# General Information (S)

S-band
The S-band is the frequency band from 1550 to 5200 mhz employed in radar.

Sabot
A sabot is a wooden shoe. They are worn in France and Holland where they are made large enough to be lined with straw or hay.

Saccharin
Saccharin is an ortho sulpho benzimide used as a substitute for sugar.

Saccharose
Saccharose is a former alternative name for sucrose.

Sackbut
The sackbut is a musical instrument of the brass family.

SafeBoot
SafeBoot by Fischer International Systems Limited is a computer product which prevents a PC from being booted from a floppy disk, and prevents a hard disk from being read in another computer.

Saffron
Saffron is an orange-yellow dye extracted from the dried stigmas of a type of crocus (Crocus sativus). It is used in cooking.

Safranines
Safranines are red dye-stuffs obtained by the oxidation of a mixture of paradiamine and a monoamine.

Sagittarius
Sagittarius is a sign of the zodiac represented by a centaur armed with a bow and arrow.

Sal Ammoniac
see "Ammonium Chloride"

Salicin
Salicin is a colourless, bitter, odourless, crystalline substance obtained from the bark of several species of tree of the willow and poplar class, and used in medicine.

Salicylic Acid
Salicylic acid (ortho-hydroxy-benzoic-acid) is the active chemical constituent of aspirin. It is an aromatic acid obtained by treating with hydrochloric acid the salt obtained by the action of carbon dioxide on sodium carbonate.

Salt
see "Salts"

Saltpetre
Saltpetre is a popular name for potassium nitrate.

Salts
Salts are formed by the replacement of acidic hydrogen by a metal or radical by the reaction of an acid upon an alkali.

Salvarsan
Salvarsan is a poisonous yellowish powder discovered by Ehrlich and once used in a dilute solution as a treatment for syphilis. It is an organic compound containing a small amount of arsenic.

Samarium
Samarium is an element with the symbol Sm.

Samba
Samba is a variation of Canasta. In some places it is known as Samba-Canasta; one Dutch book also calls it Straat-Canasta (Sequence-Canasta).

Sand
Sand is small particles of mineral matter, usually quartz. The purest quartz sands are white in colour and used for making glass. Other sands may be various colours dependant upon the minerals they contain.

Sati
see "Suttee"

Satin
Satin is a fabric made from silk or similar yarn, with a glossy surface on one side produced by a twill weave in which weft-threads are almost hidden by the warp.

Saturated solution
In chemistry, a saturated solution is a solution that contains all the solute that it can hold at a given temperature and pressure.

Saturday
Saturday is the sixth day of the week.

Sauna
A sauna is a steamy heat bath.

Savannah
A savannah is an extensive tropical grassland.

Saxhorn
The saxhorn is a musical instrument of the brass family. It evolved from the bugle-horn, but has valves instead of keys. The name derives from it's inventor, Adolphe Sax.

Saxophone
The saxophone is a metal musical instrument of the woodwind family.

Scandium
Scandium is a metal element with the symbol Sc.

Scapulary
A scapulary is a kind of garment or portion of dress, consisting of two bands of woollen stuff - one going down the breast and the other on the back, over the shoulders - worn by a religieux. The original scapular was first introduced by St Benedict, in lieu of a heavy cowl for the shoulders, designed to carry loads.

Scapulomancy
Scapulomancy is divination by reading the cracks which appear in a scapula (shoulder-blade) when it is roasted over an open fire. It was widely practised in ancient Babylon.

Scarlatina
see "Scarlet Fever"

Scarlet Fever
Scarlet Fever (Scarlatina) is an infectious fever, characterised by a sore throat, a red, diffuse eruption on the skin, followed by shedding of the superficial part of the skin.

Scat
Scat (Ride the Bus) is a simple draw and discard card game, suitable for players of all ages. Players have a three-card hand and the aim is to collect cards in a single suit worth 31 points or as near as possible to that total. It is played in the USA and the UK. In the USA it is usually called Scat or 31.
From 2 to 9 or more people can play and a standard 52-card deck is used. For scoring hands, the ace is worth 11 points, the kings, queens, and jacks are worth 10, and all other cards are worth their pip value. The value of a three-card hand is calculated by adding up the value of the cards held in any one suit. So if you have three cards of the same suit, you can add up all three. If only two cards are in the same suit you can add those, or use the value of the odd card if it is higher than the sum of the other two. If you have three different suits the value of your hand is the value of the highest card in it. The maximum hand value is 31, consisting of the ace and two ten-point cards in the same suit.

Schafkopf
Schafkopf is a point-trick card game, normally played with a German suited 32 card pack. As in several related games, the card values are ace=11, ten=10, king=4, over=3, under=2, but Schafkopf has the special feature that the overs and unders are permanent trumps, ranking above the ace. Schafkopf is considered to be the national card game of Bavaria. It is also played, probably in several different versions, in the south-east of Germany.

Schieberamsch
Schieberamsch is a point trick card game for three players. It occurs as a variation within Skat, but also makes a good game in its own right. As it is (mostly) a negative game, it looks like a cross between Skat and Hearts, but in practice it feels significantly different from either. It is played with a 32-card pack is used, French or German suited, containing the cards AKQJT987 (AKOUT987) in each suit. If German suits are used the correspondence is acorns=clubs, leaves=spades, hearts=hearts, bells=diamonds. The trump suit consists of just the four jacks ranking in the order CJ (highest), SJ, HJ, DJ (lowest). The remaining cards comprise 4 plain suits, in each of which the cards rank A (highest), T, K, Q, 9, 8, 7 (lowest).

Schizogony
In biology, schizogony refers to a type of cell reproduction involving multiple fission; the nucleus divides many times and the nuclei are separated into daughter cells.

Schnapsen
Schnapsen (Schnapser) is a popular Austrian two-hander card game. It is essentially a tightened-up version of the classic German game Sechsundsechzig. Other closely related games include Tausendeins (Austria), Tute (Spain), Tyzicha Odin (Ukraine), and Snapszli (Hungary). Schnapsen is a point-trick game of the Marriage group, and so the basic idea is to win points by capturing valuable cards in tricks, and to make bonuses by melding marriages (matched pairs of kings and queens). However, there are a few ideas that set Schnapsen apart. The first is that the game is played at trick-and-draw with no requirement to follow suit until the stock is closed, at which point the tricks remaining in hand are played out strictly following suit. The second is that to win a hand you need 66 card points, and the players are required to keep track of their score in their heads - the use of a scoresheet is not allowed. If your score reaches 66 and you neglect to announce the fact, then your opponent can claim a win when they reach 66, irrespective of your score; also, if a player claims 66 when they have not in fact made it, they pay a penalty. A game is seven game points, and can be reached pretty quickly when penalties and bonuses come into play. Finally, the pack is so short that there's no dead wood: virtually every card counts and it can be agony trying to decide how to play each one. The short pack also allows a pretty complete understanding of the lay of the cards to build up quickly, and closing turns out to be the key element of strategy. Very few games are played out to the end of the pack, and the decision of when to close can be used as a blow to crush your opponent or as a gamble to prevent them from presenting you with the same fate.

Schwimmen
Schwimmen belongs to the Commerce group of card games, in which you improve your hand by exchanging cards with a central pool of face-up cards. Other names for the game are 31, Schnautz, Knack and Hosen 'runter (trousers down). Although it is known in many parts of the world, it seems to be particularly popular in Germany and the western part of Austria.

Sciatica
Sciatica is a pain of the sciatic nerve, often caused by exposure to cold or wet.

Scintillation
Scintillation is a luminous effect produced when high-speed charged particles (alpha and beta particles and protons) pass through matter.

Scoliosis
Scoliosis is a curvature of the spine.

Scooter
A scooter is a platform mounted on wheels with a steerable column. They originally developed from roller skates, and were propelled by the rider. During the beginning of the 20th century small engines started to be fitted, followed by a saddle and the scooter developed into a form of motorcycle.

Scorbutus
see "Scurvy"

Scorpio
Scorpio is a sign of the zodiac represented by a scorpion.

Scotomization
In psychiatry, scotomization is a defence mechanism in which a person develops selective blind-spots to certain kinds of emotional or anxiety-producing situations or conflicts.

Scrabble
Scrabble is a board game based upon a crossword puzzle.

Sculpture
Sculpture is the art of carving any substance into a designed form. The material may be stone, clay, wood, ivory or metal, hand-wrought or cast in moulds.

Seam
The seam was a British measurement of glass equal to 120 lbs.

Searchlight
A searchlight is an instrument for directing a powerful beam of light. They are constructed from an electric lamp and a concave mirror arranged so as to give a cylindrical beam of light.

Sebar
Sebar is a tradename for secobarbital.

Second
The second is the basic SI unit of time, one-sixtieth of a minute. It is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 cycles of regulation (periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between two hyperfine levels of the ground state) of the caesium-133 isotope. In mathematics, the second is a unit of angular measurement, equalling one-sixtieth of a minute, which in turn is one-sixtieth of a degree.

Seed
A seed is the fertilised ovule in flowering plants. In addition to the embryo, the seed usually contains a certain amount of albumin for its early nourishment.

Seer
The seer is a unit of measurement equivalent to 1 kilogram. It was extensively used in India around 1900. The seer was a Sri Lankan unit of liquid measure equal to 1.86 British pints.

Seiner
A seiner is a ship which employs seine net fishing.

Seismology
Seismology is the scientific study of earthquakes.

Selenium
Selenium is a rare metal element with the symbol Se. It was discovered in 1817 by Berzelius in the refuse of a sulphuric acid manufactory in Sweden.

Semaphore
Semaphore is a visual form of communication using flags.

Semiconductor
A semiconductor is a material having electrical properties intermediate between those of good electrical conductors and those of insulators.

Semipermeable membrane
In chemistry, a semipermeable membrane is a membrane that allows water and crystalloids to pass through but holds back colloids.

Senile gangrene
see "Gangrene"

Senna
Senna is a purgative consisting of the leaves of the shrub Cassia actuifolia.

Seotal
Seotal is a tradename for secobarbital.

Sepia
Sepia is a dark brown pigment obtained from cuttlefish and used for monochrome sketching.

Sergeant Major
Sergeant Major is a trick taking card game for three players, using a standard 52-card deck. It is played clockwise.
The aim is to win as many tricks as possible. If a player succeeds in winning 12 or more tricks in one hand, the game ends and that player wins.
The first dealer is chosen at random. The cards are dealt singly, 16 to each player. The last four are undealt cards are placed face down on the table to form a kitty. The dealer names a suit as trumps (clubs, spades, hearts or diamonds - no trump is not allowed), discards any four cards face down, and takes the four undealt cards from the kitty in their place.
The player to dealer's left leads any card to the first trick. It is compulsory to follow suit if able to; a player holding no card of the suit led may play any card. Each trick is won by the highest trump it contains, or if there are no trumps in it, by the highest card of the suit led. The winner of each trick leads to the next.
Each player has a target. The dealer's target is 8 tricks; the player to dealer's left has a target of 5 tricks; and the player to dealer's right needs 3 tricks. A player who won more tricks than the target is said to be up by the number of tricks won in excess of target. A player who failed to reach the target is down by the number of tricks short. The player(s) who are down pay one stake per trick short of target, and the player(s) who are up receive one stake per overtrick.

Sertaline hydrochloride
see "Zoloft"

Seven Wonders of the World
The Seven Wonders of the World were: the pyramids of ancient Egypt, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Diana at Ephesus, the tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, the statue of the creek god Zeus at Olympia, and the Pharos at Alexandria (a lighthouse built by Ptolemy II).

Sevens
Sevens (Parliament, Fan Tan or Card Dominoes) is a card game that involves getting rid of all your cards by playing them to a layout. In the basic game this layout starts with the 7 of each suit and grows outward towards the king in one direction and the ace in the other. In France, the equivalent game is called Domino. The layout can be started with a rank of the first player's choice, and the other suits must then begin with the same rank (as in the Domino contract of the game Barbu).

Sextant
A sextant is a navigational instrument for determining latitude by measuring the angle between a heavenly body and the horizon.

Shamanism
Shamanism is the religion of the Eskimos of north America and Siberia.

Shanghai
Shanghai is a card game. It is a variant of Rummy for three to five players played with two 52-card decks shuffled together.

Sharia
Sharia is the law of Islam.

Shebeen
A Shebeen is an unlicensed (illegal) Scottish drinking establishment. It was defined by the Licensing (Scotland) Act, 1862, section 37 as meaning and including a house, or other place in which spirits or other excisable liquors are trafficked in by retail without a certificate and excise licence.

Sheep-Dog
A Sheep-Dog is any breed of dog trained for controlling sheep, but in England the term is usually restricted to the Old English Sheep Dog.

Sheepshank
The sheepshank is a sailor's knot.

Sheffield Flood
The Sheffield Flood occured in 1864 when the Old Dale Dyke reservoir at Bradfield burst, causing the death by drowning of 238 people.

Sheffield Plate
Sheffield Plate is the name given to articles made of copper plated with silver by heat. It was invented in Sheffield in the middle of the 18th century.

Shellac
Shellac is a resin used to make varnish. It is derived from the lac insect.

Sherlock
Sherlock by Gulf Sierra is a text comparison utility that allows you to compares two ASCII files line by line. It displays five lines from each file in separate windows. You may scroll either or both files passed the mismatch to put them in sync and continue. Either file can be automatically scanned to locate a line matching the line selected in the other file. Sherlock contains features for searching, ignoring case, spaces, tabs, jumping around the files and copying lines to a printer. This is a useful tool for programmers and writers.

Shintoism
Shintoism is the primary religion in Japan.

Ship
A ship is a vessel intended for navigating the ocean, as distinct from a boat which is any navigable vessel. The term ship now applies to sizeable boats which are intended for distant voyages.

Ship-Money
Ship-Money was a tax levied by Charles I in October 1634, ostensibly for the equipment of ships for the defence of the coast and maintaining command of the sea. The tax was deemed illegal and was a contributory dispute which led to the English civil War.

Shire Moot
In Anglo-Saxon England a Shire Moot was a meeting of all the freemen of a shire for transacting judicial and administrative matters pertaining to the shire.

Shoddy
Shoddy is wool obtained from woollen rags and wastes and respun.

Shorthand
Shorthand is a system of graphical notation making it possible to record speech at greater speed than by normal writing. Early systems were developed by the Greeks and Romans. Modern shorthand was first developed in England in 1588 by Timothy Bright. Thomas Shelton developed a system employed by Samuel Pepys in 1630. The idea of using sound instead of an alphabet as the basis for a shorthand system was introduced by William Tiffin in 1750. The Pitman system of shorthand first appeared in 1837 and is widely used today, being quite capable of 250 words a minute.

Shove-halfpenny
Shove-halfpenny is a game played on a marked board in which halfpennies or discs are jerked from the edge along the board with the ball of the thumb. The object is to lodge the coins within marked areas on the board. It was once a popular game in English pubs.

Show Jumping
Show Jumping is an equestrian event in which horse and rider jump a set course of fences specially designed and built for each contest.

Shuffle-board
Shuffle-board is a game played on a ship-deck in which wooden discs 6 inches in diameter are shoved by a kind of cue into marked squares from a distance of about 30 feet. The game has been recorded since the 15th century.

Sicilian Vespers
The Sicilian Vespers was the massacre of the French in Sicily on March 20th 1282. It was caused by a French soldier insulting a bride on her way to church, and resulted in the entire garrison of Charles of Anjour being annihilated within 3 days, putting an end to Angevin rule in Sicily.

Sickle
A Sickle is a hook-shaped steel bladed instrument used for cutting grass and grain.

SideKick
SideKick by Borland International, is a popular and simple RAM-resident desktop organiser consisting of five windows for a Notepad, Calculator, Calendar, Dialer, and ASCII table. SideKick's Notepad is an ASCII text editor that resembles WordStar. Although it is not a fully-fledged word processor, it is remarkably complete. The ASCII table is a handy reference for programmers. The Phone Dialer dials a phone number found anywhere on the screen - it doesn't need to be in SideKick. The ASCII table, binary, and hexadecimal support in the Calculator and the familiar WordStar interface in the Notepad, make SideKick popular with programmers.

Sign
A sign is a mark drawn upon a surface.

Signet
A signet is a private seal used on documents and personal letters. The privy signet is the personal seal of the British Sovereign used on private documents.

Sikhism
Sikhism is a religion founded by Nanak in the 15th century.

Silage
Silage is green fodder stored in a silo or pit without drying.

Sildenafil citrate
see "Viagra"

Silibrin
Silibrin is a tradename for Chlordiazepoxide hydrochloride.

Silicate
A silicate (sillic acid) is a compound formed by the combining of silica (SiO2) and water in various proportions.

Silicon
Silicon is a non-metallic element with the symbol Si.

Silk
Silk is a soft thread produced by the larvae of the silkworm moth.

Sill
Sill is a geological term for a sheet of igneous rock intruded into overlaying beds and lying nearly horizontal over a large area.

Sillic Acid
see "Silicate"

Silo
A silo is a structure for storing and preserving vegetable matter in a green state.

Silurian
The Silurian was the fifth geological period, 335,000,000 years ago. This period marked the appearance of the first land plants.

Silver-steel
Silver-steel is an alloy of one part silver and 500 parts Silver-steels first made around 1822 and was adopted by the cutlers of Sheffield for making fine razors, surgical instruments etc.

Simile
A simile is a literary device of description by comparison, as in 'he slept like a log'.

Simony
Simony is the trafficking in spiritual things. It was an offence against the canon law. The term derives from Simon Magus, who offered the apostles money for the power to work miracles.

Sinapine
Sinapine is an organic base, existing as sulphocyanate in the seed of Sinapis alba (white mustard), and first extracted by Henry and Garot in 1825.

Sine
Originally sine was another word to describe a gulf or a bay, as in 'The Persian Sine', today its use is more limited to its trigonometry variation which describes the straight line drawn from one extremity of an arc perpendicular to the diameter passing through the other extremity.

Single Tax
The single tax was a system of taxation proposed by Harry George. It was proposed that tax should be confined to land-rent, land being the real source of wealth.

Single-stick
Single-stick was a game of cudgels, in which the competitor who first brought blood from his opponent's head was the winner.

Sinn Fein
Sinn Fein is an Irish nationalist political party. It was founded in Dublin in 1900 by Arthur Griffith.

Sintered
see "Sintering"

Sintering
Sintering is the process of heating strongly a quantity of more or less amorphous material, so causing it to coalesce into a single solid mass.

Siphon
A siphon is a bent tube with one limb longer than the other, by means of which a liquid can be drawn off to a lower level.

Sirius
Sirius (the Dog Star) is the brightest star in the sky. It is in the constellation of Canis Major and although only 2.5 times the mass of the sun gives off 32 times as much light.

Sitar
The sitar is an Indian musical instrument similar to the lute.

Sketch
Sketch is a term used in art for a rapidly executed drawing serving as a study for a finished picture or as a note to aid the memory.

Skiagraph
A skiagraph is a photograph taken by means of X-rays.

Skiatron
A skiatron is a form of cathode-ray tube sometimes employed in radar. Its screen is composed of pottasium chloride and is white in colour, but exhibits a magenta trace of long persistence.

Skin Effect
In electronics, skin effect is the ac resistance of a conductor due to the tendency for high-frequency currents to travel along the surface of the wire.

Skitgubbe
Skitgubbe Is a popular Swedish game for three players. In Norwegian it is called Mattis.

Skittles
Skittles (also called ninepins) is an ancient game played with nine large wooden pins set up in a diamond formation, 3 pins to a side, and knocked down with a thrown missile. Originally the missile was a flattened wooden article weighing about 10 lbs and called a cheese. Today a wooden ball is rolled at the pins.

Sky Sign
A Sky Sign was a device for advertisements attached to a support above a building so as to be visible against the sky. They were outlawed in England in 1907.

Sky Writing
Sky writing is the tracing against the sky of an advertisement-word in smoke by an aeroplane.

Skylab
Skylab was an American space station launched in 1973.

Slag
Slag is the chemical compound resulting during the smelting of metallic ores. It results because of the action of the flux on impurities in the ore.

Slaked Lime
Slaked Lime is a popular name for calcium hydroxide, Ca(OH)2. Which is obtained by slaking calcium oxide. It is an important constituent of mortar and cement.

Slaking
Slaking is a chemical term for mixing a substance with water, as in the process of slaking lime to create slaked lime.

Slate Club
A Slate Club is a society whose members contribute small sums weekly or monthly to a fund held by the secretary and shared out at Christmas or on some other special occasion.

Slavery
Slavery is the legal and economic status of being property. Slavery probably originated in early agricultural societies. The slaves being recruited from prisoners of war. In Greece and Rome slaves formed the economic basis of society. From the 2nd century BC conquest flooded Rome with slaves, who in the 1st cent, AD outnumbered free men in Italy, and several slave revolts occurred. The economic crisis of the 2nd century AD onwards led to alleviation of the slaves' lot, and serfdom replaced slavery. It nevertheless died out slowly surviving in England until the 11th century The colonisation of America led to a revival of slavery in the 16th century and to the establishment of a traffic in Negro slaves. Humanitarian agitation led to the abolition of the slave trade in the British dominions in 1807 and of slave-holding itself in 1833. Leaders of the anti-slavery movement were Oranville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson and Wilberforce. In the USA the Civil War turned largely on slavery which was declared illegal by Lincoln in 1865. Although officially abolished, slavery tends to linger in remoter areas of Africa.

Sleepy Sickness
see "Encephalitis lethargica"

Slide Rule
A slide rule is a mathematical instrument used for rapid calculations including multiplication, division, and the extraction of square-roots. They are now almost extinct since the invention of the electronic calculator.

Sloop
A sloop is a small vessel furnished with one mast and a fixed bowsprit. It is fore and aft rigged, and usually carries a main-sail, fore-sail (jib-shaped), a jib, and a gaff-sail. The sloop resembles the cutter, but the latter's bow-sprit is not fixed.

Slot Machine
A Slot machine is a machine operated by coins, or in some cases by tokens similar to coins, and used for selling commodities or services automatically. Slot Machines originated with the Greeks and Romans for selling wine and are still used today.

Slow-match
Slow-match was a 19th century term for a fuse used to light mines or blasts.

SLS
Sodium Laureth Sulfate

Smack
A smack is a small sailing or steam vessel employed for fishing and with a large hold amidships to receive the catch.

Smalt
Smalt is a type of glass in which protoxide of cobalt has been mixed with common glass to produce a glass with a deep blue tinge to it. Smalt was discovered by a Bohemian glass blower in the 16th century.

Smart Technology
Smart Technology are an English PC assembler and supplier based in Birmingham. They were established in 1994 at the University of Birmingham Research Park and supply a range of budget priced deskyop and laptop computers.

Smartcom II
Smartcom II by Hayes Microcomputer Products is a menu-driven communications package which provides the ability to communicate with mainframe computers as well as other PCs. The package was made to accompany the Hayes Smartmodem 1200 and 2100, so there are advantages in having the two together. When Smartcom II is run, it checks the Smartmodem to see if the switches are set correctly - if not it will tell you so. This is a unique feature for communications packages, the others do not tell you that your modem switches are set incorrectly until you are trying to communicate. Smartcom II has auto-dial and auto-answer features as well as a directory service. The user has the capability to create a macro command for each name listed in the directory so that you do not have to key in simple log-in information. A limited number of other computers and their numhers can be kept on the directory. For those users who send messages, Smartcom II has a simple text editor which allows the user to write messages from within the package instead of exiting to a DOS editor. Smartcom II gives the user the ability to capture downloaded data to disk as it is sent, but only as it comes across the screen. Smartcom II emulates the DEC VT100, VT102 and VT52 terminals. Smartcom II makes communications easy by "holding your hand" as the user specifies the commands. The menu system is good for the novice user (but the advanced user may find it slow).

Smartcom III
Smartcom III was a major upgrade of the popular Smartcom II product. New features included a powerful script programming language and the capability to handle two online sessions more or less simultaneously. Smartcom III's script language - SCOPE (Simple Communications Programming Environment) lets you create simple log-in or file retrieval scripts that can handle entire sessions, including reading and writing files. The dial session capability allows the user to switch from one link to another with a single keystroke. Smarlcom III has a built-in editor to help you create and modify scripts. For fast execution, it also includes a compiler to convert the finished script to machine code. The compiler also checks for syntax errors and if it finds any it will return the script to the editor with appended error messages A Peruse buffer allows access to information captured while the rest of it is still being uploaded. File-compression and file-scrambling options provide data security when communicating with another Smartcom III user. Smartcom III emulates TTY, the DEC VT100, VT102 and VT52 and viewdata terminals.

SmarTerm 240
SmarTerm 240 by Persoft emulates DEC VT340, 240, 220, 125, 100, and 52 terminals on a PC. In addition to the features of the other SmarTerm communications programs providing text terminal emulation, SmarTerm 240 can emulate all features of DEC's ReGIS graphics language, and does Tektronix 4010 and 4014 emulation. The program supports a hotkey so you can toggle between the emulation session and DOS.

SmarTerm 400
SmarTerm 400 by Persoft emulates the Data General Dasher 100, 200, 400, 410 or 411 terminals on a PC. The primary function of this program is ASCII or binary file transfer between a PC and a host computer system. SmarTerm 400 makes use of all the features of these terminals, including multiple display windows, 132-column support through horizontal scrolling or on-screen with supported display adapters, full-character display attributes (underline, blink, dim, reverse video), and local printer support including pass through mode, which lets you send data directly to the printer rather than from the display. SmarTerm 400 allows you to set customised softkey commands so that repetitive functions can be mapped into a single keystroke.

SmartForecasts II
SmartForecasts II by Smart Software is a business forecasting computer program that is easy to use without a knowledge of statistics. It quickly makes accurate projections of sales, expenditures, market share, inventory levels, and other items whose values are recorded periodically over time. As a business forecasting product, SmartForecasts II provides more realistic information than you would receive by adding 5% to the most recent figures in a spreadsheet. Most business forecasting is done by managers and analysts who may not be familiar with the statistical and mathematical reasoning behind forecasting but do know a great deal about products, competition, and markets. SmartForecasts II is designed to fully utilise the special knowledge and business judgment of the user. Its exceptional ease of use makes it appropriate for novices, while the variety of methods available appeal to the experienced analyst. One of the strongest features of SmartForecasts II is Automatic Forecasting, which runs an internal check among the available forecasting techniques to determine which one best forecasts your data series. Using a process that is transparent to the user, Automatic Forecasting displays results in a graph showing historical data, smoothed historical data, forecasts, and upper/lower margins of error based on the winning method. It also produces tabular results. Forecasting can be done simultaneously on a single business variable or a group of up to 60 related variables (up to 150 data points or observations per variable), such as the sales of items in the same product line. SmartForecasts II's unique Eyeball Forecasting lets you adjust any forecast, including automatic forecasts, to reflect business judgment or new market information. It lets you use interactive graphics to quickly draw and adjust forecasts on-screen. SmartForecasts II consists of four menu-driven modes; an edit mode for creating, editing, and transferring data; an explore mode for statistical
sis and graphing of data; a forecast mode; and an on-line help mode.

SmartForm Assistant
SmartForm Assistant by Claris Corporation is a companion program to SmartForm Designer and provides help messages and automatic calculations. Using the Assistant, you can access built-in help messages, choice lists, and automatic calculated fields that were created with the Designer. The Assistant lets you fill in forms more quickly and accurately than manually.

SmartForm Designer
SmartForm Designer by Claris Corporation is an advanced computer tool designed to create professional-quality forms quickly. It creates simple or complex forms such as mailing labels, tickets, expense reports, and invoices. The Designer can create forms with calculated fields, built-in choice fields, and data-entry validation rules. Forms that are created with this product can be printed for manual completion or distributed electronically for on-line completion with SmartForm Assistant.

SmartNotes
SmartNotes by Personics Corporation is the electronic version of those little yellow sticky notes attached to many paper documents. SmartNotes attaches a note to a phrase in any document, cell in any spreadsheet, or field in any database and can be used to clarify a figure, comment on the wording of a phrase, or remind yourself to check an address in a data file. When pressing a key, a blank note pops up and attaches itself to a selected cell, field, or phrase. You can display all notes associated with a given screen, or scroll through the document to display all notes. The core of SmartNotes is a very fast pattern-matching technique. Because notes are kept in a separate file, there is no alteration or corruption of original data file.

SmartWare II
SmartWare II, by Informix Software, is the updated version of the Smart Software System. It consists of four modules: database, spreadsheet with graphics, word processor, and communications. Each of the modules is powerful enough to be compared to a standalone product in its category. SmartWare II offers a complete selection of powerful features to facilitate the building of complex custom applications and programs. It has been used extensively in companies that develop internal turnkey systems. The package provides Project Processing and a built-in application language with all four modules. Project Processing gives you access to all the SmartWare II commands, as well as over 75 programming commands, and supports programming structures such as IF-ELSE, FOR, and WHILE. You can also define your own functions with Project Processing. The SmartWare II database more closely resembles a standalone database than any of the other integrated programs. The size of the database is determined by the amount of disk space because SmartWare II writes data to disk as RAM becomes limited. There is a report generator which allows combination of data from up to 100 files in one report and you can design custom data screens that display information from as many as 127 files on one screen. The Query-by-Example feature helps to quickly find specific data simply by selecting a sample of the type of data to extract.

Snaffle
A snaffle is a type of bridle bit, composed of two bars jointed together in the middle, with rings at the ends for reins.

Snobol
Snobol is a high-level text-handling computer programming language.

Snooker
Snooker is a game derived from billiards.

Snow
Snow is the crystalline form of frozen water vapour.

Snuff
Snuff is powdered tobacco which is then inhaled through the nostrils. It was popular during the 18th century. The art of taking snuff gracefully was one of the accomplishments indispensable to gentlemen.

Soap
Soap is made by decomposing natural fats in a caustic alkali solution.

Socialism
Socialism is an economic theory based upon the public ownership of the means of production. The term was first coined in England by Robert Owen

Sociology
Sociology is the comprehensive study of the fundamental laws of social phenomena, or if you like, the science of man in society. The term sociology was first introduced by Comte in 1839.

Soda
Soda is a common name for sodium carbonate (Na2CO3).

Soda ash
see "Sodium carbonate"

Soda Water
see "Aerated water"

Sodagrain
Sodagrain is a tradename for caustic soda.

Sodium
Sodium is a metal element with the symbol Na.

Sodium amide
Sodium amide is a white, crystalline, water-soluble flammable powder used in the manufacture of sodium cyanide and in organic synthesis.

Sodium arsenite
Sodium arsenite is a white or greyish-white, water-soluble, poisonous powder used as a weed-killer and as an insecticide.

Sodium benzoate
Sodium benzoate (benzoate of soda) is a white crystalline soluble compound used as an antibacterial and antifungal agent in preserving food, as an antiseptic, and in making dyes and pharmaceuticals. It has the formula Na(C6H5COO).

Sodium Bisulphite
Sodium Bisulphite is a salt of Sulphurous Acid.

Sodium Carbonate
Sodium carbonate (soda ash) is an anhydrous, greyish-white, odourless, water-soluble powder. It is used in the manufacture of glass, ceramics, soap, paper, petroleum products.

Sodium chlorate
Sodium chlorate is a colourless crystalline soluble compound used as a bleaching agent, weak antiseptic, and weedkiller. It has the formula NaClO3.

Sodium cyanide
Sodium cyanide is a white, crystalline, deliquescent powder. It is soluble in water and very poisonous. It is prepared by heating sodium amide with charcoal and is used in casehardening alloys and electroplating.

Sodium dichromate
Sodium dichromate is a soluble crystalline solid compound, usually obtained as red or orange crystals and used as an oxidising agent, corrosion inhibitor, and mordant. It has the formula Na2Cr2O7.

Sodium Dodecyl Sulfate
see "Sodium Laureth Sulfate"

Sodium fluoracetate
Sodium fluoroacetate is a white crystalline odourless poisonous compound, used as a rodenticide.

Sodium fluoride
Sodium fluoride is a colourless, crystalline, water-soluble poisonous substance used as an insecticide, rodenticide and also as a source of fluoride in toothpaste and added to water in many developed countries.

Sodium Hydrate
Sodium Hydrate (caustic soda) is a white, opaque, brittle substance with a fibrous texture. It readily dissolves in water and was formerly used in the manufacture of soap.

Sodium Hydroxide
Sodium hydroxide is a brittle, white deliquescent solid with a soapy feel. It dissolves in water to give a strongly alkaline solution and is widely used in the manufacture of soaps, detergents, cellulose and rayon.

Sodium Iodide
Sodium iodide is a salt found in kemp. It forms anhydrous cube crystals which are very soluble in water and alcohol.

Sodium Laureth Sulfate
Sodium Laureth Sulfate (Sodium dodecyl sulfate, Sodium lauryl sulfate, SLS) is an inexpensive detergent commonly used in cosmetic cleansers, hair shampoos, bath and shower gels, bubble baths, engine degreasers, toothpaste, and car washes. It is very corrosive and readily attacks greasy surfaces. It is used throughout the world for clinical testing as a primary skin irritant. Laboratories use it to irritate skin on test animals and humans so that they may then test healing agents to see how effective they are on the irritated skin. A recent study at the University of Georgia Medical College, indicated that it penetrated into the eyes as well as brain, heart, liver, and other organs and showed long-term retention in the tissues. The study also indicated that it prevented young children's eyes from developing properly and caused cataracts to develop in adults. It may also cause hair loss by attacking the follicle. In the USA it is classified as a drug in bubble baths because it eats away the skin protection and causes rashes and infection to occur. It is potentially harmful to both the skin and hair because it cleans by corrosion. It dries the skin by stripping away the protective lipids from the surface so it can't effectively regulate moisture. It is also a lung and eye irritant and is considered a reproductive hazard. Another extremely serious problem is the connection of SLS with nitrate contamination. SLS reacts with many types of ingredients used in skin products and forms nitrosomines (nitrates). Nitrates are potential cancer-causing carcinogenics.

Sodium Lauryl Sulfate
Sodium Laureth Sulfate

Sodium Nitrate
Sodium Nitrate is the deliquescent salt (NaNO3) occurring naturally as caliche, or made by the reaction of nitric acid and soda ash. It is used as a fertiliser and in the manufacture of explosives and as a preservative in foods.

Sodium perborate
Sodium perborate is a white odourless crystalline compound used as an antiseptic and deodorant.

Sodium peroxide
Sodium peroxide is a yellowish-white odourless soluble powder formed when sodium reacts with an excess of oxygen. It is used as an oxidising agent in chemical preparations, a bleaching agent, an antiseptic, and in removing carbon dioxide from air in submarines.

Sodium Stearate
Sodium stearate is used as the basis of soap and detergents and is used in the manufacture of toothpaste.

Sodium Sulphite
Sodium Sulphite is a salt of Sulphurous Acid. It has the formulae Na2SO37H2O.

Sodium thiosulphate
Sodium thiosulphate (hypo) is a white, crystalline, water-soluble substance used in photography as a fixing agent.

Softerm PC
Softerm PC is a powerful communications manager and terminal emulation program. It emulates more than 40 popular terminals and communicates to a variety of host computers and information services. In terminal-emulation mode, Softerm PC provides all keyboard and display functions. It can capture data to disk or print in transparent mode, which captures all data received, or line mode, which captures each line on the screen after it is displayed. Send-file function transmits data from disk as if it were typed on the keyboard. Softerm PC offers various remote file transfer modes, including a character protocol which provides maximum flexibility for text file transfers. Streaming and block-modes are supported. Transmit options include fixed or variable block size, end-of-block terminator, acknowledgment of character strings, end-of-block delay and character echo wait. Softerm PC supports the concurrent operation of up to four communications ports and three printer ports through background processing queues. Speeds up to 115K bps are supported, with PCs connected locally or remotely through standard manual or autodial modems. Softerm PC is written in assembly language for fast response and efficient operation. Softerm PC includes disk and file utilities to display, print, or copy any file. The product supports automatic dialing in terminal and file transfer modes. A built-in phone book allows numbers to be accessed by user-defined names. Keyboard macros can be defined to send frequently used sequences of characters. You can toggle between Softerm PC and another application, such as Lotus 1-2-3.

Soil
Soil is a loose covering of broken rocky material and decaying organic matter.

Soke
Soke is a term used in the Domesday Book for the right to hold a court and exercise jurisdiction.

Sol-fa
Sol-fa is a system of musical notation which was founded by Miss Glover and John Curwen.

Solfoton Tedral
see "Phenobarbital"

Solid
A solid is a substance in which the molecules do not have free movement.

Solitaire
Solitaire is a game played by one person on a board with 33 small indentations, in which 32 marbles are placed. The object is to remove by 'jumping' all the marbles except one.

Solo Whist
Solo Whist is a card game, a modification of the American game of Boston. It is played by four individual players, who may form temporary partnerships, with a full pack of fifty-two cards. It was brought to London around 1852.

Solstice
A solstice is a point on the ecliptic midway between the equinoxes, where the sun, reversing its motion in declination, seems to stand still.

Solute
In chemistry, a solute is a substance dissolved in a solvent.

Solution
A solution is a homogeneous mixture of substances that cannot be separated by mechanical means.

Solvent
In chemistry, a solvent is a substance in which a solute is dissolved.

Sombrero
A sombrero is a felt hat with a very broad brim widely used through Spanish America and the southern USA.

Sonar
Sonar is a method of locating underwater objects by the reflection of ultrasonic waves.

Sonata
Sonata is an important form of musical composition comprising classically four movements. The modern form of sonata was fixed by Emanual Bach in the 18th century.

Sonimen
Sonimen is a tradename for Chlordiazepoxide hydrochloride.

Sonnet
A sonnet is a 14 line poem devoted to a single theme.

Soot
Soot is a black carbonaceous solid deposited as a result of the imperfect combustion of bituminous coal, wood, oil or other substances. It is primarily carbon, but also contains some hydrocarbons and may contain ammonium sulphate if derived from coal.

Sophist
A Sophist was a class of teacher of rhetoric and the art of conduct, in ancient Greece.

Sopor
see "Methaqualone"

Soprano
Soprano is the highest of the singing voices. In adults it is only possessed by women.

Sorbic acid
Sorbic acid is found in the fruit of the rowan tree and used in food preservation.

Sorbonne
The Sorbonne is a French educational institution in Paris. It was founded in 1253 by Robert de Sorbon as a society of clergy for study in theology.

Sordes
Sordes are crusts which form on the lips of sick persons suffering from extreme exhaustion. They are especially associated with typhoid.

Sortes Virgilianae
Sortes Virgilianae or the Virgillian Oracle was a form of divination which consisted in opening a particular book at random, and regarding as a prophecy the lines on which the eye first fell or on which the finger happened to be placed.

Sotheby's
Sotheby's is an art salesroom in London. It was established in 1744 by Samuel Baker, who specialised in the auctioning of rare books and manuscripts.

Sound
Sound is the changes in air pressure detectable by the ear.

Sounding
Sounding is a method of ascertaining from a ship the depth of water beneath it.

South Sea Bubble
The South Sea Bubble was an English scheme for liquidating the National Debt in the 18th century. In 1711 the South Sea Company was incorporated which in return for a monopoly of trade to Spanish America took over the floating National Debt. The public, encouraged by the government bought 100 pound shares in the company which quickly rose to 1000 pounds in value. Then in 1720 the company crashed and there was widespread ruin. In the ensuing inquiry the government was found guilty and Walpole attained power and restored the country's credit, and the South Sea Company henceforth conducted legitimate business.

Soviet
Soviet is a Russian word meaning 'council' and a system adopted by the Russians where by organised industries and not localities are the unit of representation and delegation. The Soviets were elected councils, anyone over the age of 18 able to vote so long as they were a worker, or looked after a worker, or were a former worker etc., thus excluding people who lived by exploiting others. The system was effectively spoiled by Stalin and eventually was broken in the 1990s by corruption and greed.

Spacecraft
A spacecraft is a vehicle used to travel through space, from one planet to another or to a moon, asteroid or other planetoid.

Spacewar
Spacewar is a space-combat simulation game, inspired by E. E. "Doc" Smith's "Lensman" books, in which two spaceships duel around a central sun, shooting torpedoes at each other and jumping through hyperspace. The game was first implemented on the PDP-1 at MIT in 1960. SPACEWAR aficionados formed the core of the early hacker culture at MIT. Nine years later, a descendant of the game motivated Ken Thompson to build, in his spare time on a scavenged PDP-7, the operating system that became UNIX. Less than nine years after that, SPACEWAR was commercialise as one of the first video games.

Span
A span is a natural unit of measurement, half a cubit, and measured from the tip of the thumb to the little finger and generally reckoned in England as nine inches.

Special Branch
see "C.I.D."

Species
Species is a biological term for related individuals with very similar general structure.

Specific gravity
In chemistry, specific gravity (or relative density) is the ratio of the weight of a given volume of a substance to the weight of an equal volume of water.

Specific Heat
The specific heat of a material is defined as the amount of heat that is required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of the material by 1 degree of the centigrade scale. As the specific heat varies with the temperature of the substance it is usual to specify the temperatures between which it has been measured, although for temperatures met with in nature the variation of specific heat is negligible. Specific heats are all measured in relation to that of water, and by definition the specific heat of water is unity.

Spectroheliograph
The spectroheliograph is an instrument devised in 1889 by Hale at Chicago for the purpose of photographing solar prominences. It is essentially a spectroscope with a double slit (as sugested by Janssen in 1869), the second slit serving to exclude from the sensitive plate immediately behind it all light except that of one selected quality, usually the K-line of calcium. By giving properly adjusted movements to the several parts of the apparatus, a picture of the object in mono-chromatic light can thus be built up in sections as its image drifts across the collimator slit.

Spectroscope
A spectroscope is a mechanical device for analysing light. They are used for such things as measuring the velocity of stars, looking at the rotation of the sun and the detection of chemical elements.

Speculum Metal
Speculum metal is an alloy of two parts copper to one part tin and a trace of arsenic. It is hard, white and brittle and can be highly polished. It was once used for making the mirrors of reflecting telescopes.

Speed
Speed is the rate of time at which something moves, travels, proceeds or operates.

SpeedBack
SpeedBack by MicroTools Inc. is a fast and user friendly disk defragmenter for the PC. Using a special algorithm to minimize movement of data, files are moved to the front of the disk and placed in contiguous clusters.

Speedometer
see "Tachometer"

Spelter
Spelter is an alloy of copper and zinc in equal parts used for hard soldering and brazing. The term is also applied to zinc ingots formed by smelting.

Spermaceti
Spermaceti is a solid wax separated on cooling the head oil of the sperm whale. It consists mainly of cetyl palmitate and was formerly used in the manufacture of candles and ointments.

Spiegel-eisen
Spiegel-eisen (Mirror-Iron) is a pig-iron containing about 10 to 40 percent Manganese and 5 percent carbon. It is prepared by smelting manganiferous iron ores in a blast furnace. When broken it forms large crystalline plates of a very lustrous appearance, hence the name mirror-iron. It is used to add to the molten pure iron of the Bessemer and open-hearth processes in order to obtain steel.

Spindle file
A spindle file is a device for holding bills, invoices, memos and other paperwork. It consists of a metal spike, sometimes bent, projecting out of a base. The papers are then impaled upon the spike.

Spinet
A spinet (virginal) is a keyed musical instrument of the harpsichord type, but with only one string to a note and therefore less volume. It is generally square in shape and the strings are plucked. Spinets were popular between 1500 and 1760 especially during the reign of Elizabeth I in England.

Spinning
Spinning is the process of twisting textile fibres into thread, so as to give them strength. The grip of the individual fibres prevents their sliding over one another.

Spinthariscope
The spinthariscope was an instrument contrived by William Crookes in 1903 to show the luminous effets due to radium. It consisted of a short brass tube closed at one end by a convex lens, and at the other by a zinc sulphide screen, with a small piece of radium salt placed close in front of it. Am observer looking at the screen through the lens, saw it lit up by dazzling seintillations, each of which marked the impact of an alpha particle hurled from the disintegrating radium.

Spirits of Hartshorn
see "Ammonia"

Spirits of salt
Spirits of salt is an old popular name for hydrochloric acid.

Spite and Malice
Spite and Malice is a kind of competitive patience (solitaire) card game for two players. It is also known as Cat and Mouse. Both players try to be the first to get rid of a pile of "pay-off cards" by playing them to centre stacks which are begun with an ace and continue in upward sequence to a king. This is not a physical race (as in Spit or Racing Demon where play is simultaneous) - in Spite and Malice the players take turns.

Spontaneous combustion
In chemistry, spontaneous combustion is the ignition of a substance as the result of the accumulated heat of slow oxidation.

Spoon
A spoon is a shallow bowl with a handle, used for measuring or conveying food or drink to the mouth. Early spoons were made of wood, ivory, bronze and silver. In England wood and ivory were the predominant materials until the 15th century when they were replaced by metal.

Sporting Times
The Sporting Times is a newspaper founded in 1865 and almost entirely devoted to horse-racing.

Spring
A spring is a device for linking two objects together so as to allow of relative displacement between them, this being resisted by a force which increases as the displacement becomes greater.

Spur
Spurs are instruments with serrated edges or spikes attached to the heels of horsemen and used for goading the horse to greater speed. In chivalry the phrase 'winning his spurs' was equivalent to qualifying as a knight. A knight's spurs were gold and a squire's silver.

SQL
SQL stands for Structured Query Language. Often referred to as Sequel for short, SQL was developed as a query language to access mainframe databases such as IBM's DB2. PC products that incorporate SQL are IBM's OS/2 Extended Edition, dBASE IV, SQL Server from Ashton-Tate and Microsoft, Paradox, DataEASE (using a modified form called DQL), PC/FOCUS, and many others. PC implementations of SQL fall into, two categories. Firstly, SQL commands can be written directly by programmers and experienced users to access databases. The second implementation recognises that most PC users are not programmers and do not want to learn SQL and so provides them with their normal friendly user interface. The underlying software then writes the SQL commands directly for them, which are used to query SQl server databases. Anonther benefit of SQL is that it will provide a common programming language for different machine architectures, i.e. code written on an IBM mainframe can be moved to a PC with less rewriting than with conventional languages. A full implementation of SQL also contains a very critical component for creating robust transnctional databases. Often referred to as ROLL RACK/COMMIT, the facility allows a transaction that was interrupted half way through updating multiple files to be rolled back, thereby preventing damage to the datafiles. Many PC implementations of SQL are subsets of the ANSI standard, and some include extensions to the ANS standard.

SQL Server
SQL Server provides a fast, transaction-oriented server for database requests sent from client programs across a LAN. SQL Server was developed by Sybase, Microsoft, and Ashton-Tate. It is an enhanced version of the popular Sybase SQL Server product that has been available on Minicomputers for the past few years. This minicomputer origin makes the system fast, secure, robust, and able to provide a high throughput of transactions. With most multi-user database managers, the file server needs to send entire copies of index files and database files down the LAN. It is a tribute to the high performance of modern networks that the performance of these DBMS is adequate. Systems based on SQL Server promise to change this. The database server handles high-level requests using SQL. Client programs send database queries to the server, which then processes the request locally, sending back only the data required by the client. This reduces the network traffic immensely: instead of several megabytes worth of index information, only a few kilobytes of data need be exchanged. SQL Server uses the OS/2 LAN Manager Named Pipes protocol to exchange data between clients and the server. This protocol is straight forward for application programmers to use, and the system includes C libraries and full documentation for developers to write their own client interfaces to the server. OS/2 provides two distinct methods for programs to run simultaneously. Processes are usually used for running distinct programs, and occupy a large system overhead as they can theoretically write to their own virtual screen. Threads are "quick and dirty", and simply inherit most of the context of their owner. SQL Server uses threads, which means that the transaction throughput of an 80386 PC is generally better than that of a low-end VAX minicomputer. Centralising data access using a database server also improves security. Conventional shared databases offer little, if any, security - both against intrusion
accidental loss of data. To use the SQL Server, each client must provide a valid user name and password when first setting up the connection. Security levels can be assigned to deny access on a field by field basis within tables in a database. Users can also be granted read but not write access, and write but not read access. SQL Server uses the features of the TRANSACT SQL language to support full transactional processing. This ensures that the database will always retain self consistency and integrity. Should the server or LAN fail during a database update, the next time SQL Server is started it will "roll back" the transactions that were in process, and restore the database to its original state prior to the failure.

Squall
A squall is a sudden strong gust of wind, which may rise for a few seconds to hurricane force.

SQWEZ
SQWEZ by JM Software is an easy to use multi-file compression package that outputs a self expanding program. File overwrite and CRC data checks are used to help assure quality data compression and decompression. Ideal for software authors to package their program files for distribution.

St Edward's Crown
St Edward's Crown is the crown worn by English kings at their coronation, and was first worn by Charles II. It is part of the British Crown Jewels.

St Louis Cardinals
see "Chicago Cardinals"

St. James' Gazette
St James' Gazette was an anti-radical evening newspaper first published in May 1880 at a price of 2d. In January 1882 the price was dropped to 1d and in 1905 it amalgamated with the Evening Standard.

Stadium
Stadium was a Greek measure of length equal to 600 Greek feet. The foot race at the Olympic games was a stadium in length and the word has thus become to mean any permanent arena for sports and games.

Stalactite
A stalactite is a mass of calcareous matter hanging in caves, formed by the filtration of water containing calcium bicarbonate in solution through holes or pores in the cave roof. the evaporation of the water and carbonic acid gas leaves behind it a deposit of limestone which continues to increase in size so long as the water drops.

Stalagmite
A stalagmite is similar to a stalactite, but grows upwards from the cave floor, usually below a stalactite.

Stamp Act
The Stamp Act was passed by Lord Rockingham's Government on March 22nd 1765. It formed part of Grenville's scheme for the taxation of the Colonies, requiring all deeds, receipts for money etc. to be written on stamped paper, the receipts going to revenue. It was one of the chief causes of the American War of Independence, the American Colonies highly resenting taxation without representation. It was repealed on March 18th 1766.

Star
A star is a luminous globe of gas producing light by nuclear reactions.

Star Chamber
The Star Chamber was an English court founded in 1487 by Henry VII to punish the misdemeanours of sheriffs and juries, and all illegal assemblies and disturbances. It had jurisdiction over all cases civil and criminal except capital offences. Howevere, under Laud it was miss used and torture was regularly used to obtain confessions. The Star Chamber was abolished in 1641.

Star of Africa Diamond
The Star of Africa diamond was an enormous diamond. It was cut up and parts of it are mounted in the British Crown Jewels

Star Trek
Star Trek was an American science fiction drama series created by Gene Roddenberry during the late 1960s. It was intended to be a 'Western set in space' and won acclaim for its controversial casting of a black actress in a senior crew position, and the casting of a multi-national crew. It also featured the first multi-racial kiss on American television - between a black lady and a white man.

Starboard
Starboard is the right-hand side of a vessel facing the bows and the opposite of port.

Starch
Starch is a carbohydrate stored in plants, and is comprised of a large numbers of glucose molecules combined.

Stark Effect
The Stark Effect is the change produced by a strong electrostatic field in the spectrum emitted by a gas subjected to an electric discharge in a highly exhausted tube. The light emitted by the atoms of the gas is due to the motion of electrons and the motion of these is disturbed when they are subjected either to a magnetic field or to an electric field, the former case being that of the Zeeman effect. The Stark effect was discovered in 1913 by Stark.

State
A state is an independent body of persons united in a political society for the purpose of resisting external aggression and maintaining internal order. The functions which distinguish a State from any other community, e.g. a Church, are thus the external and internal use of force; and these two uses of force, though essentially the same, may be distinguished as extrajudicial and judicial.

State Crown
The State Crown is a part of the British Crown Jewels. It was made for Queen Mary.

State-General
The State-General was an assembly of nobles, clergy and commoners of France. The first was convoked by Philip the Fair in 1302 and the last by Louis XVI in 1789; this transformed itself into the revolutionary National Assembly.

Statics
Statics is the branch of dynamics dealing with states of balance in which no motion occurs because the forces tending to produce it are so arranged that their effects neutralise each other.

Stationers' Company
The Stationers' Company was chartered in 1556 and was for many years the licensing body of all printers and books published in Britain, handling censorship. The Copyright Act of 1842 removed the licensing powers and provided for literary copyrights.

Statistics
Statistics is the study of numerical data, their classification and analysis. It embraces every department of activity and knowledge to which numerical comparison can be applied, but properly applies to social facts, and its greatest use is in economics and public administration.

Stator
A stator is an assembly of fixed plates in a variable capacitor.

Statute Merchant
A statute merchant was an undertaking, signed in the presence of the mayor and sealed with the King's seal, by a debtor to pay a merchant his debt on a specified date. Statue merchants were established by the Statutes of Merchants of 1286 and 1288.

Statute of Drogheda
see "Poynings' Law"

Statute of the Staple
The Statute of the Staple was enacted in 1354 and decreed that the sale of wool, leather, woolfells and lead made in England should be held at certain staple towns.

Statutory Order
A Statutory Order is a rule made by virtue of some Act of Parliament giving them power to do so, by the Crown in Council, the Courts of Justice, or Government Departments, and having the same authority as the statutes under which they are made. They usually deal with details of administration left unprovided for in the enabling statute, and generally must be submitted to Parliament before coming into force.

Steam
Steam is the transparent, colourless gas into which water is converted when it vaporises.

Steam Engine
The first workable steam engine was built by Thomas Savery who exhibited a model of it at the Royal Institution in London in 1698. But Dionysius Papin had published a design for a high-pressure steam engine in 1690, and it is probable that Savery took the plan from him.

Steam Hammer
A steam hammer is a power-driven hammer invented around 1842 by James Nasmyth. As originally designed, the striker of the hammer was attached to the lower end of the piston rod of an inverted cylinder and the instrument was worked by steam controlled by a valve.

Steam Shovel
A steam-shovel or steam-navvy was a machine for excavating earthworks. It consisted of a bucket on a long arm with an engine for articulating the bucket which was used to scoop out large quanitites of earth.

Steam-navvy
see "Steam Shovel"

Stearic Acid
Stearic acid is a long chain fatty acid soluble in alcohol but not water. Mixed with rubber in a small proportion, it is a very valuable softener and activates many vulcanisation accelerators.

Stearin
Stearin or glycerol tri-stearate, is along with glycerol tri-palmitate, the main component of the solid fats. In its pure state it forms pearly crystals, which are tasteless, and insoluble in water, but dissolve in ether and similar solvents.

Steel
Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon.

Steeple
A steeple is any tower-like structure attached to a church, whether a tower proper or spire or a combination of tower and spire or tower and lantern.

Steinway and Sons
Steinway and Sons are an American firm of piano makers. They were founded in 1853 at New York by Henry Steinway and his sons: Charles, Henry, William and Albert. They were joined in 1865 by the eldest son, Theodore. The Steinways were natives of Brunswick, but emigrated to the USA in 1849.

Stelazine
Stelazine is a tradename for trifluoperazine hydrochloride.

Stencil
A stencil is a thin metal plate or other piece of material with a series of holes forming a design or lettering through which colouring-matter is applied to a surface.

Stenotype
A stenotype is a small, light easily portable machine somewhat resembling a typewriter used for stenotypy. The speed attainable with the machine far exceeds that possible in any of the written systems of shorthand.

Stenotypy
Stenotypy is a method of using a printer instead of a written character for recording shorthand, effected by a small, light and easily portable machine called a stenotype.

Stephanome
The stephanome was an instrument invented by Professor Tait and used at the Ben Nevis observatory for measuring the angular size of halos, glories, fogbows etc. It consisted of a graduated rod with a sight at one end, and a sliding bar with an outer and inner pair of points. In practice the eye was applied to the sight and the sliding bar moved along the graduated rod until either the outer or inner pair of points on it coincided with the ends of a diamiter of the circle being measured. The graduations on the rod were reduced to angular measure and tabulated, measurements being made to an average accuracy of about five minutes of arc.

Stere
Stere is a French unit for solid measure, equal to a cubic metre or kilolitre.

Stereo-chemistry
Stereo-chemistry is the science of the study of the spatial configuration of the atoms and groups constituting the molecule in chemical compounds. The foundations of stereo-chemistry were laid by the work of Louis Pasteur on tartaric acid in 1850.

Stereoscope
A stereoscope is an optical instrument producing an impression of depth or solidity. As early as the 1930s the technique of 3-D films shown to an audience wearing stereoscopes of a red glass filter for one eye and a green glass filter for the other eye were common in Britain.

Sterling silver
Sterling silver is an alloy of silver and copper.

Stilts
Stilts are poles with stirrup-like projections for the feet placed at some distance from the bottom and used for walking over rough ground. They were used for crossing rivers, scaling castle walls and as a diversion.

Stipple
Stipple is an engraving style producing the desired effect by means of dots, in contradistinction to engraving in lines.

Stipule
In botany, a stipule is a small leaf-like appendage to a leaf, commonly situated at the base of the petiole in pairs, one on each side, and either adhering to it or standing separate. They are usually of a more delicate texture than the leaf, but vary in this respect as well as in form and colour. They are not found in all plants, but where they occur they frequently characterise a whole family, as in Leguminosae, Rosaceae and others.

Stock Exchange
The Stock Exchange is a market for dealing in shares, stocks, bonds and other securities existing in most important financial centres of the world. In most cases Stock Exchanges have developed from informal meetings of 18th century commission agents and brokers.

Stocks
Stocks are two boards with semi-circular holes, set one above the other within two posts, and padlocked so as to confine the legs of a seated person just above the feet. Formerly every parish had stocks fixed in some public spot in which petty offenders were confined as punishment.

Stocks and Shares
Stock is the capital of a company, divided into shares of a given amount which are transferable. Stock is always paid up, shares need not be, but shares cannot be divided into parts.

Stoicism
Stoicism is an ancient Greek philosophy. It is essentially a practical philosophy, the source of its ethics being the ideal of the wise man after the pattern of Socrates, who perceives that the true good of man lies not in outward objects, but in the state of the soul itself. A follower of Stoicism is known as a Stoic.

Stole
A stole is a strip of silken material worn over both shoulders by priests and bishops, but over the left shoulder only by deacons, in their administrations. The council of Laodicea forbade the use of the stole to the inferior orders of the clergy. Symbolically it represents the yoke of Christ. The colour of the stole may be changed in harmony with the church's seasons.

Stone
The stone is a standard British weight equivalent to 14 pounds. This is the Imperial stone, other stones are in use - 16 pounds being the stone for cheese, 32 pounds for hemp, 24 pounds for wool and 8 pounds for butcher meat. Officially Britian is metric, using kilogramms, but the stone lives on reflecting the independance of the British people.

Stone Age
Stone Age is the name in anthropology for the period of human culture before the discovery and use of metal when man made his tools and weapons mainly of flint, but sometimes of other stones, and later of bone, horn and ivory or wood.

Stonehenge
Stonehenge is the principal prehistoric monument in Great Britain. It consists of a group of large stones arranged in a circle on Salisbury Plain.

Stoneware
Stoneware is a crude kind of porcelain, of which the materials, mainly flint and felspar, are of coarser quality and have not been so strongly heated and nearly fused in the process of manufacture. Stoneware is unlike porcelain in being opaque, and differs from earthenware in not being porous. It is however usually glazed by throwing salt into the furnace, the sodium of the salt forming a kind of glass with the silica of the ware.

Stool of Repentance
A stool of repentance was a seat or pew in the parish churches of Scotland, on which those sentenced to expiate such sins as immorality, lying, evil-speaking, drunkeness, and the like had to appear and remain during the service. The offender was clothed in a long robe of sacking or was wrapped in a white sheet, and was required to stand for one or two Sundays for minor offences or longer for more serious offences.

Storm
A storm is a violent atmospheric disturbance caused by unequal atmospheric pressure and often occurring suddenly.

Stowaway True Archival System
The Stowaway True Archival System by Patri-Soft is a utility computer program that frees hard disk space by archiving inactive files from hard disks to a library of offline archive disks. You use its directory manager to select data to be archived. It works like a backup program to move the files to diskette while indexing them on your hard disk. It has data compression, automatic diskette formatting and viewing of files prior to archival.

Strategy
Strategy (derived from the Greek strategia, meaning 'army leadership') was originally a military term describing the general direction of a campaign and higher leadership, as distinct from tactics which describes the actual handling of troops on the march.

Strathspey
Strathspey is a Scottish dance said to have originated in the Strath valley of the Spey around the start of the 18th century.

Stratified
see "Stratum"

Stratosphere
The stratosphere is that region of the upper atmosphere where the temperature ceases to fall with increasing height above the earth's surface, and either remains constant or slightly increases.

Stratum
Stratum is a geological term describing a mass of sedimentary rock (a strata) of great horizontal extent, which was deposited more or less continuously on the bottom of former seas or lakes, or sometimes on the surface of flat plains or deserts. Stratified rocks are mostly sandstones, shales and limestone.

Street
A street is a road with houses along one or both sides of it.

Strike
A strike is the chief bargaining weapon of a labour body, and consists of a voluntary stoppage of work with the object of obtaining better conditions or resisting worsening ones.

Strontium
Strontium is a metal element with the symbol Sr of the alkaline-earth group. It is found mainly in celestine and strontianite. It is a hard yellowish metal which acts on water releasing the hydrogen.

Structural formula
In chemistry, the structural formula is the formula which shows the arrangement of the atoms in a molecule.

Strychnine
Strychnine is a poisonous alkaloid obtained from the dried seeds of nux vomica and other species of Strychnos. In small does it is administered as a heart stimulant.

Stupa
see "Tope"

Styrivolt
Styrivolt is a card game which is more than 300 years old and was probably invented in Denmark. It has been played in the Faroe Islands for over 200 years.

Submarine
A submarine is a vessel capable of travelling both on and below the surface of the sea. The first practical submarine was built in 1620 by Cornelius van Drebbel. It was made of wood covered with greased leather, and was propelled from the inside by oars passing through flexible sleeves. The crew was supplied with air by means of a pipe which led to the surface. It was demonstrated on the Thames and James I made a trip in it.

Subsidy
A subsidy is a pecuniary grant by the State to the costs of private enterprise without expectation of a direct return. Subsidies are also grants paid annualy by one state to another in order to secure its neutrality or support in war or to induce it to act in accordance with the advice and in the interests of the country making the payment.

Substitution reaction
In chemistry, substitution reaction is a chemical reaction in which one or more elements or radicals in a compound are replaced by other elements or radicals.

Succinic Acid
Succinic acid is a dibasic acid occuring in amber and other resins, from the former of which it can be obtained by distillation, though it can also be prepared by the fermentation of calcium malate.

Sucrose
Sucrose is cane sugar. It is formed by the chemical combination of glucose and sucrose. It occurs naturally in sugar-beet and sugar-cane, in sweet fruits and in roots such as carrots.

Sudd
The sudd is a floating mass of vegetable matter that forms inthe White Nile and obstructs navigation.

Sueca
Sueca is point-trick card game with trumps played in Portugal and Brazil. It is popular with students in Rio de Janeiro because it's fast and you don't need a table to play it.

Suffragan
Originally all provincial bishops under a metropolitan were called his suffragans. An Act of Henry VIII provided for what were termed suffragan bishops for the supplementing of the work of the diocesans.

Suffrage
Suffrage is the right to express an opinion by voting on political questions, applied in particular to the right to vote at parliamentary elections.

Suffragettes
see "suffragette"

Sufiism
Sufiism was a movement of revolt against the rigid law and wearisome ritual of Islam in Persia. It developed into a pantheistic mysticism which, tinged by the teachings of Zoroaster, adopted also some Buddhist theories of life.

Sugar
Sugar is a sweet, soluble carbohydrate.

Sugars
In chemistry, the sugars are a group of carbohydrates, soluble in water and having a sweet taste. The group includes glucose, lactose and saccharose.

Sulphocyanate
A sulphocyanate (sulphocyanide, thiocyanate) is a salt of thiocyanic acid and is usually obtained from gas-purification residues.

Sulphocyanide
see "Sulphocyanate"

Sulphonal
Sulphonal (Dimethylmethane diethylsulphone) is a hypnotic manufactured by the interaction of acetone and ethyl mercaptan in the presence of zinc chloride and the oxidation of the resulting product with potassium permanganate.

Sulphonic Acid
Sulphonic Acids are acids having an organic group combined with the group SO2OH.

Sulphur
Sulphur (brimstone) is a non-metallic element that occurs either free or in combination with sulphates and sulphides, is a constituent of proteins, exists in several allotropic forms including yellow orthorhombic crystals, resembles oxygen chemically but is less active and more acidic, and is used especially in the chemical and paper industries, in rubber vulcanisation, and in medicine for the treating of skin diseases. It has the symbol S.

Sulphur dioxide
Sulphur dioxide is a sulphurous anhydride gas that is given off from some volcanoes and is produced whenever sulphur or its compounds are burned in air. It is a colourles gas with a very sharp, suffocating smell. It is very soluble in water forming an acid, which in the atmosphere is known as acid rain. It is a powerful antiseptic and is used to remove traces of chlorine from bleached material, and in the curing of hops.

Sulphuric Acid
Sulphuric acid has the formulae H2SO4.

Sulphurous Acid
Sulphurous Acid (H2SO3) is a solution of sulphur dioxide in water.

Summary Jurisdiction
Summary Jurisdiction is the power conferred on Justices of the Peace to deal summarily with offenders instead of sending them for trial on indictment.

Summer
Summer is the warmest season of the year. It begins astronomically in northern latitudes when the sun enters the zodiacal sign of Cancer, about June 22nd, and terminates at the autumn equinox, about September 21st. Midsummer Day is in fact then really the start of summer. Short spells of warm weather in the middle of October and the beginning of November used to be known as St Luke's and St Martin's summer from the occurence of these saints' days on October 18th and November 11th.

Summons
A summons is an order to appear in court to answer a complaint.

Sun
The sun is the star at the centre of the solar system.

Sunday
Sunday is the seventh day of the week.

Sunday School
Sunday Schools were founded by Robert Raikes, a Gloucester printer, in 1780 to provide education to children who worked such long hours during the week in the new factories that no weekday education was possible for them.

Sundial
A sundial is an instrument for measuring the time of day from the shadow cast by the sun shining on a style or gnomon onto a graduated surface.

Sunn Hemp
Sunn Hemp (Bengal Hemp) is a fibre somewhat similar to flax, obtained from the stem of the plant Crotolaria juncea and used for making rope.

Sunstroke
Sunstroke (heat-stroke) is a disorder produced by exposure to the sun or very hot air.

Superbase 2
Superbase 2 by Precision Software, is a system which offers file management to end users together with a more powerful multi-file relational capability within the Windows 2 environment. Because the product uses a graphical interface accessing data is as simple as pointing and clicking a mouse. The product can run using either a full copy of Microsoft Windows 2 or the runtime version of Windows that is bundled with the package. Superbase 2 gives three types of views; a record view (default), a table view and a page view which allows you to place fields any place on your screen. Once you open a particular view on screen, Superbase 2 provides a VCR-type panel that allows you to easily browse through your data. A row of symbols across the bottom of the screen represent commonly used functions such as fast-forward, reverse and pause. Superbase 2 gives access to many powerful features including calculated fields, required ranges, external lookups and extemally linked text and graphics fits. The externally linked text files can be edited and stored in Superbase 2s built-in text editor. Superbase 2 includes report capabilities such as optional date stamping page numbering and headings. Fields can be from any file, making it a fully relational report writer. In-line calculations and text concatenations allow for calculated fields in the report output.

Superbase 4
Superbase 4 is a relational database which runs under Microsoft Windows. Like Superbase 2, it appeals to end users, but also includes additional powerful features for the applications developer as well. Superbase 4 contains all the features and functionality of Superbase 2, and adds a Form Designer module, for creating presentation quality forms that integrate directly with your databases. It also includes a full-scale command line language called Database Management Language (DML). DML is useful for customizing and fine-tuning applications to include functionality beyond what is accessible through the menus. With the addition of these two features, Superbase 4 extends its appeal to the higher-end user.

SuperGraphics
SuperGraphics by Computer Associates consists of two modules: SuperImage and SuperChart. SuperChart is a modified version of the popular SuperCalc 5 spreadsheet, available separately. It has been modified to provide links with SuperImage. Charts produced with SuperChart can be edited, enhanced, and annotated with SuperImage. Superimage is a complete PC drawing system designed for rapid enhancement of presentation graphics. Like comparable products, Superimage provides tools to create freehand drawings, and can edit existing charts and graphs imported from spreadsheets or from SuperChart. It can create word charts, which can be created from predefined or custom stencils, then combined with charts or backdrops. Completed drawings can then be output to printer, plotter, or 35mm slides. Output can be immediate, or jobs can be queued for batch output. Superimage can transmit batched output files to a remote, offsite plotter using a modem.

SuperKey
SuperKey, by Borland International, is a menu-driven, macro-generating program that includes a number of useful non-macro related utilities. For example, SuperKey offers vehicles for added security including methods of file encryption, a password-protected keyboard lock, and an instant screen-saving feature. SuperKey can be used to develop consistent interfaces across applications. Its macros can simplify complex command sequences and can be used to store and insert boilerplate text. The display-only macros are perfect for creating help screens. SuperKey's interface is similar to that of SideKick but includes more menus. If you prefer, you can bypass the menus by redefining a set of Ctrl or Alt key combinations.

Supernova
Supernova is the explosive death of a star.

SuperPaint
SuperPaint combines the best features of painting and drawing programs in one package. SuperPaint contains both a drawing tool menu and a paint tool menu that are as comprehensive as the standalone equivalents of these applications. Icons appear depending upon whether you have chosen the drawing stylus or paintbrush tool. This lets you do pixel-based painting and object-oriented drawing on the same screen, each on separate layers. In addition to the standard commands and drawing and painting tools, SuperPaint has features to make creating your illustration easier than with some other programs. The program includes automatic scrolling which moves the page as your cursor moves, and snap-to grids which let you define the unit of measure for both grids and rulers. You can hide the command menus and use the entire screen for your illustrafion. At any time, you can choose to show the painted bit-mapped elements of your illustration, the drawn object-oriented elements, or both. There is also AutoTrace, the capability of automatically tracing bit-mapped images in the Paint layer to create object-oriented line art in the Draw layer.

Superphosphate
Superphosphate is a manure made by mixing calcium hydrogen phosphate with gypsum.

Supertax
Supertax was an additional income tax first levied by the Finance Act of 1909 upon incomes of over 5000 pounds a year at the rate of 6d in the pound for every pound by which the income exceeded 3000 pounds.

Suranji
Suranji (aal) is a red dye extracted from the roots of the aal plant, in India and used for dyeing cotton cloth.

Surd
Surd is an algebraic term to describe a quantity not expressible in rational numbers, such as the cube root of 3.

Surface combustion
Surface combustion is a method of causing a mixture of air and gas to burn by bringing it into contact with a suitable porous surface. Usually this consists of a diaphragm of porous refractory material, to one side of which a mixture of gas and air is supplied under a low pressure.

Surface tension
Surface tension is a property characteristic of liquids, by which the surface behaves as if it were covered with an elastic stretched skin. The effect is due to the fact that at the surface the attraction between the molecules of the liquid is unbalanced, surface molecules being attracted towards the body of the liquid, whereas in the body of the liquid a molecule is attracted equally in all directions.

Surplice
A surplice is a loose white vestment of varying length, with wide sleeves; worn by the clergy, and usually by a choir at divine services.

Surveying
Surveying is the art of measuring the shape and size of parts of the earth's surface with a view to representation on a reduced scale. It is employed in map making and is the essential preliminary to all civil engineering works.

Suspension
In chemistry, suspension is a system consisting of small particles dispersed in a liquid. The particles will settle out slowly upon standing.

Suttee
Suttee (Sati) is the practice in India of burning a widow on her husband's funeral pyre.

Swamp
A swamp is a level or low-lying expanse of ground saturated with water.

Swastika
The swastika is an ancient religious symbol dating from Neolithic times, and occurring in ancient Greek and Egyptian art. It has the form of an equal armed cross with the ends of the arms all bending in the same direction at right angles. It was introduced into Europe in the 16th century and used extensively in Christian art. It was adopted by Hitler as his symbol.

Swearing
Swearing is the act of declaring upon oath. The term has also come to include the use of profane language, which under an act of 1847 is a criminal offence in Britain when such language is used on the street.

Sweatshirt
A sweatshirt is a long-sleeved knitted cotton article of clothing worn by athletes and others.

Sweatshop
A sweatshop is a workshop or factory where the employees work long hours under bad conditions for low wages.

Sweepstake
A sweepstake is a form of gambling in which those taking part pay money into a common fund which, after the deduction of expenses, is divided between those who have drawn certain numbered tickets.

Swifter
On a ship, a swifter is a line run around the ends of the capstan bars to prevent their falling out of their sockets.

Swimming
Swimming is the art of supporting oneself and propelling oneself through the water.

Swingle
A swingle is a flat-bladed wooden instrument used for beating and scraping flax or hemp to remove coarse matter from it.

Swiss
Swiss is a term used to denote someone or something from Switzerland.

Swiss Muslim
Swiss muslin is a fine muslin dress fabric, usually having a raised or woven pattern of dolls or figures. It is so called because it was formerly imported from Switzerland.

Switch
see "Crazy Eights"

Swizzle Stick
A swizzle stick is a small rod used to stir or agitate a fizzy drink to help release the bubbles of carbon dioxide.

Syllabus
A syllabus is an outline of a course of study, giving only the headings for the subjects.

Symbiosis
Symbiosis is the association of two organisms each helping the other.

Symbol
A symbol is something which represents something else.

Synagogue
A synagogue is a Jewish place of worship.

Syndicalism
Syndicalism is a doctrine of government, a development of trade unionism, its aim being the abolition of parliamentary government and capitalism and the substitution of trade unionism as the controller and owner of each particular industry.

Syndicate
A syndicate is a group of persons associated temporarily for the purpose of buying and re-selling a specific business or other property, or for forming a limited liability company prior to the issue of shares to the public.

Synersis
In chemistry, synersis is the shrinking of a gel, with the expulsion of water or other liquid from it.

Synthesis
In chemistry, synthesis is the construction of a compound by the union of elements or simple compounds.

Syriac
Syriac is a Semitic language and a dialect of Aramaic. It was the literary language of the early Eastern Christians and after the 5th century split into East and West Syriac.

Copyright 1997,1998 Servile Software Enquiries to Matthew Probert

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