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 Talk Talk - Communication terms
Category: General technical and industrial
Date & country: 28/05/2010, UK
Words: 18630


Dönitz, Karl
German admiral, originator of the wolf-pack submarine technique, which sank Allied shipping in World War II. He succeeded Hitler in 1945, capitulated, and was imprisoned 1946–56

D-notice
In the UK, a censorship notice issued by the Department of Defence to the media to prohibit the publication of information on matters alleged to be of national security. The system dates from 1922

D-day
Click images to enlarge6 June 1944, the day of the Allied invasion of Normandy under the command of General Eisenhower to commence Operation Overlord, the liberation of Western Europe from German occupation. The Anglo-US invasion fleet landed on the Normandy beaches on the stretch of coast between the Orne River and S...

Döblin, Alfred
German novelist. His Berlin-Alexanderplatz (1929) owes much to James Joyce's Ulysses in its minutely detailed depiction of the inner lives of a city's inhabitants, scrutinizing the social and psychological pressures exerted by the city; it is considered by many to be the finest 20th-century ...

d'Arblay, Madame
Married name of English writer Fanny Burney

D'Oyly Carte, Richard
English producer of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. They were performed at the Savoy Theatre, London, which he built. The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, founded in 1876, was disbanded in 1982 following the ending of its monopoly on the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. The present company, founded in 1988, moved to the Alexandra Theatre, Birmingham, i...

Dáil Éireann
Lower house of the legislature of the Republic of Ireland (Oireachtas). It consists of 166 members elected by adult suffrage through the single transferable vote system of proportional representation from 41 constituencies for a five-year term

D'Annunzio, Gabriele
Italian poet, novelist, and dramatist. Marking a departure from 19th-century Italian literary traditions, his use of language and style of writing earned him much criticism in his own time. His novels, often combining elements of corruption, snobbery, and scandal, include L'innocente/The Intruder (1891) and I...

d
Abbreviation for day; diameter; died; in the UK, d was the symbol for a penny (Latin denarius) until decimalization of the currency in 1971

D
(abbreviation) Abbreviation for 500, in the Roman numeral system

détente
Reduction of political tension and the easing of strained relations between nations, as seen in the ending of the Cold War 1989–90. The term was first used in the 1970s to describe the new easing of relations between the world's two major superpowers, the USA and the USSR. This resulted in increased contact between East and West in the for...

Díaz,
(José de la Cruz) Mexican soldier and politician, dictator-president (caudillo) of Mexico 1877–80 and 1884–1911. He seized power after losing the 1876 presidential election. He dominated the country for the next 34 years, although between 1880 and 1884 his...

Dún Laoghaire
Major port, residential town, and borough in County Dublin, Republic of Ireland, 10 km/6 mi south of the centre of Dublin; population (2002) 191,800. It is a terminal for ferries to Britain, and there are fishing industries. The National Maritime Museum is located here, and it is an important yachting centre and popular tourist resort. The ...

e-mail
Messages sent electronically from computer to computer via network connections such as Ethernet or the Internet, or via telephone lines to a host system. Messages once sent are stored on the network or by the host system until the recipient picks them up. As well as text, messages may contain attache...

E number
Code number for additives that have been approved for use by the European Commission (EC). The E written before the number stands for European. E numbers do not have to be displayed on lists of ingredients, and the manufacturer may choose to list additives by their name instead. E numbers cover all categories of additives apart from flavourings. Ad...

e.g.
Abbreviation for exempli gratia (Latin `for example`)

E
(navigation) Abbreviation for east

E-layer
Lower regions (90–120 km/56–75 mi) of the ionosphere, which reflect radio waves, allowing their reception around the surface of the Earth. The E-layer approaches the Earth by day and recedes from it at night

e-mail style
Informal and often ungrammatical style that has developed as a result of the increased use of e-mail as a swift means of communication. Sometimes, even capital letters are abandoned, and apostrophes omitted, to increase typing speed. The common opening for an e-mail is `Hi` or `Hello`, since the emphasis is on `spea...

Führer
Title adopted by Adolf Hitler as leader of the Nazi Party

Fès
Click images to enlargeFormer capital of Morocco 808–1062, 1296–1548, and 1662–1912, in the Fès valley north of the Great Atlas Mountains, 160 km/100 mi east of Rabat; population (2004) 946,800. Textiles, carpets, and leather are manufactured, in many cases on a craft basis, and the fe...

f-stop
In photography, another name for f-number

f.p.s. system
System of units based on the foot, pound, and second as units of length, mass, and time, respectively. It has now been replaced for scientific work by the SI system

f-number
Measure of the relative aperture of a telescope or camera lens; it indicates the light-gathering power of the lens. In photography, each successive f-number represents a halving of exposure speed

F
In physics, symbol for farad, the SI unit of capacitance equal to that of a capacitor with a potential difference of 1 volt between plates carrying a charge of 1 coulomb

Göteborg
Port and industrial city (ships, vehicles, chemicals) on the west coast of Sweden, at the mouth of the Göta River; population (2003 est) 506,600, urban agglomeration 744,500. It is Sweden's second-largest city and its most important seaport; it is linked with Stockholm by the Göta Canal (built 1832). A major commercial cen...

Gîza, El
City and governorate of Egypt, situated on the west bank of the Nile to the southwest of Cairo, of which it forms a suburb of the greater metropolitan area; population of city (1996 est) 2,221,900, and governorate (1996 est) 4,779,900. It has textile, footwear, brewing, and film industries. It is...

Géricault,
(Jean Louis André) French painter and graphic artist. One of the main figures of the Romantic movement, he brought a new energy and emotional intensity to painting. His subjects included spirited horses, Napoleonic cavalry officers, and portraits, including remarkable studies of the insan...

g-force
Force experienced by a pilot or astronaut when the craft in which he or she is travelling accelerates or decelerates rapidly. The unit g denotes the acceleration due to gravity, where 1 g is the ordinary pull of gravity. Early astronauts were subjected to launch and re-entry forces of up to 6 g or more; in the space shuttle, more than 3 g i...

Göring, Hermann
German spelling of Goering, Nazi leader

g
Symbol for gram

Héloïse
Abbess of Paraclete in Champagne, France, correspondent and lover of Abelard. She became deeply interested in intellectual study in her youth and was impressed by the brilliance of Abelard, her teacher, whom she secretly married. After her affair with Abelard, and the birth of a son, Astrolabe, she became a nun in 1129, and with Abelard's assis...

H-bomb
Abbreviation for hydrogen bomb

H
Symbol for henry, the SI unit of inductance, equal to the inductance of a closed circuit with a magnetic flux of 1 weber per ampere of current

i.e.
Abbreviation for id est (Latin `that is`), used to give an example. i.e. tends to interrupt the flow of a sentence, and its use is best kept to a minimum

J
(physics) In physics, the symbol for joule, the SI unit of energy

Kérkyra
Greek form of Corfu, an island in the Ionian Sea

K2
Second-highest mountain above sea level, 8,611 m/28,251 ft, in the Karakoram range, in a disputed region of Pakistan. It was first climbed in 1954 by an Italian expedition. The peak was designated `K2` by Lt-Col Henry Godwin-Austen in his surveying log since it was the second peak in the Karakorams to be surveyed and mappe...

Köln
German form of Cologne, a city in Germany

Königsberg
Former name of Kaliningrad, a Baltic port in Russia

Kádár, János
Hungarian communist leader, in power 1956–88, after suppressing the national uprising. As leader of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (HSWP) and prime minister 1956–58 and 1961–65, Kádár introduced a series of market-socialist economic reforms, while retaining cordial political relations with the USSR. Kád...

København
Danish name for Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark

K
(physics) Symbol for kelvin, a scale of temperature

K
(mathematics) Abbreviation for thousand, as in a salary of £30K

k
Symbol for kilo-, as in kg (kilogram) and km (kilometre)

K-T boundary
Geologists' shorthand for the boundary between the rocks of the Cretaceous and the Tertiary periods 65 million years ago. It coincides with the end of the extinction of the dinosaurs and in many places is marked by a layer of clay or rock enriched in the element iridium. Extinction of the dinosaurs at the K-T boundary and deposition of the ...

Königsberg bridge problem
Long-standing puzzle that was solved by topology (the geometry of those properties of a figure which remain the same under distortion). In the city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad in Russia), seven bridges connect the banks of the River Pregol'a and the islands in the river. For many years, people were challenged to cross each of the br...

Léger, Fernand
French painter and designer. He was associated with cubism. From around 1909 he evolved a characteristic style of simplified forms, clear block outlines, and bold colours. Mechanical forms are constant themes in his work, which includes designs for the Swedish Ballet 1921–22, murals, and the abstract film Ballet mécanique/Mec...

Lódz
Industrial city (textiles, machinery, dyes) in central Poland, 120 km/75 mi southwest of Warsaw; population (2002) 789,300

Lübeck
Seaport and resort of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, 24 km/15 mi from the Baltic Sea, 60 km/37 mi northeast of Hamburg; population (2005 est) 211,800. Manufactured goods include machinery, aeronautical and space equipment, steel, and ironwork; there are also marine engineering, ship-repairing, and fish-canning industries. ...

Lévi-Strauss, Claude
French anthropologist. He helped to formulate the principles of structuralism by stressing the interdependence of cultural systems and the way they relate to each other, maintaining that social and cultural life can be explained by a postulated unconscious reality concealed behind the reality by which people believe their lives to be ordered. In hi...

López, Francisco Solano
Paraguayan dictator in succession to his father Carlos López. He involved the country in a war with Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina, during which approximately 80% of the population died

L
(Roman numeral) Roman numeral for 50

l
Symbol for litre, a measure of liquid volume

L-dopa
Chemical, normally produced by the body, which is converted by an enzyme to dopamine in the brain. It is essential for integrated movement of individual muscle groups. L-dopa is a left-handed isomer of an amino acid C9H11NO2. As a treatment, it relieves the rigidity of Par...

Mâcon
Capital of the French département of Saône-et-Loire, on the River Saône, 72 km/45 mi north of Lyon; population (1999) 34,500. It produces wine. Mâcon dates from ancient Gaul, when it was known as Matisco. The French writer Alphonse Lamartine was born here

Münster
Industrial city in North Rhine-Westphalia, northwest Germany, 100 km/62 mi northeast of Düsseldorf on the Dortmund-Ems Canal; population (2005 est) 270,900. There are wire, cement, chemicals, steel, brewing, and distilling industries. It was formerly the capital of Westphalia. The Treaty of Westphalia was signed simultaneously ...

Münchhausen's syndrome
Emotional disorder in which a patient feigns or invents symptoms to secure medical treatment. It is the chronic form of factitious disorder, which is more common, and probably underdiagnosed. In some cases the patient will secretly ingest substances to produce real symptoms. It was named after the exaggerated tales of Baron Münchhausen. Some p...

Márquez, Gabriel García
Colombian novelist; see Gabriel García Márquez

Málaga
(city) Industrial seaport and capital of Málaga province in Andalusia, southern Spain, situated at the mouth of the River Guadalmedina on the Mediterranean coast; population (2001 est) 534,200. Industries include sugar refining, textiles, distilling, brewing, and olive-oil pressin...

Méliès, Georges
French film pioneer. From 1896 to 1912 he made over 500 short films, mostly fantasies (including Le Voyage dans la lune/A Trip to the Moon, 1902). He developed trick effects, slow motion, double exposure, and dissolves, and in 1897 built Europe's first film studio in Montreuil, northern France. Méliès began his ...

m.k.s. system
System of units in which the base units metre, kilogram, and second replace the centimetre, gram, and second of the c.g.s. system. From it developed the SI system (see SI units). It simplifies the incorporation of electrical units into the metric system, and was incorporated in SI. For application to electrical and magnetic pheno...

Mérimée, Prosper
French author. Among his works are the short novels Mateo Falcone (1829), Colomba (1841), Carmen (1846) (the basis for Bizet's opera), and the Lettres à une inconnue/Letters to an Unknown Girl (1873). Romantically set in foreign countries, his stories neverthel...

Médoc
French district bordering the Gironde in Aquitaine region, north of Bordeaux. It is famed for its claret wines, Margaux and St Julien being two well-known names. Lesparre and Pauillac are the chief towns

m
Symbol for metre

M
(Roman numeral) Roman numeral for 1,000

Ménière's disease
Recurring condition of the inner ear caused by an accumulation of fluid in the labyrinth of the ear that affects mechanisms of both hearing and balance. It usually develops in the middle or later years. Symptoms, which include deafness, ringing in the ears (tinnitus), nausea, vertigo, and loss of balance, may be eased by drugs, but there is no cure...

Möbius strip
Structure made by giving a half twist to a flat strip of paper and joining the ends together. It has certain remarkable properties, arising from the fact that it has only one edge and one side. If cut down the centre of the strip, instead of two new strips of paper, only one long strip is produced. I...

Nîmes
Click images to enlargeAdministrative centre of Gard département, in the Languedoc-Roussillon region of southern France, 100 km/62 mi northwest of Marseille; population (1999) 133,400. Its Roman remains include an amphitheatre dating from the 2nd century and the nearby aqueduct known as...

Núñez, Rafael
Colombian president 1880–82 and 1884–94, responsible for a new, authoritarian constitution in 1886. A doctrinaire Liberal in the 1850s, he held several government posts, and was a foreign diplomat 1863–74. During his terms in office he restored the church's influential position and tried to stimulate economic development with a p...

Nürnberg
German name for Nuremberg, a city in Bavaria, Germany

O'Higgins, Bernardo
Chilean revolutionary, known as `the Liberator of Chile`. He was a leader of the struggle for independence from Spanish rule 1810–17 and head of the first permanent national government 1817–23

O'Connell, Daniel
Click images to enlargeIrish lawyer and politician, known as `the Liberator`. In 1823 he formed the Catholic Association, to campaign for Catholic emancipation and the repeal of the 1801 Act of Union between Britain and Ireland. He achieved the first objective in 1829, but failed in the second

O'Casey, Seán
Irish dramatist. His early plays are tragicomedies, blending realism with symbolism and poetry with vernacular (commonly spoken dialect) speech. They include The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924), and The Plough and the Stars (1926). Later plays include Red Roses...

O'Connor,
(Mary) US novelist and short-story writer. Her works have a great sense of evil and sin, and often explore the religious sensibility of the Deep South, as in her novels Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960). Her work exemplifies the pos...

O'Keeffe, Georgia
US painter. One of the best known US painters of the 20th century, O'Keefe is known chiefly for her large, semi-abstract studies of flowers, bones, and other imagery, such as Black Iris (1926; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Although painting representational subjects, her strong lines, geometric forms, and fla...

O'Toole, Peter
(Seamus) Irish-born British actor. He made his name in the title role of Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and then starred in such films as Becket (1964) and The Lion in Winter (1968). He moved effortlessly from comic to dramatic roles ...

O Henry
See Henry, O, US author

O'Neill, Eugene Gladstone
US playwright. He is widely regarded as the greatest US dramatist. His plays, although tragic, are characterized by a down-to-earth quality and are often experimental in form, influenced by German expressionism, Strindberg, and Freud. They were a radical departure from the romantic and melodramatic American theatre entertainments. They incl...

O grade
In Scottish education, Ordinary Grade, the equivalent of an English GCSE taken by school students at the age of 16

O'Connor, Frank
Irish writer. His short stories are rooted in the provincial life of his native county, but he brings to his work a wide human sympathy and careful elegance. Collections include Bones of Contention (1936), Crab Apple Jelly (1944), Traveller's Samples (1950), Collection Two
O'Reilly, Tony
(Anthony Joseph Francis) Irish rugby union player and business executive. A tall, strong-running winger, he scored four tries in 29 matches for Ireland 1955–70, and a then record six in ten Tests for the British Lions 1955–59. In business he became a key executive in the US food ...

O'Neal, Shaquille Rashaun
US basketball player. In 2000 he became only the third player in National Basketball Association (NBA) history to win the Most Valuable Player awards for the regular season, the All-Star game, and the NBA finals. He helped the Los Angeles Lakers win three successive NBA Championships 2000–02. He won a fourth NBA title with the Miami Heat i...

O-Bon
Japanese Mahayana Buddhist festival held in July, during which families reunite to remember and honour their ancestors, welcoming them into the home. There is a fete with dancing and games, and the Buddha is offered flowers and fruit. Monks will visit home shrines to perform ceremonies and read the Buddhist scriptures

P'u-i, Henry
Last Manchu Qing emperor of China (as Hsuan Tung) from 1908 until he was deposed in the republican revolution of 1912; he was restored for a week in 1917. After his deposition he chose to be called Henry. He was president 1932–34 and emperor 1934–45 of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (see Manchuria). Captured by Soviet troops, ...

P retoria
City in Gauteng Province, South Africa, and the country's administrative capital; population (2001) 1,986,000. The city is a centre of rail communications and also a major centre of industry, with iron- and steel-works, engineering, chemicals, cement, diamonds, granite quarrying, and food processing. History Founded in 1855, the tow...

Pérez Esquivel, Adolfo
Argentine sculptor and architect. As leader of the Servicio de Paz y Justicia (Peace and Justice Service), a Catholic–Protestant human-rights organization, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1980 for his work for human rights in Latin America

Pétain,
(Henri) French general and head of state. Voted in as prime minister in June 1940, Pétain signed an armistice with Germany on 22 June before assuming full powers on 16 July. His authoritarian regime, established at Vichy, collaborated with the Germans and proposed a reactionary `Nati...

Pérez de Cuéllar, Javier
Peruvian politician and diplomat, fifth secretary general of the United Nations 1982–91, prime minister of Peru from 2000. He raised the standing of the UN by his successful diplomatic efforts to end the Iran–Iraq War in 1988 and secure the independence of Namibia in 1989. He was a candidat...

p.a.
Abbreviation for per annum (Latin `yearly`)

P-wave
In seismology, a class of seismic wave that passes through the Earth in the form of longitudinal pressure waves at speeds of 6–7 kps/3.7–4.4 mps in the crust and up to 13 kps/8 mps in deeper layers, the speed depending on the density of the rock. P-waves from an earthquake travel faster than S-waves and are the first to ar...

Réunion
French tropical island of the Mascarenes group, in the Indian Ocean, 650 km/400 mi east of Madagascar and 180 km/110 mi southwest of Mauritius; area 2,512 sq km/970 sq mi; population (1999 est) 706,300. The capital is St Denis. The island is volcanic, mountainous, and forested. Pr...

Röntgen, Wilhelm Konrad
German physicist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1901 for his discovery of X-rays in 1895. While investigating the passage of electricity through gases, he noticed the fluorescence of a barium platinocyanide screen. This radiation passed through some substances opaque to light, and affected photographic plates. Developments from ...

röntgen
Alternative spelling for roentgen, unit of X- and gamma-ray exposure

Röhm, Ernst
German leader of the Nazi Brownshirts, the SA (Sturmabteilung). On the pretext of an intended SA putsch (uprising) by the Brownshirts, the Nazis had some hundred of them, including Röhm, killed 29–30 June 1934. The event is known as the Night of the Long Knives

São Paulo
Industrial city and capital of São Paulo state, southeast Brazil, 72 km/45 mi northwest of its port Santos, and 400 km/249 mi southwest of Rio de Janeiro; population (2001 est) 9,785,600; metropolitan area (2001 est) 17,833,800. It is Latin America's second-largest city after Mexico City and is 900 m/3,000 ft above ...

Sèvres
Fine porcelain produced at a factory in Sèvres, France (now a Paris suburb), since the early 18th century. It is characterized by the use of intensely coloured backgrounds (such as pink and royal blue), against which flowers are painted in elaborately embellished frames, often in gold. It became popular after the firm's patronage by Louis ...

São Tomé and Príncipe
Country in the Gulf of Guinea, off the coast of West Africa. Government Under its 1990 constitution, Paraguay is a multiparty democracy with a dual executive, with power shared between a president and prime minister. There is a single-chamber legislature, the 55-member national assembly, directly elected for a four-year term through pro...

São Tomé
Port and capital of the island state of São Tomée Príncipe, on the northeast coast of t he island, Gulf of Guinea; population (2007 est) 65,400. It is the chief seaport of the island and exports sugar, cocoa, copra, bananas, and coffee. Local industries include soap and brick and tile manufacture. It is served by an international ...

s.a.e.
Abbreviation for stamped addressed envelope