watt, unit of power in the International System of Units (SI) equal to one joule of work performed per second, or to 1746 horsepower. An equivalent is the power dissipated in an electrical conductor carrying one ampere current between points at one volt potential difference. It is named in honour

tungsten (W), chemical element, an exceptionally strong refractory metal of Group 6 (VIb) of the periodic table, used in steels to increase hardness and strength and in lamp filaments. Tungsten metal was first isolated (1783) by the Spanish chemists and mineralogists Juan José and Fausto Elhuyar by

Richard Quine: …last films were the thriller W (1974), which may best be remembered for providing fashion model Twiggy with her most dramatic role, and The Prisoner of Zenda (1979), in which Peter Sellers, as he had done so often before, starred in multiple roles. In 1989 Quine died from a self-inflicted…

W particle, one of two massive electrically charged subatomic particles that are thought to transmit the weak force—that is, the force that governs radioactive decay in certain kinds of atomic nuclei. According to the Standard Model of particle physics that describes the fundamental particles and

Milky Way Galaxy: Space motions: …direction of galactic rotation; and W, toward the north galactic pole. For the nearby stars the average values for these galactic components are as follows: U = −8 km/sec, V = −28 km/sec, and W = −12 km/sec. These values are fairly similar to those for the galactic circular velocity…

Adam Zagajewski: …memoir W cudzym pięknie (1998; Another Beauty), he wrote of his growing conviction that “a poem, essay, or story must grow from an emotion, an observation, a joy, a sorrow that is my own, and not my nation’s.” His second novel, Cienka kreska (1983; “The Thin Line”), explored the spiritual…

Benin: Plant and animal life: …and savanna (grassy parkland), giving way farther north to savanna. Apart from the oil and rônier palms, trees include coconut palms, kapok, mahogany, and ebony.

W particle, one of two massive electrically charged subatomic particles that are thought to transmit the weak force—that is, the force that governs radioactive decay in certain kinds of atomic nuclei. According to the Standard Model of particle physics that describes the fundamental particles and

Polish literature: Romanticism: His subtle poem W Szwajcarii (1839; “In Switzerland”) is probably the finest lyrical work in Polish. Much of Słowacki’s work was in dramatic form, and although written for an imaginary stage rather than for an intended production, it laid the foundations of Polish tragic drama. His plays showed…

star: Explosive variables: …from contact binaries of the W Ursae Majoris type, which are pairs of stars apparently similar to the Sun in size but revolving around one another while almost touching. One member may have reached the white dwarf stage. Matter fed to it from its distended companion appears to produce instabilities…

John von Neumann: Princeton, 1930–42: …of operators, now known as von Neumann algebras (1929 through the 1940s). Other achievements include a proof of the quasi-ergodic hypothesis (1932) and important work in lattice theory (1935–37). It was not only the new physics that commanded von Neumann’s attention. A 1932 Princeton lecture, “On Certain Equations of Economics…

tactical nuclear weapons: …first such devices was the W-54 warhead, whose explosive force, or yield, varied from 0.1 to 1 kiloton (1 kiloton is a force equal to 1,000 tons of TNT). By comparison, the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in World War II had yields of 15 and 21 kilotons. The W-54…

W particle, one of two massive electrically charged subatomic particles that are thought to transmit the weak force—that is, the force that governs radioactive decay in certain kinds of atomic nuclei. According to the Standard Model of particle physics that describes the fundamental particles and

construction: Steel: …as beams and columns, the wide flange, or W shape, being the most common. The widely separated flanges give it the best profile for resisting the bending action of beams or the buckling action of columns. W shapes are made in various depths and can span up to 30 metres…

Wolf-Rayet star, any of a class of extremely hot, white stars having peculiar spectra thought to indicate either great turbulence within the star or a steady, voluminous ejection of material. A typical Wolf-Rayet star is several times the diameter of the Sun and thousands of times more luminous.

Josh Brolin: Stardom: No Country for Old Men and Milk: Bush in the biopic W., directed by Oliver Stone. That year he also had a lead role in Gus Van Sant’s biographical drama Milk (2008). Brolin was cast as San Francisco politician Dan White, who assassinated Mayor George Moscone (Victor Garber) and Harvey Milk (Sean Penn), a gay-rights activist…

W. Atlee Burpee: …continued to bear his name, W. Atlee Burpee & Co. Seeking to diversify his business, he began breeding dogs and livestock and added seeds to his catalog to supplement the animal feed. Realizing a growing demand by immigrant farmers for European vegetable crop seeds, Burpee travelled abroad to find sources…

Charles Follen McKim: …most significant of these, the residence at Bristol, Rhode Island, of W.G. Low (1887). Other examples of the firm’s work cluster at Newport, Rhode Island, on the New Jersey shore, and on Long Island, New York.

W.K. Kellogg Foundation, U.S. philanthropic organization that funds community-based approaches to improving health and well-being, with a focus on child welfare. It was established in 1930 by W.K. Kellogg, the founder of a global ready-to-eat-cereal company and a noted philanthropist. The

Keck Observatory, astronomical observatory located near the 4,200-metre (13,800-foot) summit of Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano on north-central Hawaii Island, Hawaii, U.S. Keck’s twin 10-metre (394-inch) telescopes, housed in separate domes, constitute the largest optical telescope system of the

Stephen D. Bechtel: …business executive, president (1936–60) of W.A. Bechtel Company and its successor, Bechtel Corp., one of the world’s largest construction and engineering firms. Projects to which his firm and its affiliated companies have substantially contributed include the Hoover Dam, the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, the Alaska oil pipeline, and rapid transit…

Peace River: Bennett Dam (600 feet [190 m] high and 1.25 miles [2 km] long) near Hudson’s Hope, B.C., was completed, creating Williston Lake and providing the valley with hydroelectric power and flood control. The Peace is navigable from the town of Peace River, Alta., to the…

Altus: The nearby W.C. Austin Reclamation Project (the state’s first large irrigation project, completed in 1948) restored the region’s basic agricultural economy (cotton, cattle, and wheat). Altus Reservoir, the project’s chief unit, impounded on the North Fork of the Red River by Lugert Dam, lies within Quartz Mountain…

Madonna: Film career and projects of the 21st century: …as well as the drama W.E. (2011), which juxtaposed the historical romance between Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII with the fictional story of a woman in the 1990s researching Simpson’s life. Madonna has also published several children’s picture books, including The English Roses and Mr. Peabody’s Apples (both 2003).

Scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the foremost leaders of the radical protest movement among African Americans in the early decades of the 20th century. A founding member of the NAACP in 1909, Du Bois served for nearly 25 years as editor of its magazine, The Crisis, an important venue

Mr. W.H., person known only by his initials, to whom the first edition of William Shakespeare’s sonnets (1609) was dedicated: The mystery of his identity has tantalized generations of biographers and critics, who have generally argued either that W.H. was also the “fair youth” to whom many of the

Suriname: Resources and power: …dam impounds the 600-square-mile (1,550-square-km) W.J. van Blommestein Lake.

W.K. Kellogg Foundation, U.S. philanthropic organization that funds community-based approaches to improving health and well-being, with a focus on child welfare. It was established in 1930 by W.K. Kellogg, the founder of a global ready-to-eat-cereal company and a noted philanthropist. The

W.R. Grace & Co., American industrial company, with international interests in specialty chemicals, construction materials, coatings, and sealants. It is headquartered in Columbia, Maryland. The company grew out of a Peruvian land, natural resource, and shipping enterprise formed by William R.

John G. Avildsen: The lively W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings (1975) found Burt Reynolds playing an amiable Southern con man, with supporting performances by Jerry Reed and Ned Beatty.

Tim Berners-Lee: …United States he established the World Wide Web (W3) Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Laboratory for Computer Science. The consortium, in consultation with others, lends oversight to the Web and the development of standards. In 1999 Berners-Lee became the first holder of the 3Com Founders chair at the…

Tim Berners-Lee: …United States he established the World Wide Web (W3) Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Laboratory for Computer Science. The consortium, in consultation with others, lends oversight to the Web and the development of standards. In 1999 Berners-Lee became the first holder of the 3Com Founders chair at the…

Deadmau5: His eighth studio album, W:/2016ALBUM/, was released in 2016. He later composed the score for the Netflix film Polar (2019).

Wa, peoples of the upland areas of eastern Myanmar (Burma) and southwestern Yunnan province of China. They speak a variety of Austroasiatic languages related to those spoken by upland-dwelling groups in northern Thailand and Laos. At the beginning of the 21st century, the Wa numbered approximately

Mo Yan: …Me Out), and Wa (2009; Frog). Wan shu de ren (2020; A Late Bloomer) contains 12 novellas.

Japan: Chinese chronicles: …chronicles under the name of Wo (in Japanese, Wa). The Han histories relate that “in the seas off Lelang lie the people of Wo, who are divided into more than 100 states, and who bring tribute at fixed intervals.” Lelang was one of the Han colonies established in the Korean…

Austroasiatic languages: Registers: …found, for example, in Mon, Wa, and Kuay, which distinguish breathy from clear vowels; in some Katuic languages, which distinguish creaky vowels from clear ones; and in the Pearic branch, which cumulates both distinctions. These registers have a variety of historical origins; for some languages (such as Mon) they are…

Wafangdian, city, southern Liaoning sheng (province), northeastern China. It is situated in the south-central part of the Liaodong Peninsula and is an important market centre for an agricultural and fruit-growing area that specializes in apples, pears, and grapes. It has developed industries

Arabic literature: Elegy: “Wa-ʿāda…fī kafan” (1964; “And He Came Home…in a Shroud”), by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, is a modern example:

Vaud, canton, southwestern Switzerland, bordering France and the Jura Mountains to the west and Lake Geneva (Lac Léman) to the south. It has an area of 1,240 sq mi (3,212 sq km). In the west it extends a short way along the shores of Lake Neuchâtel, with a long narrow eastern tongue stretching past

law of mass action: Guldberg and Peter Waage but is now of only historical interest. This law was useful for obtaining the correct equilibrium equation for a reaction, but the rate expressions it provides are now known to apply only to elementary reactions. (See chemical kinetics.)

art market: German museums: …Museum’s first great art director, Gustav Waagen, believed that museum collections should be organized systematically according to the new German art-historical ideas, so as to display the evolution of painting within individual schools. Further, he felt that collections should be reflective of rigorous and wide-ranging standards of connoisseurship rather than…

Waal Interglacial Stage, division of Pleistocene time and deposits in the Netherlands and northern Europe (the Pleistocene Epoch dates from 2,600,000 to 11,700 years ago). The Waal Interglacial follows the Eburon Glacial Stage and precedes the Menapian Glacial Stage, both times of relatively severe

Gelderland: …is watered by the Rhine, Waal, and Maas (Meuse) rivers. In the east are some isolated hills and a sandy, wooded stretch south of Nijmegen, the province’s largest town. The fertile marshy area of the Betuwe (“Good Land”), between the Rhine and the Waal, supports orchards (cherries and apples), market…

Johannes Diederik van der Waals was a Dutch physicist, winner of the 1910 Nobel Prize for Physics for his research on the gaseous and liquid states of matter. His work made the study of temperatures near absolute zero possible. A self-educated man who took advantage of the opportunities offered by

Het Vrije Volk: …Vrije Volk and the communist De Waarheid (“The Truth”) were for a time the only daily newspapers in the Netherlands with permanent party affiliations. In 1991 the newspaper Rotterdams Dagblad resulted from the combination of Het Vrije Volk with Rotterdams Nieuwsblad.

Nancy Lieberman: …newly created professional circuit, the Women’s American Basketball Association (WABA). Because fan interest in a women’s professional league still was not strong enough to generate financial success, however, the WABA was also short-lived.

Wabag, town on the island of New Guinea, north-central Papua New Guinea, southwestern Pacific Ocean. Situated on the Lai River at an elevation of 6,000 feet (1,830 m), it was first visited by Europeans in 1934. A radio camp and airstrip were set up at Wabag in 1938–39. Wabag developed slowly as a

Wabana, town, southeastern Newfoundland, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, lying just northwest of St. John’s, on Bell Island in Conception Bay. Located in the centre of one of the world’s richest deposits of red hematite iron ore, the town grew after the beginning of mining operations in 1895 and

Abenaki, Algonquian-speaking North American Indian tribe that united with other tribes in the 17th century to furnish mutual protection against the Iroquois Confederacy. The name refers to their location “toward the dawn.” In its earliest known form, the Abenaki Confederacy consisted of tribes or

Wabar Craters, group of meteorite craters discovered in 1932 in the Rubʿ al-Khalī desert of Saudi Arabia. The largest crater is 330 feet (100 m) in diameter, 40 feet (12 m) deep, partially filled with sand, and thought to be an explosion crater (involving the ejection of material from the ground’s

Wabash, city, seat (1835) of Wabash county, northeastern Indiana, U.S., on the Wabash River, 45 miles (72 km) west-southwest of Fort Wayne. It was platted in 1834 on land ceded to the U.S. government by the Potawatomi and Miami Indians in the Treaty of Paradise Spring, signed on a local hilltop in

Evansville: The Wabash and Erie Canal was completed in 1853 to Evansville, its southern terminus, and, until its abandonment in the 1860s, connected Lake Erie with the Ohio River. Evansville has a modern river terminal that provides for interchange of barge, rail, and truck traffic, and there…

Henry Koster: The 1950s: Koster began the decade with Wabash Avenue (1950), a musical about a producer (Victor Mature) and a saloon owner (Phil Harris) competing for a chanteuse (Betty Grable) in 1890s Chicago. Grable returned for the sentimental My Blue Heaven (1950), about a husband-and-wife radio team who want to adopt a child.…

Roy Acuff: …Great Speckled Bird” and “The Wabash Cannonball.” The latter piece became his theme song. By the early 1940s his sincere singing style, backed by the traditional sound of the Smoky Mountain Boys, was earning him $200,000 per year.

Crawfordsville: Wabash College for men was founded there in 1832 by Presbyterian missionaries. Crawfordsville was the home of General Lew Wallace, author of Ben-Hur; Henry S. Lane, statesman; and Maurice Thompson, poet and novelist. Wallace’s study (1896) and Lane’s home (1836) are preserved as museums. Shades…

Wabash River, largest southward-flowing tributary of the Ohio River, rising in Grand Lake, western Ohio. It flows generally westward across Indiana past the cities of Huntington, Wabash, Logansport, and Lafayette, then southward to Terre Haute. Just south of that city it forms a 200-mile (320-km)

Shebeli River, river in eastern Africa, rising in the Ethiopian Highlands and flowing southeast through the arid Ogaden Plateau. The Shebeli River crosses into Somalia north of Beledweyne (Beletwene) and continues south to Balcad, about 20 miles (32 km) from the Indian Ocean, turning southwest

Lucy Whitehead McGill Waterbury Peabody: …department of the newly unified Woman’s American Baptist Foreign Mission Society (WABFMS), and she was instrumental in transforming the Interdenominational Conference into the more effective Federation of Women’s Boards of Foreign Missions in 1916. She made a world tour of inspection of missions from 1913 to 1914 and another from…

Sen Rikyū: …firmly established the concepts of wabi (deliberate simplicity in daily living) and sabi (appreciation of the old and faded) as its aesthetic ideals. During his time the teahouse became smaller (from Shukō’s 4 12-mat room to a 2-mat room—i.e., 6 feet square [2 metres square]) and more secluded with the…

Huave, Mesoamerican Indian peasants of the Pacific coast of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The exact relationship of the Huave language to other Mesoamerican languages is a matter of scholarly dispute. Fishing and agriculture are the main subsistence activities, but the Huave also depend on markets in

Japan: The establishment of warrior culture: …background from Nara, began the wabi-cha form of tea ceremony by bringing together the cha-no-yu of the civil aristocracy and the cha-yoriai of the common people. This new form spread among the warriors and great merchants and was further stylized by the Sakai merchant Takeno Jōō. The development of the…

kintsugi: …form the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, which promotes deriving value from imperfection and impermanence.

Precambrian: Age and occurrence of greenstone-granite belts: …of Canada; the Abitibi, Wawa, Wabigoon, and Quetico belts of the Superior province of Canada; the Dharwar belts in India; and the Warrawoona and Yilgarn belts in Australia.

Women’s Army Corps (WAC), U.S. Army unit created during World War II to enable women to serve in noncombat positions. Never before had women, with the exception of nurses, served within the ranks of the U.S. Army. With the establishment of the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), more than 150,000 did so. In

World AIDS Day: In 1997 UNAIDS created the World AIDS Campaign (WAC) to increase AIDS awareness and to integrate AIDS information on a global level. In 2005 the WAC became an independent body, functioning as a global AIDS advocacy movement, based in Cape Town, S.Af., and Amsterdam, Neth. In addition to ensuring the…

broadcasting: International organizations: …the most important are the World Association for Christian Communications, set up in 1968 and based in London, and the Association Catholique Internationale pour la Radio, la Télévision, et l’Audiovisuel, based in Brussels. Radio Free Europe, based in Munich and financed by U.S. government funds, was established to broadcast pro-Western…

Jacksonville, city, seat (1822) of Duval county, northeastern Florida, U.S., the centre of Florida’s “First Coast” region. It lies along the St. Johns River near its mouth on the Atlantic Ocean, about 25 miles (40 km) south of the Georgia border. Jacksonville consolidated (1968) with most of Duval

Waccamaw River, river in southeastern North Carolina and eastern South Carolina, U.S., that rises in the Lake Waccamaw area of North Carolina. It flows southwest across the South Carolina border to join the Pee Dee River just before emptying into Winyah Bay near Georgetown, after a course of 140

Waccho was the king of the Lombards in the period preceding the invasion of Italy, when they occupied territory roughly coinciding with Austria north of the Danube River. A member of the ruling family, Waccho assassinated his uncle Tato and usurped the throne. In 539 the Ostrogoth king of Italy,

Wace was an Anglo-Norman author of two verse chronicles, the Roman de Brut (1155) and the Roman de Rou (1160–74), named respectively after the reputed founders of the Britons and Normans. The Rou was commissioned by Henry II of England, who sometime before 1169 secured for Wace a canonry at Bayeux

Joachim Wach was a Protestant theologian and one of the foremost scholars in the modern study of religion. As a professor of the history of religion at the University of Leipzig (1929–35) and the University of Chicago (1945–55), Wach contributed significantly to the field of study that became known

Niederösterreich: …in the Danube Gorge (Wachau), in the southeast, and in the Vienna Basin. Later, the area was part of the Roman province of Noricum and of Charlemagne’s empire. The region was granted to the Bavarian Babenberg margraves in 976; the name Ostarichi (Eastern Region) dates from that period. A…

Fred W. Friendly was a U.S. broadcast producer and journalist. He began his career in radio in 1938 and later joined CBS. In the 1950s he collaborated with Edward R. Murrow to produce the radio news series Hear It Now and the television series See It Now. Friendly also produced CBS Reports

Vajirañāṇavarorasa was the prince-patriarch of Buddhism in Siam, who institutionalized Thai Buddhism, spread the faith in the countryside, and was his generation’s leading intellectual. Vajirañāṇa was a son of King Mongkut and spent, by his own account, a youth of profligate luxury. Early contact

Vajirañāṇavarorasa was the prince-patriarch of Buddhism in Siam, who institutionalized Thai Buddhism, spread the faith in the countryside, and was his generation’s leading intellectual. Vajirañāṇa was a son of King Mongkut and spent, by his own account, a youth of profligate luxury. Early contact

dance notation: Twentieth-century developments: …Noa Eshkol and the architect Abraham Wachmann was first published in English as Movement Notation in 1958. It took an anatomical and mathematical view of movement and initially had the aim of exploring the abstract shapes and designs of movement rather than recording existing dance patterns, which had been the…

Comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 1: …Friedrich Karl Arnold Schwassmann and Arno Arthur Wachmann on November 15, 1927. It has one of the most circular orbits of any comet known (eccentricity = 0.044) and remains always between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, with an orbital period of 14.7 years. It is also remarkable for outbursts…

Skarżysko-Kamienna: …east of the city at Wąchock, the area’s mining industry began in the 16th century, reaching its peak in the 19th. Mining operations shifted to Skarżysko-Kamienna in the mid-1940s but later fell into decline. There is a military museum in the city. Pop. (2011) 48,580.

Konrad Wachsmann was a German-born American architect notable for his contributions to the mass production of building components. Originally apprenticed as a cabinetmaker, Wachsmann studied at the arts-and-crafts schools of Berlin and Dresden and at the Berlin Academy of Arts (under the

Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler was a German Expressionist artist associated with the Dresden Sezession artist group and known for her paintings of the city’s disenfranchised population. She suffered from mental illness and fell into obscurity after she was murdered by the Nazis during World War II.

wacke, sedimentary rock composed of sand-sized grains (0.063–2 mm [0.0025–0.078 inch]) with a fine-grained clay matrix. The sand-sized grains are frequently composed of rock fragments of wide-ranging mineralogies (e.g., those consisting of pyroxenes, amphiboles, feldspars, and quartz). The grains

Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder was a writer and critic who was the originator, with his friend Ludwig Tieck, of some of the most important ideas of German Romanticism. Wackenroder was the son of a senior civil servant whose expectations that he pursue a successful worldly career were incompatible

acetaldehyde: …manufacture of acetaldehyde is the Wacker process, developed between 1957 and 1959, which catalyzes the oxidation of ethylene to acetaldehyde. The catalyst is a two-component system consisting of palladium chloride, PdCl2, and copper chloride, CuCl2.

Jacob Wackernagel was a Swiss historical and comparative linguist, author of a monumental study of Sanskrit. He is also known as the discoverer of Wackernagel’s law, an important statement of word order in Indo-European languages. Influenced by his father, Wilhelm Wackernagel (1806–69), a professor

carbon footprint: …Rees and Swiss-born regional planner Mathis Wackernagel at the University of British Columbia. An ecological footprint is the total area of land required to sustain an activity or population. It includes environmental impacts, such as water use and the amount of land used for food production. In contrast, a carbon…

Wenceslas III was the last king of the Přemyslid dynasty of Bohemia, king of Hungary from 1301 to 1304, and claimant to the Polish throne; his brief reign in Bohemia was cut short by his assassination, which also prevented him from asserting his right to Poland. Wenceslas renounced his hereditary

Waco, city, seat (1850) of McLennan county, north-central Texas, U.S. Waco lies along the Brazos River some 100 miles (160 km) south of Dallas. It was founded in 1849 on the site of a Waco (Hueco) Indian village near a Texas Ranger fort (1837) in a farming and plantation area. After the American

CG-4, the principal U.S.-built glider of World War II. It was used in airborne operations to deliver assault troops to their objectives in formed groups and to deliver weapons, light artillery pieces, and vehicles too bulky or heavy to be dropped by parachute. It was also used to deliver supplies.

the Mekons: …own and as part of the Waco Brothers), Timms, and Bell. Both Langford and Bell (as Erik Bellis) also exhibited their paintings, and the group mounted collective art exhibitions both in the United States and in Britain. In 1996 they collaborated with author Kathy Acker on Pussy, King of the…

Waco siege, a 51-day standoff between Branch Davidians and federal agents that ended on April 19, 1993, when the religious group’s compound near Waco, Texas, was destroyed in a fire. Nearly 80 people were killed. The Branch Davidians were founded by Ben Roden in 1959 as an offshoot of the Davidian

Canadian literature: From settlement to 1900: In Wacousta; or, The Prophecy (1832), John Richardson portrayed the 1763 uprising led by Pontiac, chief of the Ottawa Indians, at Fort Detroit. However, James De Mille’s satiric travel fantasy A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888) and Roberts’s renowned quasi-documentary animal stories (Earth’s…

wad, black and earthy substance that consists mainly of hydrated manganese oxides; it is an important ore of manganese. It varies considerably in chemical composition and contains different impurities, often in large amounts. Wad is very soft, readily soils the fingers, and may be considered to be

Wad Madani, city, southeast-central Sudan. Wad Madani lies on the west bank of the Blue Nile 85 miles (136 km) southeast of Khartoum, at an elevation of 1,348 feet (411 metres). It was a small Egyptian administrative post in the 19th century. It owes later growth to the irrigated lands of the

Ouaddaï, historic and cultural region in eastern Chad, central Africa. The chief town of the region is Abéché. The region’s area of savanna grasslands roughly corresponds to the formerly independent Ouaddaï Muslim sultanate (see Wadai, Kingdom of). Crossed by caravans linking the Sahara with

Wadai, historical African kingdom east of Lake Chad and west of Darfur, in what is now the Ouaddaï (q.v.) region of eastern Chad. It was founded in the 16th century, and a Muslim dynasty was established there about 1630. Long subordinate to Darfur, it became independent by the 1790s and began a

plate tectonics: Subduction zones: …mantle and is called the Wadati-Benioff zone, for Japanese seismologist Kiyoo Wadati and American seismologist Hugo Benioff, who pioneered its study. Between 10 and 20 percent of the subduction zones that dominate the circum-Pacific ocean basin are subhorizontal (that is, they subduct at angles between 0° and 20°). The factors…

Arabian religion: South Arabia: …Sabaʾ the national god was Almaqah (or Ilmuqah), a protector of artificial irrigation, lord of the temple of the Sabaean federation of tribes, near the capital, Maʾrib. Until recently, Almaqah was considered to be a moon god, under the influence of a now generally rejected conception of a South Arabian…

William Bradford Waddell was an American businessman and co-proprietor of Russell, Majors and Waddell, the most prominent freight, mail, and passenger transportation company in the United States in the mid-19th century. The company founded and operated the Pony Express (1860–61). Waddell’s

Frisian Islands: …tidal mud flats generally called wadden in Dutch (German: Watten).