary from vast narratives such as The Troy Book and The Falle of Princis to occasional poems of a few lines. Of the longer poems, one translated from the French, the allegory Reason and Sensuality (c. 1408) on the theme of chastity, contains fresh and charming descriptions of nature, in well-handled couplets. The Troy Book, begun in 1412 at the command.....
  • reason, calculus of (philosophy)
    Another and distinct goal Leibniz proposed for logic was a “calculus of reason” (calculus ratiocinator). This would naturally first require a symbolism but would then involve explicit manipulations of the symbols according to established rules by which either new truths could be discovered or proposed conclusions could be checked to see if they could indeed be derived from......
  • Reason for the Fatherland (Bolivian military group)
    ...PIR). Both groups established important factions in the national congress of 1940–44. In 1943 the civilian president General Enrique Peñaranda was overthrown by a secret military group, Reason for the Fatherland (Razón de Patria; RADEPA). RADEPA allied itself with the MNR and tried to create a new-style government under Colonel Gualberto Villaroel (1943–46), but litt...
  • Reason of Church-Government Urg’d Against Prelaty, The (work by Milton)
    In another tract from this period, The Reason of Church Government, Milton appears to endorse Scottish Presbyterianism as a replacement for the episcopal hierarchy of the Church of England. A few years thereafter, he came to realize that Presbyterianism could be as inflexible as the Church of England in matters of theology, and he became more independent from......
  • Reasonable Doubt (album by Jay-Z)
    ...may also have been derived from the proximity of the J and Z subway lines to the Marcy Projects). Jay-Z and two friends founded their own company, Roc-a-Fella Records, to release his debut album, Reasonable Doubt (1996), which climbed the Billboard charts, reaching number 23 on the pop chart and number 3 on the rhythm-and-blues chart....
  • reasonable man (law)
    The standard of behaviour is external. Generally the law examines only conduct, not the excitability, ignorance, or stupidity that may cause it. The courts determine what the hypothetical “reasonable man” would have done in the situation. Such standards also demand a degree of foresight in anticipating the negligence of others—especially of special groups such as children....
  • reasonable-use doctrine (water-rights law)
    ...undiminished quantity and unimpaired quality. By the mid-19th century, however, virtually all American states had repudiated the natural-flow doctrine in favour of a second doctrine, that of “reasonable use.” Unlike natural-flow doctrine, which limited or opposed any alteration to a watercourse, reasonable-use doctrine favoured developmental use of the country’s watercourse...
  • Reasonableness of Christianity, The (work by Locke)
    ...on rates of interest, on the coinage of the realm, and, more widely, on trade (defending mercantilist views). In 1695 he published a dignified plea for a less dogmatic Christianity in The Reasonableness of Christianity....
  • reasoning
    in philosophy, the faculty or process of drawing logical inferences. The term “reason” is also used in several other, narrower senses. Reason is in opposition to sensation, perception, feeling, desire, as the faculty (the existence of which is denied by empiricists) by which fundamental truths are intuitively apprehended. These fundamental truths are the causes or “reasons...
  • Reasons and Persons (work by Parfit)
    ...of each commuter to continue driving. At least on the collective level, therefore, egoism is self-defeating—a conclusion well brought out by the English philosopher Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons (1984)....
  • Reasons of State (work by Carpentier)
    ...as in Concierto barroco (1974; Eng. trans. Concierto barroco), El recurso del método (1974; Reasons of State), and El arpa y la sombra (1979; The Harp and the Shadow). In the latter, the protagonist is Christopher Columbus, involved......
  • Réaumur, René-Antoine Ferchault de (French entomologist)
    French scientist and foremost entomologist of the early 18th century who conducted research in widely varied fields....
  • Réaumur temperature scale
    scale established in 1730 by the French naturalist René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1683–1757), with its zero set at the freezing point of water and its 80° mark at the boiling point of water at normal atmospheric pressure. Use of the Réaumur scale was once widespread, but by the late 19th century it had been supplanted by other systems. ...
  • reʿâyâ (Ottoman social class)
    The situation of the Christian reaya (literally “flock”) was not one of unmitigated oppression. Christians were exempted from military service, and in some regions the tax burden was lighter than it had been previously, although they were taxed more heavily than the Muslim population. It was even possible for subject peoples to rise within the......
Skip this Advertisement

Link to this article and share the full text with the readers of your Web site or blog-post.

If you think a reference to this article on "" will enhance your Web site, blog-post, or any other web-content, then feel free to link to this article, and your readers will gain full access to the full article, even if they do not subscribe to our service.

You may want to use the HTML code fragment provided below.

copy link

We welcome your comments. Any revisions or updates suggested for this article will be reviewed by our editorial staff. Contact us here.

Regular users of Britannica may notice that this comments feature is less robust than in the past. This is only temporary, while we make the transition to a dramatically new and richer site. The functionality of the system will be restored soon.

The Britannica Store
A-Z Browse

Image preview