geranium: Zonal, house, or bedding geraniums (P. × hortorum, a complex hybrid largely derived from P. inguinans and P. zonale) are the familiar forms in garden culture and in pots indoors. Ivy, or hanging, geraniums (P. peltatum) are grown as basket plants indoors and out; they are also used…

Mervyn LeRoy: At Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: Random Harvest, Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, and Quo Vadis: …documentary short about religious tolerance, The House I Live In (1945), written by Albert Maltz (later of the Hollywood Ten), with Frank Sinatra delivering the message. LeRoy, Maltz, Sinatra, and three others won a special Oscar for the film; it was the only Oscar LeRoy would ever receive. Without Reservations…

Louis Adamic: …followed by his first novel, The House in Antigua (1937). His following book, My America (1938), a mixture of memoir and social philosophy, outlines his dream of a unified American people.

Nigel Dennis: Both Cards of Identity and A House in Order (1966) retained some of his original concerns. The Making of Moo, a satirical play on the psychological power of religious fervor, was performed in 1957 and was published, together with the stage version of Cards of Identity, as Two Plays and…

The House in Paris, novel by Elizabeth Bowen, published in 1935, in which the plot complexities of infidelity and family tragedy are revealed mainly through the eyes of two children, Leopold and Henrietta, who meet at Naomi Fisher’s house in

José Donoso: …novel Casa de campo (1978; A House in the Country), which Donoso considered his best work, he examines in a Surrealist style the breakdown of social order in postcolonial Latin America.

Tarjei Vesaas: …up by mass psychology, and Huset i mørkret (1945; “House in Darkness”), a symbolic vision of the Nazi occupation of Norway. Fuglane (1957; The Birds), considered his greatest work (and later filmed), pleads for tolerance toward the outsider. He also wrote a renowned collection of short stories entitled Vindane (1952;…

Farne Islands: The largest of these islands, House (Inner Farne), spans 16 acres (6.5 hectares) and has precipitous cliffs reaching up to 80 feet (24 metres) in height. The lighthouse on Longstone island was the home of Grace Darling, Victorian heroine of sea-rescue fame; the modern lighthouse, however, is on House. The…

American literature: Multicultural writing: Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, James Welch’s Winter in the Blood (1974) and Fools Crow (1986), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977), and Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), and The Antelope Wife (1998) were powerful and

martin: The house martin (Delichon urbica), blue-black above and white-rumped, is common in Europe. The African river martin (Pseudochelidon eurystomina) of the Congo River is black, with red eyes and bill; it is sometimes placed in a separate family, Pseudochelidonidae. The so-called bee-martin, or bee bird, is…

house mouse, (Mus musculus), rodent native to Eurasia but introduced worldwide through association with humans. Highly adaptive, the house mouse has both behavioral and physiological traits—such as the ability to survive in buildings and aboard ships, a tendency to move into agricultural fields and

house, style of high-tempo, electronic dance music that originated in Chicago in the early 1980s and spread internationally. Born in Chicago clubs that catered to gay, predominantly black and Latino patrons, house fused the symphonic sweep and soul diva vocals of 1970s disco with the cold futurism

Sou Fujimoto: House N, a residential structure in Ōita, Japan, was also completed in 2008. Fujimoto’s design blurred the boundaries between domestic space and the street, and between the built environment and nature, with a series of progressively more intimate living spaces nested within one another. A…

Meena Alexander: Place (1978), Stone Roots (1980), House of a Thousand Doors (1988), and The Storm: A Poem in Five Parts (1989). She also wrote a one-act play, In the Middle Earth (1977); a volume of criticism, Women in Romanticism (1989); a semiautobiographical novel set in Hyderabad, India, Nampally Road (1991); and…

Emily Carr: … (1941), dealing with the Indians; The House of All Sorts (1944), describing her experiences as a boardinghouse owner and dog breeder in Victoria; Growing Pains (1946), an autobiography; and Pause: A Sketch Book (1953), telling of her stay in an English sanatorium.

Samuel Fuller: Films of the 1950s: House of Bamboo (1955) was a crime story set in Japan, with Robert Stack as an army investigator who goes undercover to hunt a gang of rogue American ex-soldiers (led by Robert Ryan) who are robbing army ammunition trains. Run of the Arrow (1957) exhibited…

The House of Bernarda Alba, three-act tragedy by Federico García Lorca, published in 1936 as La casa de Bernarda Alba: drama de mujeres en los pueblos de España (subtitled “Drama of Women in the Villages of Spain”). It constitutes the third play of Lorca’s dramatic trilogy that also includes Blood

American literature: The Off-Broadway ascendancy: …who created serious farce in The House of Blue Leaves (1971) and fresh social drama in Six Degrees of Separation (1990); and Ntozake Shange, whose “choreopoem” For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf moved to Broadway in 1976. Other well-received women playwrights included

Mahershala Ali: …in the popular Netflix series House of Cards. In 2016 he was nominated for an Emmy Award for that role. He also won praise for his performance as a former slave who becomes a political activist in the film Free State of Jones (2016). In addition to his award-winning role…

Group Theatre: …the Group staged Paul Green’s House of Connelly, a play of the decadent Old South as reflected by the disintegrating gentry class. The play was favourably received by the critics and ran for 91 performances. The Group then followed with two anticapitalist plays, 1931 and Success Story; the former closed…

David Duchovny: …directed his first motion picture, The House of D, a dramedy that he also wrote. His later television work included the series Californication (2007–14), in which he starred as a self-destructive writer, and Aquarius (2015–16), about a police officer attempting to locate murderer Charles Manson. In 2016 he reprised the…

Olga Tokarczuk: Novels and other works: …Dom dzienny, dom nocny (House of Day, House of Night), the first of what she called her “constellations novels,” stories that tell seemingly fragmented narratives.

Peter Ackroyd: Light (1989), English Music (1992), The House of Doctor Dee (1993), The Trial of Elizabeth Cree: A Novel of the Limehouse Murders (1995), The Fall of Troy (2006), Three Brothers (2013), and Mr. Cadmus (2020). In 2009 Ackroyd also published a retelling of The Canterbury Tales.

Louis Auchincloss: …of his best novels, including The House of Five Talents (1960) and Portrait in Brownstone (1962), examine family relationships over a period of decades. Others, notably The Rector of Justin (1964) and Diary of a Yuppie (1987), are studies of a single character, often from many points of view. Auchincloss…

Zhang Yimou: …included Shimian mai fu (2004; House of Flying Daggers) and Man cheng jin dai huangjinjia (2006; Curse of the Golden Flower). Zhang shifted direction again with the offbeat comic thriller San qiang pai an jing qi (2009; A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop), a remake of the Coen…

David Mamet: …and directed the motion pictures House of Games (1987), Homicide (1991), and The Spanish Prisoner (1998). In 1999 he directed The Winslow Boy, which he had adapted from a play by Terence Rattigan. State and Main (2000), a well-received ensemble piece written and directed by Mamet, depicts the trials and…

Pramoedya Ananta Toer: …Footsteps) and Rumah kaca (1988; House of Glass), had to be published abroad. These late works comprehensively depict Javanese society under Dutch colonial rule in the early 20th century. In contrast to Pramoedya’s earlier works, they were written in a plain, fast-paced narrative style.

Ridley Scott: …Driver on the true-crime drama House of Gucci (2021), which centers on the murder of Maurizio Gucci, who headed his family’s luxury fashion brand. In 2023 Scott directed Napoleon, an epic biopic about the legendary French emperor. Joaquin Phoenix appeared in the title role, and Vanessa Kirby portrayed Joséphine. In…

Dambudzo Marechera: …his collection of stories entitled The House of Hunger, a powerful account of life in his country under white rule.

Jacques Barzun: …Teacher in America (1945), essays; The House of Intellect (1959), a work that indicts the American educational system for producing counterfeit intellectuals; and The American University: How It Runs, Where It Is Going (1968, new edition 1993). A related work is Science: The Glorious Entertainment (1964), in which he criticizes…

Elsa Morante: …novel, Menzogna e sortilegio (1948; House of Liars), recounts the complex history of a southern Italian family through the memory and imagination of a young woman. Morante’s next novel, L’isola di Arturo (1957; Arturo’s Island), examines a boy’s growth from childhood dreams to the painful disillusions of adulthood. This novel,…

Don Cheadle: …in the dark comedy series House of Lies (2012–16), earning Emmy nominations in each of the series’ first four seasons. Cheadle then was cast in another dark comedy, Black Monday (2019– ), centred on the stock market crash of October 19, 1987, and his performance earned him his 9th and…

Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: …and his finest achievement, “The House of Life,” is a sonnet sequence unique in the intensity of its evocation of the mysteries of physical and spiritual love. Here, as he claimed against his detractors, “the passionate and just delights of the body are declared to be as naught if not…

Martin Amis: …Dread (2002) and the novel House of Meetings (2006). In his novel The Pregnant Widow (2010), Amis examined the sexual revolution of the 1970s and its repercussions on a group of friends who lived through it. The pop culture indictment Lionel Asbo: State of England (2012) chronicles the vicissitudes of…

Gillian Anderson: Films: The House of Mirth and The Last King of Scotland: …Lily Bart in the film The House of Mirth (2000), a British adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel. Other films in which Anderson appeared included the Irish drama The Mighty Celt (2005); The Last King of Scotland (2006), which centres on Ugandan dictator Idi Amin; and Johnny English Reborn (2011), a…

The House of Mirth, novel by Edith Wharton, published in 1905. The story concerns the tragic fate of the beautiful and well-connected but penniless Lily Bart, who at age 29 lacks a husband to secure her position in society. Maneuvering to correct this situation, she encounters both Simon Rosedale,

María Luisa Bombal: …niebla as the basis for The House of Mist (1947), an English-language novel that she considered an entirely new work. The House of Mist details an unloving marriage between Daniel, who clings to the memory of his first wife, and Helga, who takes a mysterious blind lover who may or…

Sandra Cisneros: Books: A House of My Own: Stories from My Life (2015) is a wide-ranging memoir. Inspired by Cisneros’s travels when she was an aspiring author, Martita, I Remember You (2021) follows twentysomething Corina, who leaves her Mexican family in Chicago to pursue her literary dreams in…

Colm Tóibín: Novels: House of Names (2017) centers on Clytemnestra of Greek mythology. The Magician (2022) is a work of historical fiction based on the life of German novelist Thomas Mann.

Tyler Perry: …to television with his sitcoms House of Payne (2006–12; 2020– ); Meet the Browns (2009–11), which evolved from a play (2004) and a film (2008); and For Better or Worse (2011–17), which centred on characters from Why Did I Get Married? and its sequel. The latter series was picked up…

reformatory: … in the mid-19th century, the House of Refuge movement prompted the establishment of the first reformatories, which were conceived as an alternative to the traditional practice of sending juvenile offenders to adult penitentiaries. As the term suggests, these institutions were intended to reform juvenile offenders rather than to punish or…

Jennifer Connelly: …star with Ben Kingsley in House of Sand and Fog (2003) and with Leonardo DiCaprio in Blood Diamond (2006). Her other films included Reservation Road (2007) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008). Connelly portrayed the wife of Charles Darwin (played by her real-life husband,

Edna O’Brien: Other novels: …You), The High Road (1988), House of Splendid Isolation (1994), Down by the River (1996), In the Forest (2002), and The Light of Evening (2006). Many of these works examined the social and cultural changes—and the conflicts ignited by these changes—in modern-day Ireland. The wrenching novel Down by the River,…

Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Directing: Mankiewicz then made House of Strangers (1949), a potent if somewhat heavy-handed drama about a Machiavellian businessman (Edward G. Robinson) who exploits his own sons.

José Clemente Orozco: Early life and training: …prostitutes that was collectively titled House of Tears. When civil war broke out in Mexico in 1914, Orozco supported the forces of Gen. Venustiano Carranza by working as a satiric artist on the revolutionary paper La vanguardia (“The Vanguard”), which was edited by Atl.

zombie: History: The House of the Dead, a light-gun arcade game, was released the following year. It also spawned several sequels and a big-screen adaptation in 2003. The popularity of zombie video games also contributed in part to the rise of Asian zombie films, including Hong Kong’s…

Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Political activity and arrest of Fyodor Dostoyevsky: …Zapiski iz myortvogo doma (1861–62; The House of the Dead). Gone was the tinge of Romanticism and dreaminess present in his early fiction. The novel, which was to initiate the Russian tradition of prison camp literature, describes the horrors that Dostoyevsky actually witnessed: the brutality of the guards who enjoyed…

George R.R. Martin: …later cocreated the prequel series House of the Dragon (2022– ), which takes place some 200 years before Game of Thrones; he also served as one of the executive producers.

Lok Sabha, lower house of India’s bicameral Parliament, which also includes an upper house, the Rajya Sabha (Hindi: “Council of States”). On May 14, 1954, the term Lok Sabha was officially adopted for the lower house of Parliament, which was previously referred to as “House of the People”—a name

the Animals: …second single, the traditional “House of the Rising Sun,” was brilliantly rearranged to feature Price’s electric organ and Valentine’s guitar, playing ornate arpeggios beneath Burdon’s dramatic vocal. A number one hit on both sides of the Atlantic, this was the record that persuaded Dylan to take the plunge into…

The House of the Seven Gables, romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in 1851. The work, set in mid-19th-century Salem, Mass., is a sombre study in hereditary sin, based on the legend of a curse pronounced on Hawthorne’s own family by a woman condemned to death during the infamous Salem witch

Isabel Allende: …casa de los espíritus (1982; The House of the Spirits; film 1993). It was followed by the novels De amor y de sombra (1984; Of Love and Shadows; film 1994), Eva Luna (1987), and El plan infinito (1991; The Infinite Plan) and the collection of stories Cuentos de Eva Luna…

Isabel Allende: …The House of the Spirits; film 1993). It was followed by the novels De amor y de sombra (1984; Of Love and Shadows; film 1994), Eva Luna (1987), and El plan infinito (1991; The Infinite Plan) and the collection of stories Cuentos de Eva Luna (1990; The Stories of Eva…

Paul Cézanne: Impressionist years: …famous painting of this period, The House of the Suicide (1873), illustrates these forces at work.

Casa de Contratación, central trading house and procurement agency for Spain’s New World empire from the 16th to the 18th century. Organized in 1503 by Queen Isabella in Sevilla (Seville), it was initially headed by Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, her chaplain and former overseer of the Columbus

Emilia, condesa de Pardo Bazán: …and most representative novels are The House of Ulloa (originally in Spanish, Los pazos de Ulloa, 1886) and its sequel, La madre naturaleza (1887; “Mother Nature”)—studies of physical and moral ruin among the Galician squirearchy, set against a beautiful natural background and a moral background of corrupting power. Insolación (“Sunstroke”)…

Roger Corman: Edgar Allan Poe films: …of Edgar Allan Poe, including House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Raven (1963), The Haunted Palace (1963), and The Masque of the Red Death (1964). All but one of the Poe films starred Vincent Price, and these films featured such other established actors as Basil…

House of Wax, American horror film, released in 1953, that established Vincent Price as a leading actor in the genre. It was one of the first films shot in 3-D. Price portrayed Prof. Henry Jarrod, an ingenious sculptor of wax statues and part owner of a wax museum that is burned down by his

Henry Hathaway: Film noirs: The influential The House on 92nd Street (1945) was a taut docudrama about Nazis trying to steal atomic bomb secrets during World War II. The film noir The Dark Corner (1946) also earned critical praise, in part for a solid cast that included Mark Stevens, William Bendix,…

Shirley Ann Grau: This was followed by The House on Coliseum Street (1961), which examines the lives of a mother and her five daughters, each from a different liaison, and their relationships with men. Three generations of the Howland family, a once-mighty Southern dynasty, are chronicled in The Keepers of the House…

House on Haunted Hill, American horror film, released in 1959, that was produced and directed by popular B-filmmaker William Castle, who was known for his theatre gimmicks. The movie later developed a cult following. Vincent Price played Frederick Loren, an eccentric millionaire who rents a

Sandra Cisneros: Books: …her first book of fiction, The House on Mango Street (1983), written in a defiant youthful voice that reflects her own memories of a girlhood spent trying to be a creative writer in an antagonistic environment. More poetry—including The Rodrigo Poems (1985), My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1987), and Loose Woman…

Louise Glück: …its outlook is equally grim, The House on Marshland (1975) shows a greater mastery of voice. There, as in her later volumes, Glück’s personae included historic and mythic figures such as Gretel and Joan of Arc. Her adoption of different perspectives became increasingly imaginative; for example, in “The Sick Child,”…

Italian literature: Social commitment and the new realism: …La casa in collina (1949; The House on the Hill) and La luna e i falò (1950; The Moon and the Bonfires). Also of lasting relevance is Primo Levi’s moving account of how human dignity survived the degradations of Auschwitz (Se questo è un uomo [1947; If This Is a…

Rosario Ferré: …1995 she published a novel, House on the Lagoon, written in English.

Spring Green: …is another unusual architectural structure—the House on the Rock, designed in the 1940s by Alex Jordan, 450 feet (140 metres) above the Wyoming Valley on a 60-foot (20-metre) chimneylike rock. Appended to the house is a narrow room stretching more than 200 feet (60 metres) over the valley below.…

Art Linkletter: …for the radio variety show House Party, which involved the audience in spontaneous contests and activities. He created the show’s popular segment “Kids Say the Darndest Things.” A television adaptation of the program aired from 1952 to 1969; the radio show ended in 1967. Linkletter hosted another audience-participation show, People…

Martin Lawrence: Do the Right Thing (1989); House Party (1990) and House Party 2 (1991), with his former coworkers Kid ’n Play; and Boomerang (1992). He served as host of the cable television program Def Comedy Jam from 1992 to 1993.

Martin Lawrence: … (1989); House Party (1990) and House Party 2 (1991), with his former coworkers Kid ’n Play; and Boomerang (1992). He served as host of the cable television program Def Comedy Jam from 1992 to 1993.

houseplant, any plant adapted for growing indoors. The most common are exotic plants native to warm, frost-free parts of the world that can be grown indoors in colder climates in portable containers or miniature gardens. Most houseplants are, therefore, derived from plants native to the tropics and

rat: …the Norway rat), and the house rat, R. rattus (also called the black rat, ship rat, or roof rat), live virtually everywhere that human populations have settled; the house rat is predominant in warmer climates, and the brown rat dominates in temperate regions, especially urban areas. Most likely originating in…

assassination of John F. Kennedy: Subsequent congressional responses: …establishment in 1976 of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), which investigated not only the assassination of Kennedy but also that of Martin Luther King, Jr.

house snake, any of several nonvenomous snake species that live in or around dwellings. In the United States this name is often given to the milk snake (see king snake). The house snakes of Africa belong to the genus Lamprophis, family Colubridae, with about 14 species. They are nonvenomous mouse-

house sparrow, (Passer domesticus), one of the world’s best-known and most abundant small birds, sometimes classified in the family Passeridae (order Passeriformes). It lives in towns and on farms, worldwide, having accompanied Europeans from its original home—most of Eurasia and northern Africa.

apodiform: Reproduction and life cycle: India’s population of the house swift has two breeding seasons per year. It is one of the few birds in the world in which this phenomenon has been demonstrated. Adult males are in full breeding condition in late January and again in May and June; eggs are laid in…

western Africa: Pre-European slave trading: …system gave way to the “House” system, by which both freemen and the large numbers of slaves needed to operate trading canoes and strategic and trading settlements were bound together by common economic interests into large corporations headed by the leading merchants. On the Gold Coast and Slave Coast, however,…

Wilfrid Sheed: His last work, the best-selling The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving Cole and a Crew of About Fifty (2007), chronicled the history of American popular music.

Lars von Trier: He next directed The House That Jack Built (2018), a deliberately provocative film that follows a serial killer through a succession of murders.

Yankee Stadium, baseball stadium in the Bronx borough of New York City that was home to the New York Yankees from 1923 to 2008. It is famous not only as the site of legendary baseball feats but also as the venue for a host of other notable events, such as memorable boxing matches, American football

House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, established in 1938 under Martin Dies as chairman, that conducted investigations through the 1940s and ’50s into alleged communist activities. Those investigated during the Red Scare of 1947–54 included

Cate Blanchett: Hepburn, Dylan, and Academy Awards: …from the early 2000s, and The House with a Clock in Its Walls, an adaptation of a 1973 children’s fantasy novel.

House with No Steps (HWNS), Australian charitable organization that provides support, services, and employment for people with disabilities. House with No Steps was founded in 1962 as an outgrowth of a motorized-wheelchair club that had been started by a group of individuals with disabilities in

George Douglas: Douglas’ novel The House With the Green Shutters (1901), one of the first literary works to forego romance or adventure, received much attention for its realistic study of contemporary Scottish life. Another novel, Love and a Sword (1899), was not nearly so influential. He died suddenly, at…

Marina Abramović: …also captured public attention for The House with the Ocean View (2002), a gallery installation in which she lived ascetically for 12 days in three exposed cubes mounted onto a wall. By 2005 she had begun to ruminate on the legacy of performance art, a genre in which individual works…

blues: History and notable musicians: …is represented by Charley Patton, Eddie (“Son”) House, and Robert Johnson, among others.

Edward M. House was an American diplomat and confidential adviser to President Woodrow Wilson (1913–21) who played a key role in framing the conditions of peace to end World War I. Independently wealthy, House turned from business to politics and between 1892 and 1904 served as an adviser to Texas

Edward M. House was an American diplomat and confidential adviser to President Woodrow Wilson (1913–21) who played a key role in framing the conditions of peace to end World War I. Independently wealthy, House turned from business to politics and between 1892 and 1904 served as an adviser to Texas

blues: History and notable musicians: …is represented by Charley Patton, Eddie (“Son”) House, and Robert Johnson, among others.

Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, member of the U.S. House of Representatives, who is elected by the majority party to lead the House. The speaker presides over debate, appoints members of select and conference committees, establishes the legislative agenda, maintains order within the

Will Ferrell: Step Brothers and Anchorman 2: …starred with Amy Poehler in The House, about a suburban couple who run an illegal casino in order to pay for their daughter’s college tuition.

Pittosporaceae: Tobira, or house-blooming mock orange (P. tobira), is a popular aromatic hedge plant in warm climates but a handsome indoor plant elsewhere. Karo (P. crassifolium) often is planted as a windbreak on seacoasts. The genera Hymenosporum, Bursaria, and Sollya also contain ornamental species.

World War I: Peace moves and U.S. policy to February 1917: …Edward Grey, resulted in the House–Grey Memorandum (February 22, 1916), declaring that the United States might enter the war if Germany rejected Wilson’s mediation but that Great Britain reserved the right to initiate U.S. mediatory action. By mid-1916, the imminent approach of the presidential election in the United States caused…

acarid: Importance: The house-mouse mite (Liponyssoides sanguineus) transmits rickettsialpox to humans. Widespread species such as the tropical fowl mite (Ornithonyssus bursa), northern fowl mite (O. sylviarum), and chicken mite (Dermanyssus gallinae) also are pests of poultry and humans.

houseboat, in its simplest form, a cabin of one or two rooms built on a flat-bottomed scow, drawing only from 12 to 24 inches (roughly 30 to 60 cm) of water and usually with a platform or porch at either end. Houseboats are found in great numbers on small rivers or streams—especially where there is

Master of the Housebook was an anonymous late Gothic painter and engraver who was one of the outstanding early printmakers. He was formerly referred to as the Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet because the Rijksprentenkabinet, the print room of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, has the largest collection

Ferdinand Léopold Oyono: Oyono’s first book, Houseboy, is written in the form of a diary. It depicts honestly but with humour the often brutal life of a houseboy in the service of a French commandant. The Old Man and the Medal satirizes colonialism through the eyes of a God-fearing and loyal…

theft: …and a separate offense of housebreaking covered daytime entries. In the 20th century, however, the term burglary generally became applied to break-ins committed at any hour of the day and at any fixed structure, vehicle, or vessel. Although the motivation of most burglars is theft, the intention to commit various…

housecarl, member of the personal or household troops or bodyguard of Scandinavian kings and chieftains in the Viking and medieval periods. The housecarls achieved a celebrated place in European history as the Danish occupation force in England under Canute the Great in 1015–35. Canute’s 3,000-man

housefly, (Musca domestica), a common insect of the family Muscidae (order Diptera). About 90 percent of all flies occurring in human habitations are houseflies. Once a major nuisance and hazard to public health in cities, houseflies are still a problem wherever decomposing organic waste and

accident: Accidents in the home: The home is a site for many accidents. Stairways, bathrooms, and kitchens pose special hazards, as do utility closets, medicine cabinets, gardens, and swimming pools. Among children under age five, falls, burns, choking, poisoning, and drowning are common causes of injury or death at…