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14,702 | Economy of Italy | The economy of Italy is a highly developed social market economy. It is the third-largest national economy in the European Union, the second-largest manufacturing industry in Europe (7th-largest in the world), the 8th-largest economy in the world by nominal GDP, and the 12th-largest by GDP (PPP). Italy is a founding member of the European Union, the Eurozone, the OECD, the G7 and the G20; it is the eighth-largest exporter in the world, with $611 billion exported in 2021. Its closest trade ties are with the other countries of the European Union, with whom it conducts about 59% of its total trade. The largest trading partners, in order of market share in exports, are Germany (12.5%), France (10.3%), the United States (9%), Spain (5.2%), the United Kingdom (5.2%) and Switzerland (4.6%).
In the post-World War II period, Italy saw a transformation from an agricultural-based economy which had been severely affected by the consequences of the World Wars, into one of the world's most advanced nations, and a leading country in world trade and exports. According to the Human Development Index, the country enjoys a very high standard of living. According to The Economist, Italy has the world's 8th highest quality of life. Italy owns the world's third-largest gold reserve, and is the third-largest net contributor to the budget of the European Union. Furthermore, the advanced country private wealth is one of the largest in the world. In terms of private wealth, Italy ranks second, after Hong Kong, in private wealth to GDP ratio.
Italy is the world's seventh-largest manufacturing country, characterised by a smaller number of global multinational corporations than other economies of comparable size and many dynamic small and medium-sized enterprises, notoriously clustered in several industrial districts, which are the backbone of the Italian industry. Italy is a large manufacturer and exporter of a significant variety of products. Its products include machinery, vehicles, pharmaceuticals, furniture, food and clothing. Italy has a significant trade surplus. The country is also well known for its influential and innovative business economic sector, an industrious and competitive agricultural sector (Italy is the world's largest wine producer), and manufacturers of creatively designed, high-quality products: including automobiles, ships, home appliances, and designer clothing. Italy is the largest hub for luxury goods in Europe and the third luxury hub globally. Italy has a strong cooperative sector, with the largest share of the population (4.5%) employed by a cooperative in the EU.
Despite these important achievements, the country's economy today suffers from structural and non-structural problems. Annual growth rates have often been below the EU average. Italy was hit particularly hard by the late-2000s recession. Massive government spending from the 1980s onwards has produced a severe rise in public debt. In addition, Italian living standards have a considerable North–South divide: the average GDP per capita in Northern Italy significantly exceeds the EU average, while some regions and provinces in Southern Italy are significantly below the average. In Central Italy, GDP per capita is instead average. In recent years, Italy's GDP per capita growth slowly caught-up with the Eurozone average, while its employment rate still lags behind. However, economists dispute the official figures because of the large number of informal jobs (estimated to be between 10% and 20% of the labour force) that lift the inactivity or unemployment rates. The shadow economy is highly represented in Southern Italy, while it becomes less intense as one moves north. In real economic conditions, Southern Italy almost matches Central Italy's level.
The Italian Renaissance was remarkable in economic development. Venice and Genoa were the trade pioneers, first as maritime republics and then as regional states, followed by Milan, Florence, and the rest of northern Italy. Reasons for their early development are for example the relative military safety of Venetian lagoons, the high population density and the institutional structure which inspired entrepreneurs. The Republic of Venice was the first real international financial center, which slowly emerged from the 9th century to its peak in the 15th century. Tradeable bonds as a commonly used type of security, were invented by the Italian city-states (such as Venice and Genoa) of the late medieval and early Renaissance periods.
After 1600 Italy experienced an economic catastrophe. In 1600 Northern and Central Italy comprised one of the most advanced industrial areas of Europe. There was an exceptionally high standard of living. By 1870 Italy was an economically backward and depressed area; its industrial structure had almost collapsed, its population was too high for its resources, its economy had become primarily agricultural. Wars, political fractionalization, limited fiscal capacity and the shift of world trade to north-western Europe and the Americas were key factors.
The economic history of Italy after 1861 can be divided in three main phases: an initial period of struggle after the unification of the country, characterised by high emigration and stagnant growth; a central period of robust catch-up from the 1890s to the 1980s, interrupted by the Great Depression of the 1930s and the two world wars; and a final period of sluggish growth that has been exacerbated by a double-dip recession following the 2008 global financial crush, and from which the country is slowly reemerging only in recent years.
Prior to unification, the economy of the many Italian statelets was overwhelmingly agrarian; however, the agricultural surplus produced what historians call a "pre-industrial" transformation in North-western Italy starting from the 1820s, that led to a diffuse, if mostly artisanal, concentration of manufacturing activities, especially in Piedmont-Sardinia under the liberal rule of the Count of Cavour.
After the birth of the unified Kingdom of Italy in 1861, there was a deep consciousness in the ruling class of the new country's backwardness, given that the per capita GDP expressed in PPS terms was roughly half of that of Britain and about 25% less than that of France and Germany. During the 1860s and 1870s, the manufacturing activity was backward and small-scale, while the oversized agrarian sector was the backbone of the national economy. The country lacked large coal and iron deposits and the population was largely illiterate. In the 1880s, a severe farm crisis led to the introduction of more modern farming techniques in the Po valley, while from 1878 to 1887 protectionist policies were introduced with the aim to establish a heavy industry base. Some large steel and iron works soon clustered around areas of high hydropower potential, notably the Alpine foothills and Umbria in central Italy, while Turin and Milan led a textile, chemical, engineering and banking boom and Genoa captured civil and military shipbuilding.
However, the diffusion of industrialisation that characterised the northwestern area of the country largely excluded Venetia and, especially, the South. The resulting Italian diaspora concerned up to 26 million Italians, the most part in the years between 1880 and 1914; by many scholars, it is considered the biggest mass migration of contemporary times. During the Great War, the still frail Italian state successfully fought a modern war, being able of arming and training some 5 million recruits. But this result came at a terrible cost: by the end of the war, Italy had lost 700,000 soldiers and had a ballooning sovereign debt amounting to billions of lira.
Italy emerged from World War I in a poor and weakened condition. The National Fascist Party of Benito Mussolini came to power in 1922, at the end of a period of social unrest. However, once Mussolini acquired a firmer hold of power, laissez-faire and free trade were progressively abandoned in favour of government intervention and protectionism.
In 1929, Italy was hit hard by the Great Depression. In order to deal with the crisis, the Fascist government nationalized the holdings of large banks which had accrued significant industrial securities, establishing the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale. A number of mixed entities were formed, whose purpose was to bring together representatives of the government and of the major businesses. These representatives discussed economic policy and manipulated prices and wages so as to satisfy both the wishes of the government and the wishes of business.
This economic model based on a partnership between government and business was soon extended to the political sphere, in what came to be known as corporatism. At the same time, the aggressive foreign policy of Mussolini led to increasing military expenditure. After the invasion of Ethiopia, Italy intervened to support Franco's nationalists in the Spanish Civil War. By 1939, Italy had the highest percentage of state-owned enterprises after the Soviet Union.
Italy's involvement in World War II as a member of the Axis powers required the establishment of a war economy. The Allied invasion of Italy in 1943 eventually caused the Italian political structure – and the economy – to rapidly collapse. The Allies, on the one hand, and the Germans on the other, took over the administration of the areas of Italy under their control. By the end of the war, Italian per capita income was at its lowest point since the beginning of the 20th century.
After the end of World War II, Italy was in rubble and occupied by foreign armies, a condition that worsened the chronic development gap among the more advanced European economies. However, the new geopolitical logic of the Cold War made possible that the former enemy Italy, a hinge country between Western Europe and the Mediterranean, and now a new, fragile democracy threatened by the NATO occupation forces, the proximity of the Iron Curtain and the presence of a strong Communist party, was considered by the United States as an important ally for the Free World, and received under the Marshall Plan over US$1.2 billion from 1947 to 1951.
The end of aid through the Plan could have stopped the recovery but it coincided with a crucial point in the Korean War whose demand for metal and manufactured products was a further stimulus of Italian industrial production. In addition, the creation in 1957 of the European Common Market, with Italy as a founding member, provided more investment and eased exports.
These favourable developments, combined with the presence of a large labour force, laid the foundation for spectacular economic growth that lasted almost uninterrupted until the "Hot Autumn's" massive strikes and social unrest of 1969–70, which then combined with the later 1973 oil crisis and put an abrupt end to the prolonged boom. It has been calculated that the Italian economy experienced an average rate of growth of GDP of 5.8% per year between 1951 and 1963, and 5% per year between 1964 and 1973. Italian rates of growth were second only, but very close, to the German rates, in Europe, and among the OEEC countries only Japan had been doing better.
The 1970s were a period of economic, political turmoil and social unrest in Italy, known as Years of lead. Unemployment rose sharply, especially among the young, and by 1977 there were one million unemployed people under the age of 24. Inflation continued, aggravated by the increases in the price of oil in 1973 and 1979. The budget deficit became permanent and intractable, averaging about 10 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP), higher than any other industrial country. The lira fell steadily, from Lire 560 to the U.S. dollar in 1973 to Lire 1,400 in 1982.
The economic recession went on into the mid-1980s until a set of reforms led to the independence of the Bank of Italy and a big reduction of the indexation of wages that strongly reduced inflation rates, from 20.6% in 1980 to 4.7% in 1987. The new macroeconomic and political stability resulted in a second, export-led "economic miracle", based on small and medium-sized enterprises, producing clothing, leather products, shoes, furniture, textiles, jewellery, and machine tools. As a result of this rapid expansion, in 1987 Italy overtook the UK's economy (an event known as il sorpasso), becoming the fourth richest nation in the world, after the US, Japan and West Germany. The Milan stock exchange increased its market capitalization more than fivefold in the space of a few years.
However, the Italian economy of the 1980s presented a problem: it was booming, thanks to increased productivity and surging exports, but unsustainable fiscal deficits drove the growth. In the 1990s, the new Maastricht criteria boosted the urge to curb the public debt, already at 104% of GDP in 1992. The consequent restrictive economic policies worsened the impact of the global recession already underway. After a brief recovery at the end of the 1990s, high tax rates and red tape caused the country to stagnate between 2000 and 2008.
Italy was among the wealthy countries that were hardest hit by the Great Recession of 2008–2009 and the subsequent European debt crisis. The national economy shrunk by 6.76% during the whole period, totaling seven-quarters of recession. In November 2011 the Italian bond yield was 6.74 per cent for 10-year bonds, nearing a 7 per cent level where Italy is thought to lose access to financial markets. According to Eurostat, in 2015 the Italian government debt stood at 128% of GDP, ranking as the second biggest debt ratio after Greece (with 175%). However, the biggest chunk of Italian public debt is owned by Italian nationals and relatively high levels of private savings and low levels of private indebtedness are seen as making it the safest among Europe's struggling economies. As a shock therapy to avoid the debt crisis and kick-start growth, the national unity government led by the economist Mario Monti launched a program of massive austerity measures, that brought down the deficit but precipitated the country in a double-dip recession in 2012 and 2013, receiving criticism from numerous economists.
In the period 2014-2019, the economy partially recovered from the disastrous losses incurred during the Great Recession, primarily thanks to strong exports, but nonetheless, growth rates remained well below the Euro area average, meaning that Italy's GDP in 2019 was still 5 per cent below its level in 2008.
Starting from February 2020 after the United States had the first originated from China, Italy was the first country in Europe to be severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, that eventually expanded to the rest of the world. The economy suffered a massive shock as a result of the lockdown of most of the country's economic activity. After three months, at the end of May 2020, the pandemic was put under control, and the economy started to recover, especially, the manufacturing sector. Overall, it remained surprisingly resilient, although GDP plummeted like in most western countries. The Italian government issued special treasury bills, known as BTP Futura as a COVID-19 emergency funding, waiting for the approval of the E.U. response to the outbreak. Eventually, in July 2020, the European Council approved the 750 billion € Next Generation EU fund, of which €209 billion will go to Italy.
Italy has a long history of different coinage types, which spans thousands of years. Italy has been influential at a coinage point of view: the medieval Florentine florin, one of the most used coinage types in European history and one of the most important coins in Western history, was struck in Florence in the 13th century, while the Venetian sequin, minted from 1284 to 1797, was the most prestigious gold coin in circulation in the commercial centers of the Mediterranean Sea.
Despite the fact that the first Italian coinage systems were used in the Magna Graecia and Etruscan civilization, the Romans introduced a widespread currency throughout Italy. Unlike most modern coins, Roman coins had intrinsic value. The early modern Italian coins were very similar in style to French francs, especially in decimals, since it was ruled by the country in the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy. They corresponded to a value of 0.29 grams of gold or 4.5 grams of silver.
Since Italy has been for centuries divided into many historic states, they all had different coinage systems, but when the country became unified in 1861, the Italian lira came into place, and was used until 2002. The term originates from libra, the largest unit of the Carolingian monetary system used in Western Europe and elsewhere from the 8th to the 20th century. In 1999, the euro became Italy's unit of account and the lira became a national subunit of the euro at a rate of 1 euro = 1,936.27 lire, before being replaced as cash in 2002.
The following table shows the main economic indicators in 1980–2021 (with IMF staff estimates in 2022–2027). Inflation below 5% is in green.
Of the world's 500 largest stock-market-listed companies measured by revenue in 2016, the Fortune Global 500, nine are headquartered in Italy.
Figures are for 2016. Figures in italic = Q3 2017
In 2022, the sector with the highest number of companies registered in Italy is Services with 654,065 companies followed by Retail Trade and Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate with 519,448 and 348,881 companies respectively.
Italy has over 1.4 million people with a net wealth greater than $1 million, a total national wealth of $11.857 trillion, and represents the 5th largest cumulative net wealth globally (it accounts for 4.92% of the net wealth in the world). According to the Credit Suisse's Global Wealth Databook 2013, the median wealth per adult is $138,653 (5th in the world), while according to the Allianz's Global Wealth Report 2013, the net financial wealth per capita is €45,770 (13th in the world).
The following top 10 list of Italian billionaires is based on an annual assessment of wealth and assets compiled and published by Forbes in 2017.
In the decades following the unification of Italy, the northern regions of the country, Lombardy, Piedmont and Liguria in particular, began a process of industrialization and economic development while the southern regions remained behind. At the time of the unification of the country, there was a shortage of entrepreneurs in the south, with landowners who were often absent from their farms as they lived permanently in the city, leaving the management of their funds to managers, who were not encouraged by the owners to make the agricultural estates to the maximum. Landowners invested not in agricultural equipment, but in such things as low-risk state bonds.
In southern Italy, the unification of the country broke down the feudal land system, which had survived in the south since the Middle Ages, especially where land had been the inalienable property of aristocrats, religious bodies or the king. The breakdown of feudalism, however, and redistribution of land did not necessarily lead to small farmers in the south winding up with land of their own or land they could work and make profit from. Many remained landless, and plots grew smaller and smaller and so less and less productive, as land was subdivided amongst heirs.
This gap between northern and southern Italy was also induced by the region-specific policies selected by the post-unitary governments. For example, the 1887 protectionist reform, instead of safeguarding the arboriculture sectors crushed by 1880s fall in prices, shielded the Po Valley wheat breeding and those Northern textile and manufacturing industries that had survived the liberal years due to state intervention. A similar logic guided the assignment of monopoly rights in the steamboat construction and navigation sectors and, above all, the public spending in the railway sector, which represented 53% of the 1861–1911 total.
The resources necessary to finance the public spending effort were obtained through highly unbalanced land property taxes, which affected the key source of savings available for investment in the growth sectors absent a developed banking system. Given the inability of the government to estimate the land profitability, especially because of the huge differences among the regional cadast:ers, this policy irreparably induced large regional discrepancies. This policy destroyed the relationship between the central state and the Southern population by unchaining first a civil war called Brigandage, which brought about 20,000 victims by 1864 and the militarization of the area, and then favouring emigration, especially from 1892 to 1921.
The north–south gap was intensified by language differences. Southerners spoke the Sicilian language or a variation of it: a language that developed from Latin and other influences independently of and prior to the Tuscan dialect that was adopted as the official Italian language ("standard Italian"). The Sicilian language is a complete, distinct language with its own vocabulary, syntax and grammar rules, the latter being less complex than standard Italian. But because of its similarity to Italian, northerners incorrectly assumed that it was an imperfect dialect of Italian and denigrated it as the "dialect of the poor and ignorant". This has led to continued bias by the North against southerners who "don't speak proper Italian".
After the rise of Benito Mussolini, the "Iron Prefect" Cesare Mori tried to defeat the already powerful criminal organizations flourishing in the South with some degree of success. Fascist policy aimed at the creation of an Italian Empire and Southern Italian ports were strategic for all commerce towards the colonies. With the invasion of Southern Italy during World War II, the Allies restored the authority of the mafia families, lost during the Fascist period, and used their influence to maintain public order. Mussolini also established laws requiring standard Italian to be taught in school, and discouraging the use of local Italian dialects throughout the nation, as well as the Sicilian language.
In the 1950s the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno was set up as a huge public master plan to help industrialize the South, aiming to do this in two ways: through land reforms creating 120,000 new smallholdings, and through the "Growth Pole Strategy" whereby 60% of all government investment would go to the South, thus boosting the Southern economy by attracting new capital, stimulating local firms, and providing employment. However, the objectives were largely missed, and as a result, the South became increasingly subsidized and state-dependent, incapable of generating private growth itself.
The imbalance between North and South was reduced in the 1960s and 1970s through the construction of public works, the implementation of agrarian and scholastic reforms, the expansion of industrialization and the improved living conditions of the population. This convergence process was interrupted, however, in the 1980s. To date, the per capita GDP of the South is just 58% of that of the Center-North, but this gap is mitigated by the fact that there the cost of living is around 10-15% lower on average (with even more differences between small towns and big cities) than that in the North of Italy. In the South the unemployment rate is more than double (6.7% in the North against 14.9% in the South). A study by Censis blames the pervasive presence of criminal organizations for the delay of Southern Italy, estimating an annual loss of wealth of 2.5% in the South in the period between 1981–2003 due to their presence, and that without them the per capita GDP of the South would have reached that of the North.
According to the last national agricultural census, there were 1.6 million farms in 2010 (−32.4% since 2000) covering 12,700,000 ha or 31,382,383 acres (63% of which are located in Southern Italy). The vast majority (99%) are family-operated and small, averaging only 8 ha (20 acres) in size. Of the total surface area in agricultural use (forestry excluded), grain fields take up 31%, olive tree orchards 8.2%, vineyards 5.4%, citrus orchards 3.8%, sugar beets 1.7%, and horticulture 2.4%. The remainder is primarily dedicated to pastures (25.9%) and feed grains (11.6%). The northern part of Italy produces primarily maize corn, rice, sugar beets, soybeans, meat, fruits and dairy products, while the South specializes in wheat, olive and citrus fruits. Livestock includes 6 million head of cattle, 8.6 million head of swine, 6.8 million head of sheep, and 0.9 million head of goats. The total annual production of the fishing industry in Italy from capture and aquaculture, including crustaceans and molluscs, is around 480,000 tons.
Italy is the largest producer of wine in the world, and one of the leading producers of olive oil, fruits (apples, olives, grapes, oranges, lemons, pears, apricots, hazelnuts, peaches, cherries, plums, strawberries, and kiwifruits), and vegetables (especially artichokes and tomatoes). The most famous Italian wines are the Tuscan Chianti and the Piedmontese Barolo. Other famous wines are Barbaresco, Barbera d'Asti, Brunello di Montalcino, Frascati, Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, Morellino di Scansano, Amarone della Valpolicella DOCG and the sparkling wines Franciacorta and Prosecco. Quality goods in which Italy specialises, particularly the already mentioned wines and regional cheeses, are often protected under the quality assurance labels DOC/DOP. This geographical indication certificate, which is attributed by the European Union, is considered important to avoid confusion with low-quality mass-produced ersatz products.
In fact, Italian cuisine is one of the most popular and copied around the world. The lack or total unavailability of some of its most characteristic ingredients outside of Italy, also and above all to falsifications (or food fraud), leads to the complete denaturalization of Italian ingredients. This phenomenon, widespread in all continents, is better known as Italian Sounding, consisting in the use of words as well as images, colour combinations (the Italian tricolour), geographical references, brands evocative of Italy to promote and market agri-food products which in reality have nothing to do with Italian cuisine.
Italy is the world's sixth-largest manufacturing country. Italy has a smaller number of global multinational corporations than other economies of comparable size, but it has a large number of small and medium-sized enterprises, many of them grouped in clusters, which are the backbone of the Italian industry. This results in a manufacturing sector often focused on the export of niche market and luxury products, that is less capable of competing on quantity but is more capable of facing the competition of emerging economies based on lower labour costs, given the higher quality of its products.
The industrial districts are regionalized: in the Northwest, there is a large modern group of industries, as in the so-called "industrial triangle" (Milan-Turin-Genoa), where there is an area of intense machinery, automotive, aerospace production and shipbuilding; in the Northeast, an area that experienced social and economic development mostly around family-based firms, there are mostly small and medium enterprises of lower technology but high craftsmanship, specializing in machinery, clothing, leather products, footwear, furniture, textiles, machine tools, spare parts, home appliances, and jewellery. In central Italy, there are mostly small and medium-sized companies specializing in products such as textiles, leather, jewellery but also machinery. According to a study carried out in 2015 by the Edison Foundation and Confindustria on the most industrialized provinces in Europe, of the dive most industrialized provinces in Europe, three are Italian provinces. Brescia turns out to be the first European province for value added by industry, with an added value over 10 billion euros.
The automotive industry in Italy is a significant part of the manufacturing sector, with over 144,000 firms and almost 485,000 employed people in 2015, and a contribution of 8.5% to Italian GDP. Italy's automotive industry is best known for its automobile designs and small city cars, sports and supercars. Italy is one of the significant automobile producers both in Europe and around the world. Today the Italian automotive industry is almost totally dominated by Fiat Group (now included in Stellantis corporation). As well as its own, predominantly mass market model range, Stellantis owns the mainstream Fiat brand, the upmarket Alfa Romeo and Lancia brands, and the exotic Maserati brand. Luxury cars such as Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati and Ducati motorcycles are also made in the Northeast region of Emilia-Romagna. Italian cars won in the European Car of the Year annual award one of the most times among other countries (including Fiat most that any other manufacturer) and in World Car of the Year award also.
In Italy, services represent the most important sector of the economy, both in terms of number of employees (67% of the total) and value-added (71%). Furthermore, the sector is by far the most dynamic: over 51% of the more than 5,000,000 companies operating in Italy today belong to the services sector, and in this sector over 67% of new businesses are born. Very important activities in Italy are tourism, trade, services to people and businesses (advanced tertiary).
In 2006 the main sectoral data are: for trade, there are 1,600,000 enterprises, equal to 26% of the Italian entrepreneurial fabric, and over 3,500,000 work units. Transport, communications, tourism and consumption outside the home, over 582,000 businesses, equal to 9.5% of the entrepreneurial fabric, almost 3,500,000 work units. Business services: 630,000 registered companies, equal to 10.3% of the entrepreneurial fabric, over 2,800,000 work units. In 2004 the transport sector in Italy generated a turnover of about 119.4 billion euros, employing 935,700 persons in 153,700 enterprises.
Italian Bourse, based in Milan, is the Italian stock exchange. It manages and organises the domestic market, regulating procedures for admission and listing of companies and intermediaries and supervising disclosures for listed companies. Following exchange privatisation in 1997, the Italian Bourse was established and became effective on 2 January 1998. On 23 June 2007, the Italian Bourse became a subsidiary of the London Stock Exchange Group. As of April 2018, overall capitalisation for listed companies on Borsa Italiana was worth €644.3 billion, representing 37.8% of Italian GDP.
Italy is the fifth most visited country in international tourism, with a total of 52.3 million international arrivals in 2016. The total contribution of the tourism in Italy to GDP (including wider effects from investment, the supply chain and induced income impacts) was EUR162.7bn in 2014 (10.1% of GDP) and generated 1,082,000 jobs directly in 2014 (4.8% of total employment). Factors of tourist interest in Italy are mainly culture, cuisine, history, fashion, architecture, art, religious sites and routes, wedding tourism, naturalistic beauties, nightlife, underwater sites and spas. Winter and summer tourism are present in many locations in the Alps and the Apennines, while seaside tourism is widespread in coastal locations on the Mediterranean Sea. Italy is the leading cruise tourism destination in the Mediterranean Sea. Small, historical and artistic Italian villages are promoted through the association I Borghi più belli d'Italia (literally "The Most Beautiful Villages of Italy").
The origins of modern banking can be traced to medieval and early Renaissance Italy, to the rich cities like Florence, Lucca, Siena, Venice and Genoa. The Bardi and Peruzzi families dominated banking in 14th-century Florence, establishing branches in many other parts of Europe. One of the most famous Italian banks was the Medici Bank, set up by Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici in 1397. The earliest known state deposit bank, the Bank of Saint George, was founded in 1407 in Genoa, while Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, founded in 1472, is the world's oldest or second oldest bank in continuous operation, depending on the definition, and the third-largest Italian commercial and retail bank. Today, among the financial services companies, UniCredit is one of the largest banks in Europe by capitalization and Assicurazioni Generali is second largest insurance group in the world by revenue after AXA.
The following is a list of the main Italian banks and insurance groups ranked by total assets and gross premiums written.
Italy consumed about 185 Mtoe of primary energy in 2010. This came mostly from fossil fuels. Among the most used resources are petroleum (mostly used for the transport sector), natural gas (used for electric energy production and heating), coal and renewables. Electricity is produced mainly from natural gas, which accounts for the source of more than half of the total final electric energy produced. Another important source is hydroelectric power, which was practically the only source of electricity until 1960.
Eni, with operations in 79 countries, is considered one of the seven "Supermajor" oil companies in the world, and one of the world's largest industrial companies. The Val d'Agri area, Basilicata, hosts the largest onshore hydrocarbon field in Europe. Moderate natural gas reserves, mainly in the Po Valley and offshore Adriatic Sea, have been discovered in recent years and constitute the country's most important mineral resource.
Most raw materials needed for manufacturing and more than 80% of the country's energy sources are imported (99.7% of the solid fuels demand, 92.5% of oil, 91.2% of natural gas and 13% of electricity). Due to its reliance on imports, Italians pay approximately 45% more than the EU average for electricity.
In the last decade, Italy has become one of the world's largest producers of renewable energy, ranking as the second largest producer in the European Union and the ninth in the world. Wind power, hydroelectricity, and geothermal power are also important sources of electricity in the country. Italy was the first country to exploit geothermal energy to produce electricity. The first Italian geothermal power plant was built in Tuscany, which is where all currently active geothermal plants in Italy are located. In 2014 the geothermal production was 5.92 TWh.
Solar energy production alone accounted for almost 9% of the total electric production in the country in 2014, making Italy the country with the highest contribution from solar energy in the world. The Montalto di Castro Photovoltaic Power Station, completed in 2010, is the largest photovoltaic power station in Italy with 85 MW. Other examples of large PV plants in Italy are San Bellino (70.6 MW), Cellino san Marco (42.7 MW) and Sant’ Alberto (34.6 MW). Italy was also the first country to exploit geothermal energy to produce electricity.
Renewable sources account for 27.5% of all electricity produced in Italy, with hydro alone reaching 12.6%, followed by solar at 5.7%, wind at 4.1%, bioenergy at 3.5%, and geothermal at 1.6%. The rest of the national demand is covered by fossil fuels (38.2% natural gas, 13% coal, 8.4% oil) and by imports.
Italy has managed four nuclear reactors until the 1980s, but in 1987, after the Chernobyl disaster, a large majority of Italians passed a referendum opting for phasing out nuclear power in Italy. The government responded by closing existing nuclear power plants and stopping work on projects underway, continuing to work to the nuclear energy program abroad. The national power company Enel operates seven nuclear reactors in Spain (through Endesa) and four in Slovakia (through Slovenské elektrárne), and in 2005 made an agreement with Électricité de France for a nuclear reactor in France. With these agreements, Italy has managed to access nuclear power and direct involvement in design, construction, and operation of the plants without placing reactors on Italian territory.
In the early 1970s Italy was a major producer of pyrites (from the Tuscan Maremma), asbestos (from the Balangero mines), fluorite (found in Sicily), and salt. At the same time, it was self-sufficient in aluminium (from Gargano), sulphur (from Sicily), lead, and zinc (from Sardinia). By the beginning of the 1990s, however, it had lost all its world-ranking positions and was no longer self-sufficient in those resources. There are no substantial deposits of iron, coal, or oil. Italy is one of the world's leading producers of pumice, pozzolana, and feldspar. Another mineral resource for which Italy is well-known is marble, especially the world-famous white Carrara marble from the Massa and Carrara quarries in Tuscany.
Regarding the national road network, in 2002 there were 668,721 km (415,524 mi) of serviceable roads in Italy, including 6,487 km (4,031 mi) of motorways, state-owned but privately operated by Atlantia. In 2005, about 34,667,000 passenger cars (590 cars per 1,000 people) and 4,015,000 goods vehicles circulated on the national road network.
Italy was the first country in the world to build motorways, the so-called autostrade, reserved for fast traffic and for motor vehicles only. The Milano-Laghi ("Lakes Motorway"), the first built in the world, connecting Milan to Lake Como and Lake Maggiore, and now parts of the A8 and A9 motorways, was devised by Piero Puricelli and was inaugurated in 1924. He received the first authorization to build a public-utility fast road in 1921. By the end of the 1930s, over 400 kilometres of multi- and dual-single-lane motorways were constructed throughout Italy, linking cities and rural towns. Italy is one of the countries with the most vehicles per capita, with 690 per 1000 people in 2010.
The national railway network is also extensive, especially in the north, totalizing 16,862 km of which 69% are electrified and on which 4,937 locomotives and railcars circulate. It is the 12th largest in the world, and is operated by state-owned Ferrovie dello Stato, while the rail tracks and infrastructure are managed by Rete Ferroviaria Italiana. While a number of private railroads exist and provide mostly commuter-type services, the national railway also provides sophisticated high-speed rail service that joins the major cities. The Florence–Rome high-speed railway was the first high-speed line opened in Europe when more than half of it opened in 1977. In 1991 the TAV was created for the planning and construction of high-speed rail lines along Italy's most important and saturated transport routes (Milan-Rome-Naples and Turin-Milan-Venice). High-speed trains include ETR-class trains, with the Frecciarossa 1000 reaching 400 km/h. Higher-speed trains are divided into three categories: Frecciarossa (English: red arrow) trains operate at a maximum speed of 300 km/h on dedicated high-speed tracks; Frecciargento (English: silver arrow) trains operate at a maximum speed of 250 km/h on both high-speed and mainline tracks; and Frecciabianca (English: white arrow) trains operate on high-speed regional lines at a maximum speed of 200 km/h. Italy has 11 rail border crossings over the Alpine mountains with its neighbouring countries.
Since October 2021, Italy's flag carrier airline is ITA Airways, which took over the brand, the IATA ticketing code, and many assets belonging to the former flag carrier Alitalia, after its bankruptcy. ITA Airways serves 44 destinations (as of October 2021) and also operates the former Alitalia regional subsidiary, Alitalia CityLiner. The country also has regional airlines (such as Air Dolomiti), low-cost carriers, and Charter and leisure carriers (including Neos, Blue Panorama Airlines and Poste Air Cargo). Major Italian cargo operators are Alitalia Cargo and Cargolux Italia. Italy is the fifth in Europe by number of passengers by air transport, with about 148 million passengers or about 10% of the European total in 2011. There are approximately 130 airports in Italy, of which 99 have paved runways (including the two hubs of Leonardo Da Vinci International in Rome and Malpensa International in Milan).
Italy has been the final destination of the Silk Road for many centuries. In particular, the construction of the Suez Canal intensified sea trade with East Africa and Asia from the 19th century. Since the end of the Cold War and increasing European integration, trade relations, which were often interrupted in the 20th century, have intensified again. In 2004 there were 43 major seaports including the Port of Genoa, the country's largest and the third busiest by cargo tonnage in the Mediterranean Sea. Due to the increasing importance of the maritime Silk Road with its connections to Asia and East Africa, the Italian ports for Central and Eastern Europe have become important in recent years. In addition, the trade in goods is shifting from the European northern ports to the ports of the Mediterranean Sea due to the considerable time savings and environmental protection. In particular, the deep water port of Trieste in the northernmost part of the Mediterranean Sea is the target of Italian, Asian and European investments. The national inland waterway network comprises 1,477 km (918 mi) of navigable rivers and channels. In 2007 Italy maintained a civilian air fleet of about 389,000 units and a merchant fleet of 581 ships.
In 2015, poverty in Italy hit the highest levels in the previous 10 years. The level of absolute poverty for a two-person family was €1050.95/month. The poverty line per capita changed by region from €552.39/month to €819.13/month. The number of those in absolute poverty rose nearly an entire per cent in 2015, from 6.8% in 2014 to 7.6% in 2015. In Southern Italy the numbers are even higher, with 10% living in absolute poverty, up from 9 per cent in 2014. Northern Italy is better off at 6.7%, but this is still an increase from 5.7% in 2014.
The national statistics reporting agency, ISTAT, defines absolute poverty as those who can not buy goods and services which they need to survive. In 2015, the proportion of poor households in relative poverty also increased to 13.7 from 12.9 in 2014. ISTAT defines relative poverty as people whose disposable income is less than around half the national average. The unemployment rate in February 2016 remained at 11.7%, which has been the same for almost a year, but even having a job does not guarantee freedom from poverty.
Those who have at least one family member employed still suffer from 6.1% to 11.7% poverty, the higher number being for those who have factory jobs. The numbers are even higher for the younger generations because their unemployment rate is over 40%. Also, children are hit hard. In 2014, 32% of those aged 0–17 were at risk of poverty or social exclusion, which is one child out of three. While in the north the poverty rate is about the same as that of France and Germany, in the south it is almost double that figure. In the last ISTAT report, poverty is in decline. According to the 2022 ISTAT Poverty Report, 2.18 million households and 5.6 million people live in absolute poverty in Italy.
According to Eurostat, by 2023 63% of Italian households will struggle to make ends meet, making it one of the European countries with the most widespread economic difficulties, surpassing France, Poland, Spain and Portugal. The Europea average is 45.5%. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The economy of Italy is a highly developed social market economy. It is the third-largest national economy in the European Union, the second-largest manufacturing industry in Europe (7th-largest in the world), the 8th-largest economy in the world by nominal GDP, and the 12th-largest by GDP (PPP). Italy is a founding member of the European Union, the Eurozone, the OECD, the G7 and the G20; it is the eighth-largest exporter in the world, with $611 billion exported in 2021. Its closest trade ties are with the other countries of the European Union, with whom it conducts about 59% of its total trade. The largest trading partners, in order of market share in exports, are Germany (12.5%), France (10.3%), the United States (9%), Spain (5.2%), the United Kingdom (5.2%) and Switzerland (4.6%).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In the post-World War II period, Italy saw a transformation from an agricultural-based economy which had been severely affected by the consequences of the World Wars, into one of the world's most advanced nations, and a leading country in world trade and exports. According to the Human Development Index, the country enjoys a very high standard of living. According to The Economist, Italy has the world's 8th highest quality of life. Italy owns the world's third-largest gold reserve, and is the third-largest net contributor to the budget of the European Union. Furthermore, the advanced country private wealth is one of the largest in the world. In terms of private wealth, Italy ranks second, after Hong Kong, in private wealth to GDP ratio.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Italy is the world's seventh-largest manufacturing country, characterised by a smaller number of global multinational corporations than other economies of comparable size and many dynamic small and medium-sized enterprises, notoriously clustered in several industrial districts, which are the backbone of the Italian industry. Italy is a large manufacturer and exporter of a significant variety of products. Its products include machinery, vehicles, pharmaceuticals, furniture, food and clothing. Italy has a significant trade surplus. The country is also well known for its influential and innovative business economic sector, an industrious and competitive agricultural sector (Italy is the world's largest wine producer), and manufacturers of creatively designed, high-quality products: including automobiles, ships, home appliances, and designer clothing. Italy is the largest hub for luxury goods in Europe and the third luxury hub globally. Italy has a strong cooperative sector, with the largest share of the population (4.5%) employed by a cooperative in the EU.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Despite these important achievements, the country's economy today suffers from structural and non-structural problems. Annual growth rates have often been below the EU average. Italy was hit particularly hard by the late-2000s recession. Massive government spending from the 1980s onwards has produced a severe rise in public debt. In addition, Italian living standards have a considerable North–South divide: the average GDP per capita in Northern Italy significantly exceeds the EU average, while some regions and provinces in Southern Italy are significantly below the average. In Central Italy, GDP per capita is instead average. In recent years, Italy's GDP per capita growth slowly caught-up with the Eurozone average, while its employment rate still lags behind. However, economists dispute the official figures because of the large number of informal jobs (estimated to be between 10% and 20% of the labour force) that lift the inactivity or unemployment rates. The shadow economy is highly represented in Southern Italy, while it becomes less intense as one moves north. In real economic conditions, Southern Italy almost matches Central Italy's level.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Italian Renaissance was remarkable in economic development. Venice and Genoa were the trade pioneers, first as maritime republics and then as regional states, followed by Milan, Florence, and the rest of northern Italy. Reasons for their early development are for example the relative military safety of Venetian lagoons, the high population density and the institutional structure which inspired entrepreneurs. The Republic of Venice was the first real international financial center, which slowly emerged from the 9th century to its peak in the 15th century. Tradeable bonds as a commonly used type of security, were invented by the Italian city-states (such as Venice and Genoa) of the late medieval and early Renaissance periods.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "After 1600 Italy experienced an economic catastrophe. In 1600 Northern and Central Italy comprised one of the most advanced industrial areas of Europe. There was an exceptionally high standard of living. By 1870 Italy was an economically backward and depressed area; its industrial structure had almost collapsed, its population was too high for its resources, its economy had become primarily agricultural. Wars, political fractionalization, limited fiscal capacity and the shift of world trade to north-western Europe and the Americas were key factors.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The economic history of Italy after 1861 can be divided in three main phases: an initial period of struggle after the unification of the country, characterised by high emigration and stagnant growth; a central period of robust catch-up from the 1890s to the 1980s, interrupted by the Great Depression of the 1930s and the two world wars; and a final period of sluggish growth that has been exacerbated by a double-dip recession following the 2008 global financial crush, and from which the country is slowly reemerging only in recent years.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Prior to unification, the economy of the many Italian statelets was overwhelmingly agrarian; however, the agricultural surplus produced what historians call a \"pre-industrial\" transformation in North-western Italy starting from the 1820s, that led to a diffuse, if mostly artisanal, concentration of manufacturing activities, especially in Piedmont-Sardinia under the liberal rule of the Count of Cavour.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "After the birth of the unified Kingdom of Italy in 1861, there was a deep consciousness in the ruling class of the new country's backwardness, given that the per capita GDP expressed in PPS terms was roughly half of that of Britain and about 25% less than that of France and Germany. During the 1860s and 1870s, the manufacturing activity was backward and small-scale, while the oversized agrarian sector was the backbone of the national economy. The country lacked large coal and iron deposits and the population was largely illiterate. In the 1880s, a severe farm crisis led to the introduction of more modern farming techniques in the Po valley, while from 1878 to 1887 protectionist policies were introduced with the aim to establish a heavy industry base. Some large steel and iron works soon clustered around areas of high hydropower potential, notably the Alpine foothills and Umbria in central Italy, while Turin and Milan led a textile, chemical, engineering and banking boom and Genoa captured civil and military shipbuilding.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "However, the diffusion of industrialisation that characterised the northwestern area of the country largely excluded Venetia and, especially, the South. The resulting Italian diaspora concerned up to 26 million Italians, the most part in the years between 1880 and 1914; by many scholars, it is considered the biggest mass migration of contemporary times. During the Great War, the still frail Italian state successfully fought a modern war, being able of arming and training some 5 million recruits. But this result came at a terrible cost: by the end of the war, Italy had lost 700,000 soldiers and had a ballooning sovereign debt amounting to billions of lira.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Italy emerged from World War I in a poor and weakened condition. The National Fascist Party of Benito Mussolini came to power in 1922, at the end of a period of social unrest. However, once Mussolini acquired a firmer hold of power, laissez-faire and free trade were progressively abandoned in favour of government intervention and protectionism.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In 1929, Italy was hit hard by the Great Depression. In order to deal with the crisis, the Fascist government nationalized the holdings of large banks which had accrued significant industrial securities, establishing the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale. A number of mixed entities were formed, whose purpose was to bring together representatives of the government and of the major businesses. These representatives discussed economic policy and manipulated prices and wages so as to satisfy both the wishes of the government and the wishes of business.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "This economic model based on a partnership between government and business was soon extended to the political sphere, in what came to be known as corporatism. At the same time, the aggressive foreign policy of Mussolini led to increasing military expenditure. After the invasion of Ethiopia, Italy intervened to support Franco's nationalists in the Spanish Civil War. By 1939, Italy had the highest percentage of state-owned enterprises after the Soviet Union.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Italy's involvement in World War II as a member of the Axis powers required the establishment of a war economy. The Allied invasion of Italy in 1943 eventually caused the Italian political structure – and the economy – to rapidly collapse. The Allies, on the one hand, and the Germans on the other, took over the administration of the areas of Italy under their control. By the end of the war, Italian per capita income was at its lowest point since the beginning of the 20th century.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "After the end of World War II, Italy was in rubble and occupied by foreign armies, a condition that worsened the chronic development gap among the more advanced European economies. However, the new geopolitical logic of the Cold War made possible that the former enemy Italy, a hinge country between Western Europe and the Mediterranean, and now a new, fragile democracy threatened by the NATO occupation forces, the proximity of the Iron Curtain and the presence of a strong Communist party, was considered by the United States as an important ally for the Free World, and received under the Marshall Plan over US$1.2 billion from 1947 to 1951.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The end of aid through the Plan could have stopped the recovery but it coincided with a crucial point in the Korean War whose demand for metal and manufactured products was a further stimulus of Italian industrial production. In addition, the creation in 1957 of the European Common Market, with Italy as a founding member, provided more investment and eased exports.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "These favourable developments, combined with the presence of a large labour force, laid the foundation for spectacular economic growth that lasted almost uninterrupted until the \"Hot Autumn's\" massive strikes and social unrest of 1969–70, which then combined with the later 1973 oil crisis and put an abrupt end to the prolonged boom. It has been calculated that the Italian economy experienced an average rate of growth of GDP of 5.8% per year between 1951 and 1963, and 5% per year between 1964 and 1973. Italian rates of growth were second only, but very close, to the German rates, in Europe, and among the OEEC countries only Japan had been doing better.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The 1970s were a period of economic, political turmoil and social unrest in Italy, known as Years of lead. Unemployment rose sharply, especially among the young, and by 1977 there were one million unemployed people under the age of 24. Inflation continued, aggravated by the increases in the price of oil in 1973 and 1979. The budget deficit became permanent and intractable, averaging about 10 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP), higher than any other industrial country. The lira fell steadily, from Lire 560 to the U.S. dollar in 1973 to Lire 1,400 in 1982.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The economic recession went on into the mid-1980s until a set of reforms led to the independence of the Bank of Italy and a big reduction of the indexation of wages that strongly reduced inflation rates, from 20.6% in 1980 to 4.7% in 1987. The new macroeconomic and political stability resulted in a second, export-led \"economic miracle\", based on small and medium-sized enterprises, producing clothing, leather products, shoes, furniture, textiles, jewellery, and machine tools. As a result of this rapid expansion, in 1987 Italy overtook the UK's economy (an event known as il sorpasso), becoming the fourth richest nation in the world, after the US, Japan and West Germany. The Milan stock exchange increased its market capitalization more than fivefold in the space of a few years.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "However, the Italian economy of the 1980s presented a problem: it was booming, thanks to increased productivity and surging exports, but unsustainable fiscal deficits drove the growth. In the 1990s, the new Maastricht criteria boosted the urge to curb the public debt, already at 104% of GDP in 1992. The consequent restrictive economic policies worsened the impact of the global recession already underway. After a brief recovery at the end of the 1990s, high tax rates and red tape caused the country to stagnate between 2000 and 2008.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Italy was among the wealthy countries that were hardest hit by the Great Recession of 2008–2009 and the subsequent European debt crisis. The national economy shrunk by 6.76% during the whole period, totaling seven-quarters of recession. In November 2011 the Italian bond yield was 6.74 per cent for 10-year bonds, nearing a 7 per cent level where Italy is thought to lose access to financial markets. According to Eurostat, in 2015 the Italian government debt stood at 128% of GDP, ranking as the second biggest debt ratio after Greece (with 175%). However, the biggest chunk of Italian public debt is owned by Italian nationals and relatively high levels of private savings and low levels of private indebtedness are seen as making it the safest among Europe's struggling economies. As a shock therapy to avoid the debt crisis and kick-start growth, the national unity government led by the economist Mario Monti launched a program of massive austerity measures, that brought down the deficit but precipitated the country in a double-dip recession in 2012 and 2013, receiving criticism from numerous economists.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In the period 2014-2019, the economy partially recovered from the disastrous losses incurred during the Great Recession, primarily thanks to strong exports, but nonetheless, growth rates remained well below the Euro area average, meaning that Italy's GDP in 2019 was still 5 per cent below its level in 2008.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Starting from February 2020 after the United States had the first originated from China, Italy was the first country in Europe to be severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, that eventually expanded to the rest of the world. The economy suffered a massive shock as a result of the lockdown of most of the country's economic activity. After three months, at the end of May 2020, the pandemic was put under control, and the economy started to recover, especially, the manufacturing sector. Overall, it remained surprisingly resilient, although GDP plummeted like in most western countries. The Italian government issued special treasury bills, known as BTP Futura as a COVID-19 emergency funding, waiting for the approval of the E.U. response to the outbreak. Eventually, in July 2020, the European Council approved the 750 billion € Next Generation EU fund, of which €209 billion will go to Italy.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Italy has a long history of different coinage types, which spans thousands of years. Italy has been influential at a coinage point of view: the medieval Florentine florin, one of the most used coinage types in European history and one of the most important coins in Western history, was struck in Florence in the 13th century, while the Venetian sequin, minted from 1284 to 1797, was the most prestigious gold coin in circulation in the commercial centers of the Mediterranean Sea.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Despite the fact that the first Italian coinage systems were used in the Magna Graecia and Etruscan civilization, the Romans introduced a widespread currency throughout Italy. Unlike most modern coins, Roman coins had intrinsic value. The early modern Italian coins were very similar in style to French francs, especially in decimals, since it was ruled by the country in the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy. They corresponded to a value of 0.29 grams of gold or 4.5 grams of silver.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Since Italy has been for centuries divided into many historic states, they all had different coinage systems, but when the country became unified in 1861, the Italian lira came into place, and was used until 2002. The term originates from libra, the largest unit of the Carolingian monetary system used in Western Europe and elsewhere from the 8th to the 20th century. In 1999, the euro became Italy's unit of account and the lira became a national subunit of the euro at a rate of 1 euro = 1,936.27 lire, before being replaced as cash in 2002.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The following table shows the main economic indicators in 1980–2021 (with IMF staff estimates in 2022–2027). Inflation below 5% is in green.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Of the world's 500 largest stock-market-listed companies measured by revenue in 2016, the Fortune Global 500, nine are headquartered in Italy.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Figures are for 2016. Figures in italic = Q3 2017",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In 2022, the sector with the highest number of companies registered in Italy is Services with 654,065 companies followed by Retail Trade and Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate with 519,448 and 348,881 companies respectively.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Italy has over 1.4 million people with a net wealth greater than $1 million, a total national wealth of $11.857 trillion, and represents the 5th largest cumulative net wealth globally (it accounts for 4.92% of the net wealth in the world). According to the Credit Suisse's Global Wealth Databook 2013, the median wealth per adult is $138,653 (5th in the world), while according to the Allianz's Global Wealth Report 2013, the net financial wealth per capita is €45,770 (13th in the world).",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The following top 10 list of Italian billionaires is based on an annual assessment of wealth and assets compiled and published by Forbes in 2017.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In the decades following the unification of Italy, the northern regions of the country, Lombardy, Piedmont and Liguria in particular, began a process of industrialization and economic development while the southern regions remained behind. At the time of the unification of the country, there was a shortage of entrepreneurs in the south, with landowners who were often absent from their farms as they lived permanently in the city, leaving the management of their funds to managers, who were not encouraged by the owners to make the agricultural estates to the maximum. Landowners invested not in agricultural equipment, but in such things as low-risk state bonds.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In southern Italy, the unification of the country broke down the feudal land system, which had survived in the south since the Middle Ages, especially where land had been the inalienable property of aristocrats, religious bodies or the king. The breakdown of feudalism, however, and redistribution of land did not necessarily lead to small farmers in the south winding up with land of their own or land they could work and make profit from. Many remained landless, and plots grew smaller and smaller and so less and less productive, as land was subdivided amongst heirs.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "This gap between northern and southern Italy was also induced by the region-specific policies selected by the post-unitary governments. For example, the 1887 protectionist reform, instead of safeguarding the arboriculture sectors crushed by 1880s fall in prices, shielded the Po Valley wheat breeding and those Northern textile and manufacturing industries that had survived the liberal years due to state intervention. A similar logic guided the assignment of monopoly rights in the steamboat construction and navigation sectors and, above all, the public spending in the railway sector, which represented 53% of the 1861–1911 total.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The resources necessary to finance the public spending effort were obtained through highly unbalanced land property taxes, which affected the key source of savings available for investment in the growth sectors absent a developed banking system. Given the inability of the government to estimate the land profitability, especially because of the huge differences among the regional cadast:ers, this policy irreparably induced large regional discrepancies. This policy destroyed the relationship between the central state and the Southern population by unchaining first a civil war called Brigandage, which brought about 20,000 victims by 1864 and the militarization of the area, and then favouring emigration, especially from 1892 to 1921.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The north–south gap was intensified by language differences. Southerners spoke the Sicilian language or a variation of it: a language that developed from Latin and other influences independently of and prior to the Tuscan dialect that was adopted as the official Italian language (\"standard Italian\"). The Sicilian language is a complete, distinct language with its own vocabulary, syntax and grammar rules, the latter being less complex than standard Italian. But because of its similarity to Italian, northerners incorrectly assumed that it was an imperfect dialect of Italian and denigrated it as the \"dialect of the poor and ignorant\". This has led to continued bias by the North against southerners who \"don't speak proper Italian\".",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "After the rise of Benito Mussolini, the \"Iron Prefect\" Cesare Mori tried to defeat the already powerful criminal organizations flourishing in the South with some degree of success. Fascist policy aimed at the creation of an Italian Empire and Southern Italian ports were strategic for all commerce towards the colonies. With the invasion of Southern Italy during World War II, the Allies restored the authority of the mafia families, lost during the Fascist period, and used their influence to maintain public order. Mussolini also established laws requiring standard Italian to be taught in school, and discouraging the use of local Italian dialects throughout the nation, as well as the Sicilian language.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In the 1950s the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno was set up as a huge public master plan to help industrialize the South, aiming to do this in two ways: through land reforms creating 120,000 new smallholdings, and through the \"Growth Pole Strategy\" whereby 60% of all government investment would go to the South, thus boosting the Southern economy by attracting new capital, stimulating local firms, and providing employment. However, the objectives were largely missed, and as a result, the South became increasingly subsidized and state-dependent, incapable of generating private growth itself.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The imbalance between North and South was reduced in the 1960s and 1970s through the construction of public works, the implementation of agrarian and scholastic reforms, the expansion of industrialization and the improved living conditions of the population. This convergence process was interrupted, however, in the 1980s. To date, the per capita GDP of the South is just 58% of that of the Center-North, but this gap is mitigated by the fact that there the cost of living is around 10-15% lower on average (with even more differences between small towns and big cities) than that in the North of Italy. In the South the unemployment rate is more than double (6.7% in the North against 14.9% in the South). A study by Censis blames the pervasive presence of criminal organizations for the delay of Southern Italy, estimating an annual loss of wealth of 2.5% in the South in the period between 1981–2003 due to their presence, and that without them the per capita GDP of the South would have reached that of the North.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "According to the last national agricultural census, there were 1.6 million farms in 2010 (−32.4% since 2000) covering 12,700,000 ha or 31,382,383 acres (63% of which are located in Southern Italy). The vast majority (99%) are family-operated and small, averaging only 8 ha (20 acres) in size. Of the total surface area in agricultural use (forestry excluded), grain fields take up 31%, olive tree orchards 8.2%, vineyards 5.4%, citrus orchards 3.8%, sugar beets 1.7%, and horticulture 2.4%. The remainder is primarily dedicated to pastures (25.9%) and feed grains (11.6%). The northern part of Italy produces primarily maize corn, rice, sugar beets, soybeans, meat, fruits and dairy products, while the South specializes in wheat, olive and citrus fruits. Livestock includes 6 million head of cattle, 8.6 million head of swine, 6.8 million head of sheep, and 0.9 million head of goats. The total annual production of the fishing industry in Italy from capture and aquaculture, including crustaceans and molluscs, is around 480,000 tons.",
"title": "Economic sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Italy is the largest producer of wine in the world, and one of the leading producers of olive oil, fruits (apples, olives, grapes, oranges, lemons, pears, apricots, hazelnuts, peaches, cherries, plums, strawberries, and kiwifruits), and vegetables (especially artichokes and tomatoes). The most famous Italian wines are the Tuscan Chianti and the Piedmontese Barolo. Other famous wines are Barbaresco, Barbera d'Asti, Brunello di Montalcino, Frascati, Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, Morellino di Scansano, Amarone della Valpolicella DOCG and the sparkling wines Franciacorta and Prosecco. Quality goods in which Italy specialises, particularly the already mentioned wines and regional cheeses, are often protected under the quality assurance labels DOC/DOP. This geographical indication certificate, which is attributed by the European Union, is considered important to avoid confusion with low-quality mass-produced ersatz products.",
"title": "Economic sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In fact, Italian cuisine is one of the most popular and copied around the world. The lack or total unavailability of some of its most characteristic ingredients outside of Italy, also and above all to falsifications (or food fraud), leads to the complete denaturalization of Italian ingredients. This phenomenon, widespread in all continents, is better known as Italian Sounding, consisting in the use of words as well as images, colour combinations (the Italian tricolour), geographical references, brands evocative of Italy to promote and market agri-food products which in reality have nothing to do with Italian cuisine.",
"title": "Economic sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Italy is the world's sixth-largest manufacturing country. Italy has a smaller number of global multinational corporations than other economies of comparable size, but it has a large number of small and medium-sized enterprises, many of them grouped in clusters, which are the backbone of the Italian industry. This results in a manufacturing sector often focused on the export of niche market and luxury products, that is less capable of competing on quantity but is more capable of facing the competition of emerging economies based on lower labour costs, given the higher quality of its products.",
"title": "Economic sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The industrial districts are regionalized: in the Northwest, there is a large modern group of industries, as in the so-called \"industrial triangle\" (Milan-Turin-Genoa), where there is an area of intense machinery, automotive, aerospace production and shipbuilding; in the Northeast, an area that experienced social and economic development mostly around family-based firms, there are mostly small and medium enterprises of lower technology but high craftsmanship, specializing in machinery, clothing, leather products, footwear, furniture, textiles, machine tools, spare parts, home appliances, and jewellery. In central Italy, there are mostly small and medium-sized companies specializing in products such as textiles, leather, jewellery but also machinery. According to a study carried out in 2015 by the Edison Foundation and Confindustria on the most industrialized provinces in Europe, of the dive most industrialized provinces in Europe, three are Italian provinces. Brescia turns out to be the first European province for value added by industry, with an added value over 10 billion euros.",
"title": "Economic sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The automotive industry in Italy is a significant part of the manufacturing sector, with over 144,000 firms and almost 485,000 employed people in 2015, and a contribution of 8.5% to Italian GDP. Italy's automotive industry is best known for its automobile designs and small city cars, sports and supercars. Italy is one of the significant automobile producers both in Europe and around the world. Today the Italian automotive industry is almost totally dominated by Fiat Group (now included in Stellantis corporation). As well as its own, predominantly mass market model range, Stellantis owns the mainstream Fiat brand, the upmarket Alfa Romeo and Lancia brands, and the exotic Maserati brand. Luxury cars such as Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati and Ducati motorcycles are also made in the Northeast region of Emilia-Romagna. Italian cars won in the European Car of the Year annual award one of the most times among other countries (including Fiat most that any other manufacturer) and in World Car of the Year award also.",
"title": "Economic sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "In Italy, services represent the most important sector of the economy, both in terms of number of employees (67% of the total) and value-added (71%). Furthermore, the sector is by far the most dynamic: over 51% of the more than 5,000,000 companies operating in Italy today belong to the services sector, and in this sector over 67% of new businesses are born. Very important activities in Italy are tourism, trade, services to people and businesses (advanced tertiary).",
"title": "Economic sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In 2006 the main sectoral data are: for trade, there are 1,600,000 enterprises, equal to 26% of the Italian entrepreneurial fabric, and over 3,500,000 work units. Transport, communications, tourism and consumption outside the home, over 582,000 businesses, equal to 9.5% of the entrepreneurial fabric, almost 3,500,000 work units. Business services: 630,000 registered companies, equal to 10.3% of the entrepreneurial fabric, over 2,800,000 work units. In 2004 the transport sector in Italy generated a turnover of about 119.4 billion euros, employing 935,700 persons in 153,700 enterprises.",
"title": "Economic sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Italian Bourse, based in Milan, is the Italian stock exchange. It manages and organises the domestic market, regulating procedures for admission and listing of companies and intermediaries and supervising disclosures for listed companies. Following exchange privatisation in 1997, the Italian Bourse was established and became effective on 2 January 1998. On 23 June 2007, the Italian Bourse became a subsidiary of the London Stock Exchange Group. As of April 2018, overall capitalisation for listed companies on Borsa Italiana was worth €644.3 billion, representing 37.8% of Italian GDP.",
"title": "Economic sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Italy is the fifth most visited country in international tourism, with a total of 52.3 million international arrivals in 2016. The total contribution of the tourism in Italy to GDP (including wider effects from investment, the supply chain and induced income impacts) was EUR162.7bn in 2014 (10.1% of GDP) and generated 1,082,000 jobs directly in 2014 (4.8% of total employment). Factors of tourist interest in Italy are mainly culture, cuisine, history, fashion, architecture, art, religious sites and routes, wedding tourism, naturalistic beauties, nightlife, underwater sites and spas. Winter and summer tourism are present in many locations in the Alps and the Apennines, while seaside tourism is widespread in coastal locations on the Mediterranean Sea. Italy is the leading cruise tourism destination in the Mediterranean Sea. Small, historical and artistic Italian villages are promoted through the association I Borghi più belli d'Italia (literally \"The Most Beautiful Villages of Italy\").",
"title": "Economic sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The origins of modern banking can be traced to medieval and early Renaissance Italy, to the rich cities like Florence, Lucca, Siena, Venice and Genoa. The Bardi and Peruzzi families dominated banking in 14th-century Florence, establishing branches in many other parts of Europe. One of the most famous Italian banks was the Medici Bank, set up by Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici in 1397. The earliest known state deposit bank, the Bank of Saint George, was founded in 1407 in Genoa, while Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, founded in 1472, is the world's oldest or second oldest bank in continuous operation, depending on the definition, and the third-largest Italian commercial and retail bank. Today, among the financial services companies, UniCredit is one of the largest banks in Europe by capitalization and Assicurazioni Generali is second largest insurance group in the world by revenue after AXA.",
"title": "Economic sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "The following is a list of the main Italian banks and insurance groups ranked by total assets and gross premiums written.",
"title": "Economic sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Italy consumed about 185 Mtoe of primary energy in 2010. This came mostly from fossil fuels. Among the most used resources are petroleum (mostly used for the transport sector), natural gas (used for electric energy production and heating), coal and renewables. Electricity is produced mainly from natural gas, which accounts for the source of more than half of the total final electric energy produced. Another important source is hydroelectric power, which was practically the only source of electricity until 1960.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Eni, with operations in 79 countries, is considered one of the seven \"Supermajor\" oil companies in the world, and one of the world's largest industrial companies. The Val d'Agri area, Basilicata, hosts the largest onshore hydrocarbon field in Europe. Moderate natural gas reserves, mainly in the Po Valley and offshore Adriatic Sea, have been discovered in recent years and constitute the country's most important mineral resource.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Most raw materials needed for manufacturing and more than 80% of the country's energy sources are imported (99.7% of the solid fuels demand, 92.5% of oil, 91.2% of natural gas and 13% of electricity). Due to its reliance on imports, Italians pay approximately 45% more than the EU average for electricity.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "In the last decade, Italy has become one of the world's largest producers of renewable energy, ranking as the second largest producer in the European Union and the ninth in the world. Wind power, hydroelectricity, and geothermal power are also important sources of electricity in the country. Italy was the first country to exploit geothermal energy to produce electricity. The first Italian geothermal power plant was built in Tuscany, which is where all currently active geothermal plants in Italy are located. In 2014 the geothermal production was 5.92 TWh.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Solar energy production alone accounted for almost 9% of the total electric production in the country in 2014, making Italy the country with the highest contribution from solar energy in the world. The Montalto di Castro Photovoltaic Power Station, completed in 2010, is the largest photovoltaic power station in Italy with 85 MW. Other examples of large PV plants in Italy are San Bellino (70.6 MW), Cellino san Marco (42.7 MW) and Sant’ Alberto (34.6 MW). Italy was also the first country to exploit geothermal energy to produce electricity.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Renewable sources account for 27.5% of all electricity produced in Italy, with hydro alone reaching 12.6%, followed by solar at 5.7%, wind at 4.1%, bioenergy at 3.5%, and geothermal at 1.6%. The rest of the national demand is covered by fossil fuels (38.2% natural gas, 13% coal, 8.4% oil) and by imports.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Italy has managed four nuclear reactors until the 1980s, but in 1987, after the Chernobyl disaster, a large majority of Italians passed a referendum opting for phasing out nuclear power in Italy. The government responded by closing existing nuclear power plants and stopping work on projects underway, continuing to work to the nuclear energy program abroad. The national power company Enel operates seven nuclear reactors in Spain (through Endesa) and four in Slovakia (through Slovenské elektrárne), and in 2005 made an agreement with Électricité de France for a nuclear reactor in France. With these agreements, Italy has managed to access nuclear power and direct involvement in design, construction, and operation of the plants without placing reactors on Italian territory.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "In the early 1970s Italy was a major producer of pyrites (from the Tuscan Maremma), asbestos (from the Balangero mines), fluorite (found in Sicily), and salt. At the same time, it was self-sufficient in aluminium (from Gargano), sulphur (from Sicily), lead, and zinc (from Sardinia). By the beginning of the 1990s, however, it had lost all its world-ranking positions and was no longer self-sufficient in those resources. There are no substantial deposits of iron, coal, or oil. Italy is one of the world's leading producers of pumice, pozzolana, and feldspar. Another mineral resource for which Italy is well-known is marble, especially the world-famous white Carrara marble from the Massa and Carrara quarries in Tuscany.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Regarding the national road network, in 2002 there were 668,721 km (415,524 mi) of serviceable roads in Italy, including 6,487 km (4,031 mi) of motorways, state-owned but privately operated by Atlantia. In 2005, about 34,667,000 passenger cars (590 cars per 1,000 people) and 4,015,000 goods vehicles circulated on the national road network.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Italy was the first country in the world to build motorways, the so-called autostrade, reserved for fast traffic and for motor vehicles only. The Milano-Laghi (\"Lakes Motorway\"), the first built in the world, connecting Milan to Lake Como and Lake Maggiore, and now parts of the A8 and A9 motorways, was devised by Piero Puricelli and was inaugurated in 1924. He received the first authorization to build a public-utility fast road in 1921. By the end of the 1930s, over 400 kilometres of multi- and dual-single-lane motorways were constructed throughout Italy, linking cities and rural towns. Italy is one of the countries with the most vehicles per capita, with 690 per 1000 people in 2010.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "The national railway network is also extensive, especially in the north, totalizing 16,862 km of which 69% are electrified and on which 4,937 locomotives and railcars circulate. It is the 12th largest in the world, and is operated by state-owned Ferrovie dello Stato, while the rail tracks and infrastructure are managed by Rete Ferroviaria Italiana. While a number of private railroads exist and provide mostly commuter-type services, the national railway also provides sophisticated high-speed rail service that joins the major cities. The Florence–Rome high-speed railway was the first high-speed line opened in Europe when more than half of it opened in 1977. In 1991 the TAV was created for the planning and construction of high-speed rail lines along Italy's most important and saturated transport routes (Milan-Rome-Naples and Turin-Milan-Venice). High-speed trains include ETR-class trains, with the Frecciarossa 1000 reaching 400 km/h. Higher-speed trains are divided into three categories: Frecciarossa (English: red arrow) trains operate at a maximum speed of 300 km/h on dedicated high-speed tracks; Frecciargento (English: silver arrow) trains operate at a maximum speed of 250 km/h on both high-speed and mainline tracks; and Frecciabianca (English: white arrow) trains operate on high-speed regional lines at a maximum speed of 200 km/h. Italy has 11 rail border crossings over the Alpine mountains with its neighbouring countries.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Since October 2021, Italy's flag carrier airline is ITA Airways, which took over the brand, the IATA ticketing code, and many assets belonging to the former flag carrier Alitalia, after its bankruptcy. ITA Airways serves 44 destinations (as of October 2021) and also operates the former Alitalia regional subsidiary, Alitalia CityLiner. The country also has regional airlines (such as Air Dolomiti), low-cost carriers, and Charter and leisure carriers (including Neos, Blue Panorama Airlines and Poste Air Cargo). Major Italian cargo operators are Alitalia Cargo and Cargolux Italia. Italy is the fifth in Europe by number of passengers by air transport, with about 148 million passengers or about 10% of the European total in 2011. There are approximately 130 airports in Italy, of which 99 have paved runways (including the two hubs of Leonardo Da Vinci International in Rome and Malpensa International in Milan).",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Italy has been the final destination of the Silk Road for many centuries. In particular, the construction of the Suez Canal intensified sea trade with East Africa and Asia from the 19th century. Since the end of the Cold War and increasing European integration, trade relations, which were often interrupted in the 20th century, have intensified again. In 2004 there were 43 major seaports including the Port of Genoa, the country's largest and the third busiest by cargo tonnage in the Mediterranean Sea. Due to the increasing importance of the maritime Silk Road with its connections to Asia and East Africa, the Italian ports for Central and Eastern Europe have become important in recent years. In addition, the trade in goods is shifting from the European northern ports to the ports of the Mediterranean Sea due to the considerable time savings and environmental protection. In particular, the deep water port of Trieste in the northernmost part of the Mediterranean Sea is the target of Italian, Asian and European investments. The national inland waterway network comprises 1,477 km (918 mi) of navigable rivers and channels. In 2007 Italy maintained a civilian air fleet of about 389,000 units and a merchant fleet of 581 ships.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "In 2015, poverty in Italy hit the highest levels in the previous 10 years. The level of absolute poverty for a two-person family was €1050.95/month. The poverty line per capita changed by region from €552.39/month to €819.13/month. The number of those in absolute poverty rose nearly an entire per cent in 2015, from 6.8% in 2014 to 7.6% in 2015. In Southern Italy the numbers are even higher, with 10% living in absolute poverty, up from 9 per cent in 2014. Northern Italy is better off at 6.7%, but this is still an increase from 5.7% in 2014.",
"title": "Poverty"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The national statistics reporting agency, ISTAT, defines absolute poverty as those who can not buy goods and services which they need to survive. In 2015, the proportion of poor households in relative poverty also increased to 13.7 from 12.9 in 2014. ISTAT defines relative poverty as people whose disposable income is less than around half the national average. The unemployment rate in February 2016 remained at 11.7%, which has been the same for almost a year, but even having a job does not guarantee freedom from poverty.",
"title": "Poverty"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Those who have at least one family member employed still suffer from 6.1% to 11.7% poverty, the higher number being for those who have factory jobs. The numbers are even higher for the younger generations because their unemployment rate is over 40%. Also, children are hit hard. In 2014, 32% of those aged 0–17 were at risk of poverty or social exclusion, which is one child out of three. While in the north the poverty rate is about the same as that of France and Germany, in the south it is almost double that figure. In the last ISTAT report, poverty is in decline. According to the 2022 ISTAT Poverty Report, 2.18 million households and 5.6 million people live in absolute poverty in Italy.",
"title": "Poverty"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "According to Eurostat, by 2023 63% of Italian households will struggle to make ends meet, making it one of the European countries with the most widespread economic difficulties, surpassing France, Poland, Spain and Portugal. The Europea average is 45.5%.",
"title": "Poverty"
}
]
| The economy of Italy is a highly developed social market economy. It is the third-largest national economy in the European Union, the second-largest manufacturing industry in Europe, the 8th-largest economy in the world by nominal GDP, and the 12th-largest by GDP (PPP). Italy is a founding member of the European Union, the Eurozone, the OECD, the G7 and the G20; it is the eighth-largest exporter in the world, with $611 billion exported in 2021. Its closest trade ties are with the other countries of the European Union, with whom it conducts about 59% of its total trade. The largest trading partners, in order of market share in exports, are Germany (12.5%), France (10.3%), the United States (9%), Spain (5.2%), the United Kingdom (5.2%) and Switzerland (4.6%). In the post-World War II period, Italy saw a transformation from an agricultural-based economy which had been severely affected by the consequences of the World Wars, into one of the world's most advanced nations, and a leading country in world trade and exports. According to the Human Development Index, the country enjoys a very high standard of living. According to The Economist, Italy has the world's 8th highest quality of life. Italy owns the world's third-largest gold reserve, and is the third-largest net contributor to the budget of the European Union. Furthermore, the advanced country private wealth is one of the largest in the world. In terms of private wealth, Italy ranks second, after Hong Kong, in private wealth to GDP ratio. Italy is the world's seventh-largest manufacturing country, characterised by a smaller number of global multinational corporations than other economies of comparable size and many dynamic small and medium-sized enterprises, notoriously clustered in several industrial districts, which are the backbone of the Italian industry. Italy is a large manufacturer and exporter of a significant variety of products. Its products include machinery, vehicles, pharmaceuticals, furniture, food and clothing. Italy has a significant trade surplus. The country is also well known for its influential and innovative business economic sector, an industrious and competitive agricultural sector, and manufacturers of creatively designed, high-quality products: including automobiles, ships, home appliances, and designer clothing. Italy is the largest hub for luxury goods in Europe and the third luxury hub globally. Italy has a strong cooperative sector, with the largest share of the population (4.5%) employed by a cooperative in the EU. Despite these important achievements, the country's economy today suffers from structural and non-structural problems. Annual growth rates have often been below the EU average. Italy was hit particularly hard by the late-2000s recession. Massive government spending from the 1980s onwards has produced a severe rise in public debt. In addition, Italian living standards have a considerable North–South divide: the average GDP per capita in Northern Italy significantly exceeds the EU average, while some regions and provinces in Southern Italy are significantly below the average. In Central Italy, GDP per capita is instead average. In recent years, Italy's GDP per capita growth slowly caught-up with the Eurozone average, while its employment rate still lags behind. However, economists dispute the official figures because of the large number of informal jobs that lift the inactivity or unemployment rates. The shadow economy is highly represented in Southern Italy, while it becomes less intense as one moves north. In real economic conditions, Southern Italy almost matches Central Italy's level. | 2001-05-05T03:00:49Z | 2023-12-27T22:07:26Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Italy |
14,703 | Telecommunications in Italy | The most important telecommunications in Italy are telephone, radio, television and the Internet.
This is a list of telephone companies in Italy:
This is a table of radio stations in Italy:
These are tables of television channels in Italy: RAI ITALIA
see also: RAI
see also: Mediaset
he Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Italy is .it and is sponsored by Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche. The .eu domain is also used, as it is shared with other European Union member states. Currently Internet access is available to businesses and home users in various forms, including dial-up, fiber, cable, DSL, and wireless.
According to netindex.com, the Italian average for fixed connections is below the global average (96.98 Mbit/s Down and 51.28 Mbit/s Up at january 2021) with an average speed of 79.62 Mbit/s Down and 31.41 Mbit/s in upload (consideration based on the public data available at: http://www.speedtest.net/global-index/italy - January 2021). | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The most important telecommunications in Italy are telephone, radio, television and the Internet.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "This is a list of telephone companies in Italy:",
"title": "Telephone companies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "This is a table of radio stations in Italy:",
"title": "Radio stations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "These are tables of television channels in Italy: RAI ITALIA",
"title": "Television channels"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "see also: RAI",
"title": "Television channels"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "see also: Mediaset",
"title": "Television channels"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "he Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Italy is .it and is sponsored by Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche. The .eu domain is also used, as it is shared with other European Union member states. Currently Internet access is available to businesses and home users in various forms, including dial-up, fiber, cable, DSL, and wireless.",
"title": "Internet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "According to netindex.com, the Italian average for fixed connections is below the global average (96.98 Mbit/s Down and 51.28 Mbit/s Up at january 2021) with an average speed of 79.62 Mbit/s Down and 31.41 Mbit/s in upload (consideration based on the public data available at: http://www.speedtest.net/global-index/italy - January 2021).",
"title": "Internet"
}
]
| The most important telecommunications in Italy are telephone, radio, television and the Internet. | 2001-05-05T03:01:06Z | 2023-12-20T11:11:39Z | [
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14,704 | Transport in Italy | Italy has a well developed transport infrastructure. The Italian rail network is extensive, especially in the north, and it includes a high-speed rail network that joins the major cities of Italy from Naples through northern cities such as Milan and Turin. The Florence–Rome high-speed railway was the first high-speed line opened in Europe when more than half of it opened in 1977. Italy has 2,507 people and 12.46 km per kilometer of rail track, giving Italy the world's 13th largest rail network. The Italian rail network is operated by state-owned Ferrovie dello Stato, while the rail tracks and infrastructure are managed by Rete Ferroviaria Italiana.
Italy's road network is also widespread, with a total length of about 487,700 km. It comprises both an extensive motorway network (6,758 km), mostly toll roads, and national and local roads. Italy was the first country in the world to build motorways, the so-called autostrade, reserved for fast traffic and for motor vehicles only. The Autostrada dei Laghi ("Lakes Motorway"), the first built in the world, connecting Milan to Lake Como and Lake Maggiore, and now parts of the A8 and A9 motorways, was devised by Piero Puricelli and was inaugurated in 1924.
Italy is the fifth in Europe by number of passengers by air transport, with about 148 million passengers or about 10% of the European total in 2011. In 2012 there were 130 airports in Italy, including the two hubs of Malpensa International Airport in Milan and Leonardo da Vinci International Airport in Rome. Since October 2021, Italy's flag carrier airline is ITA Airways, which took over the brand, the IATA ticketing code, and many assets belonging to the former flag carrier Alitalia, after its bankruptcy.
Because of its long seacoast, Italy also has many harbors for the transportation of both goods and passengers. In 2004 there were 43 major seaports including the Port of Genoa, the country's largest and the third busiest by cargo tonnage in the Mediterranean Sea. Due to the increasing importance of the maritime Silk Road with its connections to Asia and East Africa, the Italian ports for Central and Eastern Europe have become important in recent years. In addition, the trade in goods is shifting from the European northern ports to the ports of the Mediterranean Sea due to the considerable time savings and environmental protection. In particular, the deep water port of Trieste in the northernmost part of the Mediterranean Sea is the target of Italian, Asian and European investments. Transport networks in Italy are integrated into the Trans-European Transport Networks.
The Italian rail network is extensive, especially in the north, and it includes a high-speed rail network that joins the major cities of Italy from Naples through northern cities such as Milan and Turin. Italy has 2,507 people and 12.46 km per kilometer of rail track, giving Italy the world's 13th largest rail network. Italy has 11 rail border crossings over the Alpine mountains with its neighbouring countries.
Higher-speed trains are divided into three categories: Frecciarossa (English: red arrow) trains operate at a maximum speed of 300 km/h on dedicated high-speed tracks; Frecciargento (English: silver arrow) trains operate at a maximum speed of 250 km/h on both high-speed and mainline tracks; and Frecciabianca (English: white arrow) trains operate on high-speed regional lines at a maximum speed of 200 km/h.
The Italian railway system has a length of 19,394 km (12,051 mi), of which 18,071 km (11,229 mi) standard gauge and 11,322 km (7,035 mi) electrified. The active lines are 16,723 km. The network is recently growing with the construction of the new high-speed rail network. The narrow gauge tracks are:
A major part of the Italian rail network is managed and operated by Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane, a state owned company. Other regional agencies, mostly owned by public entities such as regional governments, operate on the Italian network. The rail tracks and infrastructure are managed by Rete Ferroviaria Italiana. The Italian railways are subsidised by the government, receiving €8.1 billion in 2009.
Travellers who often make use of the railway during their stay in Italy might use Rail Passes, such as the European Inter-Rail or Italy's national and regional passes. These rail passes allow travellers the freedom to use regional trains during the validity period, but all high-speed and intercity trains require a 10-euro reservation fee. Regional passes, such as "Io viaggio ovunque Lombardia", offer one-day, multiple-day and monthly period of validity. There are also saver passes for adults, who travel as a group, with savings up to 20%. Foreign travellers should purchase these passes in advance, so that the passes could be delivered by post prior to the trip. When using the rail passes, the date of travel needs to be filled in before boarding the trains.
Major works to increase the commercial speed of the trains already started in 1967: the Rome-Florence "super-direct" line was built for trains up to 230 km/h, and reduced the journey time to less than two hours. The Florence–Rome high-speed railway was the first high-speed line opened in Europe when more than half of it opened in 1977.
In 2009 a new high-speed line linking Milan and Turin, operating at 300 km/h, opened to passenger traffic, reducing the journey time from two hours to one hour. In the same year, the Milan-Bologna line was open, reducing the journey time to 55 minutes. Also the Bologna-Florence high-speed line was upgraded to 300 km/h for a journey time of 35 minutes.
Since then, it is possible to travel from Turin to Salerno (ca. 950 km) in less than 5 hours. More than 100 trains per day are operated.
The main public operator of high-speed trains (alta velocità AV, formerly Eurostar Italia) is Trenitalia, part of FSI. Trains are divided into three categories: Frecciarossa ("Red arrow") trains operate at a maximum of 300 km/h on dedicated high-speed tracks; Frecciargento (Silver arrow) trains operate at a maximum of 250 km/h on both high-speed and mainline tracks; Frecciabianca (White arrow) trains operate at a maximum of 200 km/h on mainline tracks only.
Since 2012, a new and Italy's first private train operator, NTV (branded as Italo), run high-speed services in competition with Trenitalia. Even nowadays, Italy is the only country in Europe with a private high-speed train operator.
Construction of the Milan-Venice high-speed line has begun in 2013 and in 2016 the Milan-Treviglio section has been opened to passenger traffic; the Milan-Genoa high-speed line (Terzo Valico dei Giovi) is also under construction.
Today it is possible to travel from Rome to Milan in less than 3 hours (2h 55') with the Frecciarossa 1000, the new high-speed train. To cover this route, there's a train every 30 minutes.
With the introduction of high-speed trains, intercity trains are limited to few services per day on mainline and regional tracks.
The daytime services (Intercity IC), while not frequent and limited to one or two trains per route, are essential in providing access to cities and towns off the railway's mainline network. The main routes are Trieste to Rome (stopping at Venice, Bologna, Prato, Florence and Arezzo), Milan to Rome (stopping at Genoa, La Spezia, Pisa and Livorno / stopping at Parma, Modena, Bologna, Prato, Florence and Arezzo), Bologna to Lecce (stopping at Rimini, Ancona, Pescara, Bari and Brindisi) and Rome to Reggio di Calabria (stopping at Latina and Naples). In addition, the Intercity trains provide a more economical means of long-distance rail travel within Italy.
The night trains (Intercity Notte ICN) have sleeper compartments and washrooms, but no showers on board. Main routes are Rome to Bolzano/Bozen (calling at Florence, Bologna, Verona, Rovereto and Trento), Milan to Lecce (calling at Piacenza, Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Bologna, Faenza, Forlì, Cesena, Rimini, Ancona, Pescara, Bari and Brindisi), Turin to Lecce (calling at Alessandria, Voghera, Piacenza, Parma, Bologna, Rimini, Pescara, Termoli, San Severo,Foggia, Barletta, Bisceglie, Molfetta, Bari, Monopoli, Fasano, Ostuni and Brindisi) and Reggio di Calabria to Turin (calling at Naples, Rome, Livorno, La Spezia and Genova). Most portions of these ICN services run during the night; since most services take 10 to 15 hours to complete a one-way journey, their day-time portion provide extra train connections to complement with the Intercity services.
There are a total of 86 intercity trains running within Italy per day.
Trenitalia operates regional services (both fast veloce RGV and stopping REG) throughout Italy.
Regional train agencies exist: their train schedules are largely connected to and shown on Trenitalia, and tickets for such train services can be purchased through Trenitalia's national network. Other regional agencies have separate ticket systems which are not mutually exchangeable with that of Trenitalia. These "regional" tickets could be purchased at local newsagents or tobacco stores instead.
In addition to these agencies, there's a great deal of other little operators, such as AMT Genova for the Genova-Casella railway.
7 cities have metro systems:
15 cities have commuter rail systems; cities without wikilink are those listed just above for their metro rail system.
Italy has 11 rail border crossings over the Alpine mountains with her neighbouring countries: six are designated as mainline tracks and two are metre-gauge tracks. The six mainline border crossings are: two with France (one for Nice and Marseille; the other for Lyon and Dijon), two with Switzerland (one for Brig, Bern and Geneva; the other for Chiasso, Lugano, Lucerne and Zürich), and two with Austria (one for Innsbruck; the other for Villach, Graz and Vienna). The two-metre-gauge track crossings are located at the border town of Tirano (enters Switzerland's Canton Graubünden/Grisons) and Domodossola (enters Switzerland's Locarno).
There is a railway line connecting Italy's northeastern port of Trieste to Slovenia, but no passenger or freight services operate on this track. Consequently, there is no direct connections between Trieste and Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, despite the proximity of both cities.
The Vatican City is also linked to Italy with a railway line serving a single railway station, the Vatican City railway station. This line is used only for special occasions. San Marino used to have a narrow gauge rail connection with Italy; this was dismantled in 1944.
Italy's top ten railway stations by annual passengers are:
Italy is one of the countries with the most vehicles per capita, with 690 per 1000 people in 2010. Italy has a total of 487,700 km of paved roads, of which 6,758 km are motorways with a general speed limit of 130 km/h (81 mph), which since 2009 was provisioned for extension up to 150 km/h (93 mph). The speed limit in towns is usually 50 km/h (31 mph) and less commonly 30 km/h (19 mph).
Italy was the first country in the world to build motorways, the so-called autostrade, reserved for fast traffic and for motor vehicles only. The Autostrada dei Laghi ("Lakes Motorway"), the first built in the world, connecting Milan to Lake Como and Lake Maggiore, and now parts of the A8 and A9 motorways, was devised by Piero Puricelli and was inaugurated in 1924.
Italy has 2,400 km (1,491 mi) of navigable waterways for various types of commercial traffic, although of limited overall value.
In the northern regions of Lombardy and Venetia, commuter ferry boats operate on Lake Garda and Lake Como to connect towns and villages at both sides of the lakes. The waterways in Venice, including the Grand Canal, serve as the vital transportation network for local residents and tourists. Frequent shuttle ferries (vaporetta) connect different points on the main island of Venice and other outlying islands of the lagoon. In addition, there are direct shuttle boats between Venice and the Venice Marco Polo Airport.
Italy has been the final destination of the Silk Road for many centuries. In particular, the construction of the Suez Canal intensified sea trade with East Africa and Asia from the 19th century. Since the end of the Cold War and increasing European integration, the trade relations, which were often interrupted in the 20th century, have intensified again. Because of its long seacoast, Italy also has many harbors for the transportation of both goods and passengers. In 2004 there were 43 major seaports including the Port of Genoa, the country's largest and the third busiest by cargo tonnage in the Mediterranean Sea.
Due to the increasing importance of the maritime Silk Road with its connections to Asia and East Africa, the Italian ports for Central and Eastern Europe have become important in recent years. In addition, the trade in goods is shifting from the European northern ports to the ports of the Mediterranean Sea due to the considerable time savings and environmental protection. In particular, the deep water port of Trieste in the northernmost part of the Mediterranean Sea is the target of Italian, Asian and European investments.
Since October 2021, Italy's flag carrier airline is ITA Airways, which took over the brand, the IATA ticketing code, and many assets belonging to the former flag carrier Alitalia, after its bankruptcy. ITA Airways serves 44 destinations (as of October 2021) and also operates the former Alitalia regional subsidiary, Alitalia CityLiner.
The country also has regional airlines (such as Air Dolomiti), low-cost carriers, and Charter and leisure carriers (including Neos, Blue Panorama Airlines and Poste Air Cargo). Major Italian cargo operators are ITA Airways Cargo and Cargolux Italia. In 2012 there were 130 airports in Italy, including the two hubs of Malpensa International Airport in Milan and Leonardo da Vinci International Airport in Rome.
Italy is the fifth in Europe by number of passengers by air transport, with about 148 million passengers or about 10% of the European total in 2011. Most of passengers in Italy are on international flights (57%). A big share of domestic flights connect the major islands (Sardinia and Sicily) to the mainland. Domestic flights between major Italian cities as Rome and Milan still play a relevant role but are declining since the opening of the Italian high-speed rail network in recent years.
Italy has a total as of 130 airports in 2012, of which 99 have paved runways:
Airports - with unpaved runways in 2012:
This is a list of the top ten busiest airports in Italy in 2017.
There are long-distance intercity buses run by local companies, but the services are infrequent during the week and usually provide a secondary link to railway services.
Italy does not have a nationwide coach operator. However, in 2015, the British company Megabus (Europe) launched daily intercity bus services on several domestic routes
This makes a daily total of 12 services in each direction between Rome and Bologna.
Flixbus, a company founded in the course of the opening of the German intercity bus market also serves routes in Italy both domestic and international.
Airport shuttle buses, however, are highly developed and convenient for rail travellers. Most airports in Italy are not connected to the railway network, except for Rome Fiumicino Airport, Milan Malpensa Airport and Turin Caselle Airport. In Bologna, a light-rail track has been constructed and inaugurated in November 2020, connecting Bologna Airport to the main railway station, while Line 1 of Naples Metro is set to finally reach Capodichino Airport and connect it to the central station and the city center in 2024.
Local buses are usually divided into urban (urbano) and suburban (interurbano or extraurbano) lines.
Media related to Transport in Italy at Wikimedia Commons | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Italy has a well developed transport infrastructure. The Italian rail network is extensive, especially in the north, and it includes a high-speed rail network that joins the major cities of Italy from Naples through northern cities such as Milan and Turin. The Florence–Rome high-speed railway was the first high-speed line opened in Europe when more than half of it opened in 1977. Italy has 2,507 people and 12.46 km per kilometer of rail track, giving Italy the world's 13th largest rail network. The Italian rail network is operated by state-owned Ferrovie dello Stato, while the rail tracks and infrastructure are managed by Rete Ferroviaria Italiana.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Italy's road network is also widespread, with a total length of about 487,700 km. It comprises both an extensive motorway network (6,758 km), mostly toll roads, and national and local roads. Italy was the first country in the world to build motorways, the so-called autostrade, reserved for fast traffic and for motor vehicles only. The Autostrada dei Laghi (\"Lakes Motorway\"), the first built in the world, connecting Milan to Lake Como and Lake Maggiore, and now parts of the A8 and A9 motorways, was devised by Piero Puricelli and was inaugurated in 1924.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Italy is the fifth in Europe by number of passengers by air transport, with about 148 million passengers or about 10% of the European total in 2011. In 2012 there were 130 airports in Italy, including the two hubs of Malpensa International Airport in Milan and Leonardo da Vinci International Airport in Rome. Since October 2021, Italy's flag carrier airline is ITA Airways, which took over the brand, the IATA ticketing code, and many assets belonging to the former flag carrier Alitalia, after its bankruptcy.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Because of its long seacoast, Italy also has many harbors for the transportation of both goods and passengers. In 2004 there were 43 major seaports including the Port of Genoa, the country's largest and the third busiest by cargo tonnage in the Mediterranean Sea. Due to the increasing importance of the maritime Silk Road with its connections to Asia and East Africa, the Italian ports for Central and Eastern Europe have become important in recent years. In addition, the trade in goods is shifting from the European northern ports to the ports of the Mediterranean Sea due to the considerable time savings and environmental protection. In particular, the deep water port of Trieste in the northernmost part of the Mediterranean Sea is the target of Italian, Asian and European investments. Transport networks in Italy are integrated into the Trans-European Transport Networks.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Italian rail network is extensive, especially in the north, and it includes a high-speed rail network that joins the major cities of Italy from Naples through northern cities such as Milan and Turin. Italy has 2,507 people and 12.46 km per kilometer of rail track, giving Italy the world's 13th largest rail network. Italy has 11 rail border crossings over the Alpine mountains with its neighbouring countries.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Higher-speed trains are divided into three categories: Frecciarossa (English: red arrow) trains operate at a maximum speed of 300 km/h on dedicated high-speed tracks; Frecciargento (English: silver arrow) trains operate at a maximum speed of 250 km/h on both high-speed and mainline tracks; and Frecciabianca (English: white arrow) trains operate on high-speed regional lines at a maximum speed of 200 km/h.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The Italian railway system has a length of 19,394 km (12,051 mi), of which 18,071 km (11,229 mi) standard gauge and 11,322 km (7,035 mi) electrified. The active lines are 16,723 km. The network is recently growing with the construction of the new high-speed rail network. The narrow gauge tracks are:",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "A major part of the Italian rail network is managed and operated by Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane, a state owned company. Other regional agencies, mostly owned by public entities such as regional governments, operate on the Italian network. The rail tracks and infrastructure are managed by Rete Ferroviaria Italiana. The Italian railways are subsidised by the government, receiving €8.1 billion in 2009.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Travellers who often make use of the railway during their stay in Italy might use Rail Passes, such as the European Inter-Rail or Italy's national and regional passes. These rail passes allow travellers the freedom to use regional trains during the validity period, but all high-speed and intercity trains require a 10-euro reservation fee. Regional passes, such as \"Io viaggio ovunque Lombardia\", offer one-day, multiple-day and monthly period of validity. There are also saver passes for adults, who travel as a group, with savings up to 20%. Foreign travellers should purchase these passes in advance, so that the passes could be delivered by post prior to the trip. When using the rail passes, the date of travel needs to be filled in before boarding the trains.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Major works to increase the commercial speed of the trains already started in 1967: the Rome-Florence \"super-direct\" line was built for trains up to 230 km/h, and reduced the journey time to less than two hours. The Florence–Rome high-speed railway was the first high-speed line opened in Europe when more than half of it opened in 1977.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In 2009 a new high-speed line linking Milan and Turin, operating at 300 km/h, opened to passenger traffic, reducing the journey time from two hours to one hour. In the same year, the Milan-Bologna line was open, reducing the journey time to 55 minutes. Also the Bologna-Florence high-speed line was upgraded to 300 km/h for a journey time of 35 minutes.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Since then, it is possible to travel from Turin to Salerno (ca. 950 km) in less than 5 hours. More than 100 trains per day are operated.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The main public operator of high-speed trains (alta velocità AV, formerly Eurostar Italia) is Trenitalia, part of FSI. Trains are divided into three categories: Frecciarossa (\"Red arrow\") trains operate at a maximum of 300 km/h on dedicated high-speed tracks; Frecciargento (Silver arrow) trains operate at a maximum of 250 km/h on both high-speed and mainline tracks; Frecciabianca (White arrow) trains operate at a maximum of 200 km/h on mainline tracks only.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Since 2012, a new and Italy's first private train operator, NTV (branded as Italo), run high-speed services in competition with Trenitalia. Even nowadays, Italy is the only country in Europe with a private high-speed train operator.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Construction of the Milan-Venice high-speed line has begun in 2013 and in 2016 the Milan-Treviglio section has been opened to passenger traffic; the Milan-Genoa high-speed line (Terzo Valico dei Giovi) is also under construction.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Today it is possible to travel from Rome to Milan in less than 3 hours (2h 55') with the Frecciarossa 1000, the new high-speed train. To cover this route, there's a train every 30 minutes.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "With the introduction of high-speed trains, intercity trains are limited to few services per day on mainline and regional tracks.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The daytime services (Intercity IC), while not frequent and limited to one or two trains per route, are essential in providing access to cities and towns off the railway's mainline network. The main routes are Trieste to Rome (stopping at Venice, Bologna, Prato, Florence and Arezzo), Milan to Rome (stopping at Genoa, La Spezia, Pisa and Livorno / stopping at Parma, Modena, Bologna, Prato, Florence and Arezzo), Bologna to Lecce (stopping at Rimini, Ancona, Pescara, Bari and Brindisi) and Rome to Reggio di Calabria (stopping at Latina and Naples). In addition, the Intercity trains provide a more economical means of long-distance rail travel within Italy.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The night trains (Intercity Notte ICN) have sleeper compartments and washrooms, but no showers on board. Main routes are Rome to Bolzano/Bozen (calling at Florence, Bologna, Verona, Rovereto and Trento), Milan to Lecce (calling at Piacenza, Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Bologna, Faenza, Forlì, Cesena, Rimini, Ancona, Pescara, Bari and Brindisi), Turin to Lecce (calling at Alessandria, Voghera, Piacenza, Parma, Bologna, Rimini, Pescara, Termoli, San Severo,Foggia, Barletta, Bisceglie, Molfetta, Bari, Monopoli, Fasano, Ostuni and Brindisi) and Reggio di Calabria to Turin (calling at Naples, Rome, Livorno, La Spezia and Genova). Most portions of these ICN services run during the night; since most services take 10 to 15 hours to complete a one-way journey, their day-time portion provide extra train connections to complement with the Intercity services.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "There are a total of 86 intercity trains running within Italy per day.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Trenitalia operates regional services (both fast veloce RGV and stopping REG) throughout Italy.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Regional train agencies exist: their train schedules are largely connected to and shown on Trenitalia, and tickets for such train services can be purchased through Trenitalia's national network. Other regional agencies have separate ticket systems which are not mutually exchangeable with that of Trenitalia. These \"regional\" tickets could be purchased at local newsagents or tobacco stores instead.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In addition to these agencies, there's a great deal of other little operators, such as AMT Genova for the Genova-Casella railway.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "7 cities have metro systems:",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "15 cities have commuter rail systems; cities without wikilink are those listed just above for their metro rail system.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Italy has 11 rail border crossings over the Alpine mountains with her neighbouring countries: six are designated as mainline tracks and two are metre-gauge tracks. The six mainline border crossings are: two with France (one for Nice and Marseille; the other for Lyon and Dijon), two with Switzerland (one for Brig, Bern and Geneva; the other for Chiasso, Lugano, Lucerne and Zürich), and two with Austria (one for Innsbruck; the other for Villach, Graz and Vienna). The two-metre-gauge track crossings are located at the border town of Tirano (enters Switzerland's Canton Graubünden/Grisons) and Domodossola (enters Switzerland's Locarno).",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "There is a railway line connecting Italy's northeastern port of Trieste to Slovenia, but no passenger or freight services operate on this track. Consequently, there is no direct connections between Trieste and Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, despite the proximity of both cities.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The Vatican City is also linked to Italy with a railway line serving a single railway station, the Vatican City railway station. This line is used only for special occasions. San Marino used to have a narrow gauge rail connection with Italy; this was dismantled in 1944.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Italy's top ten railway stations by annual passengers are:",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Italy is one of the countries with the most vehicles per capita, with 690 per 1000 people in 2010. Italy has a total of 487,700 km of paved roads, of which 6,758 km are motorways with a general speed limit of 130 km/h (81 mph), which since 2009 was provisioned for extension up to 150 km/h (93 mph). The speed limit in towns is usually 50 km/h (31 mph) and less commonly 30 km/h (19 mph).",
"title": "Roads"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Italy was the first country in the world to build motorways, the so-called autostrade, reserved for fast traffic and for motor vehicles only. The Autostrada dei Laghi (\"Lakes Motorway\"), the first built in the world, connecting Milan to Lake Como and Lake Maggiore, and now parts of the A8 and A9 motorways, was devised by Piero Puricelli and was inaugurated in 1924.",
"title": "Roads"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Italy has 2,400 km (1,491 mi) of navigable waterways for various types of commercial traffic, although of limited overall value.",
"title": "Waterways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In the northern regions of Lombardy and Venetia, commuter ferry boats operate on Lake Garda and Lake Como to connect towns and villages at both sides of the lakes. The waterways in Venice, including the Grand Canal, serve as the vital transportation network for local residents and tourists. Frequent shuttle ferries (vaporetta) connect different points on the main island of Venice and other outlying islands of the lagoon. In addition, there are direct shuttle boats between Venice and the Venice Marco Polo Airport.",
"title": "Waterways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Italy has been the final destination of the Silk Road for many centuries. In particular, the construction of the Suez Canal intensified sea trade with East Africa and Asia from the 19th century. Since the end of the Cold War and increasing European integration, the trade relations, which were often interrupted in the 20th century, have intensified again. Because of its long seacoast, Italy also has many harbors for the transportation of both goods and passengers. In 2004 there were 43 major seaports including the Port of Genoa, the country's largest and the third busiest by cargo tonnage in the Mediterranean Sea.",
"title": "Ports and harbours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Due to the increasing importance of the maritime Silk Road with its connections to Asia and East Africa, the Italian ports for Central and Eastern Europe have become important in recent years. In addition, the trade in goods is shifting from the European northern ports to the ports of the Mediterranean Sea due to the considerable time savings and environmental protection. In particular, the deep water port of Trieste in the northernmost part of the Mediterranean Sea is the target of Italian, Asian and European investments.",
"title": "Ports and harbours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Since October 2021, Italy's flag carrier airline is ITA Airways, which took over the brand, the IATA ticketing code, and many assets belonging to the former flag carrier Alitalia, after its bankruptcy. ITA Airways serves 44 destinations (as of October 2021) and also operates the former Alitalia regional subsidiary, Alitalia CityLiner.",
"title": "Air transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The country also has regional airlines (such as Air Dolomiti), low-cost carriers, and Charter and leisure carriers (including Neos, Blue Panorama Airlines and Poste Air Cargo). Major Italian cargo operators are ITA Airways Cargo and Cargolux Italia. In 2012 there were 130 airports in Italy, including the two hubs of Malpensa International Airport in Milan and Leonardo da Vinci International Airport in Rome.",
"title": "Air transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Italy is the fifth in Europe by number of passengers by air transport, with about 148 million passengers or about 10% of the European total in 2011. Most of passengers in Italy are on international flights (57%). A big share of domestic flights connect the major islands (Sardinia and Sicily) to the mainland. Domestic flights between major Italian cities as Rome and Milan still play a relevant role but are declining since the opening of the Italian high-speed rail network in recent years.",
"title": "Air transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Italy has a total as of 130 airports in 2012, of which 99 have paved runways:",
"title": "Air transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Airports - with unpaved runways in 2012:",
"title": "Air transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "This is a list of the top ten busiest airports in Italy in 2017.",
"title": "Air transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "There are long-distance intercity buses run by local companies, but the services are infrequent during the week and usually provide a secondary link to railway services.",
"title": "Bus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Italy does not have a nationwide coach operator. However, in 2015, the British company Megabus (Europe) launched daily intercity bus services on several domestic routes",
"title": "Bus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "This makes a daily total of 12 services in each direction between Rome and Bologna.",
"title": "Bus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Flixbus, a company founded in the course of the opening of the German intercity bus market also serves routes in Italy both domestic and international.",
"title": "Bus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Airport shuttle buses, however, are highly developed and convenient for rail travellers. Most airports in Italy are not connected to the railway network, except for Rome Fiumicino Airport, Milan Malpensa Airport and Turin Caselle Airport. In Bologna, a light-rail track has been constructed and inaugurated in November 2020, connecting Bologna Airport to the main railway station, while Line 1 of Naples Metro is set to finally reach Capodichino Airport and connect it to the central station and the city center in 2024.",
"title": "Bus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Local buses are usually divided into urban (urbano) and suburban (interurbano or extraurbano) lines.",
"title": "Bus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Media related to Transport in Italy at Wikimedia Commons",
"title": "External links"
}
]
| Italy has a well developed transport infrastructure. The Italian rail network is extensive, especially in the north, and it includes a high-speed rail network that joins the major cities of Italy from Naples through northern cities such as Milan and Turin. The Florence–Rome high-speed railway was the first high-speed line opened in Europe when more than half of it opened in 1977. Italy has 2,507 people and 12.46 km2 per kilometer of rail track, giving Italy the world's 13th largest rail network. The Italian rail network is operated by state-owned Ferrovie dello Stato, while the rail tracks and infrastructure are managed by Rete Ferroviaria Italiana. Italy's road network is also widespread, with a total length of about 487,700 km. It comprises both an extensive motorway network (6,758 km), mostly toll roads, and national and local roads. Italy was the first country in the world to build motorways, the so-called autostrade, reserved for fast traffic and for motor vehicles only. The Autostrada dei Laghi, the first built in the world, connecting Milan to Lake Como and Lake Maggiore, and now parts of the A8 and A9 motorways, was devised by Piero Puricelli and was inaugurated in 1924. Italy is the fifth in Europe by number of passengers by air transport, with about 148 million passengers or about 10% of the European total in 2011. In 2012 there were 130 airports in Italy, including the two hubs of Malpensa International Airport in Milan and Leonardo da Vinci International Airport in Rome. Since October 2021, Italy's flag carrier airline is ITA Airways, which took over the brand, the IATA ticketing code, and many assets belonging to the former flag carrier Alitalia, after its bankruptcy. Because of its long seacoast, Italy also has many harbors for the transportation of both goods and passengers. In 2004 there were 43 major seaports including the Port of Genoa, the country's largest and the third busiest by cargo tonnage in the Mediterranean Sea. Due to the increasing importance of the maritime Silk Road with its connections to Asia and East Africa, the Italian ports for Central and Eastern Europe have become important in recent years. In addition, the trade in goods is shifting from the European northern ports to the ports of the Mediterranean Sea due to the considerable time savings and environmental protection. In particular, the deep water port of Trieste in the northernmost part of the Mediterranean Sea is the target of Italian, Asian and European investments. Transport networks in Italy are integrated into the Trans-European Transport Networks. | 2001-05-05T03:01:25Z | 2023-12-29T22:41:11Z | [
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]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Italy |
14,705 | Italian Armed Forces | The Italian Armed Forces (Italian: Forze armate italiane, pronounced [ˈfɔrtse arˈmaːte itaˈljaːne]) encompass the Italian Army, the Italian Navy and the Italian Air Force. A fourth branch of the armed forces, known as the Carabinieri, take on the role as the nation's military police and are also involved in missions and operations abroad as a combat force. Despite not being a branch of the armed forces, the Guardia di Finanza has military status and is organized along military lines. These five forces comprise a total of 340,885 men and women with the official status of active military personnel, of which 167,057 are in the Army, Navy and Air Force. The President of the Italian Republic heads the armed forces as the President of the High Council of Defence established by article 87 of the Constitution of Italy. According to article 78, the Parliament has the authority to declare a state of war and vest the powers to lead the war in the Government.
The office of the Chief of Defence is organised as follows:
The ground force of Italy, the Regio Esercito dates back to the unification of Italy in the 1850s and 1860s. It fought in colonial engagements in China during the Boxer Rebellion, against the Ottoman Empire in Libya (1911-1912), on the Alps against the Austro-Hungarian Empire during World War I, in Abyssinia during the Interwar period, and in World War II in Albania, Greece, North Africa and Russia, as well as in the Italian Civil War. During the Cold War the Army prepared itself to defend against a Warsaw Pact invasion from the east. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it has seen extensive peacekeeping service in Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq. On 29 July 2004 it became a professional all-volunteer force when conscription was finally ended.
The navy of Italy was created in 1861, following the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy, as the Regia Marina. The new navy's baptism of fire came during the Third Italian War of Independence against the Austrian Empire. During the First World War, it spent its major efforts in the Adriatic Sea, fighting the Austro-Hungarian Navy. In the Second World War, it engaged the Royal Navy in a two-and-a-half-year struggle for the control of the Mediterranean Sea. After the war, the new Marina Militare, being a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), has taken part in many coalition peacekeeping operations. It is a blue-water navy. The Guardia Costiera (Coast Guard) is a component of the navy.
The air force of Italy was founded as an independent service arm on 28 March 1923, by King Vittorio Emanuele III as the Regia Aeronautica (which equates to "Royal Air Force"). During the 1930s, it was involved in its first military operations in Ethiopia in 1935, and later in the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939. Eventually, Italy entered World War II alongside Germany. After the armistice of 8 September 1943, Italy was divided into two sides, and the same fate befell the Regia Aeronautica. The Air Force was split into the Italian Co-Belligerent Air Force in the south aligned with the Allies, and the pro-Axis Aeronautica Nazionale Repubblicana in the north until the end of the war. When Italy was made a republic by referendum, the air force was given its current name Aeronautica Militare.
The Arma dei Carabinieri is the gendarmerie and military police of Italy. The corps was instituted in 1814 by King Victor Emmanuel I of Savoy with the aim of providing the Kingdom of Sardinia with a police corps; it is therefore older than Italy itself. The new force was divided into divisions on the scale of one division for each province of Italy. The divisions were further divided into companies and subdivided into lieutenancies, which commanded and coordinated the local police stations and were distributed throughout the national territory in direct contact with the public. The Italian unification saw the number of divisions increased, and in 1861 the Carabinieri were appointed the "First Force" of the new national military organization. In recent years Carabinieri became the fourth branch of Italian Armed Forces. Primarily they carry out law enforcement, military policing duties and peacekeeping mission abroad, such as Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. At the Sea Islands Conference of the G8 in 2004, the Carabinieri were given the mandate to establish a Center of Excellence for Stability Police Units (CoESPU) to spearhead the development of training and doctrinal standards for civilian police units attached to international peacekeeping missions.
Italy has joined in many UN, NATO and EU operations as well as with assistance to Russia and the other CIS nations, Middle East peace process, peacekeeping, and combating the illegal drug trade, human trafficking, piracy and terrorism.
Italy did take part in the 1982 Multinational Force in Lebanon along with US, French and British troops. Italy also participated in the 1990–91 Gulf War, with the deployment of eight Panavia Tornado IDS bomber jets; Italian Army troops were subsequently deployed to assist Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq following the conflict.
As part of Operation Enduring Freedom, Italy contributed to the international operation in Afghanistan. Italian forces have contributed to ISAF, the NATO force in Afghanistan, and to the Provincial reconstruction team. Italy has sent 3,800 troops, including one infantry company from the 2nd Alpini Regiment tasked to protect the ISAF HQ, one engineer company, one NBC platoon, one logistic unit, as well as liaison and staff elements integrated into the operation chain of command. Italian forces also command a multinational engineer task force and have deployed a platoon of Carabinieri military police.
The Italian Army did not take part in combat operations of the 2003 Iraq War, dispatching troops only when major combat operations were declared over by the U.S. President George W. Bush. Subsequently, Italian troops arrived in the late summer of 2003, and began patrolling Nasiriyah and the surrounding area. Italian participation in the military operations in Iraq was concluded by the end of 2006, with full withdrawal of Italian military personnel except for a small group of about 30 soldiers engaged in providing security for the Italian embassy in Baghdad. Italy played a major role in the 2004-2011 NATO Training Mission to assist in the development of Iraqi security forces training structures and institutions.
Since the second post-war the Italian armed force has become more and more engaged in international peace support operations, mainly under the auspices of the United Nations. The Italian armed forces are currently participating in 26 missions. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Italian Armed Forces (Italian: Forze armate italiane, pronounced [ˈfɔrtse arˈmaːte itaˈljaːne]) encompass the Italian Army, the Italian Navy and the Italian Air Force. A fourth branch of the armed forces, known as the Carabinieri, take on the role as the nation's military police and are also involved in missions and operations abroad as a combat force. Despite not being a branch of the armed forces, the Guardia di Finanza has military status and is organized along military lines. These five forces comprise a total of 340,885 men and women with the official status of active military personnel, of which 167,057 are in the Army, Navy and Air Force. The President of the Italian Republic heads the armed forces as the President of the High Council of Defence established by article 87 of the Constitution of Italy. According to article 78, the Parliament has the authority to declare a state of war and vest the powers to lead the war in the Government.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The office of the Chief of Defence is organised as follows:",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The ground force of Italy, the Regio Esercito dates back to the unification of Italy in the 1850s and 1860s. It fought in colonial engagements in China during the Boxer Rebellion, against the Ottoman Empire in Libya (1911-1912), on the Alps against the Austro-Hungarian Empire during World War I, in Abyssinia during the Interwar period, and in World War II in Albania, Greece, North Africa and Russia, as well as in the Italian Civil War. During the Cold War the Army prepared itself to defend against a Warsaw Pact invasion from the east. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it has seen extensive peacekeeping service in Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq. On 29 July 2004 it became a professional all-volunteer force when conscription was finally ended.",
"title": "The four branches of Italian Armed Forces"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The navy of Italy was created in 1861, following the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy, as the Regia Marina. The new navy's baptism of fire came during the Third Italian War of Independence against the Austrian Empire. During the First World War, it spent its major efforts in the Adriatic Sea, fighting the Austro-Hungarian Navy. In the Second World War, it engaged the Royal Navy in a two-and-a-half-year struggle for the control of the Mediterranean Sea. After the war, the new Marina Militare, being a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), has taken part in many coalition peacekeeping operations. It is a blue-water navy. The Guardia Costiera (Coast Guard) is a component of the navy.",
"title": "The four branches of Italian Armed Forces"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The air force of Italy was founded as an independent service arm on 28 March 1923, by King Vittorio Emanuele III as the Regia Aeronautica (which equates to \"Royal Air Force\"). During the 1930s, it was involved in its first military operations in Ethiopia in 1935, and later in the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939. Eventually, Italy entered World War II alongside Germany. After the armistice of 8 September 1943, Italy was divided into two sides, and the same fate befell the Regia Aeronautica. The Air Force was split into the Italian Co-Belligerent Air Force in the south aligned with the Allies, and the pro-Axis Aeronautica Nazionale Repubblicana in the north until the end of the war. When Italy was made a republic by referendum, the air force was given its current name Aeronautica Militare.",
"title": "The four branches of Italian Armed Forces"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The Arma dei Carabinieri is the gendarmerie and military police of Italy. The corps was instituted in 1814 by King Victor Emmanuel I of Savoy with the aim of providing the Kingdom of Sardinia with a police corps; it is therefore older than Italy itself. The new force was divided into divisions on the scale of one division for each province of Italy. The divisions were further divided into companies and subdivided into lieutenancies, which commanded and coordinated the local police stations and were distributed throughout the national territory in direct contact with the public. The Italian unification saw the number of divisions increased, and in 1861 the Carabinieri were appointed the \"First Force\" of the new national military organization. In recent years Carabinieri became the fourth branch of Italian Armed Forces. Primarily they carry out law enforcement, military policing duties and peacekeeping mission abroad, such as Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. At the Sea Islands Conference of the G8 in 2004, the Carabinieri were given the mandate to establish a Center of Excellence for Stability Police Units (CoESPU) to spearhead the development of training and doctrinal standards for civilian police units attached to international peacekeeping missions.",
"title": "The four branches of Italian Armed Forces"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Italy has joined in many UN, NATO and EU operations as well as with assistance to Russia and the other CIS nations, Middle East peace process, peacekeeping, and combating the illegal drug trade, human trafficking, piracy and terrorism.",
"title": "International stance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Italy did take part in the 1982 Multinational Force in Lebanon along with US, French and British troops. Italy also participated in the 1990–91 Gulf War, with the deployment of eight Panavia Tornado IDS bomber jets; Italian Army troops were subsequently deployed to assist Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq following the conflict.",
"title": "International stance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "As part of Operation Enduring Freedom, Italy contributed to the international operation in Afghanistan. Italian forces have contributed to ISAF, the NATO force in Afghanistan, and to the Provincial reconstruction team. Italy has sent 3,800 troops, including one infantry company from the 2nd Alpini Regiment tasked to protect the ISAF HQ, one engineer company, one NBC platoon, one logistic unit, as well as liaison and staff elements integrated into the operation chain of command. Italian forces also command a multinational engineer task force and have deployed a platoon of Carabinieri military police.",
"title": "International stance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The Italian Army did not take part in combat operations of the 2003 Iraq War, dispatching troops only when major combat operations were declared over by the U.S. President George W. Bush. Subsequently, Italian troops arrived in the late summer of 2003, and began patrolling Nasiriyah and the surrounding area. Italian participation in the military operations in Iraq was concluded by the end of 2006, with full withdrawal of Italian military personnel except for a small group of about 30 soldiers engaged in providing security for the Italian embassy in Baghdad. Italy played a major role in the 2004-2011 NATO Training Mission to assist in the development of Iraqi security forces training structures and institutions.",
"title": "International stance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Since the second post-war the Italian armed force has become more and more engaged in international peace support operations, mainly under the auspices of the United Nations. The Italian armed forces are currently participating in 26 missions.",
"title": "International stance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "",
"title": "Sources"
}
]
| The Italian Armed Forces encompass the Italian Army, the Italian Navy and the Italian Air Force. A fourth branch of the armed forces, known as the Carabinieri, take on the role as the nation's military police and are also involved in missions and operations abroad as a combat force. Despite not being a branch of the armed forces, the Guardia di Finanza has military status and is organized along military lines. These five forces comprise a total of 340,885 men and women with the official status of active military personnel, of which 167,057 are in the Army, Navy and Air Force. The President of the Italian Republic heads the armed forces as the President of the High Council of Defence established by article 87 of the Constitution of Italy. According to article 78, the Parliament has the authority to declare a state of war and vest the powers to lead the war in the Government. | 2001-05-05T03:01:38Z | 2023-11-26T14:54:59Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Armed_Forces |
14,706 | Foreign relations of Italy | The foreign relations of the Italian Republic are the Italian government's external relations with the outside world. Located in Europe, Italy has been considered a major Western power since its unification in 1860. Its main allies are the NATO countries and the EU states, two entities of which Italy is a founding member. Italy was admitted to the United Nations in 1955, and it is a member and a strong supporter of a wide number of international organisations, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and World Trade Organization (GATT and WTO), the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the Council of Europe, and the Central European Initiative.
Its turns in the rotating presidency of international organisations include the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the G7 and the EU Council. Italy is also a recurrent non-permanent member of the UN Security Council. Italy is an important actor in the Mediterranean region and has close relations with the Romance-speaking countries in Europe and Latin America. Although it is a secular state, Rome hosts the Pope and the headquarters of the Catholic Church, which operates a large diplomatic system of its own. Italy is currently commanding various multinational forces and has significant troops deployed all over the world for peacekeeping missions, and for combating organized crime, illegal drug trade, human trafficking, piracy and terrorism.
The Risorgimento was the era from 1829 to 1871 that saw the emergence of a national consciousness. The Northern Italy monarchy of the House of Savoy in the Kingdom of Sardinia, whose government was led by Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, had ambitions of establishing a united Italian state. In the context of the 1848 liberal revolutions that swept through Europe, an unsuccessful first war of independence was declared on Austria. In 1855, the Kingdom of Sardinia became an ally of Britain and France in the Crimean War, giving Cavour's diplomacy legitimacy in the eyes of the great powers. The Kingdom of Sardinia again attacked the Austrian Empire in the Second Italian War of Independence of 1859, with the aid of France, resulting in liberating Lombardy. On the basis of the Plombières Agreement, the Kingdom of Sardinia ceded Savoy and Nice to France, an event that caused the Niçard exodus, that was the emigration of a quarter of the Niçard Italians to Italy, and the Niçard Vespers.
In 1860–1861, Giuseppe Garibaldi led the drive for unification in Naples and Sicily conquering the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (the Expedition of the Thousand), while the House of Savoy troops occupied the central territories of the Italian peninsula, except Rome and part of Papal States. This allowed the Sardinian government to declare a united Italian kingdom on 17 March 1861. In 1866, Italy allied with Prussia during the Austro-Prussian War, waging the Third Italian War of Independence which allowed Italy to annexe Venetia. Finally, in 1870, as France abandoned its garrisons in Rome during the disastrous Franco-Prussian War to keep the large Prussian Army at bay, the Italians rushed to fill the power gap by taking over the Papal States. Italian unification was completed and shortly afterwards Italy's capital was moved to Rome. Later Italy formed the Triple Alliance (1882) with Germany and Austria.
Italy defeated the Ottoman Empire in 1911–1912. By 1915, Italy had acquired in Africa a colony on the Red Sea coast (Eritrea), a large protectorate in Somalia and administrative authority in formerly Turkish Libya. Outside of Africa, Italy possessed a small concession in Tientsin in China (following the Boxer Rebellion) and the Dodecanese Islands off the coast of Turkey.
Austria took the offensive against the terms of the alliance and Italy decided to take part in World War I as a principal allied power with France and Great Britain. Two leaders, Prime Minister Antonio Salandra and Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino made the decisions; their primary motivation was seizure of territory from Austria, as secretly promised by Britain and France in the Treaty of London of 1915. Also, Italy occupied southern Albania and established a protectorate over Albania, which remained in place until 1920.
The Allies defeated the Austrian Empire in 1918 and Italy became one of the main winners of the war. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando focused almost exclusively on territorial gains, but he got far less than he wanted, and Italians were bitterly resentful when they were denied control of the city of Fiume. The conference, under the control of Britain, France and the United States refused to assign Dalmatia and Albania to Italy as had been promised in the Treaty of London. Britain, France and Japan divided the German overseas colonies into mandates of their own, excluding Italy. Italy also gained no territory from the breakup of the Ottoman Empire.
Italy did not receive other territories promised by the Treaty of London, so this outcome was denounced as a Mutilated victory. The rhetoric of Mutilated victory was adopted by Benito Mussolini and led to the rise of Italian fascism, becoming a key point in the propaganda of Fascist Italy. Historians regard Mutilated victory as a "political myth", used by fascists to fuel Italian imperialism and obscure the successes of liberal Italy in the aftermath of World War I. Italy also gained a permanent seat in the League of Nations's executive council.
The Fascist government that came to power with Benito Mussolini in 1922 sought to increase the size of the Italian empire and to satisfy the claims of Italian irredentists. Italian Fascism is based upon Italian nationalism and imperialism, and in particular seeks to complete what it considers as the incomplete project of the unification of Italy by incorporating Italia Irredenta (unredeemed Italy) into the state of Italy. To the east of Italy, the Fascists claimed that Dalmatia was a land of Italian culture whose Italians, including those of Italianized South Slavic descent, had been driven out of Dalmatia and into exile in Italy, and supported the return of Italians of Dalmatian heritage. Mussolini identified Dalmatia as having strong Italian cultural roots for centuries, similarly to Istria, via the Roman Empire and the Republic of Venice. To the south of Italy, the Fascists claimed Malta, which belonged to the United Kingdom, and Corfu, which instead belonged to Greece; to the north claimed Italian Switzerland, while to the west claimed Corsica, Nice, and Savoy, which belonged to France. The Fascist regime produced literature on Corsica that presented evidence of the island's italianità. The Fascist regime produced literature on Nice that justified that Nice was an Italian land based on historic, ethnic, and linguistic grounds.
Mussolini promised to bring Italy back as a great power in Europe, building a "New Roman Empire" and holding power over the Mediterranean Sea. In propaganda, Fascists used the ancient Roman motto "Mare Nostrum" (Latin for "Our Sea") to describe the Mediterranean. For this reason the Fascist regime engaged in interventionist foreign policy. In 1923, the Greek island of Corfu was briefly occupied by Italy, after the assassination of General Tellini in Greek territory. In 1925, Italy forced Albania to become a de facto protectorate. In 1935, Mussolini invaded Ethiopia and founded Italian East Africa, resulting in an international alienation and leading to Italy's withdrawal from the League of Nations; Italy allied with Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan and strongly supported Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War. In 1939, Italy formally annexed Albania. Italy entered World War II on 10 June 1940. The Italians initially advanced in British Somaliland, Egypt, the Balkans (establishing the Governorate of Dalmatia and Montenegro, the Province of Ljubljana, and the puppet states Independent State of Croatia and Hellenic State), and eastern fronts. They were, however, subsequently defeated on the Eastern Front as well as in the East African campaign and the North African campaign, losing as a result their territories in Africa and in the Balkans.
An Allied invasion of Sicily began in July 1943, leading to the collapse of the Fascist regime and the fall of Mussolini on 25 July. In the north, the Germans set up the Italian Social Republic (RSI), a Nazi puppet state with Mussolini installed as leader after he was rescued by German paratroopers. Some Italian troops in the south were organised into the Italian Co-belligerent Army, which fought alongside the Allies for the rest of the war, while other Italian troops, loyal to Mussolini and his RSI, continued to fight alongside the Germans in the National Republican Army. Also, the post-armistice period saw the rise of a large anti-fascist resistance movement, the Resistenza. As result, the country descended into civil war; the Italian resistance fought a guerrilla war against the Nazi German occupiers and Italian Fascist forces, while clashes between the Fascist RSI Army and the Royalist Italian Co-Belligerent Army were rare. In late April 1945, with total defeat looming, Mussolini attempted to escape north, but was captured and summarily executed near Lake Como by Italian partisans. His body was then taken to Milan, where it was hung upside down at a service station for public viewing and to provide confirmation of his demise. Hostilities ended on 29 April 1945, when the German forces in Italy surrendered.
Italy became a republic after the 1946 Italian institutional referendum held on 2 June 1946, a day celebrated since as Festa della Repubblica. This was the first time that Italian women voted at the national level, and the second time overall considering the local elections that were held a few months earlier in some cities. Under the Treaty of Peace with Italy, 1947, Istria, Kvarner, most of the Julian March as well as the Dalmatian city of Zara was annexed by Yugoslavia causing the Istrian-Dalmatian exodus, which led to the emigration of between 230,000 and 350,000 of local ethnic Italians (Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians), the others being ethnic Slovenians, ethnic Croatians, and ethnic Istro-Romanians, choosing to maintain Italian citizenship. Later, the Free Territory of Trieste was divided between the two states. Italy also lost all of its colonial possessions, formally ending the Italian Empire. In 1950, Italian Somaliland was made a United Nations Trust Territory under Italian administration until 1 July 1960. The Italian border that applies today has existed since 1975, when Trieste was formally re-annexed to Italy.
in 1949 Italy became a member of NATO. The Marshall Plan helped to revive the Italian economy which, until the late 1960s, enjoyed a period of sustained economic growth commonly called the "Economic Miracle". In the 1950's, Italy became one of the six founding countries of the European Communities, following the 1952 establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community, and subsequent 1958 creations of the European Economic Community and European Atomic Energy Community. In 1993, the former two of these were incorporated into the European Union.
Italy is part of the UN, EU, NATO, the OECD, the OSCE, the DAC, the WTO, the G7, the G20, the Union for the Mediterranean, the Latin Union, the Council of Europe, the Central European Initiative, the ASEM, the MEF, the ISA, the Uniting for Consensus and several Contact Groups. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The foreign relations of the Italian Republic are the Italian government's external relations with the outside world. Located in Europe, Italy has been considered a major Western power since its unification in 1860. Its main allies are the NATO countries and the EU states, two entities of which Italy is a founding member. Italy was admitted to the United Nations in 1955, and it is a member and a strong supporter of a wide number of international organisations, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and World Trade Organization (GATT and WTO), the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the Council of Europe, and the Central European Initiative.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Its turns in the rotating presidency of international organisations include the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the G7 and the EU Council. Italy is also a recurrent non-permanent member of the UN Security Council. Italy is an important actor in the Mediterranean region and has close relations with the Romance-speaking countries in Europe and Latin America. Although it is a secular state, Rome hosts the Pope and the headquarters of the Catholic Church, which operates a large diplomatic system of its own. Italy is currently commanding various multinational forces and has significant troops deployed all over the world for peacekeeping missions, and for combating organized crime, illegal drug trade, human trafficking, piracy and terrorism.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The Risorgimento was the era from 1829 to 1871 that saw the emergence of a national consciousness. The Northern Italy monarchy of the House of Savoy in the Kingdom of Sardinia, whose government was led by Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, had ambitions of establishing a united Italian state. In the context of the 1848 liberal revolutions that swept through Europe, an unsuccessful first war of independence was declared on Austria. In 1855, the Kingdom of Sardinia became an ally of Britain and France in the Crimean War, giving Cavour's diplomacy legitimacy in the eyes of the great powers. The Kingdom of Sardinia again attacked the Austrian Empire in the Second Italian War of Independence of 1859, with the aid of France, resulting in liberating Lombardy. On the basis of the Plombières Agreement, the Kingdom of Sardinia ceded Savoy and Nice to France, an event that caused the Niçard exodus, that was the emigration of a quarter of the Niçard Italians to Italy, and the Niçard Vespers.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In 1860–1861, Giuseppe Garibaldi led the drive for unification in Naples and Sicily conquering the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (the Expedition of the Thousand), while the House of Savoy troops occupied the central territories of the Italian peninsula, except Rome and part of Papal States. This allowed the Sardinian government to declare a united Italian kingdom on 17 March 1861. In 1866, Italy allied with Prussia during the Austro-Prussian War, waging the Third Italian War of Independence which allowed Italy to annexe Venetia. Finally, in 1870, as France abandoned its garrisons in Rome during the disastrous Franco-Prussian War to keep the large Prussian Army at bay, the Italians rushed to fill the power gap by taking over the Papal States. Italian unification was completed and shortly afterwards Italy's capital was moved to Rome. Later Italy formed the Triple Alliance (1882) with Germany and Austria.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Italy defeated the Ottoman Empire in 1911–1912. By 1915, Italy had acquired in Africa a colony on the Red Sea coast (Eritrea), a large protectorate in Somalia and administrative authority in formerly Turkish Libya. Outside of Africa, Italy possessed a small concession in Tientsin in China (following the Boxer Rebellion) and the Dodecanese Islands off the coast of Turkey.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Austria took the offensive against the terms of the alliance and Italy decided to take part in World War I as a principal allied power with France and Great Britain. Two leaders, Prime Minister Antonio Salandra and Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino made the decisions; their primary motivation was seizure of territory from Austria, as secretly promised by Britain and France in the Treaty of London of 1915. Also, Italy occupied southern Albania and established a protectorate over Albania, which remained in place until 1920.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The Allies defeated the Austrian Empire in 1918 and Italy became one of the main winners of the war. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando focused almost exclusively on territorial gains, but he got far less than he wanted, and Italians were bitterly resentful when they were denied control of the city of Fiume. The conference, under the control of Britain, France and the United States refused to assign Dalmatia and Albania to Italy as had been promised in the Treaty of London. Britain, France and Japan divided the German overseas colonies into mandates of their own, excluding Italy. Italy also gained no territory from the breakup of the Ottoman Empire.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Italy did not receive other territories promised by the Treaty of London, so this outcome was denounced as a Mutilated victory. The rhetoric of Mutilated victory was adopted by Benito Mussolini and led to the rise of Italian fascism, becoming a key point in the propaganda of Fascist Italy. Historians regard Mutilated victory as a \"political myth\", used by fascists to fuel Italian imperialism and obscure the successes of liberal Italy in the aftermath of World War I. Italy also gained a permanent seat in the League of Nations's executive council.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The Fascist government that came to power with Benito Mussolini in 1922 sought to increase the size of the Italian empire and to satisfy the claims of Italian irredentists. Italian Fascism is based upon Italian nationalism and imperialism, and in particular seeks to complete what it considers as the incomplete project of the unification of Italy by incorporating Italia Irredenta (unredeemed Italy) into the state of Italy. To the east of Italy, the Fascists claimed that Dalmatia was a land of Italian culture whose Italians, including those of Italianized South Slavic descent, had been driven out of Dalmatia and into exile in Italy, and supported the return of Italians of Dalmatian heritage. Mussolini identified Dalmatia as having strong Italian cultural roots for centuries, similarly to Istria, via the Roman Empire and the Republic of Venice. To the south of Italy, the Fascists claimed Malta, which belonged to the United Kingdom, and Corfu, which instead belonged to Greece; to the north claimed Italian Switzerland, while to the west claimed Corsica, Nice, and Savoy, which belonged to France. The Fascist regime produced literature on Corsica that presented evidence of the island's italianità. The Fascist regime produced literature on Nice that justified that Nice was an Italian land based on historic, ethnic, and linguistic grounds.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Mussolini promised to bring Italy back as a great power in Europe, building a \"New Roman Empire\" and holding power over the Mediterranean Sea. In propaganda, Fascists used the ancient Roman motto \"Mare Nostrum\" (Latin for \"Our Sea\") to describe the Mediterranean. For this reason the Fascist regime engaged in interventionist foreign policy. In 1923, the Greek island of Corfu was briefly occupied by Italy, after the assassination of General Tellini in Greek territory. In 1925, Italy forced Albania to become a de facto protectorate. In 1935, Mussolini invaded Ethiopia and founded Italian East Africa, resulting in an international alienation and leading to Italy's withdrawal from the League of Nations; Italy allied with Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan and strongly supported Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War. In 1939, Italy formally annexed Albania. Italy entered World War II on 10 June 1940. The Italians initially advanced in British Somaliland, Egypt, the Balkans (establishing the Governorate of Dalmatia and Montenegro, the Province of Ljubljana, and the puppet states Independent State of Croatia and Hellenic State), and eastern fronts. They were, however, subsequently defeated on the Eastern Front as well as in the East African campaign and the North African campaign, losing as a result their territories in Africa and in the Balkans.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "An Allied invasion of Sicily began in July 1943, leading to the collapse of the Fascist regime and the fall of Mussolini on 25 July. In the north, the Germans set up the Italian Social Republic (RSI), a Nazi puppet state with Mussolini installed as leader after he was rescued by German paratroopers. Some Italian troops in the south were organised into the Italian Co-belligerent Army, which fought alongside the Allies for the rest of the war, while other Italian troops, loyal to Mussolini and his RSI, continued to fight alongside the Germans in the National Republican Army. Also, the post-armistice period saw the rise of a large anti-fascist resistance movement, the Resistenza. As result, the country descended into civil war; the Italian resistance fought a guerrilla war against the Nazi German occupiers and Italian Fascist forces, while clashes between the Fascist RSI Army and the Royalist Italian Co-Belligerent Army were rare. In late April 1945, with total defeat looming, Mussolini attempted to escape north, but was captured and summarily executed near Lake Como by Italian partisans. His body was then taken to Milan, where it was hung upside down at a service station for public viewing and to provide confirmation of his demise. Hostilities ended on 29 April 1945, when the German forces in Italy surrendered.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Italy became a republic after the 1946 Italian institutional referendum held on 2 June 1946, a day celebrated since as Festa della Repubblica. This was the first time that Italian women voted at the national level, and the second time overall considering the local elections that were held a few months earlier in some cities. Under the Treaty of Peace with Italy, 1947, Istria, Kvarner, most of the Julian March as well as the Dalmatian city of Zara was annexed by Yugoslavia causing the Istrian-Dalmatian exodus, which led to the emigration of between 230,000 and 350,000 of local ethnic Italians (Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians), the others being ethnic Slovenians, ethnic Croatians, and ethnic Istro-Romanians, choosing to maintain Italian citizenship. Later, the Free Territory of Trieste was divided between the two states. Italy also lost all of its colonial possessions, formally ending the Italian Empire. In 1950, Italian Somaliland was made a United Nations Trust Territory under Italian administration until 1 July 1960. The Italian border that applies today has existed since 1975, when Trieste was formally re-annexed to Italy.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "in 1949 Italy became a member of NATO. The Marshall Plan helped to revive the Italian economy which, until the late 1960s, enjoyed a period of sustained economic growth commonly called the \"Economic Miracle\". In the 1950's, Italy became one of the six founding countries of the European Communities, following the 1952 establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community, and subsequent 1958 creations of the European Economic Community and European Atomic Energy Community. In 1993, the former two of these were incorporated into the European Union.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Italy is part of the UN, EU, NATO, the OECD, the OSCE, the DAC, the WTO, the G7, the G20, the Union for the Mediterranean, the Latin Union, the Council of Europe, the Central European Initiative, the ASEM, the MEF, the ISA, the Uniting for Consensus and several Contact Groups.",
"title": "International institutions"
}
]
| The foreign relations of the Italian Republic are the Italian government's external relations with the outside world. Located in Europe, Italy has been considered a major Western power since its unification in 1860. Its main allies are the NATO countries and the EU states, two entities of which Italy is a founding member. Italy was admitted to the United Nations in 1955, and it is a member and a strong supporter of a wide number of international organisations, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and World Trade Organization, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the Council of Europe, and the Central European Initiative. Its turns in the rotating presidency of international organisations include the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the G7 and the EU Council. Italy is also a recurrent non-permanent member of the UN Security Council. Italy is an important actor in the Mediterranean region and has close relations with the Romance-speaking countries in Europe and Latin America. Although it is a secular state, Rome hosts the Pope and the headquarters of the Catholic Church, which operates a large diplomatic system of its own. Italy is currently commanding various multinational forces and has significant troops deployed all over the world for peacekeeping missions, and for combating organized crime, illegal drug trade, human trafficking, piracy and terrorism. | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-12-30T18:36:07Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_relations_of_Italy |
14,708 | Italian language | Italian (italiano [itaˈljaːno] or lingua italiana [ˈliŋɡwa itaˈljaːna]) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. Together with Sardinian, Italian is the least divergent language from Latin. Spoken by about 85 million people (2022), Italian is an official language in Italy, San Marino, and Switzerland (Ticino and the Grisons), and is the primary language of Vatican City. It has official minority status in Croatia and in some areas of Slovenian Istria.
Italian is also spoken by large immigrant and expatriate communities in the Americas and Australia. Italian is included under the languages covered by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Romania, although Italian is neither a co-official nor a protected language in these countries. Some speakers of Italian are native bilinguals of both Italian (either in its standard form or regional varieties) and a local language of Italy, most frequently the language spoken at home in their place of origin.
Italian is a major language in Europe, being one of the official languages of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and one of the working languages of the Council of Europe. It is the second-most-widely spoken native language in the European Union with 67 million speakers (15% of the EU population) and it is spoken as a second language by 13.4 million EU citizens (3%). Including Italian speakers in non-EU European countries (such as Switzerland, Albania and the United Kingdom) and on other continents, the total number of speakers is approximately 85 million. Italian is the main working language of the Holy See, serving as the lingua franca (common language) in the Roman Catholic hierarchy as well as the official language of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. Italian has a significant use in musical terminology and opera with numerous Italian words referring to music that have become international terms taken into various languages worldwide. Almost all native Italian words end with vowels and has a 7-vowel sound system ('e' and 'o' have mid-low and mid-high sounds). Italian has contrast between short and long consonants and gemination (doubling) of consonants.
During the Middle Ages, the established written language in Europe was Latin, though the great majority of people were illiterate, and only a handful were well versed in the language. In the Italian Peninsula, as in most of Europe, most would instead speak a local vernacular. These dialects, as they are commonly referred to, evolved from Vulgar Latin over the course of centuries, unaffected by formal standards and teachings. They are not in any sense "dialects" of standard Italian, which itself started off as one of these local tongues, but sister languages of Italian. Mutual intelligibility with Italian varies widely, as it does with Romance languages in general. The Romance languages of Italy can differ greatly from Italian at all levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, pragmatics) and are classified typologically as distinct languages.
The standard Italian language has a poetic and literary origin in the writings of Tuscan and Sicilian writers of the 12th century, and, even though the grammar and core lexicon are basically unchanged from those used in Florence in the 13th century, the modern standard of the language was largely shaped by relatively recent events. However, Romance vernacular as language spoken in the Italian Peninsula has a longer history. In fact, the earliest surviving texts that can definitely be called vernacular (as distinct from its predecessor Vulgar Latin) are legal formulae known as the Placiti Cassinesi from the Province of Benevento that date from 960 to 963, although the Veronese Riddle, probably from the 8th or early 9th century, contains a late form of Vulgar Latin that can be seen as a very early sample of a vernacular dialect of Italy. The Commodilla catacomb inscription is also a similar case.
The Italian language has progressed through a long and slow process, which started after the Western Roman Empire's fall in the 5th century.
The language that came to be thought of as Italian developed in central Tuscany and was first formalized in the early 14th century through the works of Tuscan writer Dante Alighieri, written in his native Florentine. Dante's epic poems, known collectively as the Commedia, to which another Tuscan poet Giovanni Boccaccio later affixed the title Divina, were read throughout the peninsula and his written dialect became the "canonical standard" that all educated Italians could understand. Dante is still credited with standardizing the Italian language. In addition to the widespread exposure gained through literature, the Florentine dialect also gained prestige due to the political and cultural significance of Florence at the time and the fact that it was linguistically an intermediate between the northern and the southern Italian dialects. Thus the dialect of Florence became the basis for what would become the official language of Italy.
Italian was progressively made an official language of most of the Italian states predating unification, slowly replacing Latin, even when ruled by foreign powers (like Spain in the Kingdom of Naples, or Austria in the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia), even though the masses kept speaking primarily their local vernaculars. Italian was also one of the many recognised languages in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Italy has always had a distinctive dialect for each city because the cities, until recently, were thought of as city-states. Those dialects now have considerable variety. As Tuscan-derived Italian came to be used throughout Italy, features of local speech were naturally adopted, producing various versions of Regional Italian. The most characteristic differences, for instance, between Roman Italian and Milanese Italian are syntactic gemination of initial consonants in some contexts and the pronunciation of stressed "e", and of "s" between vowels in many words: e.g. va bene "all right" is pronounced [vabˈbɛːne] by a Roman (and by any standard Italian speaker), [vaˈbeːne] by a Milanese (and by any speaker whose native dialect lies to the north of the La Spezia–Rimini Line); a casa "at home" is [akˈkaːsa] for Roman, [akˈkaːsa] or [akˈkaːza] for standard, [aˈkaːza] for Milanese and generally northern.
In contrast to the Gallo-Italic linguistic panorama of Northern Italy, the Italo-Dalmatian, Neapolitan and its related dialects were largely unaffected by the Franco-Occitan influences introduced to Italy mainly by bards from France during the Middle Ages, but after the Norman conquest of southern Italy, Sicily became the first Italian land to adopt Occitan lyric moods (and words) in poetry. Even in the case of Northern Italian languages, however, scholars are careful not to overstate the effects of outsiders on the natural indigenous developments of the languages.
The economic might and relatively advanced development of Tuscany at the time (Late Middle Ages) gave its language weight, though Venetian remained widespread in medieval Italian commercial life, and Ligurian (or Genoese) remained in use in maritime trade alongside the Mediterranean. The increasing political and cultural relevance of Florence during the periods of the rise of the Medici Bank, humanism, and the Renaissance made its dialect, or rather a refined version of it, a standard in the arts.
The Renaissance era, known as il Rinascimento in Italian, was seen as a time of rebirth, which is the literal meaning of both renaissance (from French) and rinascimento (Italian).
During this time, long-existing beliefs stemming from the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church began to be understood from new perspectives as humanists—individuals who placed emphasis on the human body and its full potential—began to shift focus from the church to human beings themselves. The continual advancements in technology play a crucial role in the diffusion of languages. After the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, the number of printing presses in Italy grew rapidly and by the year 1500 reached a total of 56, the biggest number of printing presses in all of Europe. This enabled the production of more pieces of literature at a lower cost and Italian, as the dominant language, spread.
Italian became the language used in the courts of every state in the Italian Peninsula, as well as the prestige variety used on the island of Corsica (but not in the neighbouring Sardinia, which on the contrary underwent Italianization well into the late 18th century, under Savoyard sway: the island's linguistic composition, roofed by the prestige of Spanish among the Sardinians, would therein make for a rather slow process of assimilation to the Italian cultural sphere). The rediscovery of Dante's De vulgari eloquentia, as well as a renewed interest in linguistics in the 16th century, sparked a debate that raged throughout Italy concerning the criteria that should govern the establishment of a modern Italian literary and spoken language. This discussion, known as questione della lingua (i.e., the problem of the language), ran through the Italian culture until the end of the 19th century, often linked to the political debate on achieving a united Italian state. Renaissance scholars divided into three main factions:
A fourth faction claimed that the best Italian was the one that the papal court adopted, which was a mixture of the Tuscan and Roman dialects. Eventually, Bembo's ideas prevailed, and the foundation of the Accademia della Crusca in Florence (1582–1583), the official legislative body of the Italian language, led to the publication of Agnolo Monosini's Latin tome Floris italicae linguae libri novem in 1604 followed by the first Italian dictionary in 1612.
An important event that helped the diffusion of Italian was the conquest and occupation of Italy by Napoleon in the early 19th century (who was himself of Italian-Corsican descent). This conquest propelled the unification of Italy some decades after and pushed the Italian language into a lingua franca used not only among clerks, nobility, and functionaries in the Italian courts but also by the bourgeoisie.
Italian literature's first modern novel, I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) by Alessandro Manzoni, further defined the standard by "rinsing" his Milanese "in the waters of the Arno" (Florence's river), as he states in the preface to his 1840 edition.
After unification, a huge number of civil servants and soldiers recruited from all over the country introduced many more words and idioms from their home languages—ciao is derived from the Venetian word s-cia[v]o ("slave", that is "your servant"), panettone comes from the Lombard word panetton, etc. Only 2.5% of Italy's population could speak the Italian standardized language properly when the nation was unified in 1861.
Italian is a Romance language, a descendant of Vulgar Latin (colloquial spoken Latin). Standard Italian is based on Tuscan, especially its Florentine dialect, and is, therefore, an Italo-Dalmatian language, a classification that includes most other central and southern Italian languages and the extinct Dalmatian.
According to Ethnologue, lexical similarity is 89% with French, 87% with Catalan, 85% with Sardinian, 82% with Spanish, 80% with Portuguese, 78% with Ladin, 77% with Romanian. Estimates may differ according to sources.
One study, analyzing the degree of differentiation of Romance languages in comparison to Latin (comparing phonology, inflection, discourse, syntax, vocabulary, and intonation), estimated that distance between Italian and Latin is higher than that between Sardinian and Latin. In particular, its vowels are the second-closest to Latin after Sardinian. As in most Romance languages, stress is distinctive.
Italian is the official language of Italy and San Marino and is spoken fluently by the majority of the countries' populations. Italian is the third most spoken language in Switzerland (after German and French; see Swiss Italian), though its use there has moderately declined since the 1970s. It is official both on the national level and on regional level in two cantons: Ticino and Grisons. In the latter canton, however, it is only spoken by a small minority, in the Italian Grisons. Ticino, which includes Lugano, the largest Italian-speaking city outside Italy, is the only canton where Italian is predominant. Italian is also used in administration and official documents in Vatican City.
Italian is also spoken by a minority in Monaco and France, especially in the southeastern part of the country. Italian was the official language in Savoy and in Nice until 1860, when they were both annexed by France under the Treaty of Turin, a development that triggered the "Niçard exodus", or the emigration of a quarter of the Niçard Italians to Italy, and the Niçard Vespers. Giuseppe Garibaldi complained about the referendum that allowed France to annex Savoy and Nice, and a group of his followers (among the Italian Savoyards) took refuge in Italy in the following years. Corsica passed from the Republic of Genoa to France in 1769 after the Treaty of Versailles. Italian was the official language of Corsica until 1859. Giuseppe Garibaldi called for the inclusion of the "Corsican Italians" within Italy when Rome was annexed to the Kingdom of Italy, but King Victor Emmanuel II did not agree to it. Italian is generally understood in Corsica by the population resident therein who speak Corsican, which is an Italo-Romance idiom similar to Tuscan. Francization occurred in Nice and Corsica cases, and caused a near-disappearance of the Italian language as many of the Italian speakers in these areas migrated to Italy. Italian was the official language in Monaco until 1860, when it was replaced by the French. This was due to the annexation of the surrounding County of Nice to France following the Treaty of Turin (1860).
It formerly had official status in Montenegro (because of the Venetian Albania), parts of Slovenia and Croatia (because of the Venetian Istria and Venetian Dalmatia), parts of Greece (because of the Venetian rule in the Ionian Islands and by the Kingdom of Italy in the Dodecanese). Italian is widely spoken in Malta, where nearly two-thirds of the population can speak it fluently (see Maltese Italian). Italian served as Malta's official language until 1934, when it was abolished by the British colonial administration amid strong local opposition. Italian language in Slovenia is an officially recognized minority language in the country. The official census, carried out in 2002, reported 2,258 ethnic Italians (Istrian Italians) in Slovenia (0.11% of the total population). Italian language in Croatia is an official minority language in the country, with many schools and public announcements published in both languages. The 2001 census in Croatia reported 19,636 ethnic Italians (Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians) in the country (some 0.42% of the total population). Their numbers dropped dramatically after World War II following the Istrian–Dalmatian exodus, which caused the emigration of between 230,000 and 350,000 Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians. Italian was the official language of the Republic of Ragusa from 1492 to 1807.
It formerly had official status in Albania due to the annexation of the country to the Kingdom of Italy (1939–1943). Albania has a large population of non-native speakers, with over half of the population having some knowledge of the Italian language. The Albanian government has pushed to make Italian a compulsory second language in schools. The Italian language is well-known and studied in Albania, due to its historical ties and geographical proximity to Italy and to the diffusion of Italian television in the country.
Due to heavy Italian influence during the Italian colonial period, Italian is still understood by some in former colonies such as Libya. Although it was the primary language in Libya since colonial rule, Italian greatly declined under the rule of Muammar Gaddafi, who expelled the Italian Libyan population and made Arabic the sole official language of the country. A few hundred Italian settlers returned to Libya in the 2000s.
Italian was the official language of Eritrea during Italian colonisation. Italian is today used in commerce, and it is still spoken especially among elders; besides that, Italian words are incorporated as loan words in the main language spoken in the country (Tigrinya). The capital city of Eritrea, Asmara, still has several Italian schools, established during the colonial period. In the early 19th century, Eritrea was the country with the highest number of Italians abroad, and the Italian Eritreans grew from 4,000 during World War I to nearly 100,000 at the beginning of World War II. In Asmara there are two Italian schools, the Italian School of Asmara (Italian primary school with a Montessori department) and the Liceo Sperimentale "G. Marconi" (Italian international senior high school).
Italian was also introduced to Somalia through colonialism and was the sole official language of administration and education during the colonial period but fell out of use after government, educational and economic infrastructure were destroyed in the Somali Civil War.
Italian is also spoken by large immigrant and expatriate communities in the Americas and Australia. Although over 17 million Americans are of Italian descent, only a little over one million people in the United States speak Italian at home. Nevertheless, an Italian language media market does exist in the country. In Canada, Italian is the second most spoken non-official language when varieties of Chinese are not grouped together, with 375,645 claiming Italian as their mother tongue in 2016.
Italian immigrants to South America have also brought a presence of the language to that continent. According to some sources, Italian is the second most spoken language in Argentina after the official language of Spanish, although its number of speakers, mainly of the older generation, is decreasing. Italian bilingual speakers can be found scattered across the Southeast of Brazil as well as in the South. In Venezuela, Italian is the most spoken language after Spanish and Portuguese, with around 200,000 speakers. In Uruguay, people who speak Italian as their home language are 1.1% of the total population of the country. In Australia, Italian is the second most spoken foreign language after Chinese, with 1.4% of the population speaking it as their home language.
The main Italian-language newspapers published outside Italy are the L'Osservatore Romano (Vatican City), the L'Informazione di San Marino (San Marino), the Corriere del Ticino and the laRegione Ticino (Switzerland), the La Voce del Popolo (Croatia), the Corriere d'Italia (Germany), the L'italoeuropeo (United Kingdom), the Passaparola (Luxembourg), the America Oggi (United States), the Corriere Canadese and the Corriere Italiano (Canada), the Il punto d'incontro (Mexico), the L'Italia del Popolo (Argentina), the Fanfulla (Brazil), the Gente d'Italia (Uruguay), the La Voce d'Italia (Venezuela), the Il Globo (Australia) and the La gazzetta del Sud Africa (South Africa).
Italian is widely taught in many schools around the world, but rarely as the first foreign language. In the 21st century, technology also allows for the continual spread of the Italian language, as people have new ways to learn how to speak, read, and write languages at their own pace and at any given time. For example, the free website and application Duolingo has 4.94 million English speakers learning the Italian language.
According to the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, every year there are more than 200,000 foreign students who study the Italian language; they are distributed among the 90 Institutes of Italian Culture that are located around the world, in the 179 Italian schools located abroad, or in the 111 Italian lecturer sections belonging to foreign schools where Italian is taught as a language of culture.
As of 2022, Australia had the highest number of students learning Italian in the world. This occurred because of support by the Italian community in Australia and the Italian Government and also because of successful educational reform efforts led by local governments in Australia.
From the late 19th to the mid-20th century, thousands of Italians settled in Argentina, Uruguay, Southern Brazil and Venezuela, as well as in Canada and the United States, where they formed a physical and cultural presence.
In some cases, colonies were established where variants of regional languages of Italy were used, and some continue to use this regional language. Examples are Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, where Talian is used, and the town of Chipilo near Puebla, Mexico; each continues to use a derived form of Venetian dating back to the nineteenth century. Another example is Cocoliche, an Italian–Spanish pidgin once spoken in Argentina and especially in Buenos Aires, and Lunfardo.
Starting in late medieval times in much of Europe and the Mediterranean, Latin was replaced as the primary commercial language by Italian language variants (especially Tuscan and Venetian). These variants were consolidated during the Renaissance with the strength of Italy and the rise of humanism and the arts.
During that period, Italy held artistic sway over the rest of Europe. It was the norm for all educated gentlemen to make the Grand Tour, visiting Italy to see its great historical monuments and works of art. It thus became expected to learn at least some Italian. In England, while the classical languages Latin and Greek were the first to be learned, Italian became the second most common modern language after French, a position it held until the late 18th century when it tended to be replaced by German. John Milton, for instance, wrote some of his early poetry in Italian.
Within the Catholic Church, Italian is known by a large part of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and is used in substitution for Latin in some official documents.
Italian loanwords continue to be used in most languages in matters of art and music (especially classical music including opera), in the design and fashion industries, in some sports like football and especially in culinary terms.
In Italy, almost all the other languages spoken as the vernacular—other than standard Italian and some languages spoken among immigrant communities—are often called "Italian dialects", a label that can be very misleading if it is understood to mean "dialects of Italian". The Romance dialects of Italy are local evolutions of spoken Latin that pre-date the establishment of Italian, and as such are sister languages to the Tuscan that was the historical source of Italian. They can be quite different from Italian and from each other, with some belonging to different linguistic branches of Romance. The only exceptions to this are twelve groups considered "historical language minorities", which are officially recognized as distinct minority languages by the law. On the other hand, Corsican (a language spoken on the French island of Corsica) is closely related to medieval Tuscan, from which Standard Italian derives and evolved.
The differences in the evolution of Latin in the different regions of Italy can be attributed to the natural changes that all languages in regular use are subject to, and to some extent to the presence of three other types of languages: substrata, superstrata, and adstrata. The most prevalent were substrata (the language of the original inhabitants), as the Italian dialects were most likely simply Latin as spoken by native cultural groups. Superstrata and adstrata were both less important. Foreign conquerors of Italy that dominated different regions at different times left behind little to no influence on the dialects. Foreign cultures with which Italy engaged in peaceful relations with, such as trade, had no significant influence either.
Throughout Italy, regional varieties of Standard Italian, called Regional Italian, are spoken. Regional differences can be recognized by various factors: the openness of vowels, the length of the consonants, and influence of the local language (for example, in informal situations andà, annà and nare replace the standard Italian andare in the area of Tuscany, Rome and Venice respectively for the infinitive "to go").
There is no definitive date when the various Italian variants of Latin—including varieties that contributed to modern Standard Italian—began to be distinct enough from Latin to be considered separate languages. One criterion for determining that two language variants are to be considered separate languages rather than variants of a single language is that they have evolved so that they are no longer mutually intelligible; this diagnostic is effective if mutual intelligibility is minimal or absent (e.g. in Romance, Romanian and Portuguese), but it fails in cases such as Spanish-Portuguese or Spanish-Italian, as educated native speakers of either pairing can understand each other well if they choose to do so; however, the level of intelligibility is markedly lower between Italian-Spanish, and considerably higher between the Iberian sister languages of Portuguese-Spanish. Speakers of this latter pair can communicate with one another with remarkable ease, each speaking to the other in his own native language without slang/jargon. Nevertheless, on the basis of accumulated differences in morphology, syntax, phonology, and to some extent lexicon, it is not difficult to identify that for the Romance varieties of Italy, the first extant written evidence of languages that can no longer be considered Latin comes from the ninth and tenth centuries C.E. These written sources demonstrate certain vernacular characteristics and sometimes explicitly mention the use of the vernacular in Italy. Full literary manifestations of the vernacular began to surface around the 13th century in the form of various religious texts and poetry.Although these are the first written records of Italian varieties separate from Latin, the spoken language had likely diverged long before the first written records appeared since those who were literate generally wrote in Latin even if they spoke other Romance varieties in person.
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the use of Standard Italian became increasingly widespread and was mirrored by a decline in the use of the dialects. An increase in literacy was one of the main driving factors (one can assume that only literates were capable of learning Standard Italian, whereas those who were illiterate had access only to their native dialect). The percentage of literates rose from 25% in 1861 to 60% in 1911, and then on to 78.1% in 1951. Tullio De Mauro, an Italian linguist, has asserted that in 1861 only 2.5% of the population of Italy could speak Standard Italian. He reports that in 1951 that percentage had risen to 87%. The ability to speak Italian did not necessarily mean it was in everyday use, and most people (63.5%) still usually spoke their native dialects. In addition, other factors such as mass emigration, industrialization, and urbanization, and internal migrations after World War II, contributed to the proliferation of Standard Italian. The Italians who emigrated during the Italian diaspora beginning in 1861 were often of the uneducated lower class, and thus the emigration had the effect of increasing the percentage of literates, who often knew and understood the importance of Standard Italian, back home in Italy. A large percentage of those who had emigrated also eventually returned to Italy, often more educated than when they had left.
Although use of the Italian dialects has declined in the modern era, as Italy unified under Standard Italian and continues to do so aided by mass media from newspapers to radio to television, diglossia is still frequently encountered in Italy and triglossia is not uncommon in emigrant communities among older speakers. Both situations normally involve some degree of code-switching and code-mixing.
Notes:
Italian has a seven-vowel system, consisting of /a, ɛ, e, i, ɔ, o, u/, as well as 23 consonants. Compared with most other Romance languages, Italian phonology is conservative, preserving many words nearly unchanged from Vulgar Latin. Some examples:
The conservative nature of Italian phonology is partly explained by its origin. Italian stems from a literary language that is derived from the 13th-century speech of the city of Florence in the region of Tuscany, and has changed little in the last 700 years or so. Furthermore, the Tuscan dialect is the most conservative of all Italian dialects, radically different from the Gallo-Italian languages less than 160 kilometres (100 mi) to the north (across the La Spezia–Rimini Line).
The following are some of the conservative phonological features of Italian, as compared with the common Western Romance languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, Catalan). Some of these features are also present in Romanian.
Compared with most other Romance languages, Italian has many inconsistent outcomes, where the same underlying sound produces different results in different words, e.g. laxāre > lasciare and lassare, captiāre > cacciare and cazzare, (ex)dēroteolāre > sdrucciolare, druzzolare and ruzzolare, rēgīna > regina and reina. Although in all these examples the second form has fallen out of usage, the dimorphism is thought to reflect the several-hundred-year period during which Italian developed as a literary language divorced from any native-speaking population, with an origin in 12th/13th-century Tuscan but with many words borrowed from languages farther to the north, with different sound outcomes. (The La Spezia–Rimini Line, the most important isogloss in the entire Romance-language area, passes only about 30 kilometres or 20 miles north of Florence.) Dual outcomes of Latin /p t k/ between vowels, such as lŏcum > luogo but fŏcum > fuoco, was once thought to be due to borrowing of northern voiced forms, but is now generally viewed as the result of early phonetic variation within Tuscany.
Some other features that distinguish Italian from the Western Romance languages:
Standard Italian also differs in some respects from most nearby Italian languages:
Italian phonotactics do not usually permit verbs and polysyllabic nouns to end with consonants, except in poetry and song, so foreign words may receive extra terminal vowel sounds.
Italian has a shallow orthography, meaning very regular spelling with an almost one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds. In linguistic terms, the writing system is close to being a phonemic orthography. The most important of the few exceptions are the following (see below for more details):
The Italian alphabet is typically considered to consist of 21 letters. The letters j, k, w, x, y are traditionally excluded, though they appear in loanwords such as jeans, whisky, taxi, xenofobo, xilofono. The letter ⟨x⟩ has become common in standard Italian with the prefix extra-, although (e)stra- is traditionally used; it is also common to use the Latin particle ex(-) to mean "former(ly)" as in: la mia ex ("my ex-girlfriend"), "Ex-Jugoslavia" ("Former Yugoslavia"). The letter ⟨j⟩ appears in the first name Jacopo and in some Italian place-names, such as Bajardo, Bojano, Joppolo, Jerzu, Jesolo, Jesi, Ajaccio, among others, and in Mar Jonio, an alternative spelling of Mar Ionio (the Ionian Sea). The letter ⟨j⟩ may appear in dialectal words, but its use is discouraged in contemporary standard Italian. Letters used in foreign words can be replaced with phonetically equivalent native Italian letters and digraphs: ⟨gi⟩, ⟨ge⟩, or ⟨i⟩ for ⟨j⟩; ⟨c⟩ or ⟨ch⟩ for ⟨k⟩ (including in the standard prefix kilo-); ⟨o⟩, ⟨u⟩ or ⟨v⟩ for ⟨w⟩; ⟨s⟩, ⟨ss⟩, ⟨z⟩, ⟨zz⟩ or ⟨cs⟩ for ⟨x⟩; and ⟨e⟩ or ⟨i⟩ for ⟨y⟩.
Italian has geminate, or double, consonants, which are distinguished by length and intensity. Length is distinctive for all consonants except for /ʃ/, /dz/, /ts/, /ʎ/, /ɲ/, which are always geminate when between vowels, and /z/, which is always single. Geminate plosives and affricates are realized as lengthened closures. Geminate fricatives, nasals, and /l/ are realized as lengthened continuants. There is only one vibrant phoneme /r/ but the actual pronunciation depends on the context and regional accent. Generally one can find a flap consonant [ɾ] in an unstressed position whereas [r] is more common in stressed syllables, but there may be exceptions. Especially people from the Northern part of Italy (Parma, Aosta Valley, South Tyrol) may pronounce /r/ as [ʀ], [ʁ], or [ʋ].
Of special interest to the linguistic study of Regional Italian is the gorgia toscana, or "Tuscan Throat", the weakening or lenition of intervocalic /p/, /t/, and /k/ in the Tuscan language.
The voiced postalveolar fricative /ʒ/ is present as a phoneme only in loanwords: for example, garage [ɡaˈraːʒ]. Phonetic [ʒ] is common in Central and Southern Italy as an intervocalic allophone of /dʒ/: gente [ˈdʒɛnte] 'people' but la gente [laˈʒɛnte] 'the people', ragione [raˈʒoːne] 'reason'.
Italian grammar is typical of the grammar of Romance languages in general. Cases exist for personal pronouns (nominative, oblique, accusative, dative), but not for nouns.
There are two basic classes of nouns in Italian, referred to as genders, masculine and feminine. Gender may be natural (ragazzo 'boy', ragazza 'girl') or simply grammatical with no possible reference to biological gender (masculine costo 'cost', feminine costa 'coast'). Masculine nouns typically end in -o (ragazzo 'boy'), with plural marked by -i (ragazzi 'boys'), and feminine nouns typically end in -a, with plural marked by -e (ragazza 'girl', ragazze 'girls'). For a group composed of boys and girls, ragazzi is the plural, suggesting that -i is a general neutral plural. A third category of nouns is unmarked for gender, ending in -e in the singular and -i in the plural: legge 'law, f. sg.', leggi 'laws, f. pl.'; fiume 'river, m. sg.', fiumi 'rivers, m. pl.', thus assignment of gender is arbitrary in terms of form, enough so that terms may be identical but of distinct genders: fine meaning 'aim', 'purpose' is masculine, while fine meaning 'end, ending' (e.g. of a movie) is feminine, and both are fini in the plural, a clear instance of -i as a non-gendered default plural marker. These nouns often, but not always, denote inanimates. There are a number of nouns that have a masculine singular and a feminine plural, most commonly of the pattern m. sg. -o, f. pl. -a (miglio 'mile, m. sg.', miglia 'miles, f. pl.'; paio 'pair, m. sg., paia 'pairs, f. pl.'), and thus are sometimes considered neuter (these are usually derived from neuter Latin nouns). An instance of neuter gender also exists in pronouns of the third person singular.
Examples:
Nouns, adjectives, and articles inflect for gender and number (singular and plural).
Like in English, common nouns are capitalized when occurring at the beginning of a sentence. Unlike English, nouns referring to languages (e.g. Italian), speakers of languages, or inhabitants of an area (e.g. Italians) are not capitalized.
There are three types of adjectives: descriptive, invariable and form-changing. Descriptive adjectives are the most common, and their endings change to match the number and gender of the noun they modify. Invariable adjectives are adjectives whose endings do not change. The form-changing adjectives "buono (good), bello (beautiful), grande (big), and santo (saint)" change in form when placed before different types of nouns. Italian has three degrees for comparison of adjectives: positive, comparative, and superlative.
The order of words in the phrase is relatively free compared to most European languages. The position of the verb in the phrase is highly mobile. Word order often has a lesser grammatical function in Italian than in English. Adjectives are sometimes placed before their noun and sometimes after. Subject nouns generally come before the verb. Italian is a null-subject language, so nominative pronouns are usually absent, with subject indicated by verbal inflections (e.g. amo 'I love', ama '(s)he loves', amano 'they love'). Noun objects normally come after the verb, as do pronoun objects after imperative verbs, infinitives and gerunds, but otherwise, pronoun objects come before the verb.
There are both indefinite and definite articles in Italian. There are four indefinite articles, selected by the gender of the noun they modify and by the phonological structure of the word that immediately follows the article. Uno is masculine singular, used before z (/ts/ or /dz/), s+consonant, gn (/ɲ/), or ps, while masculine singular un is used before a word beginning with any other sound. The noun zio 'uncle' selects masculine singular, thus uno zio 'an uncle' or uno zio anziano 'an old uncle,' but un mio zio 'an uncle of mine'. The feminine singular indefinite articles are una, used before any consonant sound, and its abbreviated form, written un', used before vowels: una camicia 'a shirt', una camicia bianca 'a white shirt', un'altra camicia 'a different shirt'. There are seven forms for definite articles, both singular and plural. In the singular: lo, which corresponds to the uses of uno; il, which corresponds to the uses with the consonant of un; la, which corresponds to the uses of una; l', used for both masculine and feminine singular before vowels. In the plural: gli is the masculine plural of lo and l'; i is the plural of il; and le is the plural of feminine la and l'.
There are numerous contractions of prepositions with subsequent articles. There are numerous productive suffixes for diminutive, augmentative, pejorative, attenuating, etc., which are also used to create neologisms.
There are 27 pronouns, grouped in clitic and tonic pronouns. Personal pronouns are separated into three groups: subject, object (which takes the place of both direct and indirect objects), and reflexive. Second-person subject pronouns have both a polite and a familiar form. These two different types of addresses are very important in Italian social distinctions. All object pronouns have two forms: stressed and unstressed (clitics). Unstressed object pronouns are much more frequently used, and come before a verb conjugated for subject-verb (La vedi. 'You see her.'), after (in writing, attached to) non-conjugated verbs (vedendola 'seeing her'). Stressed object pronouns come after the verb, and are used when the emphasis is required, for contrast, or to avoid ambiguity (Vedo lui, ma non lei. 'I see him, but not her'). Aside from personal pronouns, Italian also has demonstrative, interrogative, possessive, and relative pronouns. There are two types of demonstrative pronouns: relatively near (this) and relatively far (that). Demonstratives in Italian are repeated before each noun, unlike in English.
There are three regular sets of verbal conjugations, and various verbs are irregularly conjugated. Within each of these sets of conjugations, there are four simple (one-word) verbal conjugations by person/number in the indicative mood (present tense; past tense with imperfective aspect, past tense with perfective aspect, and future tense), two simple conjugations in the subjunctive mood (present tense and past tense), one simple conjugation in the conditional mood, and one simple conjugation in the imperative mood. Corresponding to each of the simple conjugations, there is a compound conjugation involving a simple conjugation of "to be" or "to have" followed by a past participle. "To have" is used to form compound conjugation when the verb is transitive ("Ha detto", "ha fatto": he/she has said, he/she has made/done), while "to be" is used in the case of verbs of motion and some other intransitive verbs ("È andato", "è stato": he has gone, he has been). "To be" may be used with transitive verbs, but in such a case it makes the verb passive ("È detto", "è fatto": it is said, it is made/done). This rule is not absolute, and some exceptions do exist.
Note: the plural form of verbs could also be used as an extremely formal (for example to noble people in monarchies) singular form (see royal we).
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Italian:
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Italian (italiano [itaˈljaːno] or lingua italiana [ˈliŋɡwa itaˈljaːna]) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. Together with Sardinian, Italian is the least divergent language from Latin. Spoken by about 85 million people (2022), Italian is an official language in Italy, San Marino, and Switzerland (Ticino and the Grisons), and is the primary language of Vatican City. It has official minority status in Croatia and in some areas of Slovenian Istria.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Italian is also spoken by large immigrant and expatriate communities in the Americas and Australia. Italian is included under the languages covered by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Romania, although Italian is neither a co-official nor a protected language in these countries. Some speakers of Italian are native bilinguals of both Italian (either in its standard form or regional varieties) and a local language of Italy, most frequently the language spoken at home in their place of origin.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Italian is a major language in Europe, being one of the official languages of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and one of the working languages of the Council of Europe. It is the second-most-widely spoken native language in the European Union with 67 million speakers (15% of the EU population) and it is spoken as a second language by 13.4 million EU citizens (3%). Including Italian speakers in non-EU European countries (such as Switzerland, Albania and the United Kingdom) and on other continents, the total number of speakers is approximately 85 million. Italian is the main working language of the Holy See, serving as the lingua franca (common language) in the Roman Catholic hierarchy as well as the official language of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. Italian has a significant use in musical terminology and opera with numerous Italian words referring to music that have become international terms taken into various languages worldwide. Almost all native Italian words end with vowels and has a 7-vowel sound system ('e' and 'o' have mid-low and mid-high sounds). Italian has contrast between short and long consonants and gemination (doubling) of consonants.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "During the Middle Ages, the established written language in Europe was Latin, though the great majority of people were illiterate, and only a handful were well versed in the language. In the Italian Peninsula, as in most of Europe, most would instead speak a local vernacular. These dialects, as they are commonly referred to, evolved from Vulgar Latin over the course of centuries, unaffected by formal standards and teachings. They are not in any sense \"dialects\" of standard Italian, which itself started off as one of these local tongues, but sister languages of Italian. Mutual intelligibility with Italian varies widely, as it does with Romance languages in general. The Romance languages of Italy can differ greatly from Italian at all levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, pragmatics) and are classified typologically as distinct languages.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The standard Italian language has a poetic and literary origin in the writings of Tuscan and Sicilian writers of the 12th century, and, even though the grammar and core lexicon are basically unchanged from those used in Florence in the 13th century, the modern standard of the language was largely shaped by relatively recent events. However, Romance vernacular as language spoken in the Italian Peninsula has a longer history. In fact, the earliest surviving texts that can definitely be called vernacular (as distinct from its predecessor Vulgar Latin) are legal formulae known as the Placiti Cassinesi from the Province of Benevento that date from 960 to 963, although the Veronese Riddle, probably from the 8th or early 9th century, contains a late form of Vulgar Latin that can be seen as a very early sample of a vernacular dialect of Italy. The Commodilla catacomb inscription is also a similar case.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The Italian language has progressed through a long and slow process, which started after the Western Roman Empire's fall in the 5th century.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The language that came to be thought of as Italian developed in central Tuscany and was first formalized in the early 14th century through the works of Tuscan writer Dante Alighieri, written in his native Florentine. Dante's epic poems, known collectively as the Commedia, to which another Tuscan poet Giovanni Boccaccio later affixed the title Divina, were read throughout the peninsula and his written dialect became the \"canonical standard\" that all educated Italians could understand. Dante is still credited with standardizing the Italian language. In addition to the widespread exposure gained through literature, the Florentine dialect also gained prestige due to the political and cultural significance of Florence at the time and the fact that it was linguistically an intermediate between the northern and the southern Italian dialects. Thus the dialect of Florence became the basis for what would become the official language of Italy.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Italian was progressively made an official language of most of the Italian states predating unification, slowly replacing Latin, even when ruled by foreign powers (like Spain in the Kingdom of Naples, or Austria in the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia), even though the masses kept speaking primarily their local vernaculars. Italian was also one of the many recognised languages in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Italy has always had a distinctive dialect for each city because the cities, until recently, were thought of as city-states. Those dialects now have considerable variety. As Tuscan-derived Italian came to be used throughout Italy, features of local speech were naturally adopted, producing various versions of Regional Italian. The most characteristic differences, for instance, between Roman Italian and Milanese Italian are syntactic gemination of initial consonants in some contexts and the pronunciation of stressed \"e\", and of \"s\" between vowels in many words: e.g. va bene \"all right\" is pronounced [vabˈbɛːne] by a Roman (and by any standard Italian speaker), [vaˈbeːne] by a Milanese (and by any speaker whose native dialect lies to the north of the La Spezia–Rimini Line); a casa \"at home\" is [akˈkaːsa] for Roman, [akˈkaːsa] or [akˈkaːza] for standard, [aˈkaːza] for Milanese and generally northern.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In contrast to the Gallo-Italic linguistic panorama of Northern Italy, the Italo-Dalmatian, Neapolitan and its related dialects were largely unaffected by the Franco-Occitan influences introduced to Italy mainly by bards from France during the Middle Ages, but after the Norman conquest of southern Italy, Sicily became the first Italian land to adopt Occitan lyric moods (and words) in poetry. Even in the case of Northern Italian languages, however, scholars are careful not to overstate the effects of outsiders on the natural indigenous developments of the languages.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The economic might and relatively advanced development of Tuscany at the time (Late Middle Ages) gave its language weight, though Venetian remained widespread in medieval Italian commercial life, and Ligurian (or Genoese) remained in use in maritime trade alongside the Mediterranean. The increasing political and cultural relevance of Florence during the periods of the rise of the Medici Bank, humanism, and the Renaissance made its dialect, or rather a refined version of it, a standard in the arts.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The Renaissance era, known as il Rinascimento in Italian, was seen as a time of rebirth, which is the literal meaning of both renaissance (from French) and rinascimento (Italian).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "During this time, long-existing beliefs stemming from the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church began to be understood from new perspectives as humanists—individuals who placed emphasis on the human body and its full potential—began to shift focus from the church to human beings themselves. The continual advancements in technology play a crucial role in the diffusion of languages. After the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, the number of printing presses in Italy grew rapidly and by the year 1500 reached a total of 56, the biggest number of printing presses in all of Europe. This enabled the production of more pieces of literature at a lower cost and Italian, as the dominant language, spread.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Italian became the language used in the courts of every state in the Italian Peninsula, as well as the prestige variety used on the island of Corsica (but not in the neighbouring Sardinia, which on the contrary underwent Italianization well into the late 18th century, under Savoyard sway: the island's linguistic composition, roofed by the prestige of Spanish among the Sardinians, would therein make for a rather slow process of assimilation to the Italian cultural sphere). The rediscovery of Dante's De vulgari eloquentia, as well as a renewed interest in linguistics in the 16th century, sparked a debate that raged throughout Italy concerning the criteria that should govern the establishment of a modern Italian literary and spoken language. This discussion, known as questione della lingua (i.e., the problem of the language), ran through the Italian culture until the end of the 19th century, often linked to the political debate on achieving a united Italian state. Renaissance scholars divided into three main factions:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "A fourth faction claimed that the best Italian was the one that the papal court adopted, which was a mixture of the Tuscan and Roman dialects. Eventually, Bembo's ideas prevailed, and the foundation of the Accademia della Crusca in Florence (1582–1583), the official legislative body of the Italian language, led to the publication of Agnolo Monosini's Latin tome Floris italicae linguae libri novem in 1604 followed by the first Italian dictionary in 1612.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "An important event that helped the diffusion of Italian was the conquest and occupation of Italy by Napoleon in the early 19th century (who was himself of Italian-Corsican descent). This conquest propelled the unification of Italy some decades after and pushed the Italian language into a lingua franca used not only among clerks, nobility, and functionaries in the Italian courts but also by the bourgeoisie.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Italian literature's first modern novel, I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) by Alessandro Manzoni, further defined the standard by \"rinsing\" his Milanese \"in the waters of the Arno\" (Florence's river), as he states in the preface to his 1840 edition.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "After unification, a huge number of civil servants and soldiers recruited from all over the country introduced many more words and idioms from their home languages—ciao is derived from the Venetian word s-cia[v]o (\"slave\", that is \"your servant\"), panettone comes from the Lombard word panetton, etc. Only 2.5% of Italy's population could speak the Italian standardized language properly when the nation was unified in 1861.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Italian is a Romance language, a descendant of Vulgar Latin (colloquial spoken Latin). Standard Italian is based on Tuscan, especially its Florentine dialect, and is, therefore, an Italo-Dalmatian language, a classification that includes most other central and southern Italian languages and the extinct Dalmatian.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "According to Ethnologue, lexical similarity is 89% with French, 87% with Catalan, 85% with Sardinian, 82% with Spanish, 80% with Portuguese, 78% with Ladin, 77% with Romanian. Estimates may differ according to sources.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "One study, analyzing the degree of differentiation of Romance languages in comparison to Latin (comparing phonology, inflection, discourse, syntax, vocabulary, and intonation), estimated that distance between Italian and Latin is higher than that between Sardinian and Latin. In particular, its vowels are the second-closest to Latin after Sardinian. As in most Romance languages, stress is distinctive.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Italian is the official language of Italy and San Marino and is spoken fluently by the majority of the countries' populations. Italian is the third most spoken language in Switzerland (after German and French; see Swiss Italian), though its use there has moderately declined since the 1970s. It is official both on the national level and on regional level in two cantons: Ticino and Grisons. In the latter canton, however, it is only spoken by a small minority, in the Italian Grisons. Ticino, which includes Lugano, the largest Italian-speaking city outside Italy, is the only canton where Italian is predominant. Italian is also used in administration and official documents in Vatican City.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Italian is also spoken by a minority in Monaco and France, especially in the southeastern part of the country. Italian was the official language in Savoy and in Nice until 1860, when they were both annexed by France under the Treaty of Turin, a development that triggered the \"Niçard exodus\", or the emigration of a quarter of the Niçard Italians to Italy, and the Niçard Vespers. Giuseppe Garibaldi complained about the referendum that allowed France to annex Savoy and Nice, and a group of his followers (among the Italian Savoyards) took refuge in Italy in the following years. Corsica passed from the Republic of Genoa to France in 1769 after the Treaty of Versailles. Italian was the official language of Corsica until 1859. Giuseppe Garibaldi called for the inclusion of the \"Corsican Italians\" within Italy when Rome was annexed to the Kingdom of Italy, but King Victor Emmanuel II did not agree to it. Italian is generally understood in Corsica by the population resident therein who speak Corsican, which is an Italo-Romance idiom similar to Tuscan. Francization occurred in Nice and Corsica cases, and caused a near-disappearance of the Italian language as many of the Italian speakers in these areas migrated to Italy. Italian was the official language in Monaco until 1860, when it was replaced by the French. This was due to the annexation of the surrounding County of Nice to France following the Treaty of Turin (1860).",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "It formerly had official status in Montenegro (because of the Venetian Albania), parts of Slovenia and Croatia (because of the Venetian Istria and Venetian Dalmatia), parts of Greece (because of the Venetian rule in the Ionian Islands and by the Kingdom of Italy in the Dodecanese). Italian is widely spoken in Malta, where nearly two-thirds of the population can speak it fluently (see Maltese Italian). Italian served as Malta's official language until 1934, when it was abolished by the British colonial administration amid strong local opposition. Italian language in Slovenia is an officially recognized minority language in the country. The official census, carried out in 2002, reported 2,258 ethnic Italians (Istrian Italians) in Slovenia (0.11% of the total population). Italian language in Croatia is an official minority language in the country, with many schools and public announcements published in both languages. The 2001 census in Croatia reported 19,636 ethnic Italians (Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians) in the country (some 0.42% of the total population). Their numbers dropped dramatically after World War II following the Istrian–Dalmatian exodus, which caused the emigration of between 230,000 and 350,000 Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians. Italian was the official language of the Republic of Ragusa from 1492 to 1807.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "It formerly had official status in Albania due to the annexation of the country to the Kingdom of Italy (1939–1943). Albania has a large population of non-native speakers, with over half of the population having some knowledge of the Italian language. The Albanian government has pushed to make Italian a compulsory second language in schools. The Italian language is well-known and studied in Albania, due to its historical ties and geographical proximity to Italy and to the diffusion of Italian television in the country.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Due to heavy Italian influence during the Italian colonial period, Italian is still understood by some in former colonies such as Libya. Although it was the primary language in Libya since colonial rule, Italian greatly declined under the rule of Muammar Gaddafi, who expelled the Italian Libyan population and made Arabic the sole official language of the country. A few hundred Italian settlers returned to Libya in the 2000s.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Italian was the official language of Eritrea during Italian colonisation. Italian is today used in commerce, and it is still spoken especially among elders; besides that, Italian words are incorporated as loan words in the main language spoken in the country (Tigrinya). The capital city of Eritrea, Asmara, still has several Italian schools, established during the colonial period. In the early 19th century, Eritrea was the country with the highest number of Italians abroad, and the Italian Eritreans grew from 4,000 during World War I to nearly 100,000 at the beginning of World War II. In Asmara there are two Italian schools, the Italian School of Asmara (Italian primary school with a Montessori department) and the Liceo Sperimentale \"G. Marconi\" (Italian international senior high school).",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Italian was also introduced to Somalia through colonialism and was the sole official language of administration and education during the colonial period but fell out of use after government, educational and economic infrastructure were destroyed in the Somali Civil War.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Italian is also spoken by large immigrant and expatriate communities in the Americas and Australia. Although over 17 million Americans are of Italian descent, only a little over one million people in the United States speak Italian at home. Nevertheless, an Italian language media market does exist in the country. In Canada, Italian is the second most spoken non-official language when varieties of Chinese are not grouped together, with 375,645 claiming Italian as their mother tongue in 2016.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Italian immigrants to South America have also brought a presence of the language to that continent. According to some sources, Italian is the second most spoken language in Argentina after the official language of Spanish, although its number of speakers, mainly of the older generation, is decreasing. Italian bilingual speakers can be found scattered across the Southeast of Brazil as well as in the South. In Venezuela, Italian is the most spoken language after Spanish and Portuguese, with around 200,000 speakers. In Uruguay, people who speak Italian as their home language are 1.1% of the total population of the country. In Australia, Italian is the second most spoken foreign language after Chinese, with 1.4% of the population speaking it as their home language.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The main Italian-language newspapers published outside Italy are the L'Osservatore Romano (Vatican City), the L'Informazione di San Marino (San Marino), the Corriere del Ticino and the laRegione Ticino (Switzerland), the La Voce del Popolo (Croatia), the Corriere d'Italia (Germany), the L'italoeuropeo (United Kingdom), the Passaparola (Luxembourg), the America Oggi (United States), the Corriere Canadese and the Corriere Italiano (Canada), the Il punto d'incontro (Mexico), the L'Italia del Popolo (Argentina), the Fanfulla (Brazil), the Gente d'Italia (Uruguay), the La Voce d'Italia (Venezuela), the Il Globo (Australia) and the La gazzetta del Sud Africa (South Africa).",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Italian is widely taught in many schools around the world, but rarely as the first foreign language. In the 21st century, technology also allows for the continual spread of the Italian language, as people have new ways to learn how to speak, read, and write languages at their own pace and at any given time. For example, the free website and application Duolingo has 4.94 million English speakers learning the Italian language.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "According to the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, every year there are more than 200,000 foreign students who study the Italian language; they are distributed among the 90 Institutes of Italian Culture that are located around the world, in the 179 Italian schools located abroad, or in the 111 Italian lecturer sections belonging to foreign schools where Italian is taught as a language of culture.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "As of 2022, Australia had the highest number of students learning Italian in the world. This occurred because of support by the Italian community in Australia and the Italian Government and also because of successful educational reform efforts led by local governments in Australia.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "From the late 19th to the mid-20th century, thousands of Italians settled in Argentina, Uruguay, Southern Brazil and Venezuela, as well as in Canada and the United States, where they formed a physical and cultural presence.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In some cases, colonies were established where variants of regional languages of Italy were used, and some continue to use this regional language. Examples are Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, where Talian is used, and the town of Chipilo near Puebla, Mexico; each continues to use a derived form of Venetian dating back to the nineteenth century. Another example is Cocoliche, an Italian–Spanish pidgin once spoken in Argentina and especially in Buenos Aires, and Lunfardo.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Starting in late medieval times in much of Europe and the Mediterranean, Latin was replaced as the primary commercial language by Italian language variants (especially Tuscan and Venetian). These variants were consolidated during the Renaissance with the strength of Italy and the rise of humanism and the arts.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "During that period, Italy held artistic sway over the rest of Europe. It was the norm for all educated gentlemen to make the Grand Tour, visiting Italy to see its great historical monuments and works of art. It thus became expected to learn at least some Italian. In England, while the classical languages Latin and Greek were the first to be learned, Italian became the second most common modern language after French, a position it held until the late 18th century when it tended to be replaced by German. John Milton, for instance, wrote some of his early poetry in Italian.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Within the Catholic Church, Italian is known by a large part of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and is used in substitution for Latin in some official documents.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Italian loanwords continue to be used in most languages in matters of art and music (especially classical music including opera), in the design and fashion industries, in some sports like football and especially in culinary terms.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In Italy, almost all the other languages spoken as the vernacular—other than standard Italian and some languages spoken among immigrant communities—are often called \"Italian dialects\", a label that can be very misleading if it is understood to mean \"dialects of Italian\". The Romance dialects of Italy are local evolutions of spoken Latin that pre-date the establishment of Italian, and as such are sister languages to the Tuscan that was the historical source of Italian. They can be quite different from Italian and from each other, with some belonging to different linguistic branches of Romance. The only exceptions to this are twelve groups considered \"historical language minorities\", which are officially recognized as distinct minority languages by the law. On the other hand, Corsican (a language spoken on the French island of Corsica) is closely related to medieval Tuscan, from which Standard Italian derives and evolved.",
"title": "Languages and dialects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The differences in the evolution of Latin in the different regions of Italy can be attributed to the natural changes that all languages in regular use are subject to, and to some extent to the presence of three other types of languages: substrata, superstrata, and adstrata. The most prevalent were substrata (the language of the original inhabitants), as the Italian dialects were most likely simply Latin as spoken by native cultural groups. Superstrata and adstrata were both less important. Foreign conquerors of Italy that dominated different regions at different times left behind little to no influence on the dialects. Foreign cultures with which Italy engaged in peaceful relations with, such as trade, had no significant influence either.",
"title": "Languages and dialects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Throughout Italy, regional varieties of Standard Italian, called Regional Italian, are spoken. Regional differences can be recognized by various factors: the openness of vowels, the length of the consonants, and influence of the local language (for example, in informal situations andà, annà and nare replace the standard Italian andare in the area of Tuscany, Rome and Venice respectively for the infinitive \"to go\").",
"title": "Languages and dialects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "There is no definitive date when the various Italian variants of Latin—including varieties that contributed to modern Standard Italian—began to be distinct enough from Latin to be considered separate languages. One criterion for determining that two language variants are to be considered separate languages rather than variants of a single language is that they have evolved so that they are no longer mutually intelligible; this diagnostic is effective if mutual intelligibility is minimal or absent (e.g. in Romance, Romanian and Portuguese), but it fails in cases such as Spanish-Portuguese or Spanish-Italian, as educated native speakers of either pairing can understand each other well if they choose to do so; however, the level of intelligibility is markedly lower between Italian-Spanish, and considerably higher between the Iberian sister languages of Portuguese-Spanish. Speakers of this latter pair can communicate with one another with remarkable ease, each speaking to the other in his own native language without slang/jargon. Nevertheless, on the basis of accumulated differences in morphology, syntax, phonology, and to some extent lexicon, it is not difficult to identify that for the Romance varieties of Italy, the first extant written evidence of languages that can no longer be considered Latin comes from the ninth and tenth centuries C.E. These written sources demonstrate certain vernacular characteristics and sometimes explicitly mention the use of the vernacular in Italy. Full literary manifestations of the vernacular began to surface around the 13th century in the form of various religious texts and poetry.Although these are the first written records of Italian varieties separate from Latin, the spoken language had likely diverged long before the first written records appeared since those who were literate generally wrote in Latin even if they spoke other Romance varieties in person.",
"title": "Languages and dialects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the use of Standard Italian became increasingly widespread and was mirrored by a decline in the use of the dialects. An increase in literacy was one of the main driving factors (one can assume that only literates were capable of learning Standard Italian, whereas those who were illiterate had access only to their native dialect). The percentage of literates rose from 25% in 1861 to 60% in 1911, and then on to 78.1% in 1951. Tullio De Mauro, an Italian linguist, has asserted that in 1861 only 2.5% of the population of Italy could speak Standard Italian. He reports that in 1951 that percentage had risen to 87%. The ability to speak Italian did not necessarily mean it was in everyday use, and most people (63.5%) still usually spoke their native dialects. In addition, other factors such as mass emigration, industrialization, and urbanization, and internal migrations after World War II, contributed to the proliferation of Standard Italian. The Italians who emigrated during the Italian diaspora beginning in 1861 were often of the uneducated lower class, and thus the emigration had the effect of increasing the percentage of literates, who often knew and understood the importance of Standard Italian, back home in Italy. A large percentage of those who had emigrated also eventually returned to Italy, often more educated than when they had left.",
"title": "Languages and dialects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Although use of the Italian dialects has declined in the modern era, as Italy unified under Standard Italian and continues to do so aided by mass media from newspapers to radio to television, diglossia is still frequently encountered in Italy and triglossia is not uncommon in emigrant communities among older speakers. Both situations normally involve some degree of code-switching and code-mixing.",
"title": "Languages and dialects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Notes:",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Italian has a seven-vowel system, consisting of /a, ɛ, e, i, ɔ, o, u/, as well as 23 consonants. Compared with most other Romance languages, Italian phonology is conservative, preserving many words nearly unchanged from Vulgar Latin. Some examples:",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The conservative nature of Italian phonology is partly explained by its origin. Italian stems from a literary language that is derived from the 13th-century speech of the city of Florence in the region of Tuscany, and has changed little in the last 700 years or so. Furthermore, the Tuscan dialect is the most conservative of all Italian dialects, radically different from the Gallo-Italian languages less than 160 kilometres (100 mi) to the north (across the La Spezia–Rimini Line).",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The following are some of the conservative phonological features of Italian, as compared with the common Western Romance languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, Catalan). Some of these features are also present in Romanian.",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Compared with most other Romance languages, Italian has many inconsistent outcomes, where the same underlying sound produces different results in different words, e.g. laxāre > lasciare and lassare, captiāre > cacciare and cazzare, (ex)dēroteolāre > sdrucciolare, druzzolare and ruzzolare, rēgīna > regina and reina. Although in all these examples the second form has fallen out of usage, the dimorphism is thought to reflect the several-hundred-year period during which Italian developed as a literary language divorced from any native-speaking population, with an origin in 12th/13th-century Tuscan but with many words borrowed from languages farther to the north, with different sound outcomes. (The La Spezia–Rimini Line, the most important isogloss in the entire Romance-language area, passes only about 30 kilometres or 20 miles north of Florence.) Dual outcomes of Latin /p t k/ between vowels, such as lŏcum > luogo but fŏcum > fuoco, was once thought to be due to borrowing of northern voiced forms, but is now generally viewed as the result of early phonetic variation within Tuscany.",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Some other features that distinguish Italian from the Western Romance languages:",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Standard Italian also differs in some respects from most nearby Italian languages:",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Italian phonotactics do not usually permit verbs and polysyllabic nouns to end with consonants, except in poetry and song, so foreign words may receive extra terminal vowel sounds.",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Italian has a shallow orthography, meaning very regular spelling with an almost one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds. In linguistic terms, the writing system is close to being a phonemic orthography. The most important of the few exceptions are the following (see below for more details):",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The Italian alphabet is typically considered to consist of 21 letters. The letters j, k, w, x, y are traditionally excluded, though they appear in loanwords such as jeans, whisky, taxi, xenofobo, xilofono. The letter ⟨x⟩ has become common in standard Italian with the prefix extra-, although (e)stra- is traditionally used; it is also common to use the Latin particle ex(-) to mean \"former(ly)\" as in: la mia ex (\"my ex-girlfriend\"), \"Ex-Jugoslavia\" (\"Former Yugoslavia\"). The letter ⟨j⟩ appears in the first name Jacopo and in some Italian place-names, such as Bajardo, Bojano, Joppolo, Jerzu, Jesolo, Jesi, Ajaccio, among others, and in Mar Jonio, an alternative spelling of Mar Ionio (the Ionian Sea). The letter ⟨j⟩ may appear in dialectal words, but its use is discouraged in contemporary standard Italian. Letters used in foreign words can be replaced with phonetically equivalent native Italian letters and digraphs: ⟨gi⟩, ⟨ge⟩, or ⟨i⟩ for ⟨j⟩; ⟨c⟩ or ⟨ch⟩ for ⟨k⟩ (including in the standard prefix kilo-); ⟨o⟩, ⟨u⟩ or ⟨v⟩ for ⟨w⟩; ⟨s⟩, ⟨ss⟩, ⟨z⟩, ⟨zz⟩ or ⟨cs⟩ for ⟨x⟩; and ⟨e⟩ or ⟨i⟩ for ⟨y⟩.",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Italian has geminate, or double, consonants, which are distinguished by length and intensity. Length is distinctive for all consonants except for /ʃ/, /dz/, /ts/, /ʎ/, /ɲ/, which are always geminate when between vowels, and /z/, which is always single. Geminate plosives and affricates are realized as lengthened closures. Geminate fricatives, nasals, and /l/ are realized as lengthened continuants. There is only one vibrant phoneme /r/ but the actual pronunciation depends on the context and regional accent. Generally one can find a flap consonant [ɾ] in an unstressed position whereas [r] is more common in stressed syllables, but there may be exceptions. Especially people from the Northern part of Italy (Parma, Aosta Valley, South Tyrol) may pronounce /r/ as [ʀ], [ʁ], or [ʋ].",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Of special interest to the linguistic study of Regional Italian is the gorgia toscana, or \"Tuscan Throat\", the weakening or lenition of intervocalic /p/, /t/, and /k/ in the Tuscan language.",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The voiced postalveolar fricative /ʒ/ is present as a phoneme only in loanwords: for example, garage [ɡaˈraːʒ]. Phonetic [ʒ] is common in Central and Southern Italy as an intervocalic allophone of /dʒ/: gente [ˈdʒɛnte] 'people' but la gente [laˈʒɛnte] 'the people', ragione [raˈʒoːne] 'reason'.",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Italian grammar is typical of the grammar of Romance languages in general. Cases exist for personal pronouns (nominative, oblique, accusative, dative), but not for nouns.",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "There are two basic classes of nouns in Italian, referred to as genders, masculine and feminine. Gender may be natural (ragazzo 'boy', ragazza 'girl') or simply grammatical with no possible reference to biological gender (masculine costo 'cost', feminine costa 'coast'). Masculine nouns typically end in -o (ragazzo 'boy'), with plural marked by -i (ragazzi 'boys'), and feminine nouns typically end in -a, with plural marked by -e (ragazza 'girl', ragazze 'girls'). For a group composed of boys and girls, ragazzi is the plural, suggesting that -i is a general neutral plural. A third category of nouns is unmarked for gender, ending in -e in the singular and -i in the plural: legge 'law, f. sg.', leggi 'laws, f. pl.'; fiume 'river, m. sg.', fiumi 'rivers, m. pl.', thus assignment of gender is arbitrary in terms of form, enough so that terms may be identical but of distinct genders: fine meaning 'aim', 'purpose' is masculine, while fine meaning 'end, ending' (e.g. of a movie) is feminine, and both are fini in the plural, a clear instance of -i as a non-gendered default plural marker. These nouns often, but not always, denote inanimates. There are a number of nouns that have a masculine singular and a feminine plural, most commonly of the pattern m. sg. -o, f. pl. -a (miglio 'mile, m. sg.', miglia 'miles, f. pl.'; paio 'pair, m. sg., paia 'pairs, f. pl.'), and thus are sometimes considered neuter (these are usually derived from neuter Latin nouns). An instance of neuter gender also exists in pronouns of the third person singular.",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Examples:",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Nouns, adjectives, and articles inflect for gender and number (singular and plural).",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Like in English, common nouns are capitalized when occurring at the beginning of a sentence. Unlike English, nouns referring to languages (e.g. Italian), speakers of languages, or inhabitants of an area (e.g. Italians) are not capitalized.",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "There are three types of adjectives: descriptive, invariable and form-changing. Descriptive adjectives are the most common, and their endings change to match the number and gender of the noun they modify. Invariable adjectives are adjectives whose endings do not change. The form-changing adjectives \"buono (good), bello (beautiful), grande (big), and santo (saint)\" change in form when placed before different types of nouns. Italian has three degrees for comparison of adjectives: positive, comparative, and superlative.",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "The order of words in the phrase is relatively free compared to most European languages. The position of the verb in the phrase is highly mobile. Word order often has a lesser grammatical function in Italian than in English. Adjectives are sometimes placed before their noun and sometimes after. Subject nouns generally come before the verb. Italian is a null-subject language, so nominative pronouns are usually absent, with subject indicated by verbal inflections (e.g. amo 'I love', ama '(s)he loves', amano 'they love'). Noun objects normally come after the verb, as do pronoun objects after imperative verbs, infinitives and gerunds, but otherwise, pronoun objects come before the verb.",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "There are both indefinite and definite articles in Italian. There are four indefinite articles, selected by the gender of the noun they modify and by the phonological structure of the word that immediately follows the article. Uno is masculine singular, used before z (/ts/ or /dz/), s+consonant, gn (/ɲ/), or ps, while masculine singular un is used before a word beginning with any other sound. The noun zio 'uncle' selects masculine singular, thus uno zio 'an uncle' or uno zio anziano 'an old uncle,' but un mio zio 'an uncle of mine'. The feminine singular indefinite articles are una, used before any consonant sound, and its abbreviated form, written un', used before vowels: una camicia 'a shirt', una camicia bianca 'a white shirt', un'altra camicia 'a different shirt'. There are seven forms for definite articles, both singular and plural. In the singular: lo, which corresponds to the uses of uno; il, which corresponds to the uses with the consonant of un; la, which corresponds to the uses of una; l', used for both masculine and feminine singular before vowels. In the plural: gli is the masculine plural of lo and l'; i is the plural of il; and le is the plural of feminine la and l'.",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "There are numerous contractions of prepositions with subsequent articles. There are numerous productive suffixes for diminutive, augmentative, pejorative, attenuating, etc., which are also used to create neologisms.",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "There are 27 pronouns, grouped in clitic and tonic pronouns. Personal pronouns are separated into three groups: subject, object (which takes the place of both direct and indirect objects), and reflexive. Second-person subject pronouns have both a polite and a familiar form. These two different types of addresses are very important in Italian social distinctions. All object pronouns have two forms: stressed and unstressed (clitics). Unstressed object pronouns are much more frequently used, and come before a verb conjugated for subject-verb (La vedi. 'You see her.'), after (in writing, attached to) non-conjugated verbs (vedendola 'seeing her'). Stressed object pronouns come after the verb, and are used when the emphasis is required, for contrast, or to avoid ambiguity (Vedo lui, ma non lei. 'I see him, but not her'). Aside from personal pronouns, Italian also has demonstrative, interrogative, possessive, and relative pronouns. There are two types of demonstrative pronouns: relatively near (this) and relatively far (that). Demonstratives in Italian are repeated before each noun, unlike in English.",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "There are three regular sets of verbal conjugations, and various verbs are irregularly conjugated. Within each of these sets of conjugations, there are four simple (one-word) verbal conjugations by person/number in the indicative mood (present tense; past tense with imperfective aspect, past tense with perfective aspect, and future tense), two simple conjugations in the subjunctive mood (present tense and past tense), one simple conjugation in the conditional mood, and one simple conjugation in the imperative mood. Corresponding to each of the simple conjugations, there is a compound conjugation involving a simple conjugation of \"to be\" or \"to have\" followed by a past participle. \"To have\" is used to form compound conjugation when the verb is transitive (\"Ha detto\", \"ha fatto\": he/she has said, he/she has made/done), while \"to be\" is used in the case of verbs of motion and some other intransitive verbs (\"È andato\", \"è stato\": he has gone, he has been). \"To be\" may be used with transitive verbs, but in such a case it makes the verb passive (\"È detto\", \"è fatto\": it is said, it is made/done). This rule is not absolute, and some exceptions do exist.",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Note: the plural form of verbs could also be used as an extremely formal (for example to noble people in monarchies) singular form (see royal we).",
"title": "Words"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Italian:",
"title": "Example text"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English:",
"title": "Example text"
}
]
| Italian is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. Together with Sardinian, Italian is the least divergent language from Latin. Spoken by about 85 million people (2022), Italian is an official language in Italy, San Marino, and Switzerland, and is the primary language of Vatican City. It has official minority status in Croatia and in some areas of Slovenian Istria. Italian is also spoken by large immigrant and expatriate communities in the Americas and Australia. Italian is included under the languages covered by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Romania, although Italian is neither a co-official nor a protected language in these countries. Some speakers of Italian are native bilinguals of both Italian and a local language of Italy, most frequently the language spoken at home in their place of origin. Italian is a major language in Europe, being one of the official languages of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and one of the working languages of the Council of Europe. It is the second-most-widely spoken native language in the European Union with 67 million speakers and it is spoken as a second language by 13.4 million EU citizens (3%). Including Italian speakers in non-EU European countries and on other continents, the total number of speakers is approximately 85 million. Italian is the main working language of the Holy See, serving as the lingua franca in the Roman Catholic hierarchy as well as the official language of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. Italian has a significant use in musical terminology and opera with numerous Italian words referring to music that have become international terms taken into various languages worldwide. Almost all native Italian words end with vowels and has a 7-vowel sound system. Italian has contrast between short and long consonants and gemination (doubling) of consonants. | 2001-05-09T22:29:15Z | 2023-12-25T18:00:35Z | [
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14,709 | Ice-T | Tracy Lauren Marrow (born February 16, 1958), better known by his stage name Ice-T (or Ice T), is an American rapper and actor. He is active in both hip hop and heavy metal. Ice-T began his career as an underground rapper in the 1980s and was signed to Sire Records in 1987, when he released his debut album Rhyme Pays. The following year, he founded the record label Rhyme $yndicate Records (named after his collective of fellow hip-hop artists called the "Rhyme $yndicate") and released another album, Power (1988), which would go platinum. He also released several other albums that went gold, including The Iceberg/Freedom of Speech... Just Watch What You Say! (1989), O.G. Original Gangster (1991) and Home Invasion (1993).
Ice-T co-founded the heavy metal band Body Count in 1990, which he introduced on O.G. Original Gangster, on the track titled "Body Count". The band released its self-titled debut album in 1992. Ice-T encountered controversy over his track "Cop Killer", the lyrics of which discussed killing police officers. He asked to be released from his contract with Warner Bros. Records, and his follow-up solo album, Home Invasion, was released through Priority Records. Ice-T released two more albums in the late 1990s and one in the 2000s before focusing on both his acting career and Body Count, who have released seven studio albums to date, the latest being 2020's Carnivore.
As an actor, Ice-T played small parts in the films Breakin' (1984) and its sequels, Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo and Rappin' (1984 and 1985 respectively), before his major role debut, starring as police detective Scotty Appleton in New Jack City (1991). He received top billing for his role in Surviving the Game (1994) and continued to appear in small roles in TV series and other films throughout the 1990s. Since 2000, he has portrayed NYPD detective/sergeant Odafin Tutuola on the NBC police drama Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, making him the longest-running male series actor in history, according to Deadline. A reality television show titled Ice Loves Coco ran for three seasons (2011–2013) on E!, featuring the home life of Ice-T and his wife Coco Austin. In 2018, he began hosting the true crime documentary In Ice Cold Blood on the Oxygen cable channel, which as of 2020 is in its third season.
Tracy Lauren Marrow, the son of Solomon and Alice Marrow, was born in Newark, New Jersey on February 16, 1958. Solomon was African-American and Alice was from a Louisiana Creole background. For decades, Solomon worked as a conveyor belt mechanic at the Rapistan Conveyor Company. When Marrow was a child, his family moved to upscale Summit, New Jersey. The first time race played a major part in Marrow's life was at the age of seven, when he became aware of the racism leveled by his white friends towards black children. Marrow surmised that he escaped similar treatment because they thought that he was white due to his lighter skin. Relaying this incident to his mother, she told him, "Honey, people are stupid"; her advice and this incident taught Marrow to control the way the negativity of others affected him.
His mother died of a heart attack when he was in third grade. Solomon raised Marrow as a single father for four years, with help from a housekeeper. Marrow's first experience with illicit activity occurred after a bicycle that his father bought him for Christmas was stolen. After Marrow told his father, Solomon shrugged, "Well, then, you ain't got no bike". Marrow stole parts from bicycles and assembled "three or four weird-looking, brightly-painted bikes" from the parts; his father either did not notice or never acknowledged this. When Marrow was thirteen years old, Solomon also died of a heart attack.
Following his father's death, the orphaned Marrow briefly lived with a nearby aunt, then was sent to live with his other aunt and her husband in View Park-Windsor Hills, an upper middle-class Black neighborhood in South Los Angeles. While his cousin Earl was preparing to leave for college, Marrow shared a bedroom with him. Earl was a fan of rock music and listened only to the local rock radio stations; sharing a room with him sparked Marrow's interest in heavy metal music.
Marrow moved to the Crenshaw District of Los Angeles when he was in the eighth grade. He attended Palms Junior High, which was predominantly made up of white students, and included black students who traveled by bus from South Central to attend. He then attended Crenshaw High School, which was almost entirely made up of black students.
Marrow stood out from most of his friends because he did not drink alcohol, smoke tobacco, or use drugs. During Marrow's time in high school, gangs became more prevalent in the Los Angeles school system. Students who belonged to the Crips and Bloods gangs attended Crenshaw, and fought in the school's hallways. Marrow, while never an actual gang member, was affiliated with the former. Marrow began reading the novels of Iceberg Slim, which he memorized and recited to his friends, who enjoyed hearing the excerpts and told him, "Yo, kick some more of that by Ice, T", giving Marrow his famous nickname. Marrow and other Crips wrote and performed "Crip Rhymes".
His music career started with the band of the singing group The Precious Few of Crenshaw High School. Marrow and his group opened the show, dancing to a live band. The singers were Thomas Barnes, Ronald Robinson and Lapekas Mayfield.
In 1975, at the age of seventeen, Marrow began receiving Social Security benefits resulting from the death of his father and used the money to rent an apartment for $90 a month. He sold cannabis and stole car stereos to earn extra cash, but he was not making enough to support his pregnant girlfriend. After his daughter was born, Marrow enlisted in the United States Army in October 1977. Following basic training, Marrow was assigned to the 25th Infantry Division. During his time in the army Marrow was involved with a group of soldiers charged with the theft of a rug. While awaiting trial, he received a $2,500 bonus check and went absent without leave (AWOL), returning a month later, after the rug had been returned. Marrow received a non-judicial punishment as a consequence of his dereliction of duty.
During his spell in the Army, Marrow became interested in hip hop music. He heard The Sugarhill Gang's newly released single "Rapper's Delight" (1979), which inspired him to perform his own raps over the instrumentals of this and other early hip-hop records. The music, however, did not fit his lyrics or form of delivery.
When he was stationed in Hawaii (where prostitution was not a heavily prosecuted crime) as a squad leader at Schofield Barracks, Marrow met a pimp named Mac. Mac admired that Marrow could quote Iceberg Slim, and he taught Marrow how to be a pimp himself. Marrow was also able to purchase stereo equipment cheaply in Hawaii, including two Technics turntables, a mixer, and large speakers. Once equipped, he then began to learn turntablism and rapping.
Marrow learned from his commanding officer that he could receive an early honorable discharge because he was a single father. Taking advantage of this, Marrow was discharged as a Private First Class (PFC - E3) in December 1979 after serving for two years and two months.
During an episode of The Adam Carolla Podcast that aired on June 6, 2012, Marrow claimed that after being discharged from the Army, he began a career as a bank robber. Marrow claimed he and some associates began conducting take-over bank robberies "like [in the film] Heat". Marrow then elaborated, explaining, "Only punks go for the drawer, we gotta go for the safe." Marrow also stated he was glad the United States justice system has statutes of limitations, which had likely expired when Marrow admitted to his involvement in multiple Class 1 Felonies in the early-to-mid 1980s.
In July 2010, Marrow was mistakenly arrested. A month later when Marrow attended court, the charges were dropped and the prosecution stated "there had been a clerical error when the rapper was arrested". Marrow gave some advice to young people who think going to jail is a mark of integrity, saying, "Street credibility has nothing to do with going to jail, it has everything to do with staying out."
After leaving the Army, Marrow wanted to stay away from gang life and violence and instead make a name for himself as a DJ. As a tribute to Iceberg Slim, Marrow adopted the stage name Ice-T. While performing as a DJ at parties, he received more attention for his rapping, which led Ice-T to pursue a career as a rapper. After breaking up with his girlfriend Caitlin Boyd, he returned to a life of crime and robbed jewelry stores with his high school friends. Ice-T's raps later described how he and his friends pretended to be customers to gain access before smashing the display glass with baby sledgehammers.
Ice-T's friends Al P. and Sean E. Sean went to prison. Al P. was caught in 1982 and sent to prison for robbing a high-end jewelry store in Laguna Niguel for $2.5 million in jewelry. Sean was arrested for possession of not only cannabis, which Sean sold, but also material stolen by Ice-T. Sean took the blame and served two years in prison. Ice-T stated that he owed a debt of gratitude to Sean because his prison time allowed him to pursue a career as a rapper. Concurrently, he wound up in a car accident and was hospitalized as a John Doe because he did not carry any form of identification due to his criminal activities. After being discharged from the hospital, he decided to abandon the criminal lifestyle and pursue a professional career rapping. Two weeks after being released from the hospital, he won an open mic competition judged by Kurtis Blow at the Carolina West nightclub. According to Michael Khalfani known as Disco Daddy, Ice-T won the first week of the competition under the name of DJ Tracy, but got beaten by Disco Daddy the second week, which lead to the name change of Ice-T (Khalfani got signed to Rappers Rapp Records).
In 1982, Ice-T met producer Willie Strong from Saturn Records. In 1983, Strong recorded Ice-T's first single, "Cold Wind Madness", also known as "The Coldest Rap", an electro hip-hop record that became an underground success, becoming popular even though radio stations did not play it due to the song's hardcore lyrics. That same year, Ice-T released "Body Rock", another electro hip-hop single that found popularity in clubs. In 1984, Ice-T released the single "Killers", the first of his political raps, and then was a featured rapper on "Reckless", a single by DJ Chris "The Glove" Taylor and (co-producer) David Storrs that gained widespread popularity as a featured track via the motion picture Breakin' and its soundtrack album. This song was almost immediately followed up with a sequel entitled "Reckless Rivalry (Combat)", which was featured in the Breakin' sequel, Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, however it was never featured on the soundtrack album and, to this day, has never been released. Ice later recorded the songs "Ya Don't Quit" and "Dog'n the Wax (Ya Don't Quit-Part II)" with Unknown DJ, who provided a Run–D.M.C.-like sound for the songs.
Ice-T received further inspiration as an artist from Schoolly D's gangsta rap single "P.S.K. What Does It Mean?", which he heard in a club. Ice-T enjoyed the single's sound and delivery, as well as its vague references to gang life, although the real life gang, Park Side Killers, was not named in the song.
Ice-T decided to adopt Schoolly D's style, and wrote the lyrics to his first gangsta rap song, "6 in the Mornin'", in his Hollywood apartment, and created a minimal beat with a Roland TR-808. He compared the sound of the song, which was recorded as a B-side on the single "Dog'n The Wax", to that of the Beastie Boys. The single was released in 1986, and he learned that "6 in the Mornin'" was more popular in clubs than its A-side, leading Ice-T to rap about Los Angeles gang life, which he described more explicitly than any previous rapper. He intentionally did not represent any particular gang, and wore a mixture of red and blue clothing and shoes to avoid antagonizing gang-affiliated listeners, who debated his true affiliation.
Ice-T finally landed a deal with a major label Sire Records. When label founder and president Seymour Stein heard his demo, he said Ice-T sounded like Bob Dylan. Shortly after, he released his debut album Rhyme Pays in 1987 supported by DJ Evil E, DJ Aladdin and producer Afrika Islam, who helped create the mainly party-oriented sound. The record wound up being certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America. That same year, he recorded the title theme song for Dennis Hopper's Colors, a film about inner-city gang life in Los Angeles. His next album Power was released in 1988, under his own label Rhyme Syndicate, and it was a more assured and impressive record, earning him strong reviews and his second gold record. Released in 1989, The Iceberg/Freedom of Speech... Just Watch What You Say! established his popularity by matching excellent abrasive music with narrative and commentative lyrics. In the same year, he appeared on Hugh Harris' single "Alice".
In 1991, he released his album O.G. Original Gangster, which is regarded as one of the albums that defined gangsta rap. On OG, he introduced his heavy metal band Body Count in a track of the same name. Ice-T toured with Body Count on the first annual Lollapalooza concert tour in 1991, gaining him appeal among middle-class teenagers and fans of alternative music genres. The album Body Count was released in March 1992. For his appearance on the heavily collaborative track "Back on the Block", a composition by jazz musician Quincy Jones that "attempt[ed] to bring together black musical styles from jazz to soul to funk to rap", Ice-T won a Grammy Award for the Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group, an award shared by others who worked on the track including Jones and fellow jazz musician Ray Charles.
Controversy later surrounded Body Count over its song "Cop Killer". The rock song was intended to speak from the viewpoint of a criminal getting revenge on racist, brutal cops. Ice-T's rock song infuriated government officials, the National Rifle Association of America, and various police advocacy groups. Consequently, Time Warner Music refused to release Ice-T's upcoming album Home Invasion because of the controversy surrounding "Cop Killer". Ice-T suggested that the furor over the song was an overreaction, telling journalist Chuck Philips "...they've done movies about nurse killers and teacher killers and student killers. Arnold Schwarzenegger blew away dozens of cops as the Terminator. But I don't hear anybody complaining about that". In the same interview, Ice-T suggested to Philips that the misunderstanding of Cop Killer, the misclassification of it as a rap song (not a rock song), and the attempts to censor it had racial overtones: "The Supreme Court says it's OK for a white man to burn a cross in public. But nobody wants a black man to write a record about a cop killer".
Ice-T split amicably with Sire/Warner Bros. Records after a dispute over the artwork of the album Home Invasion. He then reactivated Rhyme Syndicate and formed a deal with Priority Records for distribution. Priority released Home Invasion in the spring of 1993. The album peaked at No. 9 on Billboard magazine's Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums and at No. 14 on the Billboard 200, spawning several singles including "Gotta Lotta Love", "I Ain't New Ta This" and "99 Problems" – which would later inspire Jay-Z to record a version with new lyrics in 2003. In 2003 he released the single "Beat of Life" with Sandra Nasić, Trigga tha Gambler and DJ Tomekk and placed in the German charts.
Ice-T had also collaborated with certain other heavy metal bands during this time period. For the film Judgment Night, he did a duet with Slayer on the track "Disorder". In 1995, Ice-T made a guest performance on Forbidden by Black Sabbath. Another album of his, VI – Return of the Real, was released in 1996, followed by The Seventh Deadly Sin in 1999.
His first rap album since 1999, Gangsta Rap, was released on October 31, 2006. The album's cover, which "shows [Ice-T] lying on his back in bed with his ravishing wife's ample posterior in full view and one of her legs coyly draped over his private parts", was considered to be too suggestive for most retailers, many of which were reluctant to stock the album. Some reviews of the album were unenthusiastic, as many had hoped for a return to the political raps of Ice-T's most successful albums.
Ice-T appears in the film Gift. One of the last scenes includes Ice-T and Body Count playing with Jane's Addiction in a version of the Sly and the Family Stone song "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey".
Besides fronting his own band and rap projects, Ice-T has also collaborated with other hard rock and metal bands, such as Icepick, Motörhead, Slayer, Megadeth, Pro-Pain, and Six Feet Under. He has also covered songs by hardcore punk bands such as the Exploited, Jello Biafra, and Black Flag. Ice-T made an appearance at Insane Clown Posse's Gathering of the Juggalos (2008 edition). Ice-T was also a judge for the 7th annual Independent Music Awards to support independent artists. His 2012 film Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap features a who's who of underground and mainstream rappers.
In November 2011, Ice-T announced via Twitter that he was in the process of collecting beats for his next LP which was expected sometime during 2012, but as of October 2014, the album has not been released. A new Body Count album, Bloodlust, was released in 2017. After the release of the album, responding to an interview question asking if he's "done with rap", he answered "I don't know" and noted that he's "really leaning more toward EDM right now". Body Count received their second Grammy nomination and later won the award at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards in 2021 for "Best Metal Performance" with their song "Bum-Rush" from the album Carnivore.
In July 2019, Ice-T released his first solo hip hop track in 10 years, titled "Feds in My Rearview". The track is the first in a trilogy, with the second track, "Too Old for the Dumb Shit", described as a prequel to "Feds in My Rearview", and released in September 2019. Ice-T was also featured on the 2020 hip hop posse cut "The Slayers Club" alongside R.A. the Rugged Man, Brand Nubian and others.
Ice-T performed at New Year's Eve Toast & Roast 2021, Fox broadcast.
Ice-T was prominently featured as both a rapper and a breakdancer in Breakin' 'n' Enterin' (1983), a documentary about the early West Coast hip hop scene.
Ice-T's first film appearances were in the motion pictures, Breakin' (1984), and its sequel, Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984). These films were released before Ice-T released his first LP, although he appears on the soundtrack to Breakin'. He has since stated he considers the films and his own performance in them to be "wack".
In 1991, he embarked on a serious acting career, portraying police detective Scotty Appleton in Mario Van Peebles' action thriller New Jack City, gang leader Odessa (alongside Denzel Washington and John Lithgow) in Ricochet (1991), gang leader King James in Trespass (1992), followed by a notable lead role performance in Surviving the Game (1994), in addition to many supporting roles, such as J-Bone in Johnny Mnemonic (1995), and the marsupial mutant T-Saint in Tank Girl (1995). He was also interviewed in the Brent Owens documentary Pimps Up, Ho's Down, in which he claims to have had an extensive pimping background before getting into rap. He is quoted as saying "once you max something out, it ain't no fun no more. I couldn't really get no farther." He goes on to explain his pimping experience gave him the ability to get into new businesses. "I can't act, I really can't act, I ain't no rapper, it's all game. I'm just working these niggas." Later he raps at the Players Ball.
In 1993, Ice-T, along with other rappers and the three Yo! MTV Raps hosts Ed Lover, Doctor Dré, and Fab 5 Freddy starred in the comedy Who's the Man?, directed by Ted Demme. In the film, he is a drug dealer who gets really frustrated when someone calls him by his real name, "Chauncey", rather than his street name, "Nighttrain".
In 1995, Ice-T had a recurring role as vengeful drug dealer Danny Cort on the television series New York Undercover, co-created by Dick Wolf. His work on the series earned him the 1996 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. In 1997, he co-created the short-lived series Players, produced by Wolf. This was followed by a role as pimp Seymour "Kingston" Stockton in Exiled: A Law & Order Movie (1998). These collaborations led Wolf to add Ice-T to the cast of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Since 2000, he has portrayed Odafin "Fin" Tutuola, a former undercover narcotics officer transferred to the Special Victims Unit. In 2002, the NAACP awarded Ice-T with a second Image Award, again for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series, for his work on Law & Order: SVU.
Around 1995, Ice-T co-presented a UK-produced magazine television series on black culture, Baadasss TV.
In 1997, Ice-T had a pay-per-view special titled Ice-T's Extreme Babes which appeared on Action PPV, formerly owned by BET Networks.
In 1999, Ice-T starred in the HBO film Stealth Fighter as a United States Naval Aviator who fakes his own death, steals an F-117 stealth fighter, and threatens to destroy United States military bases. He also acted in the film Sonic Impact, released the same year.
Ice-T made an appearance on the comedy television series Chappelle's Show as himself presenting the award for "Player Hater of the Year" at the "Player-Haters Ball", a parody of his own appearance at the Players Ball. He was dubbed the "Original Player Hater".
Beyond Tough, a 2002 documentary series, aired on Discovery Channel about the world's most dangerous and intense professions, such as alligator wrestlers and Indy 500 pit crews, was hosted by Ice-T.
In 2007, Ice-T appeared as a celebrity guest star on the MTV sketch comedy show Short Circuitz. Also in late 2007, he appeared in the short-music film Hands of Hatred, which can be found online.
Ice-T was interviewed for the Cannibal Corpse retrospective documentary Centuries of Torment, as well as appearing in Chris Rock's 2009 documentary Good Hair, in which he reminisced about going to school in hair curlers.
A 2016 advertisement for GEICO features Ice-T behind a lemonade stand run by children. When people ask if it is Ice-T, the actor yells back, "No, it's lemonade!"
In 2020, Ice-T competed on The Masked Singer spin-off The Masked Dancer where he portrayed "Disco Ball" and was the first to be eliminated.
Ice-T's voice acting roles include Madd Dogg in the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, as well as Agent Cain in Sanity: Aiken's Artifact. He also appears as himself in Def Jam: Fight for NY and UFC: Tapout fighting video games. He also voiced the character Aaron Griffin in the video game Gears of War 3. Marrow also made an appearance in the 2019 video game Borderlands 3, in which he voices the character of BALEX. On August 22, 2023, it was revealed at Gamescom 2023 that he would be voicing the contractor, Mac in Payday 3.
On December 27, 2013, Ice-T announced that he was entering podcasting in a deal with the Paragon Collective. Ice-T co-hosts the Ice-T: Final Level podcast with his longtime friend, Mick Benzo (known as Zulu Beatz on Sirius XM). They discuss relevant issues, films, video games, and do a behind the scenes of Law & Order: SVU segment with featured guests from the entertainment world. The show will release new episodes bi-weekly. Guests have included Jim Norton. Ice-T released his first episode on January 7 to many accolades.
On October 20, 2006, Ice-T's Rap School aired and was a reality television show on VH1. It was a spin-off of the British reality show Gene Simmons' Rock School, which also aired on VH1. In Rap School, rapper/actor Ice-T teaches eight teens from York Preparatory School in New York called the "York Prep Crew" ("Y.P. Crew" for short). Each week, Ice-T gives them assignments and they compete for an imitation gold chain with a microphone on it. On the season finale on November 17, 2006, the group performed as an opening act for Public Enemy.
On June 12, 2011, E! reality show Ice Loves Coco debuted. The show is mostly about his relationship with his wife, Nicole "Coco" Austin.
Ice-T cites writer Iceberg Slim and rapper Schoolly D as influences, with Iceberg Slim's novels guiding his skills as a lyricist. His favorite heavy rock acts are Edgar Winter, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. His hip hop albums helped shape gangsta rap, with music journalists tracing works of artists such as Tupac Shakur, Notorious B.I.G., Eminem and N.W.A to "6 in the Mornin'".
A love of rock led Ice to use guitar in his albums, to provide his songs with edge and power, and to make his raps harder. He drew on the fusion of rock and hip hop by Rick Rubin-produced acts such as Beastie Boys, Run-DMC, and LL Cool J, who featured rock samples in their songs.
Body Count – whose 1992 debut album Ice described as a "rock album with a rap mentality" – is described as paving the way for the success of rap rock fusions by acts like Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit. However, Ice-T states that the band's style does not fuse the two genres, and that Body Count is solely a rock band.
In Hip Hop Connection, Ice listed his favorite rap albums:
On March 20, 1976, Marrow's high school girlfriend Adrienne gave birth to their daughter LeTesha Marrow, and they continued attending high school while raising her. While filming Breakin' in 1984, he met his second girlfriend Darlene Ortiz, who was at the club where the film was shot. They began a relationship and Ortiz was featured on the covers of Rhyme Pays and Power. Ice-T and Ortiz had a son, Ice Tracy Marrow Jr., on November 23, 1991; Ice Marrow, aka "Little Ice", became a backing vocalist with Body Count in time for the recording of their album Carnivore.
Ice-T married swimsuit model Nicole "Coco" Austin in January 2002. In celebration of their impending ninth wedding anniversary, the couple renewed their wedding vows on June 4, 2011. As of 2006, they owned a penthouse apartment in North Bergen, New Jersey. In 2012, they were building a five-bedroom house in Edgewater, New Jersey, that was expected to be completed by the end of the year. In 2015, the couple had their first child together, a daughter.
Ice-T has stated on numerous occasions that he is a teetotaler, and lives a straight edge lifestyle. He is a long time practitioner of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and boxing, and is a big fan of the UFC.
During the popularity of Public Enemy, Ice-T was closely associated with the band and his recordings of the time showed a similar political viewpoint. He was referred to as "The Soldier of the Highest Degree" in the booklet for Fear of a Black Planet and mentioned on the track "Leave This Off Your Fuckin' Charts". He also collaborated with fellow anti-censorship campaigner Jello Biafra on his album The Iceberg/Freedom of Speech... Just Watch What You Say!.
On June 5, 2008, Ice-T joked that he would be voting for John McCain in the 2008 American elections, speculating that his past affiliation with Body Count could hurt Barack Obama's chances if he endorsed him, so he would choose instead to ruin McCain's campaign by saying he supported him.
On September 22, 2022, Ice-T narrated an advertisement for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Ice-T had a feud with LL Cool J in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Apparently, this was instigated by LL's claim to be "the baddest rapper in the history of rap itself". Ice-T recorded disses against LL on his 1988 album Power. On the album was the track, "I'm Your Pusher", in which a rap music addict declines to buy an LL Cool J record. The album also contains the posse rap track, "The Syndicate", which took aim at LL's lyrical ability, claiming that rapping about oneself so frequently was a "first grade topic". The song also mocked the song's hook "I'm Bad", which identified it as an LL diss specifically. In the book Check the Technique: Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies, Ice-T said that the song "Girls L.G.B.N.A.F." was also intended as a diss to LL Cool J, by making a crude song to contrast with the love songs that LL was making at the time.
On LL's response, "To da Break of Dawn" in 1990, he dissed Kool Moe Dee (whose feud with LL was far more publicized) as well as MC Hammer. He then devoted the third verse of the song to dissing Ice-T, mocking his rap ability ("take your rhymes around the corner to rap rehab"), his background ("before you rapped, you was a downtown car thief"), and his style ("a brother with a perm deserves to get burned"). He also suggested that the success of Power was due to the appearance of Ice-T's girlfriend Darlene on the album cover. Ice-T appeared to have ignored the insults and he had also defended LL Cool J after his arrest in the song "Freedom of Speech".
In August 2012, Ice-T said that the rivalry was "never serious" and that he needed a nemesis to create "an exciting dispute".
In June 2008, on DJ Cisco's Urban Legend mixtape, Ice-T criticized Soulja Boy (whose name is DeAndre Way) for "killing hip hop" and called his song "Crank That" "garbage" compared to the works of other hip-hop artists such as Rakim, Das EFX, Big Daddy Kane and Ice Cube. One of the comments exchanged was Ice-T telling Way to "eat a dick". The two then traded numerous videos back and forth over the Internet. These videos included a cartoon and video of Ice-T dancing on Way's behalf and an apology, but reiteration of his feelings that Way's music "sucks", on Ice-T's behalf. Musician Kanye West defended Way saying, "He came from the 'hood, made his own beats, made up a new saying, new sound and a new dance with one song".
Kings of Vice novel series | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Tracy Lauren Marrow (born February 16, 1958), better known by his stage name Ice-T (or Ice T), is an American rapper and actor. He is active in both hip hop and heavy metal. Ice-T began his career as an underground rapper in the 1980s and was signed to Sire Records in 1987, when he released his debut album Rhyme Pays. The following year, he founded the record label Rhyme $yndicate Records (named after his collective of fellow hip-hop artists called the \"Rhyme $yndicate\") and released another album, Power (1988), which would go platinum. He also released several other albums that went gold, including The Iceberg/Freedom of Speech... Just Watch What You Say! (1989), O.G. Original Gangster (1991) and Home Invasion (1993).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Ice-T co-founded the heavy metal band Body Count in 1990, which he introduced on O.G. Original Gangster, on the track titled \"Body Count\". The band released its self-titled debut album in 1992. Ice-T encountered controversy over his track \"Cop Killer\", the lyrics of which discussed killing police officers. He asked to be released from his contract with Warner Bros. Records, and his follow-up solo album, Home Invasion, was released through Priority Records. Ice-T released two more albums in the late 1990s and one in the 2000s before focusing on both his acting career and Body Count, who have released seven studio albums to date, the latest being 2020's Carnivore.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "As an actor, Ice-T played small parts in the films Breakin' (1984) and its sequels, Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo and Rappin' (1984 and 1985 respectively), before his major role debut, starring as police detective Scotty Appleton in New Jack City (1991). He received top billing for his role in Surviving the Game (1994) and continued to appear in small roles in TV series and other films throughout the 1990s. Since 2000, he has portrayed NYPD detective/sergeant Odafin Tutuola on the NBC police drama Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, making him the longest-running male series actor in history, according to Deadline. A reality television show titled Ice Loves Coco ran for three seasons (2011–2013) on E!, featuring the home life of Ice-T and his wife Coco Austin. In 2018, he began hosting the true crime documentary In Ice Cold Blood on the Oxygen cable channel, which as of 2020 is in its third season.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Tracy Lauren Marrow, the son of Solomon and Alice Marrow, was born in Newark, New Jersey on February 16, 1958. Solomon was African-American and Alice was from a Louisiana Creole background. For decades, Solomon worked as a conveyor belt mechanic at the Rapistan Conveyor Company. When Marrow was a child, his family moved to upscale Summit, New Jersey. The first time race played a major part in Marrow's life was at the age of seven, when he became aware of the racism leveled by his white friends towards black children. Marrow surmised that he escaped similar treatment because they thought that he was white due to his lighter skin. Relaying this incident to his mother, she told him, \"Honey, people are stupid\"; her advice and this incident taught Marrow to control the way the negativity of others affected him.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "His mother died of a heart attack when he was in third grade. Solomon raised Marrow as a single father for four years, with help from a housekeeper. Marrow's first experience with illicit activity occurred after a bicycle that his father bought him for Christmas was stolen. After Marrow told his father, Solomon shrugged, \"Well, then, you ain't got no bike\". Marrow stole parts from bicycles and assembled \"three or four weird-looking, brightly-painted bikes\" from the parts; his father either did not notice or never acknowledged this. When Marrow was thirteen years old, Solomon also died of a heart attack.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Following his father's death, the orphaned Marrow briefly lived with a nearby aunt, then was sent to live with his other aunt and her husband in View Park-Windsor Hills, an upper middle-class Black neighborhood in South Los Angeles. While his cousin Earl was preparing to leave for college, Marrow shared a bedroom with him. Earl was a fan of rock music and listened only to the local rock radio stations; sharing a room with him sparked Marrow's interest in heavy metal music.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Marrow moved to the Crenshaw District of Los Angeles when he was in the eighth grade. He attended Palms Junior High, which was predominantly made up of white students, and included black students who traveled by bus from South Central to attend. He then attended Crenshaw High School, which was almost entirely made up of black students.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Marrow stood out from most of his friends because he did not drink alcohol, smoke tobacco, or use drugs. During Marrow's time in high school, gangs became more prevalent in the Los Angeles school system. Students who belonged to the Crips and Bloods gangs attended Crenshaw, and fought in the school's hallways. Marrow, while never an actual gang member, was affiliated with the former. Marrow began reading the novels of Iceberg Slim, which he memorized and recited to his friends, who enjoyed hearing the excerpts and told him, \"Yo, kick some more of that by Ice, T\", giving Marrow his famous nickname. Marrow and other Crips wrote and performed \"Crip Rhymes\".",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "His music career started with the band of the singing group The Precious Few of Crenshaw High School. Marrow and his group opened the show, dancing to a live band. The singers were Thomas Barnes, Ronald Robinson and Lapekas Mayfield.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1975, at the age of seventeen, Marrow began receiving Social Security benefits resulting from the death of his father and used the money to rent an apartment for $90 a month. He sold cannabis and stole car stereos to earn extra cash, but he was not making enough to support his pregnant girlfriend. After his daughter was born, Marrow enlisted in the United States Army in October 1977. Following basic training, Marrow was assigned to the 25th Infantry Division. During his time in the army Marrow was involved with a group of soldiers charged with the theft of a rug. While awaiting trial, he received a $2,500 bonus check and went absent without leave (AWOL), returning a month later, after the rug had been returned. Marrow received a non-judicial punishment as a consequence of his dereliction of duty.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "During his spell in the Army, Marrow became interested in hip hop music. He heard The Sugarhill Gang's newly released single \"Rapper's Delight\" (1979), which inspired him to perform his own raps over the instrumentals of this and other early hip-hop records. The music, however, did not fit his lyrics or form of delivery.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "When he was stationed in Hawaii (where prostitution was not a heavily prosecuted crime) as a squad leader at Schofield Barracks, Marrow met a pimp named Mac. Mac admired that Marrow could quote Iceberg Slim, and he taught Marrow how to be a pimp himself. Marrow was also able to purchase stereo equipment cheaply in Hawaii, including two Technics turntables, a mixer, and large speakers. Once equipped, he then began to learn turntablism and rapping.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Marrow learned from his commanding officer that he could receive an early honorable discharge because he was a single father. Taking advantage of this, Marrow was discharged as a Private First Class (PFC - E3) in December 1979 after serving for two years and two months.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "During an episode of The Adam Carolla Podcast that aired on June 6, 2012, Marrow claimed that after being discharged from the Army, he began a career as a bank robber. Marrow claimed he and some associates began conducting take-over bank robberies \"like [in the film] Heat\". Marrow then elaborated, explaining, \"Only punks go for the drawer, we gotta go for the safe.\" Marrow also stated he was glad the United States justice system has statutes of limitations, which had likely expired when Marrow admitted to his involvement in multiple Class 1 Felonies in the early-to-mid 1980s.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In July 2010, Marrow was mistakenly arrested. A month later when Marrow attended court, the charges were dropped and the prosecution stated \"there had been a clerical error when the rapper was arrested\". Marrow gave some advice to young people who think going to jail is a mark of integrity, saying, \"Street credibility has nothing to do with going to jail, it has everything to do with staying out.\"",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "After leaving the Army, Marrow wanted to stay away from gang life and violence and instead make a name for himself as a DJ. As a tribute to Iceberg Slim, Marrow adopted the stage name Ice-T. While performing as a DJ at parties, he received more attention for his rapping, which led Ice-T to pursue a career as a rapper. After breaking up with his girlfriend Caitlin Boyd, he returned to a life of crime and robbed jewelry stores with his high school friends. Ice-T's raps later described how he and his friends pretended to be customers to gain access before smashing the display glass with baby sledgehammers.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Ice-T's friends Al P. and Sean E. Sean went to prison. Al P. was caught in 1982 and sent to prison for robbing a high-end jewelry store in Laguna Niguel for $2.5 million in jewelry. Sean was arrested for possession of not only cannabis, which Sean sold, but also material stolen by Ice-T. Sean took the blame and served two years in prison. Ice-T stated that he owed a debt of gratitude to Sean because his prison time allowed him to pursue a career as a rapper. Concurrently, he wound up in a car accident and was hospitalized as a John Doe because he did not carry any form of identification due to his criminal activities. After being discharged from the hospital, he decided to abandon the criminal lifestyle and pursue a professional career rapping. Two weeks after being released from the hospital, he won an open mic competition judged by Kurtis Blow at the Carolina West nightclub. According to Michael Khalfani known as Disco Daddy, Ice-T won the first week of the competition under the name of DJ Tracy, but got beaten by Disco Daddy the second week, which lead to the name change of Ice-T (Khalfani got signed to Rappers Rapp Records).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In 1982, Ice-T met producer Willie Strong from Saturn Records. In 1983, Strong recorded Ice-T's first single, \"Cold Wind Madness\", also known as \"The Coldest Rap\", an electro hip-hop record that became an underground success, becoming popular even though radio stations did not play it due to the song's hardcore lyrics. That same year, Ice-T released \"Body Rock\", another electro hip-hop single that found popularity in clubs. In 1984, Ice-T released the single \"Killers\", the first of his political raps, and then was a featured rapper on \"Reckless\", a single by DJ Chris \"The Glove\" Taylor and (co-producer) David Storrs that gained widespread popularity as a featured track via the motion picture Breakin' and its soundtrack album. This song was almost immediately followed up with a sequel entitled \"Reckless Rivalry (Combat)\", which was featured in the Breakin' sequel, Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, however it was never featured on the soundtrack album and, to this day, has never been released. Ice later recorded the songs \"Ya Don't Quit\" and \"Dog'n the Wax (Ya Don't Quit-Part II)\" with Unknown DJ, who provided a Run–D.M.C.-like sound for the songs.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Ice-T received further inspiration as an artist from Schoolly D's gangsta rap single \"P.S.K. What Does It Mean?\", which he heard in a club. Ice-T enjoyed the single's sound and delivery, as well as its vague references to gang life, although the real life gang, Park Side Killers, was not named in the song.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Ice-T decided to adopt Schoolly D's style, and wrote the lyrics to his first gangsta rap song, \"6 in the Mornin'\", in his Hollywood apartment, and created a minimal beat with a Roland TR-808. He compared the sound of the song, which was recorded as a B-side on the single \"Dog'n The Wax\", to that of the Beastie Boys. The single was released in 1986, and he learned that \"6 in the Mornin'\" was more popular in clubs than its A-side, leading Ice-T to rap about Los Angeles gang life, which he described more explicitly than any previous rapper. He intentionally did not represent any particular gang, and wore a mixture of red and blue clothing and shoes to avoid antagonizing gang-affiliated listeners, who debated his true affiliation.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Ice-T finally landed a deal with a major label Sire Records. When label founder and president Seymour Stein heard his demo, he said Ice-T sounded like Bob Dylan. Shortly after, he released his debut album Rhyme Pays in 1987 supported by DJ Evil E, DJ Aladdin and producer Afrika Islam, who helped create the mainly party-oriented sound. The record wound up being certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America. That same year, he recorded the title theme song for Dennis Hopper's Colors, a film about inner-city gang life in Los Angeles. His next album Power was released in 1988, under his own label Rhyme Syndicate, and it was a more assured and impressive record, earning him strong reviews and his second gold record. Released in 1989, The Iceberg/Freedom of Speech... Just Watch What You Say! established his popularity by matching excellent abrasive music with narrative and commentative lyrics. In the same year, he appeared on Hugh Harris' single \"Alice\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In 1991, he released his album O.G. Original Gangster, which is regarded as one of the albums that defined gangsta rap. On OG, he introduced his heavy metal band Body Count in a track of the same name. Ice-T toured with Body Count on the first annual Lollapalooza concert tour in 1991, gaining him appeal among middle-class teenagers and fans of alternative music genres. The album Body Count was released in March 1992. For his appearance on the heavily collaborative track \"Back on the Block\", a composition by jazz musician Quincy Jones that \"attempt[ed] to bring together black musical styles from jazz to soul to funk to rap\", Ice-T won a Grammy Award for the Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group, an award shared by others who worked on the track including Jones and fellow jazz musician Ray Charles.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Controversy later surrounded Body Count over its song \"Cop Killer\". The rock song was intended to speak from the viewpoint of a criminal getting revenge on racist, brutal cops. Ice-T's rock song infuriated government officials, the National Rifle Association of America, and various police advocacy groups. Consequently, Time Warner Music refused to release Ice-T's upcoming album Home Invasion because of the controversy surrounding \"Cop Killer\". Ice-T suggested that the furor over the song was an overreaction, telling journalist Chuck Philips \"...they've done movies about nurse killers and teacher killers and student killers. Arnold Schwarzenegger blew away dozens of cops as the Terminator. But I don't hear anybody complaining about that\". In the same interview, Ice-T suggested to Philips that the misunderstanding of Cop Killer, the misclassification of it as a rap song (not a rock song), and the attempts to censor it had racial overtones: \"The Supreme Court says it's OK for a white man to burn a cross in public. But nobody wants a black man to write a record about a cop killer\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Ice-T split amicably with Sire/Warner Bros. Records after a dispute over the artwork of the album Home Invasion. He then reactivated Rhyme Syndicate and formed a deal with Priority Records for distribution. Priority released Home Invasion in the spring of 1993. The album peaked at No. 9 on Billboard magazine's Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums and at No. 14 on the Billboard 200, spawning several singles including \"Gotta Lotta Love\", \"I Ain't New Ta This\" and \"99 Problems\" – which would later inspire Jay-Z to record a version with new lyrics in 2003. In 2003 he released the single \"Beat of Life\" with Sandra Nasić, Trigga tha Gambler and DJ Tomekk and placed in the German charts.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Ice-T had also collaborated with certain other heavy metal bands during this time period. For the film Judgment Night, he did a duet with Slayer on the track \"Disorder\". In 1995, Ice-T made a guest performance on Forbidden by Black Sabbath. Another album of his, VI – Return of the Real, was released in 1996, followed by The Seventh Deadly Sin in 1999.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "His first rap album since 1999, Gangsta Rap, was released on October 31, 2006. The album's cover, which \"shows [Ice-T] lying on his back in bed with his ravishing wife's ample posterior in full view and one of her legs coyly draped over his private parts\", was considered to be too suggestive for most retailers, many of which were reluctant to stock the album. Some reviews of the album were unenthusiastic, as many had hoped for a return to the political raps of Ice-T's most successful albums.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Ice-T appears in the film Gift. One of the last scenes includes Ice-T and Body Count playing with Jane's Addiction in a version of the Sly and the Family Stone song \"Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Besides fronting his own band and rap projects, Ice-T has also collaborated with other hard rock and metal bands, such as Icepick, Motörhead, Slayer, Megadeth, Pro-Pain, and Six Feet Under. He has also covered songs by hardcore punk bands such as the Exploited, Jello Biafra, and Black Flag. Ice-T made an appearance at Insane Clown Posse's Gathering of the Juggalos (2008 edition). Ice-T was also a judge for the 7th annual Independent Music Awards to support independent artists. His 2012 film Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap features a who's who of underground and mainstream rappers.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In November 2011, Ice-T announced via Twitter that he was in the process of collecting beats for his next LP which was expected sometime during 2012, but as of October 2014, the album has not been released. A new Body Count album, Bloodlust, was released in 2017. After the release of the album, responding to an interview question asking if he's \"done with rap\", he answered \"I don't know\" and noted that he's \"really leaning more toward EDM right now\". Body Count received their second Grammy nomination and later won the award at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards in 2021 for \"Best Metal Performance\" with their song \"Bum-Rush\" from the album Carnivore.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In July 2019, Ice-T released his first solo hip hop track in 10 years, titled \"Feds in My Rearview\". The track is the first in a trilogy, with the second track, \"Too Old for the Dumb Shit\", described as a prequel to \"Feds in My Rearview\", and released in September 2019. Ice-T was also featured on the 2020 hip hop posse cut \"The Slayers Club\" alongside R.A. the Rugged Man, Brand Nubian and others.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Ice-T performed at New Year's Eve Toast & Roast 2021, Fox broadcast.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Ice-T was prominently featured as both a rapper and a breakdancer in Breakin' 'n' Enterin' (1983), a documentary about the early West Coast hip hop scene.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Ice-T's first film appearances were in the motion pictures, Breakin' (1984), and its sequel, Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984). These films were released before Ice-T released his first LP, although he appears on the soundtrack to Breakin'. He has since stated he considers the films and his own performance in them to be \"wack\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In 1991, he embarked on a serious acting career, portraying police detective Scotty Appleton in Mario Van Peebles' action thriller New Jack City, gang leader Odessa (alongside Denzel Washington and John Lithgow) in Ricochet (1991), gang leader King James in Trespass (1992), followed by a notable lead role performance in Surviving the Game (1994), in addition to many supporting roles, such as J-Bone in Johnny Mnemonic (1995), and the marsupial mutant T-Saint in Tank Girl (1995). He was also interviewed in the Brent Owens documentary Pimps Up, Ho's Down, in which he claims to have had an extensive pimping background before getting into rap. He is quoted as saying \"once you max something out, it ain't no fun no more. I couldn't really get no farther.\" He goes on to explain his pimping experience gave him the ability to get into new businesses. \"I can't act, I really can't act, I ain't no rapper, it's all game. I'm just working these niggas.\" Later he raps at the Players Ball.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In 1993, Ice-T, along with other rappers and the three Yo! MTV Raps hosts Ed Lover, Doctor Dré, and Fab 5 Freddy starred in the comedy Who's the Man?, directed by Ted Demme. In the film, he is a drug dealer who gets really frustrated when someone calls him by his real name, \"Chauncey\", rather than his street name, \"Nighttrain\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In 1995, Ice-T had a recurring role as vengeful drug dealer Danny Cort on the television series New York Undercover, co-created by Dick Wolf. His work on the series earned him the 1996 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. In 1997, he co-created the short-lived series Players, produced by Wolf. This was followed by a role as pimp Seymour \"Kingston\" Stockton in Exiled: A Law & Order Movie (1998). These collaborations led Wolf to add Ice-T to the cast of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Since 2000, he has portrayed Odafin \"Fin\" Tutuola, a former undercover narcotics officer transferred to the Special Victims Unit. In 2002, the NAACP awarded Ice-T with a second Image Award, again for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series, for his work on Law & Order: SVU.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Around 1995, Ice-T co-presented a UK-produced magazine television series on black culture, Baadasss TV.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In 1997, Ice-T had a pay-per-view special titled Ice-T's Extreme Babes which appeared on Action PPV, formerly owned by BET Networks.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In 1999, Ice-T starred in the HBO film Stealth Fighter as a United States Naval Aviator who fakes his own death, steals an F-117 stealth fighter, and threatens to destroy United States military bases. He also acted in the film Sonic Impact, released the same year.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Ice-T made an appearance on the comedy television series Chappelle's Show as himself presenting the award for \"Player Hater of the Year\" at the \"Player-Haters Ball\", a parody of his own appearance at the Players Ball. He was dubbed the \"Original Player Hater\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Beyond Tough, a 2002 documentary series, aired on Discovery Channel about the world's most dangerous and intense professions, such as alligator wrestlers and Indy 500 pit crews, was hosted by Ice-T.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In 2007, Ice-T appeared as a celebrity guest star on the MTV sketch comedy show Short Circuitz. Also in late 2007, he appeared in the short-music film Hands of Hatred, which can be found online.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Ice-T was interviewed for the Cannibal Corpse retrospective documentary Centuries of Torment, as well as appearing in Chris Rock's 2009 documentary Good Hair, in which he reminisced about going to school in hair curlers.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "A 2016 advertisement for GEICO features Ice-T behind a lemonade stand run by children. When people ask if it is Ice-T, the actor yells back, \"No, it's lemonade!\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In 2020, Ice-T competed on The Masked Singer spin-off The Masked Dancer where he portrayed \"Disco Ball\" and was the first to be eliminated.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Ice-T's voice acting roles include Madd Dogg in the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, as well as Agent Cain in Sanity: Aiken's Artifact. He also appears as himself in Def Jam: Fight for NY and UFC: Tapout fighting video games. He also voiced the character Aaron Griffin in the video game Gears of War 3. Marrow also made an appearance in the 2019 video game Borderlands 3, in which he voices the character of BALEX. On August 22, 2023, it was revealed at Gamescom 2023 that he would be voicing the contractor, Mac in Payday 3.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "On December 27, 2013, Ice-T announced that he was entering podcasting in a deal with the Paragon Collective. Ice-T co-hosts the Ice-T: Final Level podcast with his longtime friend, Mick Benzo (known as Zulu Beatz on Sirius XM). They discuss relevant issues, films, video games, and do a behind the scenes of Law & Order: SVU segment with featured guests from the entertainment world. The show will release new episodes bi-weekly. Guests have included Jim Norton. Ice-T released his first episode on January 7 to many accolades.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "On October 20, 2006, Ice-T's Rap School aired and was a reality television show on VH1. It was a spin-off of the British reality show Gene Simmons' Rock School, which also aired on VH1. In Rap School, rapper/actor Ice-T teaches eight teens from York Preparatory School in New York called the \"York Prep Crew\" (\"Y.P. Crew\" for short). Each week, Ice-T gives them assignments and they compete for an imitation gold chain with a microphone on it. On the season finale on November 17, 2006, the group performed as an opening act for Public Enemy.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "On June 12, 2011, E! reality show Ice Loves Coco debuted. The show is mostly about his relationship with his wife, Nicole \"Coco\" Austin.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Ice-T cites writer Iceberg Slim and rapper Schoolly D as influences, with Iceberg Slim's novels guiding his skills as a lyricist. His favorite heavy rock acts are Edgar Winter, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. His hip hop albums helped shape gangsta rap, with music journalists tracing works of artists such as Tupac Shakur, Notorious B.I.G., Eminem and N.W.A to \"6 in the Mornin'\".",
"title": "Style and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "A love of rock led Ice to use guitar in his albums, to provide his songs with edge and power, and to make his raps harder. He drew on the fusion of rock and hip hop by Rick Rubin-produced acts such as Beastie Boys, Run-DMC, and LL Cool J, who featured rock samples in their songs.",
"title": "Style and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Body Count – whose 1992 debut album Ice described as a \"rock album with a rap mentality\" – is described as paving the way for the success of rap rock fusions by acts like Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit. However, Ice-T states that the band's style does not fuse the two genres, and that Body Count is solely a rock band.",
"title": "Style and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "In Hip Hop Connection, Ice listed his favorite rap albums:",
"title": "Style and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "On March 20, 1976, Marrow's high school girlfriend Adrienne gave birth to their daughter LeTesha Marrow, and they continued attending high school while raising her. While filming Breakin' in 1984, he met his second girlfriend Darlene Ortiz, who was at the club where the film was shot. They began a relationship and Ortiz was featured on the covers of Rhyme Pays and Power. Ice-T and Ortiz had a son, Ice Tracy Marrow Jr., on November 23, 1991; Ice Marrow, aka \"Little Ice\", became a backing vocalist with Body Count in time for the recording of their album Carnivore.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Ice-T married swimsuit model Nicole \"Coco\" Austin in January 2002. In celebration of their impending ninth wedding anniversary, the couple renewed their wedding vows on June 4, 2011. As of 2006, they owned a penthouse apartment in North Bergen, New Jersey. In 2012, they were building a five-bedroom house in Edgewater, New Jersey, that was expected to be completed by the end of the year. In 2015, the couple had their first child together, a daughter.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Ice-T has stated on numerous occasions that he is a teetotaler, and lives a straight edge lifestyle. He is a long time practitioner of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and boxing, and is a big fan of the UFC.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "During the popularity of Public Enemy, Ice-T was closely associated with the band and his recordings of the time showed a similar political viewpoint. He was referred to as \"The Soldier of the Highest Degree\" in the booklet for Fear of a Black Planet and mentioned on the track \"Leave This Off Your Fuckin' Charts\". He also collaborated with fellow anti-censorship campaigner Jello Biafra on his album The Iceberg/Freedom of Speech... Just Watch What You Say!.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "On June 5, 2008, Ice-T joked that he would be voting for John McCain in the 2008 American elections, speculating that his past affiliation with Body Count could hurt Barack Obama's chances if he endorsed him, so he would choose instead to ruin McCain's campaign by saying he supported him.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "On September 22, 2022, Ice-T narrated an advertisement for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Ice-T had a feud with LL Cool J in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Apparently, this was instigated by LL's claim to be \"the baddest rapper in the history of rap itself\". Ice-T recorded disses against LL on his 1988 album Power. On the album was the track, \"I'm Your Pusher\", in which a rap music addict declines to buy an LL Cool J record. The album also contains the posse rap track, \"The Syndicate\", which took aim at LL's lyrical ability, claiming that rapping about oneself so frequently was a \"first grade topic\". The song also mocked the song's hook \"I'm Bad\", which identified it as an LL diss specifically. In the book Check the Technique: Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies, Ice-T said that the song \"Girls L.G.B.N.A.F.\" was also intended as a diss to LL Cool J, by making a crude song to contrast with the love songs that LL was making at the time.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "On LL's response, \"To da Break of Dawn\" in 1990, he dissed Kool Moe Dee (whose feud with LL was far more publicized) as well as MC Hammer. He then devoted the third verse of the song to dissing Ice-T, mocking his rap ability (\"take your rhymes around the corner to rap rehab\"), his background (\"before you rapped, you was a downtown car thief\"), and his style (\"a brother with a perm deserves to get burned\"). He also suggested that the success of Power was due to the appearance of Ice-T's girlfriend Darlene on the album cover. Ice-T appeared to have ignored the insults and he had also defended LL Cool J after his arrest in the song \"Freedom of Speech\".",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "In August 2012, Ice-T said that the rivalry was \"never serious\" and that he needed a nemesis to create \"an exciting dispute\".",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "In June 2008, on DJ Cisco's Urban Legend mixtape, Ice-T criticized Soulja Boy (whose name is DeAndre Way) for \"killing hip hop\" and called his song \"Crank That\" \"garbage\" compared to the works of other hip-hop artists such as Rakim, Das EFX, Big Daddy Kane and Ice Cube. One of the comments exchanged was Ice-T telling Way to \"eat a dick\". The two then traded numerous videos back and forth over the Internet. These videos included a cartoon and video of Ice-T dancing on Way's behalf and an apology, but reiteration of his feelings that Way's music \"sucks\", on Ice-T's behalf. Musician Kanye West defended Way saying, \"He came from the 'hood, made his own beats, made up a new saying, new sound and a new dance with one song\".",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Kings of Vice novel series",
"title": "Bibliography"
}
]
| Tracy Lauren Marrow, better known by his stage name Ice-T, is an American rapper and actor. He is active in both hip hop and heavy metal. Ice-T began his career as an underground rapper in the 1980s and was signed to Sire Records in 1987, when he released his debut album Rhyme Pays. The following year, he founded the record label Rhyme $yndicate Records and released another album, Power (1988), which would go platinum. He also released several other albums that went gold, including The Iceberg/Freedom of Speech... Just Watch What You Say! (1989), O.G. Original Gangster (1991) and Home Invasion (1993). Ice-T co-founded the heavy metal band Body Count in 1990, which he introduced on O.G. Original Gangster, on the track titled "Body Count". The band released its self-titled debut album in 1992. Ice-T encountered controversy over his track "Cop Killer", the lyrics of which discussed killing police officers. He asked to be released from his contract with Warner Bros. Records, and his follow-up solo album, Home Invasion, was released through Priority Records. Ice-T released two more albums in the late 1990s and one in the 2000s before focusing on both his acting career and Body Count, who have released seven studio albums to date, the latest being 2020's Carnivore. As an actor, Ice-T played small parts in the films Breakin' (1984) and its sequels, Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo and Rappin', before his major role debut, starring as police detective Scotty Appleton in New Jack City (1991). He received top billing for his role in Surviving the Game (1994) and continued to appear in small roles in TV series and other films throughout the 1990s. Since 2000, he has portrayed NYPD detective/sergeant Odafin Tutuola on the NBC police drama Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, making him the longest-running male series actor in history, according to Deadline. A reality television show titled Ice Loves Coco ran for three seasons (2011–2013) on E!, featuring the home life of Ice-T and his wife Coco Austin. In 2018, he began hosting the true crime documentary In Ice Cold Blood on the Oxygen cable channel, which as of 2020 is in its third season. | 2001-05-10T01:04:26Z | 2023-12-19T05:23:21Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice-T |
14,711 | Iron Age | The Iron Age is the final epoch of the three historical Metal Ages, after the Copper and Bronze Ages. It has also been considered as the final Age of the three-age division starting with prehistory (before recorded history) and progressing to protohistory (before written history). In this usage, it is preceded by the Stone Age (subdivided into the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic) and Bronze Age. These concepts originated in describing Iron Age Europe and the Ancient Near East, but they now include other parts of the Old World.
Although meteoritic iron has been used for millennia in many regions, the beginning of the Iron Age is locally defined around the world by archaeological convention when the production of smelted iron (especially steel tools and weapons) replaces their bronze equivalents in common use.
In Anatolia and the Caucasus, or Southeast Europe, the Iron Age began in the late 2nd millennium BC (c. 1300 BC). In the Ancient Near East, this transition took place simultaneously with the Bronze Age collapse, in the 12th century BC. The technology soon spread throughout the Mediterranean Basin region and to South Asia between the 12th and 11th century BC. Its further spread to Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and Central Europe is somewhat delayed, and Northern Europe was not reached until around the start of the 5th century BC.
The Iron Age in India is framed as beginning with the ironworking Painted Grey Ware culture, dating from the 15th century BC, through to the reign of Ashoka in the 3rd century BC. The use of the term "Iron Age" in the archaeology of South, East, and Southeast Asia is more recent and less common than for Western Eurasia. Africa did not have a universal "Bronze Age", and many areas transitioned directly from stone to iron. Some archaeologists believe that iron metallurgy was developed in sub-Saharan Africa independently from Eurasia and neighbouring parts of Northeast Africa as early as 2000 BC.
The concept of the Iron Age ending with the beginning of the written historiographical record has not stood up well in the modern era, as written language and steel use have developed at different times in different areas across the archaeological record. For instance, in China, written history started before iron smelting arrived, so the term is infrequently used. For the Ancient Near East, the establishment of the Achaemenid Empire c. 550 BC is traditionally and still usually taken as a cut-off date; later dates are considered historical by virtue of the record by Herodotus despite considerable written records from well back into the Bronze Age now being known. In Central and Western Europe, the Roman conquests of the 1st century BC serve as marking for the end of the Iron Age. The Germanic Iron Age of Scandinavia is taken to end c. AD 800, with the beginning of the Viking Age.
The three-age method of Stone, Bronze, and Iron ages was first used for the archaeology of Europe during the first half of the 19th century, and by the latter half of the 19th century, it had been extended to the archaeology of the Ancient Near East. Its name harks back to the mythological "Ages of Man" of Hesiod. As an archaeological era, it was first introduced to Scandinavia by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen in the 1830s. By the 1860s, it was embraced as a useful division of the "earliest history of mankind" in general and began to be applied in Assyriology. The development of the now-conventional periodization in the archaeology of the Ancient Near East was developed in the 1920s to 1930s.
Meteoric iron, a natural iron–nickel alloy, was used by various ancient peoples thousands of years before the Iron Age. The earliest-known meteoric iron artifacts are nine small beads dated to 3200 BC, which were found in burials at Gerzeh, Lower Egypt, having been shaped by careful hammering.
The characteristic of an Iron Age culture is the mass production of tools and weapons made not just of found iron, but from smelted steel alloys with an added carbon content. Only with the capability of the production of carbon steel does ferrous metallurgy result in tools or weapons that are harder and lighter than bronze.
Smelted iron appears sporadically in the archeological record from the middle Bronze Age. Whilst terrestrial iron is naturally abundant, temperatures above 1,250 °C (2,280 °F) are required to smelt it, placing it out of reach of commonly available technology until the end of the second millennium BC. In contrast, the components of bronze—tin with a melting point of 231.9 °C (449.4 °F) and copper with a relatively moderate melting point of 1,085 °C (1,985 °F)—were within the capabilities of Neolithic kilns, which date back to 6000 BC and were able to produce temperatures greater than 900 °C (1,650 °F).
In addition to specially designed furnaces, ancient iron production required the development of complex procedures for the removal of impurities, the regulation of the admixture of carbon, and the invention of hot-working to achieve a useful balance of hardness and strength in steel. The use of steel has also been highly regulated by the economics of the metallurgical advancements.
The earliest tentative evidence for iron-making is a small number of iron fragments with the appropriate amounts of carbon admixture found in the Proto-Hittite layers at Kaman-Kalehöyük in modern-day Turkey, dated to 2200–2000 BC. Akanuma (2008) concludes that "The combination of carbon dating, archaeological context, and archaeometallurgical examination indicates that it is likely that the use of ironware made of steel had already begun in the third millennium BC in Central Anatolia". Souckova-Siegolová (2001) shows that iron implements were made in Central Anatolia in very limited quantities around 1800 BC and were in general use by elites, though not by commoners, during the New Hittite Empire (≈1400–1200 BC).
Similarly, recent archaeological remains of iron-working in the Ganges Valley in India have been tentatively dated to 1800 BC. Tewari (2003) concludes that "knowledge of iron smelting and manufacturing of iron artifacts was well known in the Eastern Vindhyas and iron had been in use in the Central Ganga Plain, at least from the early second millennium BC". By the Middle Bronze Age increasing numbers of smelted iron objects (distinguishable from meteoric iron by the lack of nickel in the product) appeared in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and South Asia.
African sites are turning up dates as early as 2000–1200 BC. However, some recent studies date the inception of iron metallurgy in Africa between 3000 and 2500 BCE, with evidence existing for early iron metallurgy in parts of Nigeria, Cameroon, and Central Africa, from as early as around 2,000 BCE. The Nok culture of Nigeria may have practiced iron smelting from as early as 1000 BCE, while the nearby Djenné-Djenno culture of the Niger Valley in Mali shows evidence of iron production from c. 250 BCE. Iron technology across much of sub-Saharan Africa has an African origin dating to before 2000 BCE. These findings confirm the independent invention of iron smelting in sub-Saharan Africa.
Modern archaeological evidence identifies the start of large-scale global iron production in around 1200 BC, marking the end of the Bronze Age. The Iron Age in Europe is often seen as a part of the Bronze Age collapse in the ancient Near East.
Anthony Snodgrass suggests that a shortage of tin and trade disruptions in the Mediterranean around 1300 BC forced metalworkers to seek an alternative to bronze. Many bronze implements were recycled into weapons during that time, and more widespread use of iron led to improved steel-making technology and lower costs. When tin became readily available again, iron was cheaper, stronger and lighter, and forged iron implements superseded cast bronze tools permanently.
In Central and Western Europe, the Iron Age lasted from c. 800 BC to c. 1 BC, beginning in pre-Roman Iron Age Northern Europe in c. 600 BC, and reaching in Northern Scandinavian Europe around c. 500 BC.
The Iron Age in the Ancient Near East is taken to last from c. 1200 BC (the Bronze Age collapse) to c. 550 BC (or 539 BC), roughly the beginning of historiography with Herodotus, marking the end of the proto-historical period.
In China, because writing was developed first, there is no recognizable prehistoric period characterized by ironworking, and the Bronze Age China transitions almost directly into the Qin dynasty of imperial China. "Iron Age" in the context of China is sometimes used for the transitional period of c. 900 BC to 100 BC during which ferrous metallurgy was present even if not dominant.
The Iron Age in the Ancient Near East is believed to have begun after the discovery of iron smelting and smithing techniques in Anatolia, the Caucasus or Southeast Europe in the late 2nd millennium BC (c. 1300 BC). The earliest bloomery smelting of iron is found at Tell Hammeh, Jordan around 930 BC (determined from C dating).
The Early Iron Age in the Caucasus area is conventionally divided into two periods, Early Iron I, dated to around 1100 BC, and the Early Iron II phase from the tenth to ninth centuries BC. Many of the material culture traditions of the Late Bronze Age continued into the Early Iron Age. Thus, there is a sociocultural continuity during this transitional period.
In Iran, the earliest actual iron artifacts were unknown until the 9th century BC. For Iran, the best studied archaeological site during this time period is Teppe Hasanlu.
In the Mesopotamian states of Sumer, Akkad and Assyria, the initial use of iron reaches far back, to perhaps 3000 BC. One of the earliest smelted iron artifacts known is a dagger with an iron blade found in a Hattic tomb in Anatolia, dating from 2500 BC. The widespread use of iron weapons which replaced bronze weapons rapidly disseminated throughout the Near East (North Africa, southwest Asia) by the beginning of the 1st millennium BC.
The development of iron smelting was once attributed to the Hittites of Anatolia during the Late Bronze Age. As part of the Late Bronze Age-Early Iron Age, the Bronze Age collapse saw the slow, comparatively continuous spread of iron-working technology in the region. It was long held that the success of the Hittite Empire during the Late Bronze Age had been based on the advantages entailed by the "monopoly" on ironworking at the time. Accordingly, the invading Sea Peoples would have been responsible for spreading the knowledge through that region. The view of such a "Hittite monopoly" has come under scrutiny and no longer represents a scholarly consensus. While there are some iron objects from Bronze Age Anatolia, the number is comparable to iron objects found in Egypt and other places of the same time period; and only a small number of these objects are weapons.
Dates are approximate; consult particular article for details.
Iron metal is singularly scarce in collections of Egyptian antiquities. Bronze remained the primary material there until the conquest by the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 671 BC. The explanation of this would seem to be that the relics are in most cases the paraphernalia of tombs, the funeral vessels and vases, and iron being considered an impure metal by the ancient Egyptians it was never used in their manufacture of these or for any religious purposes. It was attributed to Seth, the spirit of evil who according to Egyptian tradition governed the central deserts of Africa. In the Black Pyramid of Abusir, dating before 2000 BC, Gaston Maspero found some pieces of iron. In the funeral text of Pepi I, the metal is mentioned. A sword bearing the name of pharaoh Merneptah as well as a battle axe with an iron blade and gold-decorated bronze shaft were both found in the excavation of Ugarit. A dagger with an iron blade found in Tutankhamun's tomb, 13th century BC, was recently examined and found to be of meteoric origin.
In Europe, the Iron Age is the last stage of prehistoric Europe and the first of the protohistoric periods, which initially means descriptions of a particular area by Greek and Roman writers. For much of Europe, the period came to an abrupt local end after conquest by the Romans, though ironworking remained the dominant technology until recent times. Elsewhere it may last until the early centuries AD, and either Christianization or a new conquest in the Migration Period.
Iron working was introduced to Europe in the late 11th century BC, probably from the Caucasus, and slowly spread northwards and westwards over the succeeding 500 years. The Iron Age did not start when iron first appeared in Europe but it began to replace bronze in the preparation of tools and weapons. It did not happen at the same time all around Europe; local cultural developments played a role in the transition to the Iron Age. For example, the Iron Age of Prehistoric Ireland begins around 500 BC (when the Greek Iron Age had already ended) and finishes around 400 AD. The widespread use of the technology of iron was implemented in Europe simultaneously with Asia. The prehistoric Iron Age in Central Europe divided into two periods based on historical events – Hallstatt culture (early Iron Age) and La Tène (late Iron Age) cultures. Material cultures of Hallstatt and La Tène consist of 4 phases (A, B, C, D phases).
The Iron Age in Europe is characterized by an elaboration of designs in weapons, implements, and utensils. These are no longer cast but hammered into shape, and decoration is elaborate and curvilinear rather than simple rectilinear; the forms and character of the ornamentation of the northern European weapons resemble in some respects Roman arms, while in other respects they are peculiar and evidently representative of northern art.
Citânia de Briteiros, located in Guimarães, Portugal, is one of the examples of archaeological sites of the Iron Age. This settlement (fortified villages) covered an area of 3.8 hectares (9.4 acres), and served as a Celtiberian stronghold against Roman invasions. İt dates more than 2500 years back. The site was researched by Francisco Martins Sarmento starting from 1874. A number of amphoras (containers usually for wine or olive oil), coins, fragments of pottery, weapons, pieces of jewelry, as well as ruins of a bath and its pedra formosa (lit. 'handsome stone') revealed here.
The Iron Age in Central Asia began when iron objects appear among the Indo-European Saka in present-day Xinjiang (China) between the 10th century BC and the 7th century BC, such as those found at the cemetery site of Chawuhukou.
The Pazyryk culture is an Iron Age archaeological culture (c. 6th to 3rd centuries BC) identified by excavated artifacts and mummified humans found in the Siberian permafrost in the Altay Mountains.
Dates are approximate; consult particular article for details.
In China, Chinese bronze inscriptions are found around 1200 BC, preceding the development of iron metallurgy, which was known by the 9th century BC. Therefore, in China prehistory had given way to history periodized by ruling dynasties by the start of iron use, so "Iron Age" is not typically used as to describe a period in Chinese history. Iron metallurgy reached the Yangtse Valley toward the end of the 6th century BC. The few objects were found at Changsha and Nanjing. The mortuary evidence suggests that the initial use of iron in Lingnan belongs to the mid-to-late Warring States period (from about 350 BC). Important non-precious husi style metal finds include Iron tools found at the tomb at Guwei-cun of the 4th century BC.
The techniques used in Lingnan are a combination of bivalve moulds of distinct southern tradition and the incorporation of piece mould technology from the Zhongyuan. The products of the combination of these two periods are bells, vessels, weapons and ornaments, and the sophisticated cast.
An Iron Age culture of the Tibetan Plateau has tentatively been associated with the Zhang Zhung culture described in early Tibetan writings.
Iron objects were introduced to the Korean peninsula through trade with chiefdoms and state-level societies in the Yellow Sea area in the 4th century BC, just at the end of the Warring States Period but before the Western Han Dynasty began. Yoon proposes that iron was first introduced to chiefdoms located along North Korean river valleys that flow into the Yellow Sea such as the Cheongcheon and Taedong Rivers. Iron production quickly followed in the 2nd century BC, and iron implements came to be used by farmers by the 1st century in southern Korea. The earliest known cast-iron axes in southern Korea are found in the Geum River basin. The time that iron production begins is the same time that complex chiefdoms of Proto-historic Korea emerged. The complex chiefdoms were the precursors of early states such as Silla, Baekje, Goguryeo, and Gaya Iron ingots were an important mortuary item and indicated the wealth or prestige of the deceased in this period.
In Japan, iron items, such as tools, weapons, and decorative objects, are postulated to have entered Japan during the late Yayoi period (c. 300 BC – 300 AD) or the succeeding Kofun period (c. 250–538 AD), most likely through contacts with the Korean Peninsula and China.
Distinguishing characteristics of the Yayoi period include the appearance of new pottery styles and the start of intensive rice agriculture in paddy fields. Yayoi culture flourished in a geographic area from southern Kyūshū to northern Honshū. The Kofun and the subsequent Asuka periods are sometimes referred to collectively as the Yamato period; The word kofun is Japanese for the type of burial mounds dating from that era.
Dates are approximate; consult particular article for details.
The earliest evidence of iron smelting predates the emergence of the Iron Age proper by several centuries. Iron was being used in Mundigak to manufacture some items in the 3rd millennium BC such as a small copper/bronze bell with an iron clapper, a copper/bronze rod with two iron decorative buttons, and a copper/bronze mirror handle with a decorative iron button. Artefacts including small knives and blades have been discovered in the Indian state of Telangana which have been dated between 2,400 BC and 1800 BC. The history of metallurgy in the Indian subcontinent began prior to the 3rd millennium BC. Archaeological sites in India, such as Malhar, Dadupur, Raja Nala Ka Tila, Lahuradewa, Kosambi and Jhusi, Allahabad in present-day Uttar Pradesh show iron implements in the period 1800–1200 BC. As the evidence from the sites Raja Nala ka tila, Malhar suggest the use of Iron in c.1800/1700 BC. The extensive use of iron smelting is from Malhar and its surrounding area. This site is assumed as the center for smelted bloomer iron to this area due to its location in the Karamnasa River and Ganga River. This site shows agricultural technology as iron implements sickles, nails, clamps, spearheads, etc, by at least c.1500 BC. Archaeological excavations in Hyderabad show an Iron Age burial site.
The beginning of the 1st millennium BC saw extensive developments in iron metallurgy in India. Technological advancement and mastery of iron metallurgy were achieved during this period of peaceful settlements. One ironworking centre in East India has been dated to the first millennium BC. In Southern India (present-day Mysore) iron appeared as early as 12th to 11th centuries BC; these developments were too early for any significant close contact with the northwest of the country. The Indian Upanishads mention metallurgy. and the Indian Mauryan period saw advances in metallurgy. As early as 300 BC, certainly by 200 AD, high-quality steel was produced in southern India, by what would later be called the crucible technique. In this system, high-purity wrought iron, charcoal, and glass were mixed in a crucible and heated until the iron melted and absorbed the carbon.
The protohistoric Early Iron Age in Sri Lanka lasted from 1000 BC to 600 BC. Radiocarbon evidence has been collected from Anuradhapura and Aligala shelter in Sigiriya. The Anuradhapura settlement is recorded to extend 10 ha (25 acres) by 800 BC and grew to 50 ha (120 acres) by 700–600 BC to become a town. The skeletal remains of an Early Iron Age chief were excavated in Anaikoddai, Jaffna. The name "Ko Veta" is engraved in Brahmi script on a seal buried with the skeleton and is assigned by the excavators to the 3rd century BC. Ko, meaning "King" in Tamil, is comparable to such names as Ko Atan and Ko Putivira occurring in contemporary Brahmi inscriptions in south India. It is also speculated that Early Iron Age sites may exist in Kandarodai, Matota, Pilapitiya and Tissamaharama.
The earliest undisputed deciphered epigraphy found in the Indian subcontinent are the Edicts of Ashoka of the 3rd century BCE, in the Brahmi script. Several inscriptions were thought to be pre-Ashokan by earlier scholars; these include the Piprahwa relic casket inscription, the Badli pillar inscription, the Bhattiprolu relic casket inscription, the Sohgaura copper plate inscription, the Mahasthangarh Brahmi inscription, the Eran coin legend, the Taxila coin legends, and the inscription on the silver coins of Sophytes. However, more recent scholars have dated them to later periods.
Dates are approximate; consult particular article for details.
Archaeology in Thailand at sites Ban Don Ta Phet and Khao Sam Kaeo yielding metallic, stone, and glass artifacts stylistically associated with the Indian subcontinent suggest Indianization of Southeast Asia beginning in the 4th to 2nd centuries BC during the late Iron Age.
In Philippines and Vietnam, the Sa Huynh culture showed evidence of an extensive trade network. Sa Huynh beads were made from glass, carnelian, agate, olivine, zircon, gold and garnet; most of these materials were not local to the region and were most likely imported. Han-Dynasty-style bronze mirrors were also found in Sa Huynh sites. Conversely, Sa Huynh produced ear ornaments have been found in archaeological sites in Central Thailand, as well as the Orchid Island.
Early evidence for iron technology in Sub-Saharan Africa can be found at sites such as KM2 and KM3 in northwest Tanzania and parts of Nigeria and the Central African Republic. Nubia was one of the relatively few places in Africa to have a sustained Bronze Age along with Egypt and much of the rest of North Africa.
Archaeometallurgical scientific knowledge and technological development originated in numerous centers of Africa; the centers of origin were located in West Africa, Central Africa, and East Africa; consequently, as these origin centers are located within inner Africa, these archaeometallurgical developments are thus native African technologies. Iron metallurgical development occurred 2631–2458 BCE at Lejja, in Nigeria, 2136–1921 BCE at Obui, in Central Africa Republic, 1895–1370 BCE at Tchire Ouma 147, in Niger, and 1297–1051 BCE at Dekpassanware, in Togo.
Very early copper and bronze working sites in Niger may date to as early as 1500 BC. There is also evidence of iron metallurgy in Termit, Niger from around this period. Nubia was a major manufacturer and exporter of iron after the expulsion of the Nubian dynasty from Egypt by the Assyrians in the 7th century BC.
Though there is some uncertainty, some archaeologists believe that iron metallurgy was developed independently in sub-Saharan West Africa, separately from Eurasia and neighboring parts of North and Northeast Africa.
Archaeological sites containing iron smelting furnaces and slag have also been excavated at sites in the Nsukka region of southeast Nigeria in what is now Igboland: dating to 2000 BC at the site of Lejja (Eze-Uzomaka 2009) and to 750 BC and at the site of Opi (Holl 2009). The site of Gbabiri (in the Central African Republic) has yielded evidence of iron metallurgy, from a reduction furnace and blacksmith workshop; with earliest dates of 896–773 BC and 907–796 BC, respectively. Similarly, smelting in bloomery-type furnaces appear in the Nok culture of central Nigeria by about 550 BC and possibly a few centuries earlier.
Iron and copper working in Sub-Saharan Africa spread south and east from Central Africa in conjunction with the Bantu expansion, from the Cameroon region to the African Great Lakes in the 3rd century BC, reaching the Cape around 400 AD. However, iron working may have been practiced in central Africa as early as the 3rd millennium BC. Instances of carbon steel based on complex preheating principles were found to be in production around the 1st century CE in northwest Tanzania.
Dates are approximate, consult particular article for details | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Iron Age is the final epoch of the three historical Metal Ages, after the Copper and Bronze Ages. It has also been considered as the final Age of the three-age division starting with prehistory (before recorded history) and progressing to protohistory (before written history). In this usage, it is preceded by the Stone Age (subdivided into the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic) and Bronze Age. These concepts originated in describing Iron Age Europe and the Ancient Near East, but they now include other parts of the Old World.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Although meteoritic iron has been used for millennia in many regions, the beginning of the Iron Age is locally defined around the world by archaeological convention when the production of smelted iron (especially steel tools and weapons) replaces their bronze equivalents in common use.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In Anatolia and the Caucasus, or Southeast Europe, the Iron Age began in the late 2nd millennium BC (c. 1300 BC). In the Ancient Near East, this transition took place simultaneously with the Bronze Age collapse, in the 12th century BC. The technology soon spread throughout the Mediterranean Basin region and to South Asia between the 12th and 11th century BC. Its further spread to Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and Central Europe is somewhat delayed, and Northern Europe was not reached until around the start of the 5th century BC.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The Iron Age in India is framed as beginning with the ironworking Painted Grey Ware culture, dating from the 15th century BC, through to the reign of Ashoka in the 3rd century BC. The use of the term \"Iron Age\" in the archaeology of South, East, and Southeast Asia is more recent and less common than for Western Eurasia. Africa did not have a universal \"Bronze Age\", and many areas transitioned directly from stone to iron. Some archaeologists believe that iron metallurgy was developed in sub-Saharan Africa independently from Eurasia and neighbouring parts of Northeast Africa as early as 2000 BC.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The concept of the Iron Age ending with the beginning of the written historiographical record has not stood up well in the modern era, as written language and steel use have developed at different times in different areas across the archaeological record. For instance, in China, written history started before iron smelting arrived, so the term is infrequently used. For the Ancient Near East, the establishment of the Achaemenid Empire c. 550 BC is traditionally and still usually taken as a cut-off date; later dates are considered historical by virtue of the record by Herodotus despite considerable written records from well back into the Bronze Age now being known. In Central and Western Europe, the Roman conquests of the 1st century BC serve as marking for the end of the Iron Age. The Germanic Iron Age of Scandinavia is taken to end c. AD 800, with the beginning of the Viking Age.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The three-age method of Stone, Bronze, and Iron ages was first used for the archaeology of Europe during the first half of the 19th century, and by the latter half of the 19th century, it had been extended to the archaeology of the Ancient Near East. Its name harks back to the mythological \"Ages of Man\" of Hesiod. As an archaeological era, it was first introduced to Scandinavia by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen in the 1830s. By the 1860s, it was embraced as a useful division of the \"earliest history of mankind\" in general and began to be applied in Assyriology. The development of the now-conventional periodization in the archaeology of the Ancient Near East was developed in the 1920s to 1930s.",
"title": "History of the concept"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Meteoric iron, a natural iron–nickel alloy, was used by various ancient peoples thousands of years before the Iron Age. The earliest-known meteoric iron artifacts are nine small beads dated to 3200 BC, which were found in burials at Gerzeh, Lower Egypt, having been shaped by careful hammering.",
"title": "Definition of \"iron\""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The characteristic of an Iron Age culture is the mass production of tools and weapons made not just of found iron, but from smelted steel alloys with an added carbon content. Only with the capability of the production of carbon steel does ferrous metallurgy result in tools or weapons that are harder and lighter than bronze.",
"title": "Definition of \"iron\""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Smelted iron appears sporadically in the archeological record from the middle Bronze Age. Whilst terrestrial iron is naturally abundant, temperatures above 1,250 °C (2,280 °F) are required to smelt it, placing it out of reach of commonly available technology until the end of the second millennium BC. In contrast, the components of bronze—tin with a melting point of 231.9 °C (449.4 °F) and copper with a relatively moderate melting point of 1,085 °C (1,985 °F)—were within the capabilities of Neolithic kilns, which date back to 6000 BC and were able to produce temperatures greater than 900 °C (1,650 °F).",
"title": "Definition of \"iron\""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In addition to specially designed furnaces, ancient iron production required the development of complex procedures for the removal of impurities, the regulation of the admixture of carbon, and the invention of hot-working to achieve a useful balance of hardness and strength in steel. The use of steel has also been highly regulated by the economics of the metallurgical advancements.",
"title": "Definition of \"iron\""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The earliest tentative evidence for iron-making is a small number of iron fragments with the appropriate amounts of carbon admixture found in the Proto-Hittite layers at Kaman-Kalehöyük in modern-day Turkey, dated to 2200–2000 BC. Akanuma (2008) concludes that \"The combination of carbon dating, archaeological context, and archaeometallurgical examination indicates that it is likely that the use of ironware made of steel had already begun in the third millennium BC in Central Anatolia\". Souckova-Siegolová (2001) shows that iron implements were made in Central Anatolia in very limited quantities around 1800 BC and were in general use by elites, though not by commoners, during the New Hittite Empire (≈1400–1200 BC).",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Similarly, recent archaeological remains of iron-working in the Ganges Valley in India have been tentatively dated to 1800 BC. Tewari (2003) concludes that \"knowledge of iron smelting and manufacturing of iron artifacts was well known in the Eastern Vindhyas and iron had been in use in the Central Ganga Plain, at least from the early second millennium BC\". By the Middle Bronze Age increasing numbers of smelted iron objects (distinguishable from meteoric iron by the lack of nickel in the product) appeared in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and South Asia.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "African sites are turning up dates as early as 2000–1200 BC. However, some recent studies date the inception of iron metallurgy in Africa between 3000 and 2500 BCE, with evidence existing for early iron metallurgy in parts of Nigeria, Cameroon, and Central Africa, from as early as around 2,000 BCE. The Nok culture of Nigeria may have practiced iron smelting from as early as 1000 BCE, while the nearby Djenné-Djenno culture of the Niger Valley in Mali shows evidence of iron production from c. 250 BCE. Iron technology across much of sub-Saharan Africa has an African origin dating to before 2000 BCE. These findings confirm the independent invention of iron smelting in sub-Saharan Africa.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Modern archaeological evidence identifies the start of large-scale global iron production in around 1200 BC, marking the end of the Bronze Age. The Iron Age in Europe is often seen as a part of the Bronze Age collapse in the ancient Near East.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Anthony Snodgrass suggests that a shortage of tin and trade disruptions in the Mediterranean around 1300 BC forced metalworkers to seek an alternative to bronze. Many bronze implements were recycled into weapons during that time, and more widespread use of iron led to improved steel-making technology and lower costs. When tin became readily available again, iron was cheaper, stronger and lighter, and forged iron implements superseded cast bronze tools permanently.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In Central and Western Europe, the Iron Age lasted from c. 800 BC to c. 1 BC, beginning in pre-Roman Iron Age Northern Europe in c. 600 BC, and reaching in Northern Scandinavian Europe around c. 500 BC.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The Iron Age in the Ancient Near East is taken to last from c. 1200 BC (the Bronze Age collapse) to c. 550 BC (or 539 BC), roughly the beginning of historiography with Herodotus, marking the end of the proto-historical period.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In China, because writing was developed first, there is no recognizable prehistoric period characterized by ironworking, and the Bronze Age China transitions almost directly into the Qin dynasty of imperial China. \"Iron Age\" in the context of China is sometimes used for the transitional period of c. 900 BC to 100 BC during which ferrous metallurgy was present even if not dominant.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The Iron Age in the Ancient Near East is believed to have begun after the discovery of iron smelting and smithing techniques in Anatolia, the Caucasus or Southeast Europe in the late 2nd millennium BC (c. 1300 BC). The earliest bloomery smelting of iron is found at Tell Hammeh, Jordan around 930 BC (determined from C dating).",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The Early Iron Age in the Caucasus area is conventionally divided into two periods, Early Iron I, dated to around 1100 BC, and the Early Iron II phase from the tenth to ninth centuries BC. Many of the material culture traditions of the Late Bronze Age continued into the Early Iron Age. Thus, there is a sociocultural continuity during this transitional period.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In Iran, the earliest actual iron artifacts were unknown until the 9th century BC. For Iran, the best studied archaeological site during this time period is Teppe Hasanlu.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In the Mesopotamian states of Sumer, Akkad and Assyria, the initial use of iron reaches far back, to perhaps 3000 BC. One of the earliest smelted iron artifacts known is a dagger with an iron blade found in a Hattic tomb in Anatolia, dating from 2500 BC. The widespread use of iron weapons which replaced bronze weapons rapidly disseminated throughout the Near East (North Africa, southwest Asia) by the beginning of the 1st millennium BC.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The development of iron smelting was once attributed to the Hittites of Anatolia during the Late Bronze Age. As part of the Late Bronze Age-Early Iron Age, the Bronze Age collapse saw the slow, comparatively continuous spread of iron-working technology in the region. It was long held that the success of the Hittite Empire during the Late Bronze Age had been based on the advantages entailed by the \"monopoly\" on ironworking at the time. Accordingly, the invading Sea Peoples would have been responsible for spreading the knowledge through that region. The view of such a \"Hittite monopoly\" has come under scrutiny and no longer represents a scholarly consensus. While there are some iron objects from Bronze Age Anatolia, the number is comparable to iron objects found in Egypt and other places of the same time period; and only a small number of these objects are weapons.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Dates are approximate; consult particular article for details.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Iron metal is singularly scarce in collections of Egyptian antiquities. Bronze remained the primary material there until the conquest by the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 671 BC. The explanation of this would seem to be that the relics are in most cases the paraphernalia of tombs, the funeral vessels and vases, and iron being considered an impure metal by the ancient Egyptians it was never used in their manufacture of these or for any religious purposes. It was attributed to Seth, the spirit of evil who according to Egyptian tradition governed the central deserts of Africa. In the Black Pyramid of Abusir, dating before 2000 BC, Gaston Maspero found some pieces of iron. In the funeral text of Pepi I, the metal is mentioned. A sword bearing the name of pharaoh Merneptah as well as a battle axe with an iron blade and gold-decorated bronze shaft were both found in the excavation of Ugarit. A dagger with an iron blade found in Tutankhamun's tomb, 13th century BC, was recently examined and found to be of meteoric origin.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In Europe, the Iron Age is the last stage of prehistoric Europe and the first of the protohistoric periods, which initially means descriptions of a particular area by Greek and Roman writers. For much of Europe, the period came to an abrupt local end after conquest by the Romans, though ironworking remained the dominant technology until recent times. Elsewhere it may last until the early centuries AD, and either Christianization or a new conquest in the Migration Period.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Iron working was introduced to Europe in the late 11th century BC, probably from the Caucasus, and slowly spread northwards and westwards over the succeeding 500 years. The Iron Age did not start when iron first appeared in Europe but it began to replace bronze in the preparation of tools and weapons. It did not happen at the same time all around Europe; local cultural developments played a role in the transition to the Iron Age. For example, the Iron Age of Prehistoric Ireland begins around 500 BC (when the Greek Iron Age had already ended) and finishes around 400 AD. The widespread use of the technology of iron was implemented in Europe simultaneously with Asia. The prehistoric Iron Age in Central Europe divided into two periods based on historical events – Hallstatt culture (early Iron Age) and La Tène (late Iron Age) cultures. Material cultures of Hallstatt and La Tène consist of 4 phases (A, B, C, D phases).",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The Iron Age in Europe is characterized by an elaboration of designs in weapons, implements, and utensils. These are no longer cast but hammered into shape, and decoration is elaborate and curvilinear rather than simple rectilinear; the forms and character of the ornamentation of the northern European weapons resemble in some respects Roman arms, while in other respects they are peculiar and evidently representative of northern art.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Citânia de Briteiros, located in Guimarães, Portugal, is one of the examples of archaeological sites of the Iron Age. This settlement (fortified villages) covered an area of 3.8 hectares (9.4 acres), and served as a Celtiberian stronghold against Roman invasions. İt dates more than 2500 years back. The site was researched by Francisco Martins Sarmento starting from 1874. A number of amphoras (containers usually for wine or olive oil), coins, fragments of pottery, weapons, pieces of jewelry, as well as ruins of a bath and its pedra formosa (lit. 'handsome stone') revealed here.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The Iron Age in Central Asia began when iron objects appear among the Indo-European Saka in present-day Xinjiang (China) between the 10th century BC and the 7th century BC, such as those found at the cemetery site of Chawuhukou.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The Pazyryk culture is an Iron Age archaeological culture (c. 6th to 3rd centuries BC) identified by excavated artifacts and mummified humans found in the Siberian permafrost in the Altay Mountains.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Dates are approximate; consult particular article for details.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In China, Chinese bronze inscriptions are found around 1200 BC, preceding the development of iron metallurgy, which was known by the 9th century BC. Therefore, in China prehistory had given way to history periodized by ruling dynasties by the start of iron use, so \"Iron Age\" is not typically used as to describe a period in Chinese history. Iron metallurgy reached the Yangtse Valley toward the end of the 6th century BC. The few objects were found at Changsha and Nanjing. The mortuary evidence suggests that the initial use of iron in Lingnan belongs to the mid-to-late Warring States period (from about 350 BC). Important non-precious husi style metal finds include Iron tools found at the tomb at Guwei-cun of the 4th century BC.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The techniques used in Lingnan are a combination of bivalve moulds of distinct southern tradition and the incorporation of piece mould technology from the Zhongyuan. The products of the combination of these two periods are bells, vessels, weapons and ornaments, and the sophisticated cast.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "An Iron Age culture of the Tibetan Plateau has tentatively been associated with the Zhang Zhung culture described in early Tibetan writings.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Iron objects were introduced to the Korean peninsula through trade with chiefdoms and state-level societies in the Yellow Sea area in the 4th century BC, just at the end of the Warring States Period but before the Western Han Dynasty began. Yoon proposes that iron was first introduced to chiefdoms located along North Korean river valleys that flow into the Yellow Sea such as the Cheongcheon and Taedong Rivers. Iron production quickly followed in the 2nd century BC, and iron implements came to be used by farmers by the 1st century in southern Korea. The earliest known cast-iron axes in southern Korea are found in the Geum River basin. The time that iron production begins is the same time that complex chiefdoms of Proto-historic Korea emerged. The complex chiefdoms were the precursors of early states such as Silla, Baekje, Goguryeo, and Gaya Iron ingots were an important mortuary item and indicated the wealth or prestige of the deceased in this period.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In Japan, iron items, such as tools, weapons, and decorative objects, are postulated to have entered Japan during the late Yayoi period (c. 300 BC – 300 AD) or the succeeding Kofun period (c. 250–538 AD), most likely through contacts with the Korean Peninsula and China.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Distinguishing characteristics of the Yayoi period include the appearance of new pottery styles and the start of intensive rice agriculture in paddy fields. Yayoi culture flourished in a geographic area from southern Kyūshū to northern Honshū. The Kofun and the subsequent Asuka periods are sometimes referred to collectively as the Yamato period; The word kofun is Japanese for the type of burial mounds dating from that era.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Dates are approximate; consult particular article for details.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The earliest evidence of iron smelting predates the emergence of the Iron Age proper by several centuries. Iron was being used in Mundigak to manufacture some items in the 3rd millennium BC such as a small copper/bronze bell with an iron clapper, a copper/bronze rod with two iron decorative buttons, and a copper/bronze mirror handle with a decorative iron button. Artefacts including small knives and blades have been discovered in the Indian state of Telangana which have been dated between 2,400 BC and 1800 BC. The history of metallurgy in the Indian subcontinent began prior to the 3rd millennium BC. Archaeological sites in India, such as Malhar, Dadupur, Raja Nala Ka Tila, Lahuradewa, Kosambi and Jhusi, Allahabad in present-day Uttar Pradesh show iron implements in the period 1800–1200 BC. As the evidence from the sites Raja Nala ka tila, Malhar suggest the use of Iron in c.1800/1700 BC. The extensive use of iron smelting is from Malhar and its surrounding area. This site is assumed as the center for smelted bloomer iron to this area due to its location in the Karamnasa River and Ganga River. This site shows agricultural technology as iron implements sickles, nails, clamps, spearheads, etc, by at least c.1500 BC. Archaeological excavations in Hyderabad show an Iron Age burial site.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The beginning of the 1st millennium BC saw extensive developments in iron metallurgy in India. Technological advancement and mastery of iron metallurgy were achieved during this period of peaceful settlements. One ironworking centre in East India has been dated to the first millennium BC. In Southern India (present-day Mysore) iron appeared as early as 12th to 11th centuries BC; these developments were too early for any significant close contact with the northwest of the country. The Indian Upanishads mention metallurgy. and the Indian Mauryan period saw advances in metallurgy. As early as 300 BC, certainly by 200 AD, high-quality steel was produced in southern India, by what would later be called the crucible technique. In this system, high-purity wrought iron, charcoal, and glass were mixed in a crucible and heated until the iron melted and absorbed the carbon.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The protohistoric Early Iron Age in Sri Lanka lasted from 1000 BC to 600 BC. Radiocarbon evidence has been collected from Anuradhapura and Aligala shelter in Sigiriya. The Anuradhapura settlement is recorded to extend 10 ha (25 acres) by 800 BC and grew to 50 ha (120 acres) by 700–600 BC to become a town. The skeletal remains of an Early Iron Age chief were excavated in Anaikoddai, Jaffna. The name \"Ko Veta\" is engraved in Brahmi script on a seal buried with the skeleton and is assigned by the excavators to the 3rd century BC. Ko, meaning \"King\" in Tamil, is comparable to such names as Ko Atan and Ko Putivira occurring in contemporary Brahmi inscriptions in south India. It is also speculated that Early Iron Age sites may exist in Kandarodai, Matota, Pilapitiya and Tissamaharama.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The earliest undisputed deciphered epigraphy found in the Indian subcontinent are the Edicts of Ashoka of the 3rd century BCE, in the Brahmi script. Several inscriptions were thought to be pre-Ashokan by earlier scholars; these include the Piprahwa relic casket inscription, the Badli pillar inscription, the Bhattiprolu relic casket inscription, the Sohgaura copper plate inscription, the Mahasthangarh Brahmi inscription, the Eran coin legend, the Taxila coin legends, and the inscription on the silver coins of Sophytes. However, more recent scholars have dated them to later periods.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Dates are approximate; consult particular article for details.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Archaeology in Thailand at sites Ban Don Ta Phet and Khao Sam Kaeo yielding metallic, stone, and glass artifacts stylistically associated with the Indian subcontinent suggest Indianization of Southeast Asia beginning in the 4th to 2nd centuries BC during the late Iron Age.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In Philippines and Vietnam, the Sa Huynh culture showed evidence of an extensive trade network. Sa Huynh beads were made from glass, carnelian, agate, olivine, zircon, gold and garnet; most of these materials were not local to the region and were most likely imported. Han-Dynasty-style bronze mirrors were also found in Sa Huynh sites. Conversely, Sa Huynh produced ear ornaments have been found in archaeological sites in Central Thailand, as well as the Orchid Island.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Early evidence for iron technology in Sub-Saharan Africa can be found at sites such as KM2 and KM3 in northwest Tanzania and parts of Nigeria and the Central African Republic. Nubia was one of the relatively few places in Africa to have a sustained Bronze Age along with Egypt and much of the rest of North Africa.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Archaeometallurgical scientific knowledge and technological development originated in numerous centers of Africa; the centers of origin were located in West Africa, Central Africa, and East Africa; consequently, as these origin centers are located within inner Africa, these archaeometallurgical developments are thus native African technologies. Iron metallurgical development occurred 2631–2458 BCE at Lejja, in Nigeria, 2136–1921 BCE at Obui, in Central Africa Republic, 1895–1370 BCE at Tchire Ouma 147, in Niger, and 1297–1051 BCE at Dekpassanware, in Togo.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Very early copper and bronze working sites in Niger may date to as early as 1500 BC. There is also evidence of iron metallurgy in Termit, Niger from around this period. Nubia was a major manufacturer and exporter of iron after the expulsion of the Nubian dynasty from Egypt by the Assyrians in the 7th century BC.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Though there is some uncertainty, some archaeologists believe that iron metallurgy was developed independently in sub-Saharan West Africa, separately from Eurasia and neighboring parts of North and Northeast Africa.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Archaeological sites containing iron smelting furnaces and slag have also been excavated at sites in the Nsukka region of southeast Nigeria in what is now Igboland: dating to 2000 BC at the site of Lejja (Eze-Uzomaka 2009) and to 750 BC and at the site of Opi (Holl 2009). The site of Gbabiri (in the Central African Republic) has yielded evidence of iron metallurgy, from a reduction furnace and blacksmith workshop; with earliest dates of 896–773 BC and 907–796 BC, respectively. Similarly, smelting in bloomery-type furnaces appear in the Nok culture of central Nigeria by about 550 BC and possibly a few centuries earlier.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Iron and copper working in Sub-Saharan Africa spread south and east from Central Africa in conjunction with the Bantu expansion, from the Cameroon region to the African Great Lakes in the 3rd century BC, reaching the Cape around 400 AD. However, iron working may have been practiced in central Africa as early as the 3rd millennium BC. Instances of carbon steel based on complex preheating principles were found to be in production around the 1st century CE in northwest Tanzania.",
"title": "Chronology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Dates are approximate, consult particular article for details",
"title": "Chronology"
}
]
| The Iron Age is the final epoch of the three historical Metal Ages, after the Copper and Bronze Ages. It has also been considered as the final Age of the three-age division starting with prehistory and progressing to protohistory. In this usage, it is preceded by the Stone Age and Bronze Age. These concepts originated in describing Iron Age Europe and the Ancient Near East, but they now include other parts of the Old World. Although meteoritic iron has been used for millennia in many regions, the beginning of the Iron Age is locally defined around the world by archaeological convention when the production of smelted iron replaces their bronze equivalents in common use. In Anatolia and the Caucasus, or Southeast Europe, the Iron Age began in the late 2nd millennium BC. In the Ancient Near East, this transition took place simultaneously with the Bronze Age collapse, in the 12th century BC. The technology soon spread throughout the Mediterranean Basin region and to South Asia between the 12th and 11th century BC. Its further spread to Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and Central Europe is somewhat delayed, and Northern Europe was not reached until around the start of the 5th century BC. The Iron Age in India is framed as beginning with the ironworking Painted Grey Ware culture, dating from the 15th century BC, through to the reign of Ashoka in the 3rd century BC. The use of the term "Iron Age" in the archaeology of South, East, and Southeast Asia is more recent and less common than for Western Eurasia. Africa did not have a universal "Bronze Age", and many areas transitioned directly from stone to iron. Some archaeologists believe that iron metallurgy was developed in sub-Saharan Africa independently from Eurasia and neighbouring parts of Northeast Africa as early as 2000 BC. The concept of the Iron Age ending with the beginning of the written historiographical record has not stood up well in the modern era, as written language and steel use have developed at different times in different areas across the archaeological record. For instance, in China, written history started before iron smelting arrived, so the term is infrequently used. For the Ancient Near East, the establishment of the Achaemenid Empire c. 550 BC is traditionally and still usually taken as a cut-off date; later dates are considered historical by virtue of the record by Herodotus despite considerable written records from well back into the Bronze Age now being known. In Central and Western Europe, the Roman conquests of the 1st century BC serve as marking for the end of the Iron Age. The Germanic Iron Age of Scandinavia is taken to end c. AD 800, with the beginning of the Viking Age. | 2001-11-16T17:34:33Z | 2023-12-31T00:06:09Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Age |
14,712 | EFnet | EFnet or Eris-Free network is a major Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network, with more than 35,000 users. It is the modern-day descendant of the original IRC network.
Initially, most IRC servers formed a single IRC network, to which new servers could join without restriction, but this was soon abused by people who set up servers to sabotage other users, channels, or servers. Restriction grew and, in August 1990, eris.Berkeley.EDU was the last server indiscriminately allowing other servers to join it, Eris being the Greek goddess of strife and discord.
A group of operators, with the support of Jarkko Oikarinen, introduced a new "Q-line" into their server configurations, to "quarantine" themselves away from eris by disconnecting from any subset of the IRC network as soon as they saw eris there.
For a few days, the entire IRC network suffered frequent netsplits, but eventually the majority of servers added the Q-line and effectively created a new separate IRC net called EFnet (Eris-Free Network); the remaining servers which stayed connected to eris (and thus were no longer able to connect to EFnet servers) were called A-net (Anarchy Network). A-net soon vanished, leaving EFnet as the only IRC network.
Continuing problems with performance and abuse eventually led to the rise of another major IRC network, Undernet, which split off in October 1992.
In July 1996, disagreement on policy caused EFnet to break in two: the slightly larger European half (including Australia and Japan) formed IRCnet, while the American servers continued as EFnet. This was known as The Great Split.
In July 2001, after a string of DDoS attacks a service called CHANFIX (originally JUPES) was created, which is designed to give back ops to channels which have lost ops or been taken over.
In 2007, various EFnet servers began implementing SSL.
February 2009 saw the introduction of a new CHANFIX module called OPME, a mechanism for EFnet Admins to use to restore ops in an opless channel. It was proposed by Douglas Boldt to provide a much cleaner alternative to masskill, which was unnecessarily invasive and disruptive to the network.
Later in 2009, some major IRC servers were delinked: irc.vel.net, irc.dks.ca, irc.pte.hu, EFnet's only UK server efnet.demon.co.uk, and EFnet's only UK hub hub.uk, which were sponsored by Demon Internet.
In September 2010, the two western regions of the network (United States and Canada) merged into the North American region. While the North American and European regions are technically independent of each other, today many issues within EFnet are handled at a global level.
On April 1, 2018, as an April Fools' joke, the 1990s IRC server eris.Berkeley.EDU server was resurrected. Some EFnet admins worked with the Open Computing Facility student group at UC Berkeley for months to resurrect the server for April Fools. Only a few EFnet staff were aware of the efforts and the server was linked in via a defunct H:line for the (normally) leaf (client-only) server irc.efnet.nl, bypassing the normal linking procedure. As of 12:30 UTC on April 01 2018, eris.Berkeley.EDU was once again a valid IRC server on the "Eris Free" IRC network and accepted clients. At the same time, efnet.org begin redirecting to erisnet.org. eris.Berkeley.EDU delinked on April 02 2018 at 19:50 UTC.
EFnet has large variations in rules and policy between different servers as well as the two major regions (EU and NA). Both have their own policy structure, and each region votes on their own server applications. However, central policies are voted upon by the server admin community which is archived for referencing.
Due to EFnet's nature, it has gained recognition over the years for warez, hackers, and DoS attacks.
EFnet has always been known for its lack of IRC services that other IRC networks support (such as NickServ and ChanServ, although it had a NickServ until April 8, 1994). Instead, the CHANFIX service was introduced to fix "opless" channels.
All servers on EFnet run ircd-ratbox.
EFnet's channel operators are generally free to run their channels however they see fit without the intervention of IRC operators. IRC ops are primarily there to handle network and server related issues, and rarely get involved with channel-level issues. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "EFnet or Eris-Free network is a major Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network, with more than 35,000 users. It is the modern-day descendant of the original IRC network.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Initially, most IRC servers formed a single IRC network, to which new servers could join without restriction, but this was soon abused by people who set up servers to sabotage other users, channels, or servers. Restriction grew and, in August 1990, eris.Berkeley.EDU was the last server indiscriminately allowing other servers to join it, Eris being the Greek goddess of strife and discord.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "A group of operators, with the support of Jarkko Oikarinen, introduced a new \"Q-line\" into their server configurations, to \"quarantine\" themselves away from eris by disconnecting from any subset of the IRC network as soon as they saw eris there.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "For a few days, the entire IRC network suffered frequent netsplits, but eventually the majority of servers added the Q-line and effectively created a new separate IRC net called EFnet (Eris-Free Network); the remaining servers which stayed connected to eris (and thus were no longer able to connect to EFnet servers) were called A-net (Anarchy Network). A-net soon vanished, leaving EFnet as the only IRC network.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Continuing problems with performance and abuse eventually led to the rise of another major IRC network, Undernet, which split off in October 1992.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In July 1996, disagreement on policy caused EFnet to break in two: the slightly larger European half (including Australia and Japan) formed IRCnet, while the American servers continued as EFnet. This was known as The Great Split.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In July 2001, after a string of DDoS attacks a service called CHANFIX (originally JUPES) was created, which is designed to give back ops to channels which have lost ops or been taken over.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In 2007, various EFnet servers began implementing SSL.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "February 2009 saw the introduction of a new CHANFIX module called OPME, a mechanism for EFnet Admins to use to restore ops in an opless channel. It was proposed by Douglas Boldt to provide a much cleaner alternative to masskill, which was unnecessarily invasive and disruptive to the network.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Later in 2009, some major IRC servers were delinked: irc.vel.net, irc.dks.ca, irc.pte.hu, EFnet's only UK server efnet.demon.co.uk, and EFnet's only UK hub hub.uk, which were sponsored by Demon Internet.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In September 2010, the two western regions of the network (United States and Canada) merged into the North American region. While the North American and European regions are technically independent of each other, today many issues within EFnet are handled at a global level.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "On April 1, 2018, as an April Fools' joke, the 1990s IRC server eris.Berkeley.EDU server was resurrected. Some EFnet admins worked with the Open Computing Facility student group at UC Berkeley for months to resurrect the server for April Fools. Only a few EFnet staff were aware of the efforts and the server was linked in via a defunct H:line for the (normally) leaf (client-only) server irc.efnet.nl, bypassing the normal linking procedure. As of 12:30 UTC on April 01 2018, eris.Berkeley.EDU was once again a valid IRC server on the \"Eris Free\" IRC network and accepted clients. At the same time, efnet.org begin redirecting to erisnet.org. eris.Berkeley.EDU delinked on April 02 2018 at 19:50 UTC.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "EFnet has large variations in rules and policy between different servers as well as the two major regions (EU and NA). Both have their own policy structure, and each region votes on their own server applications. However, central policies are voted upon by the server admin community which is archived for referencing.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Due to EFnet's nature, it has gained recognition over the years for warez, hackers, and DoS attacks.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "EFnet has always been known for its lack of IRC services that other IRC networks support (such as NickServ and ChanServ, although it had a NickServ until April 8, 1994). Instead, the CHANFIX service was introduced to fix \"opless\" channels.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "All servers on EFnet run ircd-ratbox.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "EFnet's channel operators are generally free to run their channels however they see fit without the intervention of IRC operators. IRC ops are primarily there to handle network and server related issues, and rarely get involved with channel-level issues.",
"title": "Characteristics"
}
]
| EFnet or Eris-Free network is a major Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network, with more than 35,000 users. It is the modern-day descendant of the original IRC network. | 2001-12-04T13:38:36Z | 2023-09-30T20:55:13Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFnet |
14,713 | Undernet | The Undernet is the third largest publicly monitored Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network, c. 2022, with about 36 client servers serving 47,444 users in ~6000 channels at any given time.
IRC clients can connect to Undernet via the global round robin irc.undernet.org, the region-specific round robins us.undernet.org and eu.undernet.org, IPv6 client servers irc6.undernet.org or a specific server from the server list.
Undernet was established in October 1992 by Danny Mitchell, Donald Lambert, and Laurent Demally as an experimental network running a modified version of the EFnet irc2.7 IRCd software, created in an attempt to make it less bandwidth-consumptive and less chaotic, as netsplits and takeovers were starting to plague EFnet. The Undernet IRC daemon became known as "ircu". Undernet was formed at a time when many small IRC networks were being started and subsequently disappearing; however, it managed to grow into one of the largest and oldest IRC networks despite some initial in-fighting and setbacks. For a period in 1994, Undernet was wracked by an ongoing series of flame wars. Again in 2001, it was threatened by automated heavy spamming of its users for potential commercial gain. Undernet survived these periods relatively intact and its popularity continues to the present day.
It is notable as being the first network to utilize timestamping, originally made by Carlo Wood, in the IRC server protocol as a means to curb abuse.
Undernet uses GNUworld to provide X, its channel service bot. X operates on a username basis; a username is independent from a nickname, which cannot be registered on Undernet.
As Undernet limits channel registration to "established channels" or channels with an active userbase, Undernet introduced a version of ChanFix (under the nickname C) designed to work like EFNet's CHANFIX. Its use is to protect unregistered channels. ChanFix tracks channel op usage by username basis and restores ops if channels become opless or are taken over. | [
{
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},
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"text": "IRC clients can connect to Undernet via the global round robin irc.undernet.org, the region-specific round robins us.undernet.org and eu.undernet.org, IPv6 client servers irc6.undernet.org or a specific server from the server list.",
"title": ""
},
{
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"text": "Undernet was established in October 1992 by Danny Mitchell, Donald Lambert, and Laurent Demally as an experimental network running a modified version of the EFnet irc2.7 IRCd software, created in an attempt to make it less bandwidth-consumptive and less chaotic, as netsplits and takeovers were starting to plague EFnet. The Undernet IRC daemon became known as \"ircu\". Undernet was formed at a time when many small IRC networks were being started and subsequently disappearing; however, it managed to grow into one of the largest and oldest IRC networks despite some initial in-fighting and setbacks. For a period in 1994, Undernet was wracked by an ongoing series of flame wars. Again in 2001, it was threatened by automated heavy spamming of its users for potential commercial gain. Undernet survived these periods relatively intact and its popularity continues to the present day.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "It is notable as being the first network to utilize timestamping, originally made by Carlo Wood, in the IRC server protocol as a means to curb abuse.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Undernet uses GNUworld to provide X, its channel service bot. X operates on a username basis; a username is independent from a nickname, which cannot be registered on Undernet.",
"title": "Services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "As Undernet limits channel registration to \"established channels\" or channels with an active userbase, Undernet introduced a version of ChanFix (under the nickname C) designed to work like EFNet's CHANFIX. Its use is to protect unregistered channels. ChanFix tracks channel op usage by username basis and restores ops if channels become opless or are taken over.",
"title": "Services"
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]
| The Undernet is the third largest publicly monitored Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network, c. 2022, with about 36 client servers serving 47,444 users in ~6000 channels at any given time. IRC clients can connect to Undernet via the global round robin irc.undernet.org, the region-specific round robins us.undernet.org and eu.undernet.org, IPv6 client servers irc6.undernet.org or a specific server from the server list. | 2001-12-04T13:44:47Z | 2023-08-17T22:42:32Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undernet |
14,715 | DALnet | DALnet is an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network made up of 39 servers, with a stable population of approximately 10,000 users in about 4,000 channels. DALnet is accessible by connecting with an IRC client to an active DALnet server on ports 6660 through 6669, and 7000. SSL users can connect on port 6697 as well. The generic round-robin address is irc.dal.net.
DALnet was founded in July 1994 by members of the EFnet #startrek channel. This new network was known as "dal's net", after the nickname used by the administrator of the first IRC server on the network, "dalvenjah", taken from the dragon "Dalvenjah Foxfire", in a fantasy novel by Thorarinn Gunnarsson. The network was soon renamed from dal's net to DALnet.
In contrast to other IRC networks of the time, in 1995 DALnet implemented "services", a system that enforced IRC nickname and channel registrations. Traditionally, on IRC, anybody can own a channel or a nickname; if no one is using it, it can be used by anyone who chooses to do so. On DALnet, however, this was no longer the case. This service—which many users saw as a way of firmly establishing their online identities—was a significant factor in DALnet's popularity and afforded the network a distinctive reputation among IRCers. While attempts to implement a similar system had been made before and other networks have since developed registration services of their own, at the time DALnet's successful decision to allow and enforce nickname and channel registration was considered to be unique and even controversial, as it went against established practice.
From 25 users in July 1994, the number of users grew to 1,000 by November 1995, 5,000 by June 1996, 10,000 by December 1996, 50,000 by October 1999, 100,000 in November 2001, and peaked around 142,000 in April 2002, by which time the network had 44 servers. At that point DALnet was one of the four biggest IRC networks.
The network was severely disrupted in late 2002 and early 2003 by distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Added to the DDoS issues was that the owner of twisted.dal.net (the world's largest single IRC server, hosting more than 50,000 clients most of the time) delinked his servers (for personal reasons). The other servers on the network could not absorb the extra client load, leading to users' complete inability to connect to DALnet. The network was first crushed by attacks, and then by its own user base.
It was around this time that DALnet closed many of their channels that were dedicated to serving content such as MP3 files and movies. File transfers were still allowed but not on a large scale. This raised suspicion as to whether DALnet was being targeted by the RIAA, although this was not true, but a precautionary measure.
In 2003, DALnet put up their first anycast servers under the name "The IX Concept", and made irc.dal.net resolve to the anycast IP. Since then, most new client servers linked are anycast.
The main characteristics of DALnet is its ChanServ services which was invented on DALnet in 1995. Along with NickServ it gave a solid ground for usability and security on IRC where users got the ability to register their nicknames and their channels.
DALnet is also developing and running on its own ircd software called Bahamut which is based on ircd-hybrid and Dreamforge and was first live in the early 2000s. The name Bahamut comes from a silver-white dragon with blue eyes standing for protection, wisdom, justice and hope in Dungeons & Dragons. | [
{
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"text": "DALnet is an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network made up of 39 servers, with a stable population of approximately 10,000 users in about 4,000 channels. DALnet is accessible by connecting with an IRC client to an active DALnet server on ports 6660 through 6669, and 7000. SSL users can connect on port 6697 as well. The generic round-robin address is irc.dal.net.",
"title": ""
},
{
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"text": "DALnet was founded in July 1994 by members of the EFnet #startrek channel. This new network was known as \"dal's net\", after the nickname used by the administrator of the first IRC server on the network, \"dalvenjah\", taken from the dragon \"Dalvenjah Foxfire\", in a fantasy novel by Thorarinn Gunnarsson. The network was soon renamed from dal's net to DALnet.",
"title": "History"
},
{
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"text": "In contrast to other IRC networks of the time, in 1995 DALnet implemented \"services\", a system that enforced IRC nickname and channel registrations. Traditionally, on IRC, anybody can own a channel or a nickname; if no one is using it, it can be used by anyone who chooses to do so. On DALnet, however, this was no longer the case. This service—which many users saw as a way of firmly establishing their online identities—was a significant factor in DALnet's popularity and afforded the network a distinctive reputation among IRCers. While attempts to implement a similar system had been made before and other networks have since developed registration services of their own, at the time DALnet's successful decision to allow and enforce nickname and channel registration was considered to be unique and even controversial, as it went against established practice.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "From 25 users in July 1994, the number of users grew to 1,000 by November 1995, 5,000 by June 1996, 10,000 by December 1996, 50,000 by October 1999, 100,000 in November 2001, and peaked around 142,000 in April 2002, by which time the network had 44 servers. At that point DALnet was one of the four biggest IRC networks.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The network was severely disrupted in late 2002 and early 2003 by distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Added to the DDoS issues was that the owner of twisted.dal.net (the world's largest single IRC server, hosting more than 50,000 clients most of the time) delinked his servers (for personal reasons). The other servers on the network could not absorb the extra client load, leading to users' complete inability to connect to DALnet. The network was first crushed by attacks, and then by its own user base.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "It was around this time that DALnet closed many of their channels that were dedicated to serving content such as MP3 files and movies. File transfers were still allowed but not on a large scale. This raised suspicion as to whether DALnet was being targeted by the RIAA, although this was not true, but a precautionary measure.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 2003, DALnet put up their first anycast servers under the name \"The IX Concept\", and made irc.dal.net resolve to the anycast IP. Since then, most new client servers linked are anycast.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The main characteristics of DALnet is its ChanServ services which was invented on DALnet in 1995. Along with NickServ it gave a solid ground for usability and security on IRC where users got the ability to register their nicknames and their channels.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "DALnet is also developing and running on its own ircd software called Bahamut which is based on ircd-hybrid and Dreamforge and was first live in the early 2000s. The name Bahamut comes from a silver-white dragon with blue eyes standing for protection, wisdom, justice and hope in Dungeons & Dragons.",
"title": "Characteristics"
}
]
| DALnet is an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network made up of 39 servers, with a stable population of approximately 10,000 users in about 4,000 channels. DALnet is accessible by connecting with an IRC client to an active DALnet server on ports 6660 through 6669, and 7000. SSL users can connect on port 6697 as well. The generic round-robin address is irc.dal.net. | 2002-02-25T15:43:11Z | 2023-11-16T23:19:53Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DALnet |
14,716 | BitchX | BitchX /ˈbɪtʃɛks/ is a free IRC client that has been regarded as the most popular ircII-based IRC client. The initial implementation, written by "Trench" and "HappyCrappy", was a script for the IrcII chat client. It was converted to a program in its own right by panasync (Colten Edwards). BitchX 1.1 final was released in 2004. It is written in C and is a TUI application utilizing ncurses. GTK+ toolkit support has been dropped. It works on all Unix-like operating systems, and is distributed under a BSD license. It was originally based on ircII-EPIC, and eventually it was merged into the EPIC IRC client. It supports IPv6, multiple servers and SSL, and a subset of UTF-8 (characters contained in ISO-8859-1) with an unofficial patch.
On several occasions, BitchX has been noted to be a popular IRC client for Unix-like systems.
The latest official release is version 1.2.
BitchX does not yet support Unicode.
It was known that early versions of BitchX were vulnerable to a denial-of-service attack in that they could be caused to crash by passing specially-crafted strings as arguments to certain IRC commands. This was before format string attacks became a well-known class of vulnerability.
The previous version of BitchX, released in 2004, has security problems allowing remote IRC servers to execute arbitrary code on the client's machine (CVE-2007-3360, CVE-2007-4584).
On April 26, 2009, Slackware removed BitchX from its distribution, citing the numerous unresolved security issues.
The aforementioned vulnerabilities were fixed in the sources for the 1.2 release. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "BitchX /ˈbɪtʃɛks/ is a free IRC client that has been regarded as the most popular ircII-based IRC client. The initial implementation, written by \"Trench\" and \"HappyCrappy\", was a script for the IrcII chat client. It was converted to a program in its own right by panasync (Colten Edwards). BitchX 1.1 final was released in 2004. It is written in C and is a TUI application utilizing ncurses. GTK+ toolkit support has been dropped. It works on all Unix-like operating systems, and is distributed under a BSD license. It was originally based on ircII-EPIC, and eventually it was merged into the EPIC IRC client. It supports IPv6, multiple servers and SSL, and a subset of UTF-8 (characters contained in ISO-8859-1) with an unofficial patch.",
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{
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"text": "BitchX does not yet support Unicode.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "It was known that early versions of BitchX were vulnerable to a denial-of-service attack in that they could be caused to crash by passing specially-crafted strings as arguments to certain IRC commands. This was before format string attacks became a well-known class of vulnerability.",
"title": "Security"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The previous version of BitchX, released in 2004, has security problems allowing remote IRC servers to execute arbitrary code on the client's machine (CVE-2007-3360, CVE-2007-4584).",
"title": "Security"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "On April 26, 2009, Slackware removed BitchX from its distribution, citing the numerous unresolved security issues.",
"title": "Security"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The aforementioned vulnerabilities were fixed in the sources for the 1.2 release.",
"title": "Security"
}
]
| BitchX is a free IRC client that has been regarded as the most popular ircII-based IRC client. The initial implementation, written by "Trench" and "HappyCrappy", was a script for the IrcII chat client. It was converted to a program in its own right by panasync. BitchX 1.1 final was released in 2004. It is written in C and is a TUI application utilizing ncurses. GTK+ toolkit support has been dropped. It works on all Unix-like operating systems, and is distributed under a BSD license. It was originally based on ircII-EPIC, and eventually it was merged into the EPIC IRC client. It supports IPv6, multiple servers and SSL, and a subset of UTF-8 with an unofficial patch. On several occasions, BitchX has been noted to be a popular IRC client for Unix-like systems. The latest official release is version 1.2. BitchX does not yet support Unicode. | 2001-12-04T13:53:32Z | 2023-09-24T21:28:01Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitchX |
14,717 | MIRC | mIRC (Arabic: إم آي آر سي) is an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client for Windows. It is a fully functional chat utility and its integrated scripting language makes it extensible and versatile. The software was first released in 1995 and has since been described as "one of the most popular IRC clients available for Windows." mIRC is shareware and requires payment for registration after the 30-day evaluation period.
mIRC was created by Khaled Mardam-Bey, a Jordanian-born British programmer. He began developing the software in late 1994, and released its first version on 28 February 1995.
Mardam-Bey states that he decided to create mIRC because he felt the first IRC clients for Windows lacked some basic IRC features. He then continued developing it due to the challenge and the fact that people appreciated his work. The author states that its subsequent popularity allowed him to make a living out of mIRC. He also jokingly states that the "m" in mIRC stands for "moo" or "MU" (meaning 'nothing' in Japanese and Korean).
mIRC 5.91 is the final version to support 16-bit Windows; 6.35 is the last to support Windows 95, NT 4.0, 98, and ME. The current version supports Windows XP and later.
The application makes an appearance in the 2006 music video for "Boten Anna" by Basshunter.
mIRC has a number of distinguishing features. One is its scripting language which is further developed with each version. The scripting language can be used to make minor changes to the program like custom commands (aliases), but can also used to completely alter the behavior and appearance of mIRC. Another claimed feature is mIRC's file sharing abilities, via the DCC protocol, featuring a built-in file server.
Starting with mIRC 7.1, released on 30 July 2010, Unicode and IPv6 are supported.
mIRC's abilities and behaviors can be altered and extended using the embedded mIRC scripting language. mIRC includes its own GUI scripting editor, with help that has been described as "extremely detailed".
Due to the level of access the language has to a user's computer — for example, being able to rename and delete files — a number of abusive scripts have been made. One example of abuse was that executed with the $decode identifier which decodes a given encoded string. The issue was reported in August 2001; even five months later, users were still being reported as having fallen prey, tricked into executing commands on their systems which result in "handing control of [their] mIRC over to somebody else". This led to changes being made in mIRC version 6.17: according to the author, $decode is now disabled by default, and various other features which can be considered dangerous are now lockable.
It has been downloaded over 40 million times from CNET's Download.com service. In 2003, Nielsen/NetRatings ranked mIRC among the top ten most popular Internet applications. | [
{
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"text": "mIRC (Arabic: إم آي آر سي) is an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client for Windows. It is a fully functional chat utility and its integrated scripting language makes it extensible and versatile. The software was first released in 1995 and has since been described as \"one of the most popular IRC clients available for Windows.\" mIRC is shareware and requires payment for registration after the 30-day evaluation period.",
"title": ""
},
{
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"text": "mIRC was created by Khaled Mardam-Bey, a Jordanian-born British programmer. He began developing the software in late 1994, and released its first version on 28 February 1995.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Mardam-Bey states that he decided to create mIRC because he felt the first IRC clients for Windows lacked some basic IRC features. He then continued developing it due to the challenge and the fact that people appreciated his work. The author states that its subsequent popularity allowed him to make a living out of mIRC. He also jokingly states that the \"m\" in mIRC stands for \"moo\" or \"MU\" (meaning 'nothing' in Japanese and Korean).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "mIRC 5.91 is the final version to support 16-bit Windows; 6.35 is the last to support Windows 95, NT 4.0, 98, and ME. The current version supports Windows XP and later.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The application makes an appearance in the 2006 music video for \"Boten Anna\" by Basshunter.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "mIRC has a number of distinguishing features. One is its scripting language which is further developed with each version. The scripting language can be used to make minor changes to the program like custom commands (aliases), but can also used to completely alter the behavior and appearance of mIRC. Another claimed feature is mIRC's file sharing abilities, via the DCC protocol, featuring a built-in file server.",
"title": "Main features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Starting with mIRC 7.1, released on 30 July 2010, Unicode and IPv6 are supported.",
"title": "Main features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "mIRC's abilities and behaviors can be altered and extended using the embedded mIRC scripting language. mIRC includes its own GUI scripting editor, with help that has been described as \"extremely detailed\".",
"title": "Main features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Due to the level of access the language has to a user's computer — for example, being able to rename and delete files — a number of abusive scripts have been made. One example of abuse was that executed with the $decode identifier which decodes a given encoded string. The issue was reported in August 2001; even five months later, users were still being reported as having fallen prey, tricked into executing commands on their systems which result in \"handing control of [their] mIRC over to somebody else\". This led to changes being made in mIRC version 6.17: according to the author, $decode is now disabled by default, and various other features which can be considered dangerous are now lockable.",
"title": "Main features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "It has been downloaded over 40 million times from CNET's Download.com service. In 2003, Nielsen/NetRatings ranked mIRC among the top ten most popular Internet applications.",
"title": "Reception"
}
]
| mIRC is an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client for Windows. It is a fully functional chat utility and its integrated scripting language makes it extensible and versatile. The software was first released in 1995 and has since been described as "one of the most popular IRC clients available for Windows." mIRC is shareware and requires payment for registration after the 30-day evaluation period. | 2001-12-04T13:57:51Z | 2023-12-27T14:14:45Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIRC |
14,718 | HexChat | HexChat is an Internet Relay Chat client that is a fork of XChat. It has a choice of a tabbed document interface or tree interface, support for multiple servers, and numerous configuration options. Both command-line and graphical versions are available.
The client runs on Unix-like operating systems, and many Linux distributions include packages in their repositories.
The XChat-WDK (XChat Windows Driver Kit) project started in 2010 and was originally Windows-only. The project's original goal was to merge itself with XChat, but evolved from just fixing Windows bugs to adding new features. It started to make sense to support more platforms than Windows. On July 6, 2012, XChat-WDK officially changed its name to HexChat. | [
{
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"text": "HexChat is an Internet Relay Chat client that is a fork of XChat. It has a choice of a tabbed document interface or tree interface, support for multiple servers, and numerous configuration options. Both command-line and graphical versions are available.",
"title": ""
},
{
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"text": "The client runs on Unix-like operating systems, and many Linux distributions include packages in their repositories.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The XChat-WDK (XChat Windows Driver Kit) project started in 2010 and was originally Windows-only. The project's original goal was to merge itself with XChat, but evolved from just fixing Windows bugs to adding new features. It started to make sense to support more platforms than Windows. On July 6, 2012, XChat-WDK officially changed its name to HexChat.",
"title": "History"
}
]
| HexChat is an Internet Relay Chat client that is a fork of XChat. It has a choice of a tabbed document interface or tree interface, support for multiple servers, and numerous configuration options. Both command-line and graphical versions are available. The client runs on Unix-like operating systems, and many Linux distributions include packages in their repositories. | 2001-12-04T14:04:44Z | 2023-12-30T11:48:39Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HexChat |
14,720 | IRC takeover | An IRC channel takeover is an acquisition of IRC channel operator status by someone other than the channel's owner. It has largely been eliminated due to the increased use of services on IRC networks.
The most common variety of channel takeover uses disconnections caused by a netsplit; this is called riding the split. After such mass disconnections, a channel may be left without users, allowing the first rejoining user to recreate the channel and gain operator status. When the servers merge, any pre-existing operators retain their status, allowing the new user to kick out the original operators and take over the channel.
A simple prevention mechanism involves timestamping (abbreviated to TS), or checking the creation dates of the channels being merged. This was first implemented by Undernet (ircu) in November 2000 and is now common in many IRC servers. If both channels were created at the same time, all user statuses are retained when the two are combined; if one is newer than the other, special statuses are removed from those in the newer channel.
Additionally, a newer protection involving timestamping is used when a server splits away from the main network (when it no longer detects that IRC services are available), it disallows anyone creating a channel to be given operator privileges.
Another popular form of channel takeover abuses nickname collision protection, which keeps two users from having the same nickname at once. A user on one side of a netsplit takes the nickname of a target on the other side of the split; when the servers reconnect, the nicks collide and both users are kicked from the server. The attacker then reconnects or switches nicks in a second client while the target reconnects, and proceeds to jupe (or block) the target's nickname for a period of time.
User timestamping is often used to detect these kinds of attacks in a fashion similar to channel timestamping, with the user who selected that nickname later being kicked from the server. Another protection method, called nickhold, disallows the use of recently split nicknames. This causes fewer kicks, but causes more inconvenience to users. For this reason, timestamping is generally more common. Some servers, such as ircd-ratbox, do both. IRC services and bots can also protect against such attacks by requiring that a password be supplied to use a certain nick. Users who do not provide a password are killed after a certain amount of time.
Other methods can be used to take over a channel, though they are unrelated to flaws in IRC itself; for example, cracking the computers of channel operators, compromising channel bot shell accounts, or obtaining services passwords through social engineering.
Smurf attacks have been used to take over IRC servers. These exploit ICMP ping responses from broadcast addresses at multiple hosts sharing an Internet address, and forge the ping packet's return address to match a target machine's address. A single malformed packet sent to the "smurf amplifier" will be echoed to the target machine. | [
{
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"text": "An IRC channel takeover is an acquisition of IRC channel operator status by someone other than the channel's owner. It has largely been eliminated due to the increased use of services on IRC networks.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The most common variety of channel takeover uses disconnections caused by a netsplit; this is called riding the split. After such mass disconnections, a channel may be left without users, allowing the first rejoining user to recreate the channel and gain operator status. When the servers merge, any pre-existing operators retain their status, allowing the new user to kick out the original operators and take over the channel.",
"title": "Riding the split"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "A simple prevention mechanism involves timestamping (abbreviated to TS), or checking the creation dates of the channels being merged. This was first implemented by Undernet (ircu) in November 2000 and is now common in many IRC servers. If both channels were created at the same time, all user statuses are retained when the two are combined; if one is newer than the other, special statuses are removed from those in the newer channel.",
"title": "Riding the split"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Additionally, a newer protection involving timestamping is used when a server splits away from the main network (when it no longer detects that IRC services are available), it disallows anyone creating a channel to be given operator privileges.",
"title": "Riding the split"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Another popular form of channel takeover abuses nickname collision protection, which keeps two users from having the same nickname at once. A user on one side of a netsplit takes the nickname of a target on the other side of the split; when the servers reconnect, the nicks collide and both users are kicked from the server. The attacker then reconnects or switches nicks in a second client while the target reconnects, and proceeds to jupe (or block) the target's nickname for a period of time.",
"title": "Nick collision"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "User timestamping is often used to detect these kinds of attacks in a fashion similar to channel timestamping, with the user who selected that nickname later being kicked from the server. Another protection method, called nickhold, disallows the use of recently split nicknames. This causes fewer kicks, but causes more inconvenience to users. For this reason, timestamping is generally more common. Some servers, such as ircd-ratbox, do both. IRC services and bots can also protect against such attacks by requiring that a password be supplied to use a certain nick. Users who do not provide a password are killed after a certain amount of time.",
"title": "Nick collision"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Other methods can be used to take over a channel, though they are unrelated to flaws in IRC itself; for example, cracking the computers of channel operators, compromising channel bot shell accounts, or obtaining services passwords through social engineering.",
"title": "Other methods"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Smurf attacks have been used to take over IRC servers. These exploit ICMP ping responses from broadcast addresses at multiple hosts sharing an Internet address, and forge the ping packet's return address to match a target machine's address. A single malformed packet sent to the \"smurf amplifier\" will be echoed to the target machine.",
"title": "Other methods"
}
]
| An IRC channel takeover is an acquisition of IRC channel operator status by someone other than the channel's owner. It has largely been eliminated due to the increased use of services on IRC networks. | 2001-12-04T16:43:21Z | 2023-07-28T11:57:45Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC_takeover |
14,722 | Irssi | Irssi (Finnish pronunciation: [ˈirsːi] (listen)) is an IRC client program for Linux, FreeBSD, macOS and Microsoft Windows. It was originally written by Timo Sirainen, and released under the terms of the GNU GPL-2.0-or-later in January 1999.
Irssi is written in the C programming language and in normal operation uses a text-mode user interface.
According to the developers, Irssi was written from scratch, not based on ircII (like BitchX and epic). This freed the developers from having to deal with the constraints of an existing codebase, allowing them to maintain tighter control over issues such as security and customization. Numerous Perl scripts have been made available for Irssi to customise how it looks and operates. Plugins are available which add encryption and protocols such as ICQ and XMPP.
Irssi may be configured by using its user interface or by manually editing its configuration files, which use a syntax resembling Perl data structures.
Irssi was written primarily to run on Unix-like operating systems, and binaries and packages are available for Gentoo Linux, Debian, Slackware, SUSE (openSUSE), Frugalware, Fedora, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly BSD, Solaris, Arch Linux, Ubuntu, NixOS, and others.
Irssi builds and runs on Microsoft Windows under Cygwin, and in 2006, an official Windows standalone build was released.
For the Unix-based macOS, text mode ports are available from the Homebrew, MacPorts, and Fink package managers, and two graphical clients have been written based on Irssi, IrssiX, and MacIrssi. The Cocoa client Colloquy was previously based on Irssi, but it now uses its own IRC core implementation. | [
{
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"text": "Irssi (Finnish pronunciation: [ˈirsːi] (listen)) is an IRC client program for Linux, FreeBSD, macOS and Microsoft Windows. It was originally written by Timo Sirainen, and released under the terms of the GNU GPL-2.0-or-later in January 1999.",
"title": ""
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"text": "Irssi is written in the C programming language and in normal operation uses a text-mode user interface.",
"title": "Features"
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{
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"text": "According to the developers, Irssi was written from scratch, not based on ircII (like BitchX and epic). This freed the developers from having to deal with the constraints of an existing codebase, allowing them to maintain tighter control over issues such as security and customization. Numerous Perl scripts have been made available for Irssi to customise how it looks and operates. Plugins are available which add encryption and protocols such as ICQ and XMPP.",
"title": "Features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Irssi may be configured by using its user interface or by manually editing its configuration files, which use a syntax resembling Perl data structures.",
"title": "Features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Irssi was written primarily to run on Unix-like operating systems, and binaries and packages are available for Gentoo Linux, Debian, Slackware, SUSE (openSUSE), Frugalware, Fedora, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly BSD, Solaris, Arch Linux, Ubuntu, NixOS, and others.",
"title": "Distributions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Irssi builds and runs on Microsoft Windows under Cygwin, and in 2006, an official Windows standalone build was released.",
"title": "Distributions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "For the Unix-based macOS, text mode ports are available from the Homebrew, MacPorts, and Fink package managers, and two graphical clients have been written based on Irssi, IrssiX, and MacIrssi. The Cocoa client Colloquy was previously based on Irssi, but it now uses its own IRC core implementation.",
"title": "Distributions"
}
]
| Irssi is an IRC client program for Linux, FreeBSD, macOS and Microsoft Windows. It was originally written by Timo Sirainen, and released under the terms of the GNU GPL-2.0-or-later in January 1999. | 2002-02-25T15:43:11Z | 2023-10-06T00:02:22Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irssi |
14,724 | Intellectual property | Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets. The modern concept of intellectual property developed in England in the 17th and 18th centuries. The term "intellectual property" began to be used in the 19th century, though it was not until the late 20th century that intellectual property became commonplace in most of the world's legal systems.
Supporters of intellectual property laws often describe their main purpose as encouraging the creation of a wide variety of intellectual goods. To achieve this, the law gives people and businesses property rights to certain information and intellectual goods they create, usually for a limited period of time. Supporters argue that because IP laws allow people to protect their original ideas and prevent unauthorized copying, creators derive greater individual economic benefit from the information and intellectual goods they create, and thus have more economic incentives to create them in the first place. Advocates of IP believe that these economic incentives and legal protections stimulate innovation and contribute to technological progress of certain kinds.
The intangible nature of intellectual property presents difficulties when compared with traditional property like land or goods. Unlike traditional property, intellectual property is "indivisible", since an unlimited number of people can in theory "consume" an intellectual good without its being depleted. Additionally, investments in intellectual goods suffer from appropriation problems: Landowners can surround their land with a robust fence and hire armed guards to protect it, but producers of information or literature can usually do little to stop their first buyer from replicating it and selling it at a lower price. Balancing rights so that they are strong enough to encourage the creation of intellectual goods but not so strong that they prevent the goods' wide use is the primary focus of modern intellectual property law.
The Venetian Patent Statute of March 19, 1474, established by the Republic of Venice is usually considered to be the earliest codified patent system in the world. It states that patents might be granted for "any new and ingenious device, not previously made", provided it was useful. By and large, these principles still remain the basic principles of current patent laws. The Statute of Monopolies (1624) and the British Statute of Anne (1710) are seen as the origins of the current patent law and copyright respectively, firmly establishing the concept of intellectual property.
"Literary property" was the term predominantly used in the British legal debates of the 1760s and 1770s over the extent to which authors and publishers of works also had rights deriving from the common law of property (Millar v Taylor (1769), Hinton v Donaldson (1773), Donaldson v Becket (1774)). The first known use of the term intellectual property dates to this time, when a piece published in the Monthly Review in 1769 used the phrase. The first clear example of modern usage goes back as early as 1808, when it was used as a heading title in a collection of essays.
The German equivalent was used with the founding of the North German Confederation whose constitution granted legislative power over the protection of intellectual property (Schutz des geistigen Eigentums) to the confederation. When the administrative secretariats established by the Paris Convention (1883) and the Berne Convention (1886) merged in 1893, they located in Berne, and also adopted the term intellectual property in their new combined title, the United International Bureaux for the Protection of Intellectual Property.
The organization subsequently relocated to Geneva in 1960 and was succeeded in 1967 with the establishment of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) by treaty as an agency of the United Nations. According to legal scholar Mark Lemley, it was only at this point that the term really began to be used in the United States (which had not been a party to the Berne Convention), and it did not enter popular usage there until passage of the Bayh–Dole Act in 1980.
The history of patents does not begin with inventions, but rather with royal grants by Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603) for monopoly privileges. Approximately 200 years after the end of Elizabeth's reign, however, a patent represents a legal right obtained by an inventor providing for exclusive control over the production and sale of his mechanical or scientific invention. demonstrating the evolution of patents from royal prerogative to common-law doctrine.
The term can be found used in an October 1845 Massachusetts Circuit Court ruling in the patent case Davoll et al. v. Brown, in which Justice Charles L. Woodbury wrote that "only in this way can we protect intellectual property, the labors of the mind, productions and interests are as much a man's own ... as the wheat he cultivates, or the flocks he rears." The statement that "discoveries are ... property" goes back earlier. Section 1 of the French law of 1791 stated, "All new discoveries are the property of the author; to assure the inventor the property and temporary enjoyment of his discovery, there shall be delivered to him a patent for five, ten or fifteen years." In Europe, French author A. Nion mentioned propriété intellectuelle in his Droits civils des auteurs, artistes et inventeurs, published in 1846.
Until recently, the purpose of intellectual property law was to give as little protection as possible in order to encourage innovation. Historically, therefore, legal protection was granted only when necessary to encourage invention, and it was limited in time and scope. This is mainly as a result of knowledge being traditionally viewed as a public good, in order to allow its extensive dissemination and improvement.
The concept's origin can potentially be traced back further. Jewish law includes several considerations whose effects are similar to those of modern intellectual property laws, though the notion of intellectual creations as property does not seem to exist—notably the principle of Hasagat Ge'vul (unfair encroachment) was used to justify limited-term publisher (but not author) copyright in the 16th century. In 500 BCE, the government of the Greek state of Sybaris offered one year's patent "to all who should discover any new refinement in luxury".
According to Jean-Frédéric Morin, "the global intellectual property regime is currently in the midst of a paradigm shift". Indeed, up until the early 2000s the global IP regime used to be dominated by high standards of protection characteristic of IP laws from Europe or the United States, with a vision that uniform application of these standards over every country and to several fields with little consideration over social, cultural or environmental values or of the national level of economic development. Morin argues that "the emerging discourse of the global IP regime advocates for greater policy flexibility and greater access to knowledge, especially for developing countries." Indeed, with the Development Agenda adopted by WIPO in 2007, a set of 45 recommendations to adjust WIPO's activities to the specific needs of developing countries and aim to reduce distortions especially on issues such as patients' access to medicines, Internet users' access to information, farmers' access to seeds, programmers' access to source codes or students' access to scientific articles. However, this paradigm shift has not yet manifested itself in concrete legal reforms at the international level.
Similarly, it is based on these background that the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement requires members of the WTO to set minimum standards of legal protection, but its objective to have a "one-fits-all" protection law on Intellectual Property has been viewed with controversies regarding differences in the development level of countries. Despite the controversy, the agreement has extensively incorporated intellectual property rights into the global trading system for the first time in 1995, and has prevailed as the most comprehensive agreement reached by the world.
Intellectual property rights include patents, copyright, industrial design rights, trademarks, plant variety rights, trade dress, geographical indications, and in some jurisdictions trade secrets. There are also more specialized or derived varieties of sui generis exclusive rights, such as circuit design rights (called mask work rights in the US), supplementary protection certificates for pharmaceutical products (after expiry of a patent protecting them), and database rights (in European law). The term "industrial property" is sometimes used to refer to a large subset of intellectual property rights including patents, trademarks, industrial designs, utility models, service marks, trade names, and geographical indications.
A patent is a form of right granted by the government to an inventor or their successor-in-title, giving the owner the right to exclude others from making, using, selling, offering to sell, and importing an invention for a limited period of time, in exchange for the public disclosure of the invention. An invention is a solution to a specific technological problem, which may be a product or a process, and generally has to fulfill three main requirements: it has to be new, not obvious and there needs to be an industrial applicability. To enrich the body of knowledge and to stimulate innovation, it is an obligation for patent owners to disclose valuable information about their inventions to the public.
A copyright gives the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time. Copyright may apply to a wide range of creative, intellectual, or artistic forms, or "works". Copyright does not cover ideas and information themselves, only the form or manner in which they are expressed.
An industrial design right (sometimes called "design right" or design patent) protects the visual design of objects that are not purely utilitarian. An industrial design consists of the creation of a shape, configuration or composition of pattern or color, or combination of pattern and color in three-dimensional form containing aesthetic value. An industrial design can be a two- or three-dimensional pattern used to produce a product, industrial commodity or handicraft. Generally speaking, it is what makes a product look appealing, and as such, it increases the commercial value of goods.
Plant breeders' rights or plant variety rights are the rights to commercially use a new variety of a plant. The variety must, amongst others, be novel and distinct and for registration the evaluation of propagating material of the variety is considered.
A trademark is a recognizable sign, design or expression that distinguishes a particular trader's products or services from similar products or services of other traders.
Trade dress is a legal term of art that generally refers to characteristics of the visual and aesthetic appearance of a product or its packaging (or even the design of a building) that signify the source of the product to consumers.
A trade secret is a formula, practice, process, design, instrument, pattern, or compilation of information which is not generally known or reasonably ascertainable, by which a business can obtain an economic advantage over competitors and customers. There is no formal government protection granted; each business must take measures to guard its own trade secrets (e.g., Formula of its soft drinks is a trade secret for Coca-Cola.)
The main purpose of intellectual property law is to encourage the creation of a wide variety of intellectual goods for consumers. To achieve this, the law gives people and businesses property rights to the information and intellectual goods they create, usually for a limited period of time. Because they can then profit from them, this gives economic incentive for their creation. The intangible nature of intellectual property presents difficulties when compared with traditional property like land or goods. Unlike traditional property, intellectual property is indivisible – an unlimited number of people can "consume" an intellectual good without it being depleted. Additionally, investments in intellectual goods suffer from problems of appropriation – while a landowner can surround their land with a robust fence and hire armed guards to protect it, a producer of information or an intellectual good can usually do very little to stop their first buyer from replicating it and selling it at a lower price. Balancing rights so that they are strong enough to encourage the creation of information and intellectual goods but not so strong that they prevent their wide use is the primary focus of modern intellectual property law.
By exchanging limited exclusive rights for disclosure of inventions and creative works, society and the patentee/copyright owner mutually benefit, and an incentive is created for inventors and authors to create and disclose their work. Some commentators have noted that the objective of intellectual property legislators and those who support its implementation appears to be "absolute protection". "If some intellectual property is desirable because it encourages innovation, they reason, more is better. The thinking is that creators will not have sufficient incentive to invent unless they are legally entitled to capture the full social value of their inventions". This absolute protection or full value view treats intellectual property as another type of "real" property, typically adopting its law and rhetoric. Other recent developments in intellectual property law, such as the America Invents Act, stress international harmonization. Recently there has also been much debate over the desirability of using intellectual property rights to protect cultural heritage, including intangible ones, as well as over risks of commodification derived from this possibility. The issue still remains open in legal scholarship.
These exclusive rights allow intellectual property owners to benefit from the property they have created, providing a financial incentive for the creation of an investment in intellectual property, and, in case of patents, pay associated research and development costs. In the United States Article I Section 8 Clause 8 of the Constitution, commonly called the Patent and Copyright Clause, reads; "The Congress shall have power 'To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.'" "Some commentators, such as David Levine and Michele Boldrin, dispute this justification.
In 2013 the United States Patent & Trademark Office approximated that the worth of intellectual property to the U.S. economy is more than US $5 trillion and creates employment for an estimated 18 million American people. The value of intellectual property is considered similarly high in other developed nations, such as those in the European Union. In the UK, IP has become a recognised asset class for use in pension-led funding and other types of business finance. However, in 2013, the UK Intellectual Property Office stated: "There are millions of intangible business assets whose value is either not being leveraged at all, or only being leveraged inadvertently".
The WIPO treaty and several related international agreements underline that the protection of intellectual property rights is essential to maintaining economic growth. The WIPO Intellectual Property Handbook gives two reasons for intellectual property laws:
One is to give statutory expression to the moral and economic rights of creators in their creations and the rights of the public in access to those creations. The second is to promote, as a deliberate act of Government policy, creativity and the dissemination and application of its results and to encourage fair trading which would contribute to economic and social development.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) states that "effective enforcement of intellectual property rights is critical to sustaining economic growth across all industries and globally".
Economists estimate that two-thirds of the value of large businesses in the United States can be traced to intangible assets. "IP-intensive industries" are estimated to generate 72% more value added (price minus material cost) per employee than "non-IP-intensive industries".
A joint research project of the WIPO and the United Nations University measuring the impact of IP systems on six Asian countries found "a positive correlation between the strengthening of the IP system and subsequent economic growth."
According to Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, "everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author". Although the relationship between intellectual property and human rights is complex, there are moral arguments for intellectual property.
The arguments that justify intellectual property fall into three major categories. Personality theorists believe intellectual property is an extension of an individual. Utilitarians believe that intellectual property stimulates social progress and pushes people to further innovation. Lockeans argue that intellectual property is justified based on deservedness and hard work.
Various moral justifications for private property can be used to argue in favor of the morality of intellectual property, such as:
Lysander Spooner (1855) argues "that a man has a natural and absolute right—and if a natural and absolute, then necessarily a perpetual, right—of property, in the ideas, of which he is the discoverer or creator; that his right of property, in ideas, is intrinsically the same as, and stands on identically the same grounds with, his right of property in material things; that no distinction, of principle, exists between the two cases".
Writer Ayn Rand argued in her book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal that the protection of intellectual property is essentially a moral issue. The belief is that the human mind itself is the source of wealth and survival and that all property at its base is intellectual property. To violate intellectual property is therefore no different morally than violating other property rights which compromises the very processes of survival and therefore constitutes an immoral act.
Violation of intellectual property rights, called "infringement" with respect to patents, copyright, and trademarks, and "misappropriation" with respect to trade secrets, may be a breach of civil law or criminal law, depending on the type of intellectual property involved, jurisdiction, and the nature of the action.
As of 2011, trade in counterfeit copyrighted and trademarked works was a $600 billion industry worldwide and accounted for 5–7% of global trade. During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, IP has been a consideration in punishment of the aggressor through trade sanctions, has been proposed as a method to prevent future wars of aggression involving nuclear weapons, and has caused concern about stifling innovation by keeping patent information secret.
Patent infringement typically is caused by using or selling a patented invention without permission from the patent holder, i.e. from the patent owner. The scope of the patented invention or the extent of protection is defined in the claims of the granted patent. There is safe harbor in many jurisdictions to use a patented invention for research. This safe harbor does not exist in the US unless the research is done for purely philosophical purposes, or to gather data to prepare an application for regulatory approval of a drug. In general, patent infringement cases are handled under civil law (e.g., in the United States) but several jurisdictions incorporate infringement in criminal law also (for example, Argentina, China, France, Japan, Russia, South Korea).
Copyright infringement is reproducing, distributing, displaying or performing a work, or to make derivative works, without permission from the copyright holder, which is typically a publisher or other business representing or assigned by the work's creator. It is often called "piracy". In the United States, while copyright is created the instant a work is fixed, generally the copyright holder can only get money damages if the owner registers the copyright. Enforcement of copyright is generally the responsibility of the copyright holder. The ACTA trade agreement, signed in May 2011 by the United States, Japan, Switzerland, and the EU, and which has not entered into force, requires that its parties add criminal penalties, including incarceration and fines, for copyright and trademark infringement, and obligated the parties to actively police for infringement. There are limitations and exceptions to copyright, allowing limited use of copyrighted works, which does not constitute infringement. Examples of such doctrines are the fair use and fair dealing doctrine.
Trademark infringement occurs when one party uses a trademark that is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark owned by another party, in relation to products or services which are identical or similar to the products or services of the other party. In many countries, a trademark receives protection without registration, but registering a trademark provides legal advantages for enforcement. Infringement can be addressed by civil litigation and, in several jurisdictions, under criminal law.
Trade secret misappropriation is different from violations of other intellectual property laws, since by definition trade secrets are secret, while patents and registered copyrights and trademarks are publicly available. In the United States, trade secrets are protected under state law, and states have nearly universally adopted the Uniform Trade Secrets Act. The United States also has federal law in the form of the Economic Espionage Act of 1996 (18 U.S.C. §§ 1831–1839), which makes the theft or misappropriation of a trade secret a federal crime. This law contains two provisions criminalizing two sorts of activity. The first, 18 U.S.C. § 1831(a), criminalizes the theft of trade secrets to benefit foreign powers. The second, 18 U.S.C. § 1832, criminalizes their theft for commercial or economic purposes. (The statutory penalties are different for the two offenses.) In Commonwealth common law jurisdictions, confidentiality and trade secrets are regarded as an equitable right rather than a property right but penalties for theft are roughly the same as in the United States.
The international governance of IP involves multiple overlapping institutions and forums. There is no overall rule-making body.
One of the most important aspects of global IP governance is the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). The TRIPS Agreement sets minimum international standards for IP which every member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) must comply with. A member's non-compliance with the TRIPS Agreement may be grounds for suit under the WTO's Dispute Settlement Mechanism.
Bilateral and multi-lateral agreements often establish IP requirements above the requirements of the TRIPS Agreement.
Criticism of the term intellectual property ranges from discussing its vagueness and abstract overreach to direct contention to the semantic validity of using words like property and rights in fashions that contradict practice and law. Many detractors think this term specially serves the doctrinal agenda of parties opposing reform in the public interest or otherwise abusing related legislations, and that it disallows intelligent discussion about specific and often unrelated aspects of copyright, patents, trademarks, etc.
Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman argues that, although the term intellectual property is in wide use, it should be rejected altogether, because it "systematically distorts and confuses these issues, and its use was and is promoted by those who gain from this confusion". He claims that the term "operates as a catch-all to lump together disparate laws [which] originated separately, evolved differently, cover different activities, have different rules, and raise different public policy issues" and that it creates a "bias" by confusing these monopolies with ownership of limited physical things, likening them to "property rights". Stallman advocates referring to copyrights, patents and trademarks in the singular and warns against abstracting disparate laws into a collective term. He argues that, "to avoid spreading unnecessary bias and confusion, it is best to adopt a firm policy not to speak or even think in terms of 'intellectual property'."
Similarly, economists Boldrin and Levine prefer to use the term "intellectual monopoly" as a more appropriate and clear definition of the concept, which, they argue, is very dissimilar from property rights. They further argued that "stronger patents do little or nothing to encourage innovation", mainly explained by its tendency to create market monopolies, thereby restricting further innovations and technology transfer.
On the assumption that intellectual property rights are actual rights, Stallman says that this claim does not live to the historical intentions behind these laws, which in the case of copyright served as a censorship system, and later on, a regulatory model for the printing press that may have benefited authors incidentally, but never interfered with the freedom of average readers. Still referring to copyright, he cites legal literature such as the United States Constitution and case law to demonstrate that the law is meant to be an optional and experimental bargain to temporarily trade property rights and free speech for public, not private, benefits in the form of increased artistic production and knowledge. He mentions that "if copyright were a natural right nothing could justify terminating this right after a certain period of time".
Law professor, writer and political activist Lawrence Lessig, along with many other copyleft and free software activists, has criticized the implied analogy with physical property (like land or an automobile). They argue such an analogy fails because physical property is generally rivalrous while intellectual works are non-rivalrous (that is, if one makes a copy of a work, the enjoyment of the copy does not prevent enjoyment of the original). Other arguments along these lines claim that unlike the situation with tangible property, there is no natural scarcity of a particular idea or information: once it exists at all, it can be re-used and duplicated indefinitely without such re-use diminishing the original. Stephan Kinsella has objected to intellectual property on the grounds that the word "property" implies scarcity, which may not be applicable to ideas.
Entrepreneur and politician Rickard Falkvinge and hacker Alexandre Oliva have independently compared George Orwell's fictional dialect Newspeak to the terminology used by intellectual property supporters as a linguistic weapon to shape public opinion regarding copyright debate and DRM.
In civil law jurisdictions, intellectual property has often been referred to as intellectual rights, traditionally a somewhat broader concept that has included moral rights and other personal protections that cannot be bought or sold. Use of the term intellectual rights has declined since the early 1980s, as use of the term intellectual property has increased.
Alternative terms monopolies on information and intellectual monopoly have emerged among those who argue against the "property" or "intellect" or "rights" assumptions, notably Richard Stallman. The backronyms intellectual protectionism and intellectual poverty, whose initials are also IP, have also found supporters, especially among those who have used the backronym digital restrictions management.
The argument that an intellectual property right should (in the interests of better balancing of relevant private and public interests) be termed an intellectual monopoly privilege (IMP) has been advanced by several academics including Birgitte Andersen and Thomas Alured Faunce.
Some critics of intellectual property, such as those in the free culture movement, point at intellectual monopolies as harming health (in the case of pharmaceutical patents), preventing progress, and benefiting concentrated interests to the detriment of the masses, and argue that ever-expansive monopolies in the form of copyright extensions, software patents, and business method patents harm the public interest. More recently scientists and engineers are expressing concern that patent thickets are undermining technological development even in high-tech fields like nanotechnology.
Petra Moser has asserted that historical analysis suggests that intellectual property laws may harm innovation:
Overall, the weight of the existing historical evidence suggests that patent policies, which grant strong intellectual property rights to early generations of inventors, may discourage innovation. On the contrary, policies that encourage the diffusion of ideas and modify patent laws to facilitate entry and encourage competition may be an effective mechanism to encourage innovation.
In support of that argument, Jörg Baten, Nicola Bianchi and Petra Moser find historical evidence that especially compulsory licensing – which allows governments to license patents without the consent of patent-owners – encouraged invention in Germany in the early 20th century by increasing the threat of competition in fields with low pre-existing levels of competition.
Peter Drahos notes, "Property rights confer authority over resources. When authority is granted to the few over resources on which the many depend, the few gain power over the goals of the many. This has consequences for both political and economic freedom within a society."
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) recognizes that conflicts may exist between respecting and implementing current intellectual property systems and other human rights. In 2001 the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights issued a document called "Human rights and intellectual property" that argued that intellectual property tends to be governed by economic goals when it should be viewed primarily as a social product; in order to serve human well-being, intellectual property systems must respect and conform to human rights laws. According to the Committee, when systems fail to do so, they risk infringing upon the human right to food and health, and to cultural participation and scientific benefits. In 2004 the General Assembly of WIPO adopted The Geneva Declaration on the Future of the World Intellectual Property Organization which argues that WIPO should "focus more on the needs of developing countries, and to view IP as one of many tools for development—not as an end in itself".
Ethical problems are most pertinent when socially valuable goods like life-saving medicines are given IP protection. While the application of IP rights can allow companies to charge higher than the marginal cost of production in order to recoup the costs of research and development, the price may exclude from the market anyone who cannot afford the cost of the product, in this case a life-saving drug. "An IPR driven regime is therefore not a regime that is conductive to the investment of R&D of products that are socially valuable to predominately poor populations".
Libertarians have differing views on intellectual property. Stephan Kinsella, an anarcho-capitalist on the right-wing of libertarianism, argues against intellectual property because allowing property rights in ideas and information creates artificial scarcity and infringes on the right to own tangible property. Kinsella uses the following scenario to argue this point:
[I]magine the time when men lived in caves. One bright guy—let's call him Galt-Magnon—decides to build a log cabin on an open field, near his crops. To be sure, this is a good idea, and others notice it. They naturally imitate Galt-Magnon, and they start building their own cabins. But the first man to invent a house, according to IP advocates, would have a right to prevent others from building houses on their own land, with their own logs, or to charge them a fee if they do build houses. It is plain that the innovator in these examples becomes a partial owner of the tangible property (e.g., land and logs) of others, due not to first occupation and use of that property (for it is already owned), but due to his coming up with an idea. Clearly, this rule flies in the face of the first-user homesteading rule, arbitrarily and groundlessly overriding the very homesteading rule that is at the foundation of all property rights.
Thomas Jefferson once said in a letter to Isaac McPherson on 13 August 1813:
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
In 2005 the Royal Society of Arts launched the Adelphi Charter, aimed at creating an international policy statement to frame how governments should make balanced intellectual property law.
Another aspect of current U.S. Intellectual Property legislation is its focus on individual and joint works; thus, copyright protection can only be obtained in 'original' works of authorship. Critics like Philip Bennet argue that this does not provide adequate protection against cultural appropriation of indigenous knowledge, for which a collective IP regime is needed.
Intellectual property law has been criticized as not recognizing new forms of art such as the remix culture, whose participants often commit what technically constitutes violations of such laws, creation works such as anime music videos and others, or are otherwise subject to unnecessary burdens and limitations which prevent them from fully expressing themselves.
Other criticism of intellectual property law concerns the expansion of intellectual property, both in duration and in scope.
As scientific knowledge has expanded and allowed new industries to arise in fields such as biotechnology and nanotechnology, originators of technology have sought IP protection for the new technologies. Patents have been granted for living organisms, and in the United States, certain living organisms have been patentable for over a century.
The increase in terms of protection is particularly seen in relation to copyright, which has recently been the subject of serial extensions in the United States and in Europe. With no need for registration or copyright notices, this is thought to have led to an increase in orphan works (copyrighted works for which the copyright owner cannot be contacted), a problem that has been noticed and addressed by governmental bodies around the world.
Also with respect to copyright, the American film industry helped to change the social construct of intellectual property via its trade organization, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). In amicus briefs in important cases, in lobbying before Congress, and in its statements to the public, the MPAA has advocated strong protection of intellectual property rights. In framing its presentations, the association has claimed that people are entitled to the property that is produced by their labor. Additionally Congress's awareness of the position of the United States as the world's largest producer of films has made it convenient to expand the conception of intellectual property. These doctrinal reforms have further strengthened the industry, lending the MPAA even more power and authority.
The growth of the Internet, and particularly distributed search engines like Kazaa and Gnutella, have represented a challenge for copyright policy. The Recording Industry Association of America, in particular, has been on the front lines of the fight against copyright infringement, which the industry calls "piracy". The industry has had victories against some services, including a highly publicized case against the file-sharing company Napster, and some people have been prosecuted for sharing files in violation of copyright. The electronic age has seen an increase in the attempt to use software-based digital rights management tools to restrict the copying and use of digitally based works. Laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act have been enacted that use criminal law to prevent any circumvention of software used to enforce digital rights management systems. Equivalent provisions, to prevent circumvention of copyright protection have existed in EU for some time, and are being expanded in, for example, Article 6 and 7 the Copyright Directive. Other examples are Article 7 of the Software Directive of 1991 (91/250/EEC), and the Conditional Access Directive of 1998 (98/84/EEC). This can hinder legal uses, affecting public domain works, limitations and exceptions to copyright, or uses allowed by the copyright holder. Some copyleft licenses, like the GNU GPL 3, are designed to counter this. Laws may permit circumvention under specific conditions, such as when it is necessary to achieve interoperability with the circumventor's program, or for accessibility reasons; however, distribution of circumvention tools or instructions may be illegal.
In the context of trademarks, this expansion has been driven by international efforts to harmonise the definition of "trademark", as exemplified by the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights ratified in 1994, which formalized regulations for IP rights that had been handled by common law, or not at all, in member states. Pursuant to TRIPs, any sign which is "capable of distinguishing" the products or services of one business from the products or services of another business is capable of constituting a trademark.
Make no mistake: the headline [tax] rate is not what triggers tax evasion and aggressive tax planning. That comes from schemes that facilitate profit shifting.
Pierre MoscoviciEuropean Commissioner for TaxFinancial Times, 11 March 2018
Intellectual property has become a core tool in corporate tax planning and tax avoidance. IP is a key component of the leading multinational tax avoidance base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) tools, which the OECD estimates costs $100–240 billion in lost annual tax revenues.
In 2017–2018, both the U.S. and the EU Commission simultaneously decided to depart from the OECD BEPS Project timetable, which was set up in 2013 to combat IP BEPS tax tools like the above, and launch their own anti-IP BEPS tax regimes:
The departure of the U.S. and EU Commission from the OECD BEPS Project process, is attributed to frustrations with the rise in IP as a key BEPS tax tool, creating intangible assets, which are then turned into royalty payment BEPS schemes (double Irish), and/or capital allowance BEPS schemes (capital allowances for intangibles). In contrast, the OECD has spent years developing and advocating intellectual property as a legal and a GAAP accounting concept.
Women have historically been underrepresented in the creation and ownership of intellectual property covered by intellectual property rights. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization, women composed only 16.5% of patent holders even as recently as 2020. This disparity is the result of several factors including systemic bias, sexism and discrimination within the intellectual property space, underrepresentation within STEM, and barriers to access of necessary finance and knowledge in order to obtain intellectual property rights, among other reasons.
The global increase in intellectual property protection is sometimes referred to as a global IP ratchet in which a spiral of bilateral and multilateral agreements result in growing obligations where new agreements never recede from existing standards and very often further heighten them.
The global IP ratchet has limited the freedom of developing countries to set their own IP standards. Developing countries' lack of bargaining power relative to the developed countries driving the global IP ratchet means that developing countries' ability to regulate intellectual property to advance domestic interests is eroding. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets. The modern concept of intellectual property developed in England in the 17th and 18th centuries. The term \"intellectual property\" began to be used in the 19th century, though it was not until the late 20th century that intellectual property became commonplace in most of the world's legal systems.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Supporters of intellectual property laws often describe their main purpose as encouraging the creation of a wide variety of intellectual goods. To achieve this, the law gives people and businesses property rights to certain information and intellectual goods they create, usually for a limited period of time. Supporters argue that because IP laws allow people to protect their original ideas and prevent unauthorized copying, creators derive greater individual economic benefit from the information and intellectual goods they create, and thus have more economic incentives to create them in the first place. Advocates of IP believe that these economic incentives and legal protections stimulate innovation and contribute to technological progress of certain kinds.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The intangible nature of intellectual property presents difficulties when compared with traditional property like land or goods. Unlike traditional property, intellectual property is \"indivisible\", since an unlimited number of people can in theory \"consume\" an intellectual good without its being depleted. Additionally, investments in intellectual goods suffer from appropriation problems: Landowners can surround their land with a robust fence and hire armed guards to protect it, but producers of information or literature can usually do little to stop their first buyer from replicating it and selling it at a lower price. Balancing rights so that they are strong enough to encourage the creation of intellectual goods but not so strong that they prevent the goods' wide use is the primary focus of modern intellectual property law.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The Venetian Patent Statute of March 19, 1474, established by the Republic of Venice is usually considered to be the earliest codified patent system in the world. It states that patents might be granted for \"any new and ingenious device, not previously made\", provided it was useful. By and large, these principles still remain the basic principles of current patent laws. The Statute of Monopolies (1624) and the British Statute of Anne (1710) are seen as the origins of the current patent law and copyright respectively, firmly establishing the concept of intellectual property.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "\"Literary property\" was the term predominantly used in the British legal debates of the 1760s and 1770s over the extent to which authors and publishers of works also had rights deriving from the common law of property (Millar v Taylor (1769), Hinton v Donaldson (1773), Donaldson v Becket (1774)). The first known use of the term intellectual property dates to this time, when a piece published in the Monthly Review in 1769 used the phrase. The first clear example of modern usage goes back as early as 1808, when it was used as a heading title in a collection of essays.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The German equivalent was used with the founding of the North German Confederation whose constitution granted legislative power over the protection of intellectual property (Schutz des geistigen Eigentums) to the confederation. When the administrative secretariats established by the Paris Convention (1883) and the Berne Convention (1886) merged in 1893, they located in Berne, and also adopted the term intellectual property in their new combined title, the United International Bureaux for the Protection of Intellectual Property.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The organization subsequently relocated to Geneva in 1960 and was succeeded in 1967 with the establishment of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) by treaty as an agency of the United Nations. According to legal scholar Mark Lemley, it was only at this point that the term really began to be used in the United States (which had not been a party to the Berne Convention), and it did not enter popular usage there until passage of the Bayh–Dole Act in 1980.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The history of patents does not begin with inventions, but rather with royal grants by Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603) for monopoly privileges. Approximately 200 years after the end of Elizabeth's reign, however, a patent represents a legal right obtained by an inventor providing for exclusive control over the production and sale of his mechanical or scientific invention. demonstrating the evolution of patents from royal prerogative to common-law doctrine.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The term can be found used in an October 1845 Massachusetts Circuit Court ruling in the patent case Davoll et al. v. Brown, in which Justice Charles L. Woodbury wrote that \"only in this way can we protect intellectual property, the labors of the mind, productions and interests are as much a man's own ... as the wheat he cultivates, or the flocks he rears.\" The statement that \"discoveries are ... property\" goes back earlier. Section 1 of the French law of 1791 stated, \"All new discoveries are the property of the author; to assure the inventor the property and temporary enjoyment of his discovery, there shall be delivered to him a patent for five, ten or fifteen years.\" In Europe, French author A. Nion mentioned propriété intellectuelle in his Droits civils des auteurs, artistes et inventeurs, published in 1846.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Until recently, the purpose of intellectual property law was to give as little protection as possible in order to encourage innovation. Historically, therefore, legal protection was granted only when necessary to encourage invention, and it was limited in time and scope. This is mainly as a result of knowledge being traditionally viewed as a public good, in order to allow its extensive dissemination and improvement.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The concept's origin can potentially be traced back further. Jewish law includes several considerations whose effects are similar to those of modern intellectual property laws, though the notion of intellectual creations as property does not seem to exist—notably the principle of Hasagat Ge'vul (unfair encroachment) was used to justify limited-term publisher (but not author) copyright in the 16th century. In 500 BCE, the government of the Greek state of Sybaris offered one year's patent \"to all who should discover any new refinement in luxury\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "According to Jean-Frédéric Morin, \"the global intellectual property regime is currently in the midst of a paradigm shift\". Indeed, up until the early 2000s the global IP regime used to be dominated by high standards of protection characteristic of IP laws from Europe or the United States, with a vision that uniform application of these standards over every country and to several fields with little consideration over social, cultural or environmental values or of the national level of economic development. Morin argues that \"the emerging discourse of the global IP regime advocates for greater policy flexibility and greater access to knowledge, especially for developing countries.\" Indeed, with the Development Agenda adopted by WIPO in 2007, a set of 45 recommendations to adjust WIPO's activities to the specific needs of developing countries and aim to reduce distortions especially on issues such as patients' access to medicines, Internet users' access to information, farmers' access to seeds, programmers' access to source codes or students' access to scientific articles. However, this paradigm shift has not yet manifested itself in concrete legal reforms at the international level.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Similarly, it is based on these background that the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement requires members of the WTO to set minimum standards of legal protection, but its objective to have a \"one-fits-all\" protection law on Intellectual Property has been viewed with controversies regarding differences in the development level of countries. Despite the controversy, the agreement has extensively incorporated intellectual property rights into the global trading system for the first time in 1995, and has prevailed as the most comprehensive agreement reached by the world.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Intellectual property rights include patents, copyright, industrial design rights, trademarks, plant variety rights, trade dress, geographical indications, and in some jurisdictions trade secrets. There are also more specialized or derived varieties of sui generis exclusive rights, such as circuit design rights (called mask work rights in the US), supplementary protection certificates for pharmaceutical products (after expiry of a patent protecting them), and database rights (in European law). The term \"industrial property\" is sometimes used to refer to a large subset of intellectual property rights including patents, trademarks, industrial designs, utility models, service marks, trade names, and geographical indications.",
"title": "Rights"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "A patent is a form of right granted by the government to an inventor or their successor-in-title, giving the owner the right to exclude others from making, using, selling, offering to sell, and importing an invention for a limited period of time, in exchange for the public disclosure of the invention. An invention is a solution to a specific technological problem, which may be a product or a process, and generally has to fulfill three main requirements: it has to be new, not obvious and there needs to be an industrial applicability. To enrich the body of knowledge and to stimulate innovation, it is an obligation for patent owners to disclose valuable information about their inventions to the public.",
"title": "Rights"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "A copyright gives the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time. Copyright may apply to a wide range of creative, intellectual, or artistic forms, or \"works\". Copyright does not cover ideas and information themselves, only the form or manner in which they are expressed.",
"title": "Rights"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "An industrial design right (sometimes called \"design right\" or design patent) protects the visual design of objects that are not purely utilitarian. An industrial design consists of the creation of a shape, configuration or composition of pattern or color, or combination of pattern and color in three-dimensional form containing aesthetic value. An industrial design can be a two- or three-dimensional pattern used to produce a product, industrial commodity or handicraft. Generally speaking, it is what makes a product look appealing, and as such, it increases the commercial value of goods.",
"title": "Rights"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Plant breeders' rights or plant variety rights are the rights to commercially use a new variety of a plant. The variety must, amongst others, be novel and distinct and for registration the evaluation of propagating material of the variety is considered.",
"title": "Rights"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "A trademark is a recognizable sign, design or expression that distinguishes a particular trader's products or services from similar products or services of other traders.",
"title": "Rights"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Trade dress is a legal term of art that generally refers to characteristics of the visual and aesthetic appearance of a product or its packaging (or even the design of a building) that signify the source of the product to consumers.",
"title": "Rights"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "A trade secret is a formula, practice, process, design, instrument, pattern, or compilation of information which is not generally known or reasonably ascertainable, by which a business can obtain an economic advantage over competitors and customers. There is no formal government protection granted; each business must take measures to guard its own trade secrets (e.g., Formula of its soft drinks is a trade secret for Coca-Cola.)",
"title": "Rights"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The main purpose of intellectual property law is to encourage the creation of a wide variety of intellectual goods for consumers. To achieve this, the law gives people and businesses property rights to the information and intellectual goods they create, usually for a limited period of time. Because they can then profit from them, this gives economic incentive for their creation. The intangible nature of intellectual property presents difficulties when compared with traditional property like land or goods. Unlike traditional property, intellectual property is indivisible – an unlimited number of people can \"consume\" an intellectual good without it being depleted. Additionally, investments in intellectual goods suffer from problems of appropriation – while a landowner can surround their land with a robust fence and hire armed guards to protect it, a producer of information or an intellectual good can usually do very little to stop their first buyer from replicating it and selling it at a lower price. Balancing rights so that they are strong enough to encourage the creation of information and intellectual goods but not so strong that they prevent their wide use is the primary focus of modern intellectual property law.",
"title": "Motivation and justification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "By exchanging limited exclusive rights for disclosure of inventions and creative works, society and the patentee/copyright owner mutually benefit, and an incentive is created for inventors and authors to create and disclose their work. Some commentators have noted that the objective of intellectual property legislators and those who support its implementation appears to be \"absolute protection\". \"If some intellectual property is desirable because it encourages innovation, they reason, more is better. The thinking is that creators will not have sufficient incentive to invent unless they are legally entitled to capture the full social value of their inventions\". This absolute protection or full value view treats intellectual property as another type of \"real\" property, typically adopting its law and rhetoric. Other recent developments in intellectual property law, such as the America Invents Act, stress international harmonization. Recently there has also been much debate over the desirability of using intellectual property rights to protect cultural heritage, including intangible ones, as well as over risks of commodification derived from this possibility. The issue still remains open in legal scholarship.",
"title": "Motivation and justification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "These exclusive rights allow intellectual property owners to benefit from the property they have created, providing a financial incentive for the creation of an investment in intellectual property, and, in case of patents, pay associated research and development costs. In the United States Article I Section 8 Clause 8 of the Constitution, commonly called the Patent and Copyright Clause, reads; \"The Congress shall have power 'To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.'\" \"Some commentators, such as David Levine and Michele Boldrin, dispute this justification.",
"title": "Motivation and justification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In 2013 the United States Patent & Trademark Office approximated that the worth of intellectual property to the U.S. economy is more than US $5 trillion and creates employment for an estimated 18 million American people. The value of intellectual property is considered similarly high in other developed nations, such as those in the European Union. In the UK, IP has become a recognised asset class for use in pension-led funding and other types of business finance. However, in 2013, the UK Intellectual Property Office stated: \"There are millions of intangible business assets whose value is either not being leveraged at all, or only being leveraged inadvertently\".",
"title": "Motivation and justification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The WIPO treaty and several related international agreements underline that the protection of intellectual property rights is essential to maintaining economic growth. The WIPO Intellectual Property Handbook gives two reasons for intellectual property laws:",
"title": "Motivation and justification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "One is to give statutory expression to the moral and economic rights of creators in their creations and the rights of the public in access to those creations. The second is to promote, as a deliberate act of Government policy, creativity and the dissemination and application of its results and to encourage fair trading which would contribute to economic and social development.",
"title": "Motivation and justification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) states that \"effective enforcement of intellectual property rights is critical to sustaining economic growth across all industries and globally\".",
"title": "Motivation and justification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Economists estimate that two-thirds of the value of large businesses in the United States can be traced to intangible assets. \"IP-intensive industries\" are estimated to generate 72% more value added (price minus material cost) per employee than \"non-IP-intensive industries\".",
"title": "Motivation and justification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "A joint research project of the WIPO and the United Nations University measuring the impact of IP systems on six Asian countries found \"a positive correlation between the strengthening of the IP system and subsequent economic growth.\"",
"title": "Motivation and justification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "According to Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, \"everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author\". Although the relationship between intellectual property and human rights is complex, there are moral arguments for intellectual property.",
"title": "Motivation and justification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The arguments that justify intellectual property fall into three major categories. Personality theorists believe intellectual property is an extension of an individual. Utilitarians believe that intellectual property stimulates social progress and pushes people to further innovation. Lockeans argue that intellectual property is justified based on deservedness and hard work.",
"title": "Motivation and justification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Various moral justifications for private property can be used to argue in favor of the morality of intellectual property, such as:",
"title": "Motivation and justification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Lysander Spooner (1855) argues \"that a man has a natural and absolute right—and if a natural and absolute, then necessarily a perpetual, right—of property, in the ideas, of which he is the discoverer or creator; that his right of property, in ideas, is intrinsically the same as, and stands on identically the same grounds with, his right of property in material things; that no distinction, of principle, exists between the two cases\".",
"title": "Motivation and justification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Writer Ayn Rand argued in her book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal that the protection of intellectual property is essentially a moral issue. The belief is that the human mind itself is the source of wealth and survival and that all property at its base is intellectual property. To violate intellectual property is therefore no different morally than violating other property rights which compromises the very processes of survival and therefore constitutes an immoral act.",
"title": "Motivation and justification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Violation of intellectual property rights, called \"infringement\" with respect to patents, copyright, and trademarks, and \"misappropriation\" with respect to trade secrets, may be a breach of civil law or criminal law, depending on the type of intellectual property involved, jurisdiction, and the nature of the action.",
"title": "Infringement, misappropriation, and enforcement"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "As of 2011, trade in counterfeit copyrighted and trademarked works was a $600 billion industry worldwide and accounted for 5–7% of global trade. During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, IP has been a consideration in punishment of the aggressor through trade sanctions, has been proposed as a method to prevent future wars of aggression involving nuclear weapons, and has caused concern about stifling innovation by keeping patent information secret.",
"title": "Infringement, misappropriation, and enforcement"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Patent infringement typically is caused by using or selling a patented invention without permission from the patent holder, i.e. from the patent owner. The scope of the patented invention or the extent of protection is defined in the claims of the granted patent. There is safe harbor in many jurisdictions to use a patented invention for research. This safe harbor does not exist in the US unless the research is done for purely philosophical purposes, or to gather data to prepare an application for regulatory approval of a drug. In general, patent infringement cases are handled under civil law (e.g., in the United States) but several jurisdictions incorporate infringement in criminal law also (for example, Argentina, China, France, Japan, Russia, South Korea).",
"title": "Infringement, misappropriation, and enforcement"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Copyright infringement is reproducing, distributing, displaying or performing a work, or to make derivative works, without permission from the copyright holder, which is typically a publisher or other business representing or assigned by the work's creator. It is often called \"piracy\". In the United States, while copyright is created the instant a work is fixed, generally the copyright holder can only get money damages if the owner registers the copyright. Enforcement of copyright is generally the responsibility of the copyright holder. The ACTA trade agreement, signed in May 2011 by the United States, Japan, Switzerland, and the EU, and which has not entered into force, requires that its parties add criminal penalties, including incarceration and fines, for copyright and trademark infringement, and obligated the parties to actively police for infringement. There are limitations and exceptions to copyright, allowing limited use of copyrighted works, which does not constitute infringement. Examples of such doctrines are the fair use and fair dealing doctrine.",
"title": "Infringement, misappropriation, and enforcement"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Trademark infringement occurs when one party uses a trademark that is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark owned by another party, in relation to products or services which are identical or similar to the products or services of the other party. In many countries, a trademark receives protection without registration, but registering a trademark provides legal advantages for enforcement. Infringement can be addressed by civil litigation and, in several jurisdictions, under criminal law.",
"title": "Infringement, misappropriation, and enforcement"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Trade secret misappropriation is different from violations of other intellectual property laws, since by definition trade secrets are secret, while patents and registered copyrights and trademarks are publicly available. In the United States, trade secrets are protected under state law, and states have nearly universally adopted the Uniform Trade Secrets Act. The United States also has federal law in the form of the Economic Espionage Act of 1996 (18 U.S.C. §§ 1831–1839), which makes the theft or misappropriation of a trade secret a federal crime. This law contains two provisions criminalizing two sorts of activity. The first, 18 U.S.C. § 1831(a), criminalizes the theft of trade secrets to benefit foreign powers. The second, 18 U.S.C. § 1832, criminalizes their theft for commercial or economic purposes. (The statutory penalties are different for the two offenses.) In Commonwealth common law jurisdictions, confidentiality and trade secrets are regarded as an equitable right rather than a property right but penalties for theft are roughly the same as in the United States.",
"title": "Infringement, misappropriation, and enforcement"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The international governance of IP involves multiple overlapping institutions and forums. There is no overall rule-making body.",
"title": "International framework"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "One of the most important aspects of global IP governance is the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). The TRIPS Agreement sets minimum international standards for IP which every member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) must comply with. A member's non-compliance with the TRIPS Agreement may be grounds for suit under the WTO's Dispute Settlement Mechanism.",
"title": "International framework"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Bilateral and multi-lateral agreements often establish IP requirements above the requirements of the TRIPS Agreement.",
"title": "International framework"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Criticism of the term intellectual property ranges from discussing its vagueness and abstract overreach to direct contention to the semantic validity of using words like property and rights in fashions that contradict practice and law. Many detractors think this term specially serves the doctrinal agenda of parties opposing reform in the public interest or otherwise abusing related legislations, and that it disallows intelligent discussion about specific and often unrelated aspects of copyright, patents, trademarks, etc.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman argues that, although the term intellectual property is in wide use, it should be rejected altogether, because it \"systematically distorts and confuses these issues, and its use was and is promoted by those who gain from this confusion\". He claims that the term \"operates as a catch-all to lump together disparate laws [which] originated separately, evolved differently, cover different activities, have different rules, and raise different public policy issues\" and that it creates a \"bias\" by confusing these monopolies with ownership of limited physical things, likening them to \"property rights\". Stallman advocates referring to copyrights, patents and trademarks in the singular and warns against abstracting disparate laws into a collective term. He argues that, \"to avoid spreading unnecessary bias and confusion, it is best to adopt a firm policy not to speak or even think in terms of 'intellectual property'.\"",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Similarly, economists Boldrin and Levine prefer to use the term \"intellectual monopoly\" as a more appropriate and clear definition of the concept, which, they argue, is very dissimilar from property rights. They further argued that \"stronger patents do little or nothing to encourage innovation\", mainly explained by its tendency to create market monopolies, thereby restricting further innovations and technology transfer.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "On the assumption that intellectual property rights are actual rights, Stallman says that this claim does not live to the historical intentions behind these laws, which in the case of copyright served as a censorship system, and later on, a regulatory model for the printing press that may have benefited authors incidentally, but never interfered with the freedom of average readers. Still referring to copyright, he cites legal literature such as the United States Constitution and case law to demonstrate that the law is meant to be an optional and experimental bargain to temporarily trade property rights and free speech for public, not private, benefits in the form of increased artistic production and knowledge. He mentions that \"if copyright were a natural right nothing could justify terminating this right after a certain period of time\".",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Law professor, writer and political activist Lawrence Lessig, along with many other copyleft and free software activists, has criticized the implied analogy with physical property (like land or an automobile). They argue such an analogy fails because physical property is generally rivalrous while intellectual works are non-rivalrous (that is, if one makes a copy of a work, the enjoyment of the copy does not prevent enjoyment of the original). Other arguments along these lines claim that unlike the situation with tangible property, there is no natural scarcity of a particular idea or information: once it exists at all, it can be re-used and duplicated indefinitely without such re-use diminishing the original. Stephan Kinsella has objected to intellectual property on the grounds that the word \"property\" implies scarcity, which may not be applicable to ideas.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Entrepreneur and politician Rickard Falkvinge and hacker Alexandre Oliva have independently compared George Orwell's fictional dialect Newspeak to the terminology used by intellectual property supporters as a linguistic weapon to shape public opinion regarding copyright debate and DRM.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "In civil law jurisdictions, intellectual property has often been referred to as intellectual rights, traditionally a somewhat broader concept that has included moral rights and other personal protections that cannot be bought or sold. Use of the term intellectual rights has declined since the early 1980s, as use of the term intellectual property has increased.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Alternative terms monopolies on information and intellectual monopoly have emerged among those who argue against the \"property\" or \"intellect\" or \"rights\" assumptions, notably Richard Stallman. The backronyms intellectual protectionism and intellectual poverty, whose initials are also IP, have also found supporters, especially among those who have used the backronym digital restrictions management.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The argument that an intellectual property right should (in the interests of better balancing of relevant private and public interests) be termed an intellectual monopoly privilege (IMP) has been advanced by several academics including Birgitte Andersen and Thomas Alured Faunce.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Some critics of intellectual property, such as those in the free culture movement, point at intellectual monopolies as harming health (in the case of pharmaceutical patents), preventing progress, and benefiting concentrated interests to the detriment of the masses, and argue that ever-expansive monopolies in the form of copyright extensions, software patents, and business method patents harm the public interest. More recently scientists and engineers are expressing concern that patent thickets are undermining technological development even in high-tech fields like nanotechnology.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Petra Moser has asserted that historical analysis suggests that intellectual property laws may harm innovation:",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Overall, the weight of the existing historical evidence suggests that patent policies, which grant strong intellectual property rights to early generations of inventors, may discourage innovation. On the contrary, policies that encourage the diffusion of ideas and modify patent laws to facilitate entry and encourage competition may be an effective mechanism to encourage innovation.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "In support of that argument, Jörg Baten, Nicola Bianchi and Petra Moser find historical evidence that especially compulsory licensing – which allows governments to license patents without the consent of patent-owners – encouraged invention in Germany in the early 20th century by increasing the threat of competition in fields with low pre-existing levels of competition.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Peter Drahos notes, \"Property rights confer authority over resources. When authority is granted to the few over resources on which the many depend, the few gain power over the goals of the many. This has consequences for both political and economic freedom within a society.\"",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) recognizes that conflicts may exist between respecting and implementing current intellectual property systems and other human rights. In 2001 the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights issued a document called \"Human rights and intellectual property\" that argued that intellectual property tends to be governed by economic goals when it should be viewed primarily as a social product; in order to serve human well-being, intellectual property systems must respect and conform to human rights laws. According to the Committee, when systems fail to do so, they risk infringing upon the human right to food and health, and to cultural participation and scientific benefits. In 2004 the General Assembly of WIPO adopted The Geneva Declaration on the Future of the World Intellectual Property Organization which argues that WIPO should \"focus more on the needs of developing countries, and to view IP as one of many tools for development—not as an end in itself\".",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Ethical problems are most pertinent when socially valuable goods like life-saving medicines are given IP protection. While the application of IP rights can allow companies to charge higher than the marginal cost of production in order to recoup the costs of research and development, the price may exclude from the market anyone who cannot afford the cost of the product, in this case a life-saving drug. \"An IPR driven regime is therefore not a regime that is conductive to the investment of R&D of products that are socially valuable to predominately poor populations\".",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Libertarians have differing views on intellectual property. Stephan Kinsella, an anarcho-capitalist on the right-wing of libertarianism, argues against intellectual property because allowing property rights in ideas and information creates artificial scarcity and infringes on the right to own tangible property. Kinsella uses the following scenario to argue this point:",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "[I]magine the time when men lived in caves. One bright guy—let's call him Galt-Magnon—decides to build a log cabin on an open field, near his crops. To be sure, this is a good idea, and others notice it. They naturally imitate Galt-Magnon, and they start building their own cabins. But the first man to invent a house, according to IP advocates, would have a right to prevent others from building houses on their own land, with their own logs, or to charge them a fee if they do build houses. It is plain that the innovator in these examples becomes a partial owner of the tangible property (e.g., land and logs) of others, due not to first occupation and use of that property (for it is already owned), but due to his coming up with an idea. Clearly, this rule flies in the face of the first-user homesteading rule, arbitrarily and groundlessly overriding the very homesteading rule that is at the foundation of all property rights.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Thomas Jefferson once said in a letter to Isaac McPherson on 13 August 1813:",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "In 2005 the Royal Society of Arts launched the Adelphi Charter, aimed at creating an international policy statement to frame how governments should make balanced intellectual property law.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Another aspect of current U.S. Intellectual Property legislation is its focus on individual and joint works; thus, copyright protection can only be obtained in 'original' works of authorship. Critics like Philip Bennet argue that this does not provide adequate protection against cultural appropriation of indigenous knowledge, for which a collective IP regime is needed.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Intellectual property law has been criticized as not recognizing new forms of art such as the remix culture, whose participants often commit what technically constitutes violations of such laws, creation works such as anime music videos and others, or are otherwise subject to unnecessary burdens and limitations which prevent them from fully expressing themselves.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Other criticism of intellectual property law concerns the expansion of intellectual property, both in duration and in scope.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "As scientific knowledge has expanded and allowed new industries to arise in fields such as biotechnology and nanotechnology, originators of technology have sought IP protection for the new technologies. Patents have been granted for living organisms, and in the United States, certain living organisms have been patentable for over a century.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "The increase in terms of protection is particularly seen in relation to copyright, which has recently been the subject of serial extensions in the United States and in Europe. With no need for registration or copyright notices, this is thought to have led to an increase in orphan works (copyrighted works for which the copyright owner cannot be contacted), a problem that has been noticed and addressed by governmental bodies around the world.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Also with respect to copyright, the American film industry helped to change the social construct of intellectual property via its trade organization, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). In amicus briefs in important cases, in lobbying before Congress, and in its statements to the public, the MPAA has advocated strong protection of intellectual property rights. In framing its presentations, the association has claimed that people are entitled to the property that is produced by their labor. Additionally Congress's awareness of the position of the United States as the world's largest producer of films has made it convenient to expand the conception of intellectual property. These doctrinal reforms have further strengthened the industry, lending the MPAA even more power and authority.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "The growth of the Internet, and particularly distributed search engines like Kazaa and Gnutella, have represented a challenge for copyright policy. The Recording Industry Association of America, in particular, has been on the front lines of the fight against copyright infringement, which the industry calls \"piracy\". The industry has had victories against some services, including a highly publicized case against the file-sharing company Napster, and some people have been prosecuted for sharing files in violation of copyright. The electronic age has seen an increase in the attempt to use software-based digital rights management tools to restrict the copying and use of digitally based works. Laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act have been enacted that use criminal law to prevent any circumvention of software used to enforce digital rights management systems. Equivalent provisions, to prevent circumvention of copyright protection have existed in EU for some time, and are being expanded in, for example, Article 6 and 7 the Copyright Directive. Other examples are Article 7 of the Software Directive of 1991 (91/250/EEC), and the Conditional Access Directive of 1998 (98/84/EEC). This can hinder legal uses, affecting public domain works, limitations and exceptions to copyright, or uses allowed by the copyright holder. Some copyleft licenses, like the GNU GPL 3, are designed to counter this. Laws may permit circumvention under specific conditions, such as when it is necessary to achieve interoperability with the circumventor's program, or for accessibility reasons; however, distribution of circumvention tools or instructions may be illegal.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "In the context of trademarks, this expansion has been driven by international efforts to harmonise the definition of \"trademark\", as exemplified by the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights ratified in 1994, which formalized regulations for IP rights that had been handled by common law, or not at all, in member states. Pursuant to TRIPs, any sign which is \"capable of distinguishing\" the products or services of one business from the products or services of another business is capable of constituting a trademark.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Make no mistake: the headline [tax] rate is not what triggers tax evasion and aggressive tax planning. That comes from schemes that facilitate profit shifting.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Pierre MoscoviciEuropean Commissioner for TaxFinancial Times, 11 March 2018",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Intellectual property has become a core tool in corporate tax planning and tax avoidance. IP is a key component of the leading multinational tax avoidance base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) tools, which the OECD estimates costs $100–240 billion in lost annual tax revenues.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "In 2017–2018, both the U.S. and the EU Commission simultaneously decided to depart from the OECD BEPS Project timetable, which was set up in 2013 to combat IP BEPS tax tools like the above, and launch their own anti-IP BEPS tax regimes:",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "The departure of the U.S. and EU Commission from the OECD BEPS Project process, is attributed to frustrations with the rise in IP as a key BEPS tax tool, creating intangible assets, which are then turned into royalty payment BEPS schemes (double Irish), and/or capital allowance BEPS schemes (capital allowances for intangibles). In contrast, the OECD has spent years developing and advocating intellectual property as a legal and a GAAP accounting concept.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Women have historically been underrepresented in the creation and ownership of intellectual property covered by intellectual property rights. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization, women composed only 16.5% of patent holders even as recently as 2020. This disparity is the result of several factors including systemic bias, sexism and discrimination within the intellectual property space, underrepresentation within STEM, and barriers to access of necessary finance and knowledge in order to obtain intellectual property rights, among other reasons.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "The global increase in intellectual property protection is sometimes referred to as a global IP ratchet in which a spiral of bilateral and multilateral agreements result in growing obligations where new agreements never recede from existing standards and very often further heighten them.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "The global IP ratchet has limited the freedom of developing countries to set their own IP standards. Developing countries' lack of bargaining power relative to the developed countries driving the global IP ratchet means that developing countries' ability to regulate intellectual property to advance domestic interests is eroding.",
"title": "Criticisms"
}
]
| Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets. The modern concept of intellectual property developed in England in the 17th and 18th centuries. The term "intellectual property" began to be used in the 19th century, though it was not until the late 20th century that intellectual property became commonplace in most of the world's legal systems. Supporters of intellectual property laws often describe their main purpose as encouraging the creation of a wide variety of intellectual goods. To achieve this, the law gives people and businesses property rights to certain information and intellectual goods they create, usually for a limited period of time. Supporters argue that because IP laws allow people to protect their original ideas and prevent unauthorized copying, creators derive greater individual economic benefit from the information and intellectual goods they create, and thus have more economic incentives to create them in the first place. Advocates of IP believe that these economic incentives and legal protections stimulate innovation and contribute to technological progress of certain kinds. The intangible nature of intellectual property presents difficulties when compared with traditional property like land or goods. Unlike traditional property, intellectual property is "indivisible", since an unlimited number of people can in theory "consume" an intellectual good without its being depleted. Additionally, investments in intellectual goods suffer from appropriation problems: Landowners can surround their land with a robust fence and hire armed guards to protect it, but producers of information or literature can usually do little to stop their first buyer from replicating it and selling it at a lower price. Balancing rights so that they are strong enough to encourage the creation of intellectual goods but not so strong that they prevent the goods' wide use is the primary focus of modern intellectual property law. | 2001-10-16T19:38:16Z | 2023-12-30T23:23:05Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property |
14,726 | Great Famine (Ireland) | The Great Famine (Irish: an Gorta Mór [ənˠ ˈɡɔɾˠt̪ˠə ˈmˠoːɾˠ]), also known within Ireland as the Great Hunger or simply the Famine and outside Ireland as the Irish Potato Famine, was a period of starvation and disease in Ireland lasting from 1845 to 1852 that constituted a historical social crisis and subsequently had a major impact on Irish society and history as a whole. The most severely affected areas were in the western and southern parts of Ireland—where the Irish language was dominant—and hence the period was contemporaneously known in Irish as an Drochshaol, which literally translates to "the bad life" and loosely translates to "the hard times". The worst year of the famine was 1847, which became known as "Black '47". During the Great Hunger, roughly 1 million people died and more than 1 million more fled the country, causing the country's population to fall by 20–25% (in some towns, populations fell as much as 67%) between 1841 and 1871. Between 1845 and 1855, at least 2.1 million people left Ireland, primarily on packet ships but also on steamboats and barques—one of the greatest exoduses from a single island in history.
The proximate cause of the famine was the infection of potato crops by blight (Phytophthora infestans) throughout Europe during the 1840s. Blight infection caused 100,000 deaths outside Ireland and influenced much of the unrest that culminated in European Revolutions of 1848. Longer-term reasons for the massive impact of this particular famine included the system of absentee landlordism and single-crop dependence. Initial limited but constructive government actions to alleviate famine distress were ended by a new Whig administration in London, which pursued a laissez-faire economic doctrine, but also because some in power believed in divine providence or that the Irish lacked moral character, with aid only resuming to some degree later. Large amounts of food were exported from Ireland during the famine and the refusal of London to bar such exports, as had been done on previous occasions, was an immediate and continuing source of controversy, contributing to anti-British sentiment and the campaign for independence. Additionally, the famine indirectly resulted in tens of thousands of households being evicted, exacerbated by a provision forbidding access to workhouse aid while in possession of more than one-quarter acre of land.
The famine was a defining moment in the history of Ireland, which was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 1801 to 1922. The famine and its effects permanently changed the island's demographic, political, and cultural landscape, producing an estimated 2 million refugees and spurring a century-long population decline. For both the native Irish and those in the resulting diaspora, the famine entered folk memory. The strained relations between many Irish and their ruling British government worsened further because of the famine, heightening ethnic and sectarian tensions and boosting nationalism and republicanism both in Ireland and among Irish emigrants around the world. English documentary maker John Percival said that the famine "became part of the long story of betrayal and exploitation which led to the growing movement in Ireland for independence." Scholar Kirby Miller makes the same point. Debate exists regarding nomenclature for the event, whether to use the term "Famine", "Potato Famine" or "Great Hunger", the last of which some believe most accurately captures the complicated history of the period.
The potato blight returned to Europe in 1879 but, by this time, the Land War (one of the largest agrarian movements to take place in 19th-century Europe) had begun in Ireland. The movement, organized by the Land League, continued the political campaign for the Three Fs which was issued in 1850 by the Tenant Right League during the Great Famine. When the potato blight returned to Ireland in the 1879 famine, the League boycotted "notorious landlords" and its members physically blocked the evictions of farmers; the consequent reduction in homelessness and house demolition resulted in a drastic reduction in the number of deaths.
Ireland was brought into the United Kingdom in January 1801 following the passage of the Acts of Union. Executive power lay in the hands of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and Chief Secretary for Ireland, who were appointed by the British government. Ireland sent 105 members of parliament to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, and Irish representative peers elected 28 of their own number to sit for life in the House of Lords. Between 1832 and 1859, 70% of Irish representatives were landowners or the sons of landowners.
In the 40 years that followed the union, successive British governments grappled with the problems of governing a country which had, as Benjamin Disraeli stated in 1844, "a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, an alien established Protestant church, and in addition, the weakest executive in the world". One historian calculated that, between 1801 and 1845, there had been 114 commissions and 61 special committees inquiring into the state of Ireland, and that "without exception their findings prophesied disaster; Ireland was on the verge of starvation, her population rapidly increasing, three-quarters of her labourers unemployed, housing conditions appalling and the standard of living unbelievably low".
Lectures printed in 1847 by John Hughes, Bishop of New York, are a contemporary exploration into the antecedent causes, particularly the political climate, in which the Irish famine occurred.
The "middleman system" for managing landed property was introduced in the 18th century. Rent collection was left in the hands of the landlords' agents, or middlemen. This assured the landlord of a regular income and relieved them of direct responsibility while leaving tenants open to exploitation by the middlemen. The ability of middlemen was measured by the rent income they could contrive to extract from tenants. Middlemen leased large tracts of land from the landlords on long leases with fixed rents and sublet to tenants, keeping any money raised in excess to the rent paid to the landlord. This system, coupled with minimal oversight of the middlemen, incentivised harsh exploitation of tenants. Middlemen would split a holding into smaller and smaller parcels so as to increase the amount of rent they could obtain. Tenants could be evicted for reasons such as non-payment of rents (which were high), or a landlord's decision to raise sheep instead of grain crops. Cottiers paid their rent by working for the landlord while the spalpeens (itinerant labourers) paid for short-term leases through temporary day work.
A majority of Catholics, who constituted 80% of the Irish population, lived in conditions of poverty and insecurity. At the top of the social hierarchy was the Ascendancy class, composed of English and Anglo-Irish families who owned most of the land and held more or less unchecked power over their tenants. Some of their estates were vast; for example, the Earl of Lucan owned more than 60,000 acres (240 km). Many of these landowners lived in England and functioned as absentee landlords. The rent revenue—collected from impoverished tenants who were paid minimal wages to raise crops and livestock for export—was mostly sent to England.
In 1800, the 1st Earl of Clare observed of landlords that "confiscation is their common title". According to the historian Cecil Woodham-Smith, landlords regarded the land as a source of income, from which as much as possible was to be extracted. With the peasantry "brooding over their discontent in sullen indignation" (in the words of the Earl of Clare), the landlords largely viewed the countryside as a hostile place in which to live. Some landlords visited their property only once or twice in a lifetime, if ever. The rents from Ireland were generally spent elsewhere; an estimated £6,000,000 was remitted out of Ireland in 1842.
In 1843, the British Government recognized that the land management system in Ireland was the foundational cause of disaffection in the country. The Prime Minister established a Royal Commission, chaired by the Earl of Devon (Devon Commission), to enquire into the laws regarding the occupation of land. Irish politician Daniel O'Connell described this commission as "perfectly one-sided", being composed of landlords with no tenant representation.
In February 1845, Devon reported:
It would be impossible adequately to describe the privations which they [the Irish labourer and his family] habitually and silently endure ... in many districts their only food is the potato, their only beverage water ... their cabins are seldom a protection against the weather ... a bed or a blanket is a rare luxury ... and nearly in all their pig and a manure heap constitute their only property.
The Commissioners concluded they could not "forbear expressing our strong sense of the patient endurance which the labouring classes have exhibited under sufferings greater, we believe, than the people of any other country in Europe have to sustain". The Commission stated that bad relations between landlord and tenant were principally responsible for this suffering. Landlords were described in evidence before the commission as "land sharks", "bloodsuckers", and "the most oppressive species of tyrant that ever lent assistance to the destruction of a country".
As any improvement made on a holding by a tenant became the property of the landlord when the lease expired or was terminated, the incentive to make improvements was limited. Most tenants had no security of tenure on the land; as tenants "at will", they could be turned out whenever the landlord chose. The only exception to this arrangement was in Ulster where, under a practice known as "tenant right", a tenant was compensated for any improvement they made to their holding. According to Woodham-Smith, the commission stated that "the superior prosperity and tranquillity of Ulster, compared with the rest of Ireland, were due to tenant right".
Landlords in Ireland often used their powers without compunction, and tenants lived in dread of them. Woodham-Smith writes that, in these circumstances, "industry and enterprise were extinguished and a peasantry created which was one of the most destitute in Europe".
The Popery Act (Penal Law) of 1704 required that a tenant's land be divided equally between his sons upon his death. Immense population growth, from about 2 million in 1700 to 8 million by the time of the Great Famine, led to increased division of holdings and a consequent reduction in their average size. By 1845, 24% of all Irish tenant farms were of 0.4–2 hectares (1–5 acres) in size, while 40% were of 2–6 hectares (5–15 acres). Holdings were so small that no crop other than potatoes would suffice to feed a family. Shortly before the famine, the British government reported that poverty was so widespread that one-third of all Irish small holdings could not support the tenant families after rent was paid; the families survived only by earnings as seasonal migrant labour in England and Scotland. Following the famine, reforms were implemented making it illegal to further divide land holdings.
The 1841 census showed a population of just over eight million. Two-thirds of people depended on agriculture for their survival but rarely received a working wage. They had to work for their landlords in return for a small patch of land to farm. This forced Ireland's peasantry to practice continuous monoculture, as the potato was the only crop that could meet nutritional needs.
The potato was introduced in Ireland as a garden crop of the gentry. By the late 17th century, it had become widespread as a supplementary food; their main diet was still based on butter, milk, and grain products.
The Irish economy grew between 1760 and 1815 due to infrastructure expansion and the Napoleonic Wars (1805–1815), which had increased the demand for food in Britain. Tillage increased to such an extent that there was only a small amount of land available to small farmers to feed themselves. The potato was adopted as a primary food source because of its quick growth in a comparatively small space. By 1800, the potato had become a staple food for one in three Irish people, especially in winter. It eventually became a staple year-round for farmers. A disproportionate share of the potatoes grown in Ireland were the Irish Lumper, creating a lack of genetic variability among potato plants, which increased vulnerability to disease.
Potatoes were essential to the expansion of the cottier system; they supported an extremely cheap workforce, but at the cost of lower living standards. For the labourer, "a potato wage" shaped the expanding agrarian economy. The potato was also used extensively as a fodder crop for livestock immediately prior to the famine. Approximately 33% of production, amounting to 5,000,000 short tons (4,500,000 t), was typically used in this way.
Prior to the arrival of Phytophthora infestans, commonly known as "blight", only two main potato plant diseases had been discovered. One was called "dry rot" or "taint", and the other was a virus known popularly as "curl". Phytophthora infestans is an oomycete (a variety of parasitic, non-photosynthetic organisms closely related to brown algae, and not a fungus).
In 1851, the Census of Ireland Commissioners recorded 24 failures of the potato crop going back to 1728, of varying severity. General crop failures, through disease or frost, were recorded in 1739, 1740, 1770, 1800, and 1807. In 1821 and 1822, the potato crop failed in Munster and Connaught. In 1830 and 1831, counties Mayo, Donegal, and Galway suffered likewise. In 1832, 1833, 1834, and 1836, dry rot and curl caused serious losses, and in 1835 the potato failed in Ulster. Widespread failures throughout Ireland occurred in 1836, 1837, 1839, 1841, and 1844. According to Woodham-Smith, "the unreliability of the potato was an accepted fact in Ireland".
Experts are still unsure of how and when blight arrived in Europe; it almost certainly was not present prior to 1842, and probably arrived in 1844. The origin of the pathogen has been traced to the Toluca Valley in Mexico, whence it spread within North America and then to Europe. The 1845–1846 blight was caused by the HERB-1 strain of the blight.
In 1844, Irish newspapers carried reports concerning a disease that had attacked the potato crops in America for two years. In 1843 and 1844, blight largely destroyed the potato crops in the Eastern United States. Ships from Baltimore, Philadelphia, or New York City could have carried diseased potatoes from these areas to European ports. American plant pathologist William C. Paddock posited that the blight was transported via potatoes being carried to feed passengers on clipper ships sailing from America to Ireland. Once introduced in Ireland and Europe, blight spread rapidly. By mid-August 1845, it had reached much of northern and central Europe; Belgium, The Netherlands, northern France, and southern England had all already been affected.
On 16 August 1845, The Gardeners' Chronicle and Horticultural Gazette reported "a blight of unusual character" on the Isle of Wight. A week later, on 23 August, it reported that "A fearful malady has broken out among the potato crop ... In Belgium the fields are said to be completely desolated. There is hardly a sound sample in Covent Garden market ... As for cure for this distemper, there is none." These reports were extensively covered in Irish newspapers. On 11 September, the Freeman's Journal reported on "the appearance of what is called 'cholera' in potatoes in Ireland, especially in the north". On 13 September, The Gardeners' Chronicle announced: "We stop the Press with very great regret to announce that the potato Murrain has unequivocally declared itself in Ireland."
Nevertheless, the British government remained optimistic over the next few weeks, as it received conflicting reports. Only when the crop was harvested in October did the scale of destruction become apparent. Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel wrote to Sir James Graham in mid-October that he found the reports "very alarming", but allayed his fears by claiming that there was "always a tendency to exaggeration in Irish news".
Crop loss in 1845 has been estimated at anywhere from one-third to one-half of cultivated acreage. The Mansion House Committee in Dublin, to which hundreds of letters were directed from all over Ireland, claimed on 19 November 1845 to have ascertained beyond the shadow of a doubt that "considerably more than one-third of the entire of the potato crop ... has been already destroyed".
In 1846, three-quarters of the harvest was lost to blight. By December, a third of a million destitute people were employed in public works. According to Cormac Ó Gráda, the first attack of potato blight caused considerable hardship in rural Ireland from the autumn of 1846, when the first deaths from starvation were recorded. Seed potatoes were scarce in 1847. Few had been sown, so, despite average yields, hunger continued. 1848 yields were only two-thirds of normal. Since over three million Irish people were totally dependent on potatoes for food, hunger and famine were widespread.
The Corporation of Dublin sent a memorial to the Queen, "praying her" to call Parliament together early (Parliament was at this time prorogued), and to recommend the requisition of some public money for public works, especially railways in Ireland. The Town Council of Belfast met and made similar suggestions, but neither body asked for charity, according to John Mitchel, one of the leading Repealers.
In early November 1845, a deputation from the citizens of Dublin, including the Duke of Leinster, Lord Cloncurry, Daniel O'Connell and the Lord Mayor, went to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Heytesbury to discuss the issue. They offered suggestions such as opening the ports to foreign corn, stopping distillation from grain, prohibiting the export of foodstuffs, and providing employment through public works. Lord Heytesbury urged them not to be alarmed, that they "were premature", that scientists were enquiring into all those matters, and that the Inspectors of Constabulary and Stipendiary Magistrates were charged with making constant reports from their districts, and there was no "immediate pressure on the market".
On 8 December 1845, Daniel O'Connell, head of the Repeal Association, proposed several remedies to the pending disaster. One of the first things he suggested was the introduction of Tenant-Right as practised in Ulster, giving the landlord a fair rent for his land, but giving the tenant compensation for any money he might have laid out on the land in permanent improvements. O'Connell noted actions taken by the Belgian legislature during the same season, as they had also been hit by blight: shutting their ports against the export of provisions and opening them to imports. He suggested that, if Ireland had a domestic Parliament, the ports would be thrown open and the abundant crops raised in Ireland would be kept for the people of Ireland, as the Dublin parliament had done during the food shortages of the 1780s. O'Connell maintained that only an Irish parliament would provide both food and employment for the people. He said that repeal of the Act of Union was a necessity and Ireland's only hope.
Mitchel later wrote one of the first widely circulated tracts on the famine, The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), published in 1861. It proposed that British actions during the famine and their treatment of the Irish were a deliberate effort at genocide. It contained a sentence that has since become famous: "The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine." Mitchel was charged with sedition because of his writings, but this charge was dropped. He was convicted by a packed jury under the newly enacted Treason Felony Act and sentenced to 14 years transportation to Bermuda.
According to Charles Gavan Duffy, The Nation insisted that the proper remedy, retaining in the country the food raised by her people until the people were fed, was one which the rest of Europe had adopted, and one which even the parliaments of the Pale (i.e., before the union with Great Britain in 1801) had adopted in periods of distress.
Contemporaneously, as found in letters from the period and in particular later oral memory, the name for the event is in Irish: An Drochshaol, though with the earlier spelling standard of the era, which was Gaelic script, it is found written as in Droċ-Ṡaoġal. In the modern era, this name, while loosely translated as "the hard-time", is always denoted with a capital letter to express its specific historic meaning.
The period of the potato blight in Ireland from 1845 to 1851 was full of political confrontation. A more radical Young Ireland group seceded from the Repeal movement in July 1846, and attempted an armed rebellion in 1848. It was unsuccessful.
In 1847, William Smith O'Brien, leader of the Young Ireland party, became one of the founding members of the Irish Confederation to campaign for a Repeal of the Act of Union, and called for the export of grain to be stopped and the ports closed. The following year, he helped organise the short-lived Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848 in County Tipperary.
When Ireland experienced food shortages in 1782–1783, ports were closed to exporting food, with the intention of keeping locally grown food in Ireland to feed the hungry. Irish food prices promptly dropped. Some merchants lobbied against the export ban, but the government in the 1780s overrode their protests.
Historian F. S. L. Lyons characterised the initial response of the British government to the early, less severe phase of the famine as "prompt and relatively successful". Confronted by widespread crop failure in November 1845, the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, purchased £100,000 worth of maize and cornmeal secretly from America with Baring Brothers initially acting as his agents. The government hoped that they would not "stifle private enterprise" and that their actions would not act as a disincentive to local relief efforts. Due to poor weather conditions, the first shipment did not arrive in Ireland until the beginning of February 1846. The initial shipments were of unground dried kernels, but the few Irish mills in operation were not equipped for milling maize and a long and complicated milling process had to be adopted before the meal could be distributed. In addition, before the cornmeal could be consumed, it had to be "very much" cooked again, or eating it could result in severe bowel complaints. Due to its yellow colour, and initial unpopularity, it became known as "Peel's brimstone".
In October 1845, Peel moved to repeal the Corn Laws—tariffs on grain which kept the price of bread high—but the issue split his party and he had insufficient support from his own colleagues to push the measure through. He resigned the premiership in December, but the opposition was unable to form a government and he was re-appointed. In March, Peel set up a programme of public works in Ireland, but the famine situation worsened during 1846, and the repeal of the Corn Laws in that year did little to help the starving Irish; the measure split the Conservative Party, leading to the fall of Peel's ministry. On 25 June, the second reading of the government's Irish Coercion Bill was defeated by 73 votes in the House of Commons by a combination of Whigs, Radicals, Irish Repealers, and protectionist Conservatives. Peel was forced to resign as prime minister on 29 June, and the Whig leader, Lord John Russell, became prime minister.
The measures undertaken by Peel's successor, Russell, proved inadequate as the crisis deepened. The new Whig administration, influenced by the doctrine of laissez-faire, believed that the market would provide the food needed. They refused to interfere with the movement of food to England, and then halted the previous government's food and relief works, leaving many hundreds of thousands of people without access to work, money, or food. Russell's ministry introduced a new programme of public works that by the end of December 1846 employed some half a million but proved impossible to administer.
Charles Trevelyan, who was in charge of the administration of government relief, limited the Government's food aid programme, claiming that food would be readily imported into Ireland once people had more money to spend after wages were being paid on new public-works projects. Saying "The judgement of God send the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson and that calamity must not be too mitigated [..] The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people."
In a private correspondence, Trevelyan explained how the famine could bring benefit to the English; As he wrote to Edward Twisleton:
"We must not complain of what we really want to obtain. If small farmers go, and their landlords are reduced to sell portions of their estates to persons who will invest capital we shall at last arrive at something like a satisfactory settlement of the country".
In January 1847, the government abandoned its policy of noninterference, realising that it had failed, and turned to a mixture of "indoor" and "outdoor" direct relief; the former administered in workhouses through the Irish Poor Laws, the latter through soup kitchens. The costs of the Poor Law fell primarily on the local landlords, some of whom in turn attempted to reduce their liability by evicting their tenants or providing some relief through the conversionist practice of Souperism.
On 1 March 1847, the Bank of England announced plans to raise a loan of £14 million to relieve the Irish crisis, and also for unfunded tax cuts. This led to the Panic of 1847, in which gold was withdrawn from circulation, so reducing the amount of bank notes that the Bank could legally circulate. By 17 April 1847 the bullion reserve of the Bank of England had diminished from £15 million in January to some £9 million, and it was announced that the cost of famine relief would be transferred to local taxes in Ireland. The financial crisis temporarily improved, but the intended relief for Ireland did not materialise.
In June 1847, the Poor Law Amendment Act was passed which embodied the principle, popular in Britain, that Irish property must support Irish poverty. The landed proprietors in Ireland were held in Britain to have created the conditions that led to the famine. However, it was asserted that the British parliament since the Act of Union of 1800 was partly to blame. This point was raised in The Illustrated London News on 13 February 1847: "There was no law it would not pass at their request, and no abuse it would not defend for them." On 24 March, The Times reported that Britain had permitted in Ireland "a mass of poverty, disaffection, and degradation without a parallel in the world. It allowed proprietors to suck the very life-blood of that wretched race".
The "Gregory clause" of the Poor Law, named after William H. Gregory, M.P., prohibited anyone who held at least 1⁄4 acre (0.1 ha) from receiving relief. In practice, this meant that the many farmers who had to sell all their produce to pay rent and taxes, would have to deliver up all their land to the landlord to qualify for public outdoor relief. Of this Law, Mitchel wrote that "it is the able-bodied idler only who is to be fed—if he attempted to till but one rood of ground, he dies". This simple method of ejectment was called "passing paupers through the workhouse"—a man went in, a pauper came out. These factors combined to drive thousands of people off the land: 90,000 in 1849, and 104,000 in 1850.
In 1849, the Encumbered Estates Act allowed landlord estates to be auctioned off upon the petition of creditors. Estates with debts were then auctioned off at low prices. Wealthy British speculators purchased the lands and "took a harsh view" of the tenant farmers who continued renting. The rents were raised, and tenants evicted to create large cattle grazing pastures. Between 1849 and 1854, some 50,000 families were evicted.
The Royal Navy squadron stationed in Cork under the command of Rear-Admiral Hugh Pigot undertook significant relief operation from 1846 to 1847, transporting government relief into the port of Cork and other ports along the Irish coast, being ordered on 2 January 1846 to assist distressed regions. On 27 December 1846, Trevelyan ordered every available steamship to Ireland to assist in relief, and on 14 January 1847, Pigot received orders to also distribute supplies from the British Relief Association and treat them identically to government aid. In addition, some naval officers under Pigot oversaw the logistics of relief operations further inland from Cork. In February 1847, Trevelyan ordered Royal Navy surgeons dispatched to provide medical care for those suffering from illnesses that accompanied starvation, distribute medicines that were in short supply, and assist in proper, sanitary burials for the deceased. These efforts, although significant, were insufficient at preventing mass mortality from famine and disease.
The historian Cecil Woodham-Smith wrote in The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849 that no issue has provoked so much anger and embittered relations between England and Ireland "as the indisputable fact that huge quantities of food were exported from Ireland to England throughout the period when the people of Ireland were dying of starvation". While in addition to the maize imports, four times as much wheat was imported into Ireland at the height of the famine as exported, much of the imported wheat was used as livestock feed. Woodham-Smith added that provision via the Poor law union workhouses by the Act of 1838 had to be paid by rates levied on the local property owners, and in areas where the famine was worst, the tenants could not pay their rents to enable landlords to fund the rates and therefore the workhouses. Only by selling food, some of which would inevitably be exported, could a "virtuous circle" be created whereby the rents and rates would be paid, and the workhouses funded. Relief through the workhouse system was simply overwhelmed by the enormous scale and duration of the famine. Nicolas McEvoy, parish priest of Kells, wrote in October 1845:
On my most minute personal inspection of the potato crop in this most fertile potato-growing locale is founded my inexpressibly painful conviction that one family in twenty of the people will not have a single potato left on Christmas day next. Many are the fields I have examined and testimony the most solemn can I tender, that in the great bulk of those fields all the potatoes sizable enough to be sent to table are irreparably damaged, while for the remaining comparatively sounder fields very little hopes are entertained in consequence of the daily rapid development of the deplorable disease.
With starvation at our doors, grimly staring us, vessels laden with our sole hopes of existence, our provisions, are hourly wafted from our every port. From one milling establishment I have last night seen not less than fifty dray loads of meal moving on to Drogheda, thence to go to feed the foreigner, leaving starvation and death the sure and certain fate of the toil and sweat that raised this food.
For their respective inhabitants England, Holland, Scotland, Germany, are taking early the necessary precautions—getting provisions from every possible part of the globe; and I ask are Irishmen alone unworthy the sympathies of a paternal gentry or a paternal Government?
Let Irishmen themselves take heed before the provisions are gone. Let those, too, who have sheep, and oxen, and haggards. Self-preservation is the first law of nature. The right of the starving to try and sustain existence is a right far and away paramount to every right that property confers.
Infinitely more precious in the eyes of reason in the adorable eye of the Omnipotent Creator, is the life of the last and least of human beings than the whole united property of the entire universe. The appalling character of the crisis renders delicacy but criminal and imperatively calls for the timely and explicit notice of principles that will not fail to prove terrible arms in the hands of a neglected, abandoned starving people.
In the 5 May 2020, issue of the Dublin Review of Books, Editor Maurice Earls wrote:
Dr. McEvoy, in his grim forebodings and apocalyptic fear, was closer to the truth than the sanguine rationalists quoted in the newspapers, but McEvoy, like many others, overestimated the likelihood of mass rebellion, and even this great clerical friend of the poor could hardly have contemplated the depth of social, economic and cultural destruction which would persist and deepen over the following century and beyond. It was politics that turned a disease of potatoes and tomatoes into famine, and it was politics which ensured its disastrous aftereffects would disfigure numerous future generations.
According to historian James Donnelly, "the picture of Irish people starving as food was exported was the most powerful image in the nationalist construct of the Famine". Grain imports, especially for livestock feed, increased after the spring of 1847 and much of the debate "has been conducted within narrow parameters," focusing "almost exclusively on national estimates with little attempt to disaggregate the data by region or by product."
Total charitable donations for famine relief might have been about £1.5 million of which £856,500 came from outside Ireland. Donations within Ireland are harder to trace; £380,000 of donations were officially registered but once some allowance is made for less formal donations the Irish total probably exceeds that of Britain (£525,000). People of Irish descent also contributed to funds raised outside of Ireland and those donations would be included in the region where the donation was made. English Protestants donated more to Irish famine relief than any other source outside of Ireland.
Large sums of money were donated by charities; the first foreign campaign in December 1845 included the Boston Repeal Association and the Catholic Church. Calcutta is credited with making the first larger donations in 1846, summing up to around £14,000. The money raised included contributions by Irish soldiers serving there and Irish people employed by the East India Company. Russian Tsar Alexander II sent funds and Queen Victoria donated £2,000. According to legend, Sultan Abdülmecid I of the Ottoman Empire originally offered to send £10,000 but was asked either by British diplomats or his own ministers to reduce it to £1,000 to avoid donating more than the Queen. U.S. President James K. Polk donated $50 and in 1847 Congressman Abraham Lincoln donated $10 ($307 in 2019 value). Pope Pius IX also made a personal contribution of 1,000 Scudi (approximately £213) for famine relief in Ireland and authorized collections in Rome. Most significantly, on 25 March 1847, Pius IX issued the encyclical Praedecessores nostros, which called the whole Catholic world to contribute moneywise and spiritually to Irish relief. Major figures behind international Catholic fundraising for Ireland were the rector of the Pontifical Irish College, Paul Cullen, and the President of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, Jules Gossin.
International fundraising activities received donations from locations as diverse as Venezuela, Australia, South Africa, Mexico, Russia and Italy. In addition to the religious, non-religious organisations came to the assistance of famine victims. The British Relief Association was the largest of these groups. Founded on 1 January 1847 by Lionel de Rothschild, Abel Smith, and other prominent bankers and aristocrats, the Association raised money throughout England, America, and Australia; their funding drive was benefited by a "Queen's Letter", a letter from Queen Victoria appealing for money to relieve the distress in Ireland. With this initial letter, the Association raised £171,533. A second, somewhat less successful "Queen's Letter" was issued in late 1847. In total, the Association raised approximately £390,000 for Irish relief.
Private initiatives such as the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends (Quakers) attempted to fill the gap caused by the end of government relief, and eventually, the government reinstated the relief works, although bureaucracy slowed the release of food supplies. Thousands of dollars were raised in the United States, including $170 ($5,218 in 2019 value) collected from a group of Native American Choctaws in 1847. Judy Allen, editor of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma's newspaper Biskinik, wrote that "It had been just 16 years since the Choctaw people had experienced the Trail of Tears, and they had faced starvation ... It was an amazing gesture." To mark the 150th anniversary, eight Irish people retraced the Trail of Tears.
Contributions by the United States during the famine were highlighted by Senator Henry Clay who said; "No imagination can conceive—no tongue express—no brush paint—the horrors of the scenes which are daily exhibited in Ireland." He called upon Americans to remind them that the practice of charity was the greatest act of humanity they could do. In total, 118 vessels sailed from the US to Ireland with relief goods valued at $545,145. Specific states which provided aid include South Carolina and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania was the second most important state for famine relief in the US and the second-largest shipping port for aid to Ireland. The state hosted the Philadelphia Irish Famine Relief Committee. Catholics, Methodists, Quakers, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Moravian and Jewish groups put aside their differences in the name of humanity to help out the Irish. South Carolina rallied around the efforts to help those experiencing the famine. They raised donations of money, food and clothing to help the victims of the famine—Irish immigrants made up 39% of the white population in the southern cities. Historian Harvey Strum claims that "The states ignored all their racial, religious, and political differences to support the cause for relief."
Landlords were responsible for paying the rates of every tenant whose yearly rent was £4 or less. Landlords whose land was crowded with poorer tenants were now faced with large bills. Many began clearing the poor tenants from their small plots and letting the land in larger plots for over £4 which then reduced their debts. In 1846, there had been some clearances, but the great mass of evictions came in 1847. According to James S. Donnelly Jr., it is impossible to be sure how many people were evicted during the years of the famine and its immediate aftermath. It was only in 1849 that the police began to keep a count, and they recorded a total of almost 250,000 persons as officially evicted between 1849 and 1854.
Donnelly considered this to be an underestimate, and if the figures were to include the number pressured into "voluntary" surrenders during the whole period (1846–1854), the figure would almost certainly exceed half a million persons. While Helen Litton says there were also thousands of "voluntary" surrenders, she notes also that there was "precious little voluntary about them". In some cases, tenants were persuaded to accept a small sum of money to leave their homes, "cheated into believing the workhouse would take them in".
West Clare was one of the worst areas for evictions, where landlords turned thousands of families out and demolished their derisory cabins. Captain Kennedy in April 1848 estimated that 1,000 houses, with an average of six people to each, had been levelled since November. The Mahon family of Strokestown House evicted 3,000 people in 1847 and were still able to dine on lobster soup.
After Clare, the worst area for evictions was County Mayo, accounting for 10% of all evictions between 1849 and 1854. George Bingham, 3rd Earl of Lucan, who owned over 60,000 acres (240 km), was among the worst evicting landlords. He was quoted as saying that "he would not breed paupers to pay priests". Having turned out in the parish of Ballinrobe over 2,000 tenants alone, he then used the cleared land as grazing farms. In 1848, the Marquis of Sligo owed £1,650 to Westport Union; he was also an evicting landlord, though he claimed to be selective, saying that he was only getting rid of the idle and dishonest. Altogether, he cleared about 25% of his tenants.
In 1847, Bishop of Meath, Thomas Nulty, described his personal recollection of the evictions in a pastoral letter to his clergy:
Seven hundred human beings were driven from their homes in one day and set adrift on the world, to gratify the caprice of one who, before God and man, probably deserved less consideration than the last and least of them ... The horrid scenes I then witnessed, I must remember all my life long. The wailing of women—the screams, the terror, the consternation of children—the speechless agony of honest industrious men—wrung tears of grief from all who saw them. I saw officers and men of a large police force, who were obliged to attend on the occasion, cry like children at beholding the cruel sufferings of the very people whom they would be obliged to butcher had they offered the least resistance. The landed proprietors in a circle all around—and for many miles in every direction—warned their tenantry, with threats of their direct vengeance, against the humanity of extending to any of them the hospitality of a single night's shelter ... and in little more than three years, nearly a fourth of them lay quietly in their graves.
The population in Drumbaragh, a townland in County Meath, plummeted 67 per cent between 1841 and 1851; in neighbouring Springville, it fell 54 per cent. There were fifty houses in Springville in 1841 and only eleven left in 1871.
According to Litton, evictions might have taken place earlier but for fear of the secret societies. However, they were now greatly weakened by the Famine. Revenge still occasionally took place, with seven landlords being shot, six fatally, during the autumn and winter of 1847. Ten other occupiers of land, though without tenants, were also murdered, she says.
One such landlord reprisal occurred in West Roscommon. The "notorious" Major Denis Mahon enforced thousands of his tenants into eviction before the end of 1847, with an estimated 60 per cent decline in population in some parishes. He was shot dead in that year. In East Roscommon, "where conditions were more benign", the estimated decline in population was under 10 percent.
Lord Clarendon, alarmed at the number of landlords being shot and that this might mean rebellion, asked for special powers. Lord John Russell was not sympathetic to this appeal. Lord Clarendon believed that the landlords themselves were mostly responsible for the tragedy in the first place, saying that "It is quite true that landlords in England would not like to be shot like hares and partridges ... but neither does any landlord in England turn out fifty persons at once and burn their houses over their heads, giving them no provision for the future." The Crime and Outrage Act was passed in December 1847 as a compromise, and additional troops were sent to Ireland.
The "Gregory clause", described by Donnelly as a "vicious amendment to the Irish poor law", had been a successful Tory amendment to the Whig poor-relief bill which became law in early June 1847, where its potential as an estate-clearing device was widely recognised in parliament, although not in advance. At first, the poor law commissioners and inspectors viewed the clause as a valuable instrument for a more cost-effective administration of public relief, but the drawbacks soon became apparent, even from an administrative perspective. They would soon view them as little more than murderous from a humanitarian perspective. According to Donnelly, it became obvious that the quarter-acre clause was "indirectly a death-dealing instrument".
At least a million people are thought to have emigrated as a result of the famine. There were about 1 million long-distance emigrants between 1846 and 1851, mainly to North America. The total given in the 1851 census is 967,908. Short-distance emigrants, mainly to Britain, may have numbered 200,000 or more.
While the famine was responsible for a significant increase in emigration from Ireland, of anywhere from 45% to nearly 85% depending on the year and the county, it was not the sole cause. The beginning of mass emigration from Ireland can be traced to the mid-18th century, when some 250,000 people left Ireland over a period of 50 years to settle in the New World. Irish economist Cormac Ó Gráda estimates that between 1 million and 1.5 million people emigrated during the 30 years between 1815 (when Napoleon was defeated in Waterloo) and 1845 (when the Great Famine began). However, during the worst of the famine, emigration reached somewhere around 250,000 in one year alone, with western Ireland seeing the most emigrants.
Families did not migrate en masse, but younger members of families did, so much so that emigration almost became a rite of passage, as evidenced by the data that show that, unlike similar emigrations throughout world history, women emigrated just as often, just as early, and in the same numbers as men. The emigrants would send remittances (reaching a total of £1,404,000 by 1851) back to family in Ireland, which, in turn, allowed another member of their family to leave.
Emigration during the famine years of 1845–1850 was primarily to England, Scotland, South Wales, North America, and Australia. Many of those fleeing to the Americas used the McCorkell Line. One city that experienced a particularly strong influx of Irish immigrants was Liverpool, with at least one-quarter of the city's population being Irish-born by 1851. This would heavily influence the city's identity and culture in the coming years, earning it the nickname of "Ireland's second capital". Liverpool became the only place outside of Ireland to elect an Irish nationalist to parliament when it elected T. P. O'Connor in 1885, and continuously re-elected him unopposed until his death in 1929. As of 2020, it is estimated that three quarters of people from the city have Irish ancestry.
Of the more than 100,000 Irish that sailed to Canada in 1847, an estimated one out of five died from disease and malnutrition, including over 5,000 at Grosse Isle, Quebec, an island in the Saint Lawrence River used to quarantine ships near Quebec City. Overcrowded, poorly maintained, and badly provisioned vessels known as coffin ships sailed from small, unregulated harbours in the West of Ireland in contravention of British safety requirements, and mortality rates were high. The 1851 census reported that more than half the inhabitants of Toronto were Irish, and, in 1847 alone, 38,000 Irish flooded a city with fewer than 20,000 citizens. Other Canadian cities such as Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa, Kingston, Hamilton, and Saint John also received large numbers. By 1871, 55% of Saint John residents were Irish natives or children of Irish-born parents. Unlike the United States, Canada could not close its ports to Irish ships because it was part of the British Empire, so emigrants could obtain cheap passage in returning empty lumber holds.
In America, most Irish became city-dwellers; with little money, many had to settle in the cities that the ships they came on landed in. By 1850, the Irish made up a quarter of the population in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.
The famine marked the beginning of the depopulation of Ireland in the 19th century. The population had increased by 13–14% in the first three decades of the 19th century; between 1831 and 1841, the population grew by 5%. Application of Thomas Malthus's idea of population expanding geometrically while resources increase arithmetically was popular during the famines of 1817 and 1822. By the 1830s, they were seen as overly simplistic, and Ireland's problems were seen "less as an excess of population than as a lack of capital investment". The population of Ireland was increasing no faster than that of England, which suffered no equivalent catastrophe. By 1854, between 1.5 and 2 million Irish left their country due to evictions, starvation, and harsh living conditions.
It is not known exactly how many people died during the period of the famine, although it is believed that more died from disease than from starvation. State registration of births, marriages, or deaths had not yet begun, and records kept by the Catholic Church are incomplete. One possible estimate has been reached by comparing the expected population with the eventual numbers in the 1850s. A census taken in 1841 recorded a population of 8,175,124. A census immediately after the famine in 1851 counted 6,552,385, a drop of over 1.5 million in 10 years. The census commissioners estimated that, at the normal rate of population increase, the population in 1851 should have grown to just over 9 million if the famine had not occurred.
On the in-development Great Irish Famine Online resource, produced by the Geography department of University College Cork, the population of Ireland section states, that together with the census figures being called low, before the famine it reads that "it is now generally believed" that over 8.75 million people populated the island of Ireland prior to it striking.
In 1851, the census commissioners collected information on the number who died in each family since 1841, and the cause, season, and year of death. They recorded 21,770 total deaths from starvation in the previous decade and 400,720 deaths from diseases. Listed diseases were fever, diphtheria, dysentery, cholera, smallpox, and influenza, with the first two being the main killers (222,021 and 93,232). The commissioners acknowledged that their figures were incomplete and that the true number of deaths was probably higher:
The greater the amount of destitution of mortality ... the less will be the amount of recorded deaths derived through any household form;—for not only were whole families swept away by disease ... but whole villages were effaced from off the land.
Later historians agree that the 1851 death tables "were flawed and probably under-estimated the level of mortality". The combination of institutional and figures provided by individuals gives "an incomplete and biased count" of fatalities during the famine. Cormac Ó Gráda, referencing the work of W. A. MacArthur, writes that specialists have long known that the Irish death tables were inaccurate, and undercounted the number of deaths.
S. H. Cousens's estimate of 800,000 deaths relied heavily on retrospective information contained in the 1851 census and elsewhere, and is now regarded as too low. Modern historian Joseph Lee says "at least 800,000", and R. F. Foster estimates that "at least 775,000 died, mostly through disease, including cholera in the latter stages of the holocaust". He further notes that "a recent sophisticated computation estimates excess deaths from 1846 to 1851 as between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000 ... after a careful critique of this, other statisticians arrive at a figure of 1,000,000".
Joel Mokyr's estimates at an aggregated county level range from 1.1 million to 1.5 million deaths between 1846 and 1851. Mokyr produced two sets of data which contained an upper-bound and lower-bound estimate, which showed not much difference in regional patterns. The true figure is likely to lie between the two extremes of half and one and a half million, and the most widely accepted estimate is one million.
Detailed statistics of the population of Ireland since 1841 are available at Irish population analysis.
Another area of uncertainty lies in the descriptions of disease given by tenants as to the cause of their relatives' deaths. Though the 1851 census has been rightly criticised as underestimating the true extent of mortality, it does provide a framework for the medical history of the Great Famine. The diseases that badly affected the population fell into two categories: famine-induced diseases and diseases of nutritional deficiency. Of the nutritional deficiency diseases, the most commonly experienced were starvation and marasmus, as well as a condition at the time called dropsy. Dropsy (oedema) was a popular name given for the symptoms of several diseases, one of which, kwashiorkor, is associated with starvation.
However, the greatest mortality was not from nutritional deficiency diseases, but from famine-induced ailments. The malnourished are very vulnerable to infections; therefore, these were more severe when they occurred. Measles, diphtheria, diarrhoea, tuberculosis, most respiratory infections, whooping cough, many intestinal parasites, and cholera were all strongly conditioned by nutritional status. Potentially lethal diseases, such as smallpox and influenza, were so virulent that their spread was independent of nutrition. The best example of this phenomenon was fever, which exacted the greatest death toll. In the popular mind, as well as medical opinion, fever and famine were closely related. Social dislocation—the congregation of the hungry at soup kitchens, food depots, and overcrowded workhouses—created conditions that were ideal for spreading infectious diseases such as typhus, typhoid, and relapsing fever.
Diarrhoeal diseases were the result of poor hygiene, bad sanitation, and dietary changes. The concluding attack on a population incapacitated by famine was delivered by Asiatic cholera, which had visited Ireland briefly in the 1830s. In the following decade, it spread uncontrollably across Asia, through Europe, and into Britain, finally reaching Ireland in 1849. Some scholars estimate that the population of Ireland was reduced by 20–25%.
Ireland's mean age of marriage in 1830 was 23.8 for women and 27.5 for men, where they had once been 21 for women and 25 for men, and those who never married numbered about 10% of the population; in 1840, they had respectively risen to 24.4 and 27.7. In the decades after the Famine, the age of marriage had risen to 28–29 for women and 33 for men, and as many as a third of Irishmen and a quarter of Irishwomen never married, due to low wages and chronic economic problems that discouraged early and universal marriage.
One consequence of the increase in the number of orphaned children was that some young women turned to prostitution to provide for themselves. Some of the women who became Wrens of the Curragh were famine orphans.
The potato blight would return to Ireland in 1879, though by then the rural cottier tenant farmers and labourers of Ireland had begun the "Land War", described as one of the largest agrarian movements to take place in nineteenth-century Europe.
By the time the potato blight returned in 1879, The Land League, which was led by Michael Davitt, who was born during the Great Famine and whose family had been evicted when Davitt was only 4 years old, encouraged the mass boycott of "notorious landlords" with some members also physically blocking evictions. The policy, however, would soon be suppressed. Despite close to 1000 interned under the 1881 Coercion Act for suspected membership. With the reduction in the rate of homelessness and the increased physical and political networks eroding the landlordism system, the severity of the following shorter famine would be limited.
According to the linguist Erick Falc'her-Poyroux, surprisingly, for a country renowned for its rich musical heritage, only a small number of folk songs can be traced back to the demographic and cultural catastrophe brought about by the Great Famine, and he infers from this that the subject was generally avoided for decades among poorer people as it brought back too many sorrowful memories. Also, large areas of the country became uninhabited and the folk song collectors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not collect the songs they heard in the Irish language, as the language of the peasantry was often regarded as dead, or "not delicate enough for educated ears". Of the songs that have survived probably the best known is Skibbereen. Emigration has been an important source of inspiration for songs of the Irish during the 20th century.
Contemporary opinion was sharply critical of the Russell government's response to and management of the crisis. From the start, there were accusations that the government failed to grasp the magnitude of the disaster. Sir James Graham, who had served as Home Secretary in Sir Robert Peel's late government, wrote to Peel that, in his opinion, "the real extent and magnitude of the Irish difficulty are underestimated by the Government, and cannot be met by measures within the strict rule of economical science".
This criticism was not confined to outside critics. The Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Clarendon, wrote a letter to Russell on 26 April 1849, urging that the government propose additional relief measures: "I don't think there is another legislature in Europe that would disregard such suffering as now exists in the west of Ireland, or coldly persist in a policy of extermination." Also in 1849, the Chief Poor Law Commissioner, Edward Twisleton, resigned in protest over the Rate-in-Aid Act, which provided additional funds for the Poor Law through a 6d in the pound levy on all rateable properties in Ireland. Twisleton testified that "comparatively trifling sums were required for Britain to spare itself the deep disgrace of permitting its miserable fellow-subjects to die of starvation". According to Peter Gray in his book The Irish Famine, the government spent £7 million for relief in Ireland between 1845 and 1850, "representing less than half of one per cent of the British gross national product over five years. Contemporaries noted the sharp contrast with the £20 million compensation given to West Indian slave-owners in the 1830s."
Other critics maintained that, even after the government recognised the scope of the crisis, it failed to take sufficient steps to address it. John Mitchel, one of the leaders of the Young Ireland Movement, wrote in 1860:
I have called it an artificial famine: that is to say, it was a famine which desolated a rich and fertile island that produced every year abundance and superabundance to sustain all her people and many more. The English, indeed, call the famine a "dispensation of Providence"; and ascribe it entirely to the blight on potatoes. But potatoes failed in like manner all over Europe, yet there was no famine save in Ireland. The British account of the matter, then, is first, a fraud; second, a blasphemy. The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine.
Still, other critics saw reflected in the government's response its attitude to the so-called "Irish Question". Nassau Senior, an economics professor at Oxford University, wrote that the Famine "would not kill more than one million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do any good". In 1848, Denis Shine Lawlor suggested that Russell was a student of the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser, who had calculated "how far English colonisation and English policy might be most effectively carried out by Irish starvation". Charles Trevelyan, the civil servant with most direct responsibility for the government's handling of the famine, described it in 1848 as "a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence", which laid bare "the deep and inveterate root of social evil"; he affirmed that the Famine was "the sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure is likely to be effected. God grant that the generation to which this opportunity has been offered may rightly perform its part..."
Christine Kinealy has written that "the major tragedy of the Irish Famine of 1845–1852 marked a watershed in modern Irish history. Its occurrence, however, was neither inevitable nor unavoidable". The underlying factors which combined to cause the famine were aggravated by an inadequate government response. Kinealy notes that the "government had to do something to help alleviate the suffering" but that "it became apparent that the government was using its information not merely to help it formulate its relief policies, but also as an opportunity to facilitate various long-desired changes within Ireland".
Joel Mokyr writes that, "There is no doubt that Britain could have saved Ireland," and compares the £9.5 million the government spent on famine relief in Ireland to the £63.9 million it would spend a few years later on the "utterly futile" Crimean War. Mokyr argues that, despite its formal integration into the United Kingdom, Ireland was effectively a foreign country to the British, who were therefore unwilling to spend resources that could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
Some also pointed to the structure of the British Empire as a contributing factor. James Anthony Froude wrote that "England governed Ireland for what she deemed her own interest, making her calculations on the gross balance of her trade ledgers, and leaving moral obligations aside, as if right and wrong had been blotted out of the statute book of the Universe." Dennis Clark, an Irish-American historian and critic of empire, claimed the famine was "the culmination of generations of neglect, misrule and repression. It was an epic of English colonial cruelty and inadequacy. For the landless cabin dwellers, it meant emigration or extinction..."
The British government has not expressly apologized for its role in the famine. But in 1997, at a commemoration event in County Cork, the actor Gabriel Byrne read out a message by Prime Minister Tony Blair that acknowledged the inadequacy of the government response. It asserted that "those who governed in London at the time failed their people through standing by while a crop failure turned into a massive human tragedy". The message was well received in Ireland, where it was understood as the long-sought-after British apology. Archive documents released in 2021 showed that the message was not in fact written or approved by Blair, who could not be reached by aides at the time. It was therefore approved by Blair's principal private secretary John Holmes on his own initiative.
Virtually all historians reject the claim that the British government's response to the famine constituted a genocide, their position is partially based on the fact that with regard to famine related deaths, there was a lack of intent to commit genocide. For a mass-death atrocity to be defined as a genocide, it must include the intentional destruction of a people.
In 1996, the U.S. state of New Jersey included the famine in the "Holocaust and Genocide Curriculum" of its secondary schools. In the 1990s, Irish-American lobbying groups, campaigned vigorously to include the study of the Irish Famine in school curriculums, alongside studies of the Holocaust, slavery and other similar atrocities. The New Jersey curriculum was pushed by such lobbying groups and was drafted by the librarian James Mullin. Following criticism, the New Jersey Holocaust Commission requested statements from two academics that the Irish famine was genocide, which was eventually provided by law professors Charles E. Rice and Francis Boyle, who had not been previously known for studying Irish history. They concluded that the British government deliberately pursued a race- and ethnicity-based policy aimed at destroying the Irish people and that the policy of mass starvation amounted to genocide per retrospective application of article 2 of the Hague Convention of 1948.
Historian Donald Akenson, who has written 24 books on Ireland, stated that "When you see [the word Holocaust used with regard to the Great Famine], you know that you are encountering famine-porn. It is inevitably part of a presentation that is historically unbalanced and, like other kinds of pornography, is distinguished by a covert (and sometimes overt) appeal to misanthropy and almost always an incitement to hatred."
Irish historian Cormac Ó Gráda rejected the claim that the British government's response to the famine was a genocide and he also stated that "no academic historian continues to take the claim of 'genocide' seriously". He argued that "genocide includes murderous intent, and it must be said that not even the most bigoted and racist commentators of the day sought the extermination of the Irish", and he also stated that most people in Whitehall "hoped for better times for Ireland". Additionally, he stated that the claim of genocide overlooks "the enormous challenge facing relief agencies, both central and local, public and private". Ó Gráda thinks that a case of neglect is easier to sustain than a case of genocide.
Professor of history John Leazer writes that the binary framing of the debate about the British government's, and particularly Trevelyan's, actions as being good or bad is "unsatisfactory", and that the entire debate surrounding the question of genocide serves to oversimplify and obfuscate complex factors behind the actions of the government as a whole and individuals within it.
Ireland's National Famine Memorial is situated in Murrisk Millennium Peace Park, a five-acre park overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in the village of Murrisk, County Mayo at the foot of Croagh Patrick mountain. Designed by Irish artist John Behan, the memorial consists of a bronze sculpture of a coffin ship with skeletons interwoven through the rigging symbolising the many emigrants that did not survive the journey across the ocean to Britain, America and elsewhere. It was unveiled on 20 July 1997 by then-President Mary Robinson. The Famine Commemoration Committee who led the project chose the site in Murrisk as they felt it was "...entirely fitting that the national famine memorial [..] be located in the west, which suffered most during the Famine with one in four of the population of Connaught dying in those terrible years."
The National Famine Commemoration Day is observed annually in Ireland, usually on a Sunday in May.
It is also memorialized in many locations throughout Ireland, especially in those regions of Ireland which suffered the greatest losses, and it is also memorialized overseas, particularly in cities with large populations which are descended from Irish immigrants, such as New York City. These include, at Custom House Quay, Dublin, the thin sculptural figures, by artist Rowan Gillespie, who are portrayed as if they are walking towards the emigration ships which are docked on the Dublin Quayside.
Kindred Spirits, a large stainless steel sculpture of nine eagle feathers by artist Alex Pentek was erected in 2017 in the Irish town of Midleton, County Cork, to thank the Choctaw people for its financial assistance during the famine.
Among the memorials in Ireland are the National Famine Museum and Strokestown Park House in County Roscommon; the Irish Famine Exhibition in Dublin; the Jeanie Johnston: An Irish Famine Story, Dublin; EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum, Dublin; and the Doagh Famine Village in County Donegal.
Among the memorials in the US is the Irish Hunger Memorial near a section of the Manhattan waterfront in New York City, where many Irish arrived and the National Memorial to An Gorta Mór, in Philadelphia, a sculpture suggesting the multitudes with 35 life-size bronze figures arranged in clusters of vignettes. Ireland's Great Hunger Institute, at Quinnipiac University fosters a deeper understanding of the Great Hunger of Ireland and its causes and consequences through a strategic program of lectures, conferences, course offerings and publications. Ireland's Great Hunger Museum, at Quinnipiac University, hosts the world's largest collection of Great Hunger-related art including artefacts and printed materials. An annual Great Famine walk from Doolough to Louisburgh, County Mayo was inaugurated in 1988 and has been led by such notable personalities as Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa and representatives of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. The walk, organised by Afri, takes place on the first or second Saturday of May and links the memory of the Great Hunger with a contemporary Human Rights issue.
Informational notes
Footnotes
Citations
Bibliography
Further reading | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Great Famine (Irish: an Gorta Mór [ənˠ ˈɡɔɾˠt̪ˠə ˈmˠoːɾˠ]), also known within Ireland as the Great Hunger or simply the Famine and outside Ireland as the Irish Potato Famine, was a period of starvation and disease in Ireland lasting from 1845 to 1852 that constituted a historical social crisis and subsequently had a major impact on Irish society and history as a whole. The most severely affected areas were in the western and southern parts of Ireland—where the Irish language was dominant—and hence the period was contemporaneously known in Irish as an Drochshaol, which literally translates to \"the bad life\" and loosely translates to \"the hard times\". The worst year of the famine was 1847, which became known as \"Black '47\". During the Great Hunger, roughly 1 million people died and more than 1 million more fled the country, causing the country's population to fall by 20–25% (in some towns, populations fell as much as 67%) between 1841 and 1871. Between 1845 and 1855, at least 2.1 million people left Ireland, primarily on packet ships but also on steamboats and barques—one of the greatest exoduses from a single island in history.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The proximate cause of the famine was the infection of potato crops by blight (Phytophthora infestans) throughout Europe during the 1840s. Blight infection caused 100,000 deaths outside Ireland and influenced much of the unrest that culminated in European Revolutions of 1848. Longer-term reasons for the massive impact of this particular famine included the system of absentee landlordism and single-crop dependence. Initial limited but constructive government actions to alleviate famine distress were ended by a new Whig administration in London, which pursued a laissez-faire economic doctrine, but also because some in power believed in divine providence or that the Irish lacked moral character, with aid only resuming to some degree later. Large amounts of food were exported from Ireland during the famine and the refusal of London to bar such exports, as had been done on previous occasions, was an immediate and continuing source of controversy, contributing to anti-British sentiment and the campaign for independence. Additionally, the famine indirectly resulted in tens of thousands of households being evicted, exacerbated by a provision forbidding access to workhouse aid while in possession of more than one-quarter acre of land.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The famine was a defining moment in the history of Ireland, which was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 1801 to 1922. The famine and its effects permanently changed the island's demographic, political, and cultural landscape, producing an estimated 2 million refugees and spurring a century-long population decline. For both the native Irish and those in the resulting diaspora, the famine entered folk memory. The strained relations between many Irish and their ruling British government worsened further because of the famine, heightening ethnic and sectarian tensions and boosting nationalism and republicanism both in Ireland and among Irish emigrants around the world. English documentary maker John Percival said that the famine \"became part of the long story of betrayal and exploitation which led to the growing movement in Ireland for independence.\" Scholar Kirby Miller makes the same point. Debate exists regarding nomenclature for the event, whether to use the term \"Famine\", \"Potato Famine\" or \"Great Hunger\", the last of which some believe most accurately captures the complicated history of the period.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The potato blight returned to Europe in 1879 but, by this time, the Land War (one of the largest agrarian movements to take place in 19th-century Europe) had begun in Ireland. The movement, organized by the Land League, continued the political campaign for the Three Fs which was issued in 1850 by the Tenant Right League during the Great Famine. When the potato blight returned to Ireland in the 1879 famine, the League boycotted \"notorious landlords\" and its members physically blocked the evictions of farmers; the consequent reduction in homelessness and house demolition resulted in a drastic reduction in the number of deaths.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Ireland was brought into the United Kingdom in January 1801 following the passage of the Acts of Union. Executive power lay in the hands of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and Chief Secretary for Ireland, who were appointed by the British government. Ireland sent 105 members of parliament to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, and Irish representative peers elected 28 of their own number to sit for life in the House of Lords. Between 1832 and 1859, 70% of Irish representatives were landowners or the sons of landowners.",
"title": "Causes and contributing factors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In the 40 years that followed the union, successive British governments grappled with the problems of governing a country which had, as Benjamin Disraeli stated in 1844, \"a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, an alien established Protestant church, and in addition, the weakest executive in the world\". One historian calculated that, between 1801 and 1845, there had been 114 commissions and 61 special committees inquiring into the state of Ireland, and that \"without exception their findings prophesied disaster; Ireland was on the verge of starvation, her population rapidly increasing, three-quarters of her labourers unemployed, housing conditions appalling and the standard of living unbelievably low\".",
"title": "Causes and contributing factors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Lectures printed in 1847 by John Hughes, Bishop of New York, are a contemporary exploration into the antecedent causes, particularly the political climate, in which the Irish famine occurred.",
"title": "Causes and contributing factors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The \"middleman system\" for managing landed property was introduced in the 18th century. Rent collection was left in the hands of the landlords' agents, or middlemen. This assured the landlord of a regular income and relieved them of direct responsibility while leaving tenants open to exploitation by the middlemen. The ability of middlemen was measured by the rent income they could contrive to extract from tenants. Middlemen leased large tracts of land from the landlords on long leases with fixed rents and sublet to tenants, keeping any money raised in excess to the rent paid to the landlord. This system, coupled with minimal oversight of the middlemen, incentivised harsh exploitation of tenants. Middlemen would split a holding into smaller and smaller parcels so as to increase the amount of rent they could obtain. Tenants could be evicted for reasons such as non-payment of rents (which were high), or a landlord's decision to raise sheep instead of grain crops. Cottiers paid their rent by working for the landlord while the spalpeens (itinerant labourers) paid for short-term leases through temporary day work.",
"title": "Causes and contributing factors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "A majority of Catholics, who constituted 80% of the Irish population, lived in conditions of poverty and insecurity. At the top of the social hierarchy was the Ascendancy class, composed of English and Anglo-Irish families who owned most of the land and held more or less unchecked power over their tenants. Some of their estates were vast; for example, the Earl of Lucan owned more than 60,000 acres (240 km). Many of these landowners lived in England and functioned as absentee landlords. The rent revenue—collected from impoverished tenants who were paid minimal wages to raise crops and livestock for export—was mostly sent to England.",
"title": "Causes and contributing factors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1800, the 1st Earl of Clare observed of landlords that \"confiscation is their common title\". According to the historian Cecil Woodham-Smith, landlords regarded the land as a source of income, from which as much as possible was to be extracted. With the peasantry \"brooding over their discontent in sullen indignation\" (in the words of the Earl of Clare), the landlords largely viewed the countryside as a hostile place in which to live. Some landlords visited their property only once or twice in a lifetime, if ever. The rents from Ireland were generally spent elsewhere; an estimated £6,000,000 was remitted out of Ireland in 1842.",
"title": "Causes and contributing factors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In 1843, the British Government recognized that the land management system in Ireland was the foundational cause of disaffection in the country. The Prime Minister established a Royal Commission, chaired by the Earl of Devon (Devon Commission), to enquire into the laws regarding the occupation of land. Irish politician Daniel O'Connell described this commission as \"perfectly one-sided\", being composed of landlords with no tenant representation.",
"title": "Causes and contributing factors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In February 1845, Devon reported:",
"title": "Causes and contributing factors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "It would be impossible adequately to describe the privations which they [the Irish labourer and his family] habitually and silently endure ... in many districts their only food is the potato, their only beverage water ... their cabins are seldom a protection against the weather ... a bed or a blanket is a rare luxury ... and nearly in all their pig and a manure heap constitute their only property.",
"title": "Causes and contributing factors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The Commissioners concluded they could not \"forbear expressing our strong sense of the patient endurance which the labouring classes have exhibited under sufferings greater, we believe, than the people of any other country in Europe have to sustain\". The Commission stated that bad relations between landlord and tenant were principally responsible for this suffering. Landlords were described in evidence before the commission as \"land sharks\", \"bloodsuckers\", and \"the most oppressive species of tyrant that ever lent assistance to the destruction of a country\".",
"title": "Causes and contributing factors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "As any improvement made on a holding by a tenant became the property of the landlord when the lease expired or was terminated, the incentive to make improvements was limited. Most tenants had no security of tenure on the land; as tenants \"at will\", they could be turned out whenever the landlord chose. The only exception to this arrangement was in Ulster where, under a practice known as \"tenant right\", a tenant was compensated for any improvement they made to their holding. According to Woodham-Smith, the commission stated that \"the superior prosperity and tranquillity of Ulster, compared with the rest of Ireland, were due to tenant right\".",
"title": "Causes and contributing factors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Landlords in Ireland often used their powers without compunction, and tenants lived in dread of them. Woodham-Smith writes that, in these circumstances, \"industry and enterprise were extinguished and a peasantry created which was one of the most destitute in Europe\".",
"title": "Causes and contributing factors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The Popery Act (Penal Law) of 1704 required that a tenant's land be divided equally between his sons upon his death. Immense population growth, from about 2 million in 1700 to 8 million by the time of the Great Famine, led to increased division of holdings and a consequent reduction in their average size. By 1845, 24% of all Irish tenant farms were of 0.4–2 hectares (1–5 acres) in size, while 40% were of 2–6 hectares (5–15 acres). Holdings were so small that no crop other than potatoes would suffice to feed a family. Shortly before the famine, the British government reported that poverty was so widespread that one-third of all Irish small holdings could not support the tenant families after rent was paid; the families survived only by earnings as seasonal migrant labour in England and Scotland. Following the famine, reforms were implemented making it illegal to further divide land holdings.",
"title": "Causes and contributing factors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The 1841 census showed a population of just over eight million. Two-thirds of people depended on agriculture for their survival but rarely received a working wage. They had to work for their landlords in return for a small patch of land to farm. This forced Ireland's peasantry to practice continuous monoculture, as the potato was the only crop that could meet nutritional needs.",
"title": "Causes and contributing factors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The potato was introduced in Ireland as a garden crop of the gentry. By the late 17th century, it had become widespread as a supplementary food; their main diet was still based on butter, milk, and grain products.",
"title": "Causes and contributing factors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The Irish economy grew between 1760 and 1815 due to infrastructure expansion and the Napoleonic Wars (1805–1815), which had increased the demand for food in Britain. Tillage increased to such an extent that there was only a small amount of land available to small farmers to feed themselves. The potato was adopted as a primary food source because of its quick growth in a comparatively small space. By 1800, the potato had become a staple food for one in three Irish people, especially in winter. It eventually became a staple year-round for farmers. A disproportionate share of the potatoes grown in Ireland were the Irish Lumper, creating a lack of genetic variability among potato plants, which increased vulnerability to disease.",
"title": "Causes and contributing factors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Potatoes were essential to the expansion of the cottier system; they supported an extremely cheap workforce, but at the cost of lower living standards. For the labourer, \"a potato wage\" shaped the expanding agrarian economy. The potato was also used extensively as a fodder crop for livestock immediately prior to the famine. Approximately 33% of production, amounting to 5,000,000 short tons (4,500,000 t), was typically used in this way.",
"title": "Causes and contributing factors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Prior to the arrival of Phytophthora infestans, commonly known as \"blight\", only two main potato plant diseases had been discovered. One was called \"dry rot\" or \"taint\", and the other was a virus known popularly as \"curl\". Phytophthora infestans is an oomycete (a variety of parasitic, non-photosynthetic organisms closely related to brown algae, and not a fungus).",
"title": "Causes and contributing factors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In 1851, the Census of Ireland Commissioners recorded 24 failures of the potato crop going back to 1728, of varying severity. General crop failures, through disease or frost, were recorded in 1739, 1740, 1770, 1800, and 1807. In 1821 and 1822, the potato crop failed in Munster and Connaught. In 1830 and 1831, counties Mayo, Donegal, and Galway suffered likewise. In 1832, 1833, 1834, and 1836, dry rot and curl caused serious losses, and in 1835 the potato failed in Ulster. Widespread failures throughout Ireland occurred in 1836, 1837, 1839, 1841, and 1844. According to Woodham-Smith, \"the unreliability of the potato was an accepted fact in Ireland\".",
"title": "Causes and contributing factors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Experts are still unsure of how and when blight arrived in Europe; it almost certainly was not present prior to 1842, and probably arrived in 1844. The origin of the pathogen has been traced to the Toluca Valley in Mexico, whence it spread within North America and then to Europe. The 1845–1846 blight was caused by the HERB-1 strain of the blight.",
"title": "Causes and contributing factors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In 1844, Irish newspapers carried reports concerning a disease that had attacked the potato crops in America for two years. In 1843 and 1844, blight largely destroyed the potato crops in the Eastern United States. Ships from Baltimore, Philadelphia, or New York City could have carried diseased potatoes from these areas to European ports. American plant pathologist William C. Paddock posited that the blight was transported via potatoes being carried to feed passengers on clipper ships sailing from America to Ireland. Once introduced in Ireland and Europe, blight spread rapidly. By mid-August 1845, it had reached much of northern and central Europe; Belgium, The Netherlands, northern France, and southern England had all already been affected.",
"title": "Causes and contributing factors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "On 16 August 1845, The Gardeners' Chronicle and Horticultural Gazette reported \"a blight of unusual character\" on the Isle of Wight. A week later, on 23 August, it reported that \"A fearful malady has broken out among the potato crop ... In Belgium the fields are said to be completely desolated. There is hardly a sound sample in Covent Garden market ... As for cure for this distemper, there is none.\" These reports were extensively covered in Irish newspapers. On 11 September, the Freeman's Journal reported on \"the appearance of what is called 'cholera' in potatoes in Ireland, especially in the north\". On 13 September, The Gardeners' Chronicle announced: \"We stop the Press with very great regret to announce that the potato Murrain has unequivocally declared itself in Ireland.\"",
"title": "Causes and contributing factors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Nevertheless, the British government remained optimistic over the next few weeks, as it received conflicting reports. Only when the crop was harvested in October did the scale of destruction become apparent. Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel wrote to Sir James Graham in mid-October that he found the reports \"very alarming\", but allayed his fears by claiming that there was \"always a tendency to exaggeration in Irish news\".",
"title": "Causes and contributing factors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Crop loss in 1845 has been estimated at anywhere from one-third to one-half of cultivated acreage. The Mansion House Committee in Dublin, to which hundreds of letters were directed from all over Ireland, claimed on 19 November 1845 to have ascertained beyond the shadow of a doubt that \"considerably more than one-third of the entire of the potato crop ... has been already destroyed\".",
"title": "Causes and contributing factors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In 1846, three-quarters of the harvest was lost to blight. By December, a third of a million destitute people were employed in public works. According to Cormac Ó Gráda, the first attack of potato blight caused considerable hardship in rural Ireland from the autumn of 1846, when the first deaths from starvation were recorded. Seed potatoes were scarce in 1847. Few had been sown, so, despite average yields, hunger continued. 1848 yields were only two-thirds of normal. Since over three million Irish people were totally dependent on potatoes for food, hunger and famine were widespread.",
"title": "Causes and contributing factors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The Corporation of Dublin sent a memorial to the Queen, \"praying her\" to call Parliament together early (Parliament was at this time prorogued), and to recommend the requisition of some public money for public works, especially railways in Ireland. The Town Council of Belfast met and made similar suggestions, but neither body asked for charity, according to John Mitchel, one of the leading Repealers.",
"title": "Reaction in Ireland"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In early November 1845, a deputation from the citizens of Dublin, including the Duke of Leinster, Lord Cloncurry, Daniel O'Connell and the Lord Mayor, went to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Heytesbury to discuss the issue. They offered suggestions such as opening the ports to foreign corn, stopping distillation from grain, prohibiting the export of foodstuffs, and providing employment through public works. Lord Heytesbury urged them not to be alarmed, that they \"were premature\", that scientists were enquiring into all those matters, and that the Inspectors of Constabulary and Stipendiary Magistrates were charged with making constant reports from their districts, and there was no \"immediate pressure on the market\".",
"title": "Reaction in Ireland"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "On 8 December 1845, Daniel O'Connell, head of the Repeal Association, proposed several remedies to the pending disaster. One of the first things he suggested was the introduction of Tenant-Right as practised in Ulster, giving the landlord a fair rent for his land, but giving the tenant compensation for any money he might have laid out on the land in permanent improvements. O'Connell noted actions taken by the Belgian legislature during the same season, as they had also been hit by blight: shutting their ports against the export of provisions and opening them to imports. He suggested that, if Ireland had a domestic Parliament, the ports would be thrown open and the abundant crops raised in Ireland would be kept for the people of Ireland, as the Dublin parliament had done during the food shortages of the 1780s. O'Connell maintained that only an Irish parliament would provide both food and employment for the people. He said that repeal of the Act of Union was a necessity and Ireland's only hope.",
"title": "Reaction in Ireland"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Mitchel later wrote one of the first widely circulated tracts on the famine, The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), published in 1861. It proposed that British actions during the famine and their treatment of the Irish were a deliberate effort at genocide. It contained a sentence that has since become famous: \"The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine.\" Mitchel was charged with sedition because of his writings, but this charge was dropped. He was convicted by a packed jury under the newly enacted Treason Felony Act and sentenced to 14 years transportation to Bermuda.",
"title": "Reaction in Ireland"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "According to Charles Gavan Duffy, The Nation insisted that the proper remedy, retaining in the country the food raised by her people until the people were fed, was one which the rest of Europe had adopted, and one which even the parliaments of the Pale (i.e., before the union with Great Britain in 1801) had adopted in periods of distress.",
"title": "Reaction in Ireland"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Contemporaneously, as found in letters from the period and in particular later oral memory, the name for the event is in Irish: An Drochshaol, though with the earlier spelling standard of the era, which was Gaelic script, it is found written as in Droċ-Ṡaoġal. In the modern era, this name, while loosely translated as \"the hard-time\", is always denoted with a capital letter to express its specific historic meaning.",
"title": "Reaction in Ireland"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The period of the potato blight in Ireland from 1845 to 1851 was full of political confrontation. A more radical Young Ireland group seceded from the Repeal movement in July 1846, and attempted an armed rebellion in 1848. It was unsuccessful.",
"title": "Reaction in Ireland"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In 1847, William Smith O'Brien, leader of the Young Ireland party, became one of the founding members of the Irish Confederation to campaign for a Repeal of the Act of Union, and called for the export of grain to be stopped and the ports closed. The following year, he helped organise the short-lived Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848 in County Tipperary.",
"title": "Reaction in Ireland"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "When Ireland experienced food shortages in 1782–1783, ports were closed to exporting food, with the intention of keeping locally grown food in Ireland to feed the hungry. Irish food prices promptly dropped. Some merchants lobbied against the export ban, but the government in the 1780s overrode their protests.",
"title": "Government response"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Historian F. S. L. Lyons characterised the initial response of the British government to the early, less severe phase of the famine as \"prompt and relatively successful\". Confronted by widespread crop failure in November 1845, the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, purchased £100,000 worth of maize and cornmeal secretly from America with Baring Brothers initially acting as his agents. The government hoped that they would not \"stifle private enterprise\" and that their actions would not act as a disincentive to local relief efforts. Due to poor weather conditions, the first shipment did not arrive in Ireland until the beginning of February 1846. The initial shipments were of unground dried kernels, but the few Irish mills in operation were not equipped for milling maize and a long and complicated milling process had to be adopted before the meal could be distributed. In addition, before the cornmeal could be consumed, it had to be \"very much\" cooked again, or eating it could result in severe bowel complaints. Due to its yellow colour, and initial unpopularity, it became known as \"Peel's brimstone\".",
"title": "Government response"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In October 1845, Peel moved to repeal the Corn Laws—tariffs on grain which kept the price of bread high—but the issue split his party and he had insufficient support from his own colleagues to push the measure through. He resigned the premiership in December, but the opposition was unable to form a government and he was re-appointed. In March, Peel set up a programme of public works in Ireland, but the famine situation worsened during 1846, and the repeal of the Corn Laws in that year did little to help the starving Irish; the measure split the Conservative Party, leading to the fall of Peel's ministry. On 25 June, the second reading of the government's Irish Coercion Bill was defeated by 73 votes in the House of Commons by a combination of Whigs, Radicals, Irish Repealers, and protectionist Conservatives. Peel was forced to resign as prime minister on 29 June, and the Whig leader, Lord John Russell, became prime minister.",
"title": "Government response"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "The measures undertaken by Peel's successor, Russell, proved inadequate as the crisis deepened. The new Whig administration, influenced by the doctrine of laissez-faire, believed that the market would provide the food needed. They refused to interfere with the movement of food to England, and then halted the previous government's food and relief works, leaving many hundreds of thousands of people without access to work, money, or food. Russell's ministry introduced a new programme of public works that by the end of December 1846 employed some half a million but proved impossible to administer.",
"title": "Government response"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Charles Trevelyan, who was in charge of the administration of government relief, limited the Government's food aid programme, claiming that food would be readily imported into Ireland once people had more money to spend after wages were being paid on new public-works projects. Saying \"The judgement of God send the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson and that calamity must not be too mitigated [..] The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.\"",
"title": "Government response"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In a private correspondence, Trevelyan explained how the famine could bring benefit to the English; As he wrote to Edward Twisleton:",
"title": "Government response"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "\"We must not complain of what we really want to obtain. If small farmers go, and their landlords are reduced to sell portions of their estates to persons who will invest capital we shall at last arrive at something like a satisfactory settlement of the country\".",
"title": "Government response"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In January 1847, the government abandoned its policy of noninterference, realising that it had failed, and turned to a mixture of \"indoor\" and \"outdoor\" direct relief; the former administered in workhouses through the Irish Poor Laws, the latter through soup kitchens. The costs of the Poor Law fell primarily on the local landlords, some of whom in turn attempted to reduce their liability by evicting their tenants or providing some relief through the conversionist practice of Souperism.",
"title": "Government response"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "On 1 March 1847, the Bank of England announced plans to raise a loan of £14 million to relieve the Irish crisis, and also for unfunded tax cuts. This led to the Panic of 1847, in which gold was withdrawn from circulation, so reducing the amount of bank notes that the Bank could legally circulate. By 17 April 1847 the bullion reserve of the Bank of England had diminished from £15 million in January to some £9 million, and it was announced that the cost of famine relief would be transferred to local taxes in Ireland. The financial crisis temporarily improved, but the intended relief for Ireland did not materialise.",
"title": "Government response"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "In June 1847, the Poor Law Amendment Act was passed which embodied the principle, popular in Britain, that Irish property must support Irish poverty. The landed proprietors in Ireland were held in Britain to have created the conditions that led to the famine. However, it was asserted that the British parliament since the Act of Union of 1800 was partly to blame. This point was raised in The Illustrated London News on 13 February 1847: \"There was no law it would not pass at their request, and no abuse it would not defend for them.\" On 24 March, The Times reported that Britain had permitted in Ireland \"a mass of poverty, disaffection, and degradation without a parallel in the world. It allowed proprietors to suck the very life-blood of that wretched race\".",
"title": "Government response"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The \"Gregory clause\" of the Poor Law, named after William H. Gregory, M.P., prohibited anyone who held at least 1⁄4 acre (0.1 ha) from receiving relief. In practice, this meant that the many farmers who had to sell all their produce to pay rent and taxes, would have to deliver up all their land to the landlord to qualify for public outdoor relief. Of this Law, Mitchel wrote that \"it is the able-bodied idler only who is to be fed—if he attempted to till but one rood of ground, he dies\". This simple method of ejectment was called \"passing paupers through the workhouse\"—a man went in, a pauper came out. These factors combined to drive thousands of people off the land: 90,000 in 1849, and 104,000 in 1850.",
"title": "Government response"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "In 1849, the Encumbered Estates Act allowed landlord estates to be auctioned off upon the petition of creditors. Estates with debts were then auctioned off at low prices. Wealthy British speculators purchased the lands and \"took a harsh view\" of the tenant farmers who continued renting. The rents were raised, and tenants evicted to create large cattle grazing pastures. Between 1849 and 1854, some 50,000 families were evicted.",
"title": "Government response"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The Royal Navy squadron stationed in Cork under the command of Rear-Admiral Hugh Pigot undertook significant relief operation from 1846 to 1847, transporting government relief into the port of Cork and other ports along the Irish coast, being ordered on 2 January 1846 to assist distressed regions. On 27 December 1846, Trevelyan ordered every available steamship to Ireland to assist in relief, and on 14 January 1847, Pigot received orders to also distribute supplies from the British Relief Association and treat them identically to government aid. In addition, some naval officers under Pigot oversaw the logistics of relief operations further inland from Cork. In February 1847, Trevelyan ordered Royal Navy surgeons dispatched to provide medical care for those suffering from illnesses that accompanied starvation, distribute medicines that were in short supply, and assist in proper, sanitary burials for the deceased. These efforts, although significant, were insufficient at preventing mass mortality from famine and disease.",
"title": "Government response"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The historian Cecil Woodham-Smith wrote in The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849 that no issue has provoked so much anger and embittered relations between England and Ireland \"as the indisputable fact that huge quantities of food were exported from Ireland to England throughout the period when the people of Ireland were dying of starvation\". While in addition to the maize imports, four times as much wheat was imported into Ireland at the height of the famine as exported, much of the imported wheat was used as livestock feed. Woodham-Smith added that provision via the Poor law union workhouses by the Act of 1838 had to be paid by rates levied on the local property owners, and in areas where the famine was worst, the tenants could not pay their rents to enable landlords to fund the rates and therefore the workhouses. Only by selling food, some of which would inevitably be exported, could a \"virtuous circle\" be created whereby the rents and rates would be paid, and the workhouses funded. Relief through the workhouse system was simply overwhelmed by the enormous scale and duration of the famine. Nicolas McEvoy, parish priest of Kells, wrote in October 1845:",
"title": "Food exports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "On my most minute personal inspection of the potato crop in this most fertile potato-growing locale is founded my inexpressibly painful conviction that one family in twenty of the people will not have a single potato left on Christmas day next. Many are the fields I have examined and testimony the most solemn can I tender, that in the great bulk of those fields all the potatoes sizable enough to be sent to table are irreparably damaged, while for the remaining comparatively sounder fields very little hopes are entertained in consequence of the daily rapid development of the deplorable disease.",
"title": "Food exports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "With starvation at our doors, grimly staring us, vessels laden with our sole hopes of existence, our provisions, are hourly wafted from our every port. From one milling establishment I have last night seen not less than fifty dray loads of meal moving on to Drogheda, thence to go to feed the foreigner, leaving starvation and death the sure and certain fate of the toil and sweat that raised this food.",
"title": "Food exports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "For their respective inhabitants England, Holland, Scotland, Germany, are taking early the necessary precautions—getting provisions from every possible part of the globe; and I ask are Irishmen alone unworthy the sympathies of a paternal gentry or a paternal Government?",
"title": "Food exports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Let Irishmen themselves take heed before the provisions are gone. Let those, too, who have sheep, and oxen, and haggards. Self-preservation is the first law of nature. The right of the starving to try and sustain existence is a right far and away paramount to every right that property confers.",
"title": "Food exports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Infinitely more precious in the eyes of reason in the adorable eye of the Omnipotent Creator, is the life of the last and least of human beings than the whole united property of the entire universe. The appalling character of the crisis renders delicacy but criminal and imperatively calls for the timely and explicit notice of principles that will not fail to prove terrible arms in the hands of a neglected, abandoned starving people.",
"title": "Food exports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "In the 5 May 2020, issue of the Dublin Review of Books, Editor Maurice Earls wrote:",
"title": "Food exports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Dr. McEvoy, in his grim forebodings and apocalyptic fear, was closer to the truth than the sanguine rationalists quoted in the newspapers, but McEvoy, like many others, overestimated the likelihood of mass rebellion, and even this great clerical friend of the poor could hardly have contemplated the depth of social, economic and cultural destruction which would persist and deepen over the following century and beyond. It was politics that turned a disease of potatoes and tomatoes into famine, and it was politics which ensured its disastrous aftereffects would disfigure numerous future generations.",
"title": "Food exports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "According to historian James Donnelly, \"the picture of Irish people starving as food was exported was the most powerful image in the nationalist construct of the Famine\". Grain imports, especially for livestock feed, increased after the spring of 1847 and much of the debate \"has been conducted within narrow parameters,\" focusing \"almost exclusively on national estimates with little attempt to disaggregate the data by region or by product.\"",
"title": "Food exports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Total charitable donations for famine relief might have been about £1.5 million of which £856,500 came from outside Ireland. Donations within Ireland are harder to trace; £380,000 of donations were officially registered but once some allowance is made for less formal donations the Irish total probably exceeds that of Britain (£525,000). People of Irish descent also contributed to funds raised outside of Ireland and those donations would be included in the region where the donation was made. English Protestants donated more to Irish famine relief than any other source outside of Ireland.",
"title": "Charity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Large sums of money were donated by charities; the first foreign campaign in December 1845 included the Boston Repeal Association and the Catholic Church. Calcutta is credited with making the first larger donations in 1846, summing up to around £14,000. The money raised included contributions by Irish soldiers serving there and Irish people employed by the East India Company. Russian Tsar Alexander II sent funds and Queen Victoria donated £2,000. According to legend, Sultan Abdülmecid I of the Ottoman Empire originally offered to send £10,000 but was asked either by British diplomats or his own ministers to reduce it to £1,000 to avoid donating more than the Queen. U.S. President James K. Polk donated $50 and in 1847 Congressman Abraham Lincoln donated $10 ($307 in 2019 value). Pope Pius IX also made a personal contribution of 1,000 Scudi (approximately £213) for famine relief in Ireland and authorized collections in Rome. Most significantly, on 25 March 1847, Pius IX issued the encyclical Praedecessores nostros, which called the whole Catholic world to contribute moneywise and spiritually to Irish relief. Major figures behind international Catholic fundraising for Ireland were the rector of the Pontifical Irish College, Paul Cullen, and the President of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, Jules Gossin.",
"title": "Charity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "International fundraising activities received donations from locations as diverse as Venezuela, Australia, South Africa, Mexico, Russia and Italy. In addition to the religious, non-religious organisations came to the assistance of famine victims. The British Relief Association was the largest of these groups. Founded on 1 January 1847 by Lionel de Rothschild, Abel Smith, and other prominent bankers and aristocrats, the Association raised money throughout England, America, and Australia; their funding drive was benefited by a \"Queen's Letter\", a letter from Queen Victoria appealing for money to relieve the distress in Ireland. With this initial letter, the Association raised £171,533. A second, somewhat less successful \"Queen's Letter\" was issued in late 1847. In total, the Association raised approximately £390,000 for Irish relief.",
"title": "Charity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Private initiatives such as the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends (Quakers) attempted to fill the gap caused by the end of government relief, and eventually, the government reinstated the relief works, although bureaucracy slowed the release of food supplies. Thousands of dollars were raised in the United States, including $170 ($5,218 in 2019 value) collected from a group of Native American Choctaws in 1847. Judy Allen, editor of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma's newspaper Biskinik, wrote that \"It had been just 16 years since the Choctaw people had experienced the Trail of Tears, and they had faced starvation ... It was an amazing gesture.\" To mark the 150th anniversary, eight Irish people retraced the Trail of Tears.",
"title": "Charity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Contributions by the United States during the famine were highlighted by Senator Henry Clay who said; \"No imagination can conceive—no tongue express—no brush paint—the horrors of the scenes which are daily exhibited in Ireland.\" He called upon Americans to remind them that the practice of charity was the greatest act of humanity they could do. In total, 118 vessels sailed from the US to Ireland with relief goods valued at $545,145. Specific states which provided aid include South Carolina and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania was the second most important state for famine relief in the US and the second-largest shipping port for aid to Ireland. The state hosted the Philadelphia Irish Famine Relief Committee. Catholics, Methodists, Quakers, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Moravian and Jewish groups put aside their differences in the name of humanity to help out the Irish. South Carolina rallied around the efforts to help those experiencing the famine. They raised donations of money, food and clothing to help the victims of the famine—Irish immigrants made up 39% of the white population in the southern cities. Historian Harvey Strum claims that \"The states ignored all their racial, religious, and political differences to support the cause for relief.\"",
"title": "Charity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Landlords were responsible for paying the rates of every tenant whose yearly rent was £4 or less. Landlords whose land was crowded with poorer tenants were now faced with large bills. Many began clearing the poor tenants from their small plots and letting the land in larger plots for over £4 which then reduced their debts. In 1846, there had been some clearances, but the great mass of evictions came in 1847. According to James S. Donnelly Jr., it is impossible to be sure how many people were evicted during the years of the famine and its immediate aftermath. It was only in 1849 that the police began to keep a count, and they recorded a total of almost 250,000 persons as officially evicted between 1849 and 1854.",
"title": "Eviction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Donnelly considered this to be an underestimate, and if the figures were to include the number pressured into \"voluntary\" surrenders during the whole period (1846–1854), the figure would almost certainly exceed half a million persons. While Helen Litton says there were also thousands of \"voluntary\" surrenders, she notes also that there was \"precious little voluntary about them\". In some cases, tenants were persuaded to accept a small sum of money to leave their homes, \"cheated into believing the workhouse would take them in\".",
"title": "Eviction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "West Clare was one of the worst areas for evictions, where landlords turned thousands of families out and demolished their derisory cabins. Captain Kennedy in April 1848 estimated that 1,000 houses, with an average of six people to each, had been levelled since November. The Mahon family of Strokestown House evicted 3,000 people in 1847 and were still able to dine on lobster soup.",
"title": "Eviction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "After Clare, the worst area for evictions was County Mayo, accounting for 10% of all evictions between 1849 and 1854. George Bingham, 3rd Earl of Lucan, who owned over 60,000 acres (240 km), was among the worst evicting landlords. He was quoted as saying that \"he would not breed paupers to pay priests\". Having turned out in the parish of Ballinrobe over 2,000 tenants alone, he then used the cleared land as grazing farms. In 1848, the Marquis of Sligo owed £1,650 to Westport Union; he was also an evicting landlord, though he claimed to be selective, saying that he was only getting rid of the idle and dishonest. Altogether, he cleared about 25% of his tenants.",
"title": "Eviction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "In 1847, Bishop of Meath, Thomas Nulty, described his personal recollection of the evictions in a pastoral letter to his clergy:",
"title": "Eviction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Seven hundred human beings were driven from their homes in one day and set adrift on the world, to gratify the caprice of one who, before God and man, probably deserved less consideration than the last and least of them ... The horrid scenes I then witnessed, I must remember all my life long. The wailing of women—the screams, the terror, the consternation of children—the speechless agony of honest industrious men—wrung tears of grief from all who saw them. I saw officers and men of a large police force, who were obliged to attend on the occasion, cry like children at beholding the cruel sufferings of the very people whom they would be obliged to butcher had they offered the least resistance. The landed proprietors in a circle all around—and for many miles in every direction—warned their tenantry, with threats of their direct vengeance, against the humanity of extending to any of them the hospitality of a single night's shelter ... and in little more than three years, nearly a fourth of them lay quietly in their graves.",
"title": "Eviction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "The population in Drumbaragh, a townland in County Meath, plummeted 67 per cent between 1841 and 1851; in neighbouring Springville, it fell 54 per cent. There were fifty houses in Springville in 1841 and only eleven left in 1871.",
"title": "Eviction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "According to Litton, evictions might have taken place earlier but for fear of the secret societies. However, they were now greatly weakened by the Famine. Revenge still occasionally took place, with seven landlords being shot, six fatally, during the autumn and winter of 1847. Ten other occupiers of land, though without tenants, were also murdered, she says.",
"title": "Eviction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "One such landlord reprisal occurred in West Roscommon. The \"notorious\" Major Denis Mahon enforced thousands of his tenants into eviction before the end of 1847, with an estimated 60 per cent decline in population in some parishes. He was shot dead in that year. In East Roscommon, \"where conditions were more benign\", the estimated decline in population was under 10 percent.",
"title": "Eviction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Lord Clarendon, alarmed at the number of landlords being shot and that this might mean rebellion, asked for special powers. Lord John Russell was not sympathetic to this appeal. Lord Clarendon believed that the landlords themselves were mostly responsible for the tragedy in the first place, saying that \"It is quite true that landlords in England would not like to be shot like hares and partridges ... but neither does any landlord in England turn out fifty persons at once and burn their houses over their heads, giving them no provision for the future.\" The Crime and Outrage Act was passed in December 1847 as a compromise, and additional troops were sent to Ireland.",
"title": "Eviction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "The \"Gregory clause\", described by Donnelly as a \"vicious amendment to the Irish poor law\", had been a successful Tory amendment to the Whig poor-relief bill which became law in early June 1847, where its potential as an estate-clearing device was widely recognised in parliament, although not in advance. At first, the poor law commissioners and inspectors viewed the clause as a valuable instrument for a more cost-effective administration of public relief, but the drawbacks soon became apparent, even from an administrative perspective. They would soon view them as little more than murderous from a humanitarian perspective. According to Donnelly, it became obvious that the quarter-acre clause was \"indirectly a death-dealing instrument\".",
"title": "Eviction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "At least a million people are thought to have emigrated as a result of the famine. There were about 1 million long-distance emigrants between 1846 and 1851, mainly to North America. The total given in the 1851 census is 967,908. Short-distance emigrants, mainly to Britain, may have numbered 200,000 or more.",
"title": "Emigration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "While the famine was responsible for a significant increase in emigration from Ireland, of anywhere from 45% to nearly 85% depending on the year and the county, it was not the sole cause. The beginning of mass emigration from Ireland can be traced to the mid-18th century, when some 250,000 people left Ireland over a period of 50 years to settle in the New World. Irish economist Cormac Ó Gráda estimates that between 1 million and 1.5 million people emigrated during the 30 years between 1815 (when Napoleon was defeated in Waterloo) and 1845 (when the Great Famine began). However, during the worst of the famine, emigration reached somewhere around 250,000 in one year alone, with western Ireland seeing the most emigrants.",
"title": "Emigration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Families did not migrate en masse, but younger members of families did, so much so that emigration almost became a rite of passage, as evidenced by the data that show that, unlike similar emigrations throughout world history, women emigrated just as often, just as early, and in the same numbers as men. The emigrants would send remittances (reaching a total of £1,404,000 by 1851) back to family in Ireland, which, in turn, allowed another member of their family to leave.",
"title": "Emigration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Emigration during the famine years of 1845–1850 was primarily to England, Scotland, South Wales, North America, and Australia. Many of those fleeing to the Americas used the McCorkell Line. One city that experienced a particularly strong influx of Irish immigrants was Liverpool, with at least one-quarter of the city's population being Irish-born by 1851. This would heavily influence the city's identity and culture in the coming years, earning it the nickname of \"Ireland's second capital\". Liverpool became the only place outside of Ireland to elect an Irish nationalist to parliament when it elected T. P. O'Connor in 1885, and continuously re-elected him unopposed until his death in 1929. As of 2020, it is estimated that three quarters of people from the city have Irish ancestry.",
"title": "Emigration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Of the more than 100,000 Irish that sailed to Canada in 1847, an estimated one out of five died from disease and malnutrition, including over 5,000 at Grosse Isle, Quebec, an island in the Saint Lawrence River used to quarantine ships near Quebec City. Overcrowded, poorly maintained, and badly provisioned vessels known as coffin ships sailed from small, unregulated harbours in the West of Ireland in contravention of British safety requirements, and mortality rates were high. The 1851 census reported that more than half the inhabitants of Toronto were Irish, and, in 1847 alone, 38,000 Irish flooded a city with fewer than 20,000 citizens. Other Canadian cities such as Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa, Kingston, Hamilton, and Saint John also received large numbers. By 1871, 55% of Saint John residents were Irish natives or children of Irish-born parents. Unlike the United States, Canada could not close its ports to Irish ships because it was part of the British Empire, so emigrants could obtain cheap passage in returning empty lumber holds.",
"title": "Emigration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "In America, most Irish became city-dwellers; with little money, many had to settle in the cities that the ships they came on landed in. By 1850, the Irish made up a quarter of the population in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.",
"title": "Emigration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "The famine marked the beginning of the depopulation of Ireland in the 19th century. The population had increased by 13–14% in the first three decades of the 19th century; between 1831 and 1841, the population grew by 5%. Application of Thomas Malthus's idea of population expanding geometrically while resources increase arithmetically was popular during the famines of 1817 and 1822. By the 1830s, they were seen as overly simplistic, and Ireland's problems were seen \"less as an excess of population than as a lack of capital investment\". The population of Ireland was increasing no faster than that of England, which suffered no equivalent catastrophe. By 1854, between 1.5 and 2 million Irish left their country due to evictions, starvation, and harsh living conditions.",
"title": "Emigration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "It is not known exactly how many people died during the period of the famine, although it is believed that more died from disease than from starvation. State registration of births, marriages, or deaths had not yet begun, and records kept by the Catholic Church are incomplete. One possible estimate has been reached by comparing the expected population with the eventual numbers in the 1850s. A census taken in 1841 recorded a population of 8,175,124. A census immediately after the famine in 1851 counted 6,552,385, a drop of over 1.5 million in 10 years. The census commissioners estimated that, at the normal rate of population increase, the population in 1851 should have grown to just over 9 million if the famine had not occurred.",
"title": "Death toll"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "On the in-development Great Irish Famine Online resource, produced by the Geography department of University College Cork, the population of Ireland section states, that together with the census figures being called low, before the famine it reads that \"it is now generally believed\" that over 8.75 million people populated the island of Ireland prior to it striking.",
"title": "Death toll"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "In 1851, the census commissioners collected information on the number who died in each family since 1841, and the cause, season, and year of death. They recorded 21,770 total deaths from starvation in the previous decade and 400,720 deaths from diseases. Listed diseases were fever, diphtheria, dysentery, cholera, smallpox, and influenza, with the first two being the main killers (222,021 and 93,232). The commissioners acknowledged that their figures were incomplete and that the true number of deaths was probably higher:",
"title": "Death toll"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "The greater the amount of destitution of mortality ... the less will be the amount of recorded deaths derived through any household form;—for not only were whole families swept away by disease ... but whole villages were effaced from off the land.",
"title": "Death toll"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Later historians agree that the 1851 death tables \"were flawed and probably under-estimated the level of mortality\". The combination of institutional and figures provided by individuals gives \"an incomplete and biased count\" of fatalities during the famine. Cormac Ó Gráda, referencing the work of W. A. MacArthur, writes that specialists have long known that the Irish death tables were inaccurate, and undercounted the number of deaths.",
"title": "Death toll"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "S. H. Cousens's estimate of 800,000 deaths relied heavily on retrospective information contained in the 1851 census and elsewhere, and is now regarded as too low. Modern historian Joseph Lee says \"at least 800,000\", and R. F. Foster estimates that \"at least 775,000 died, mostly through disease, including cholera in the latter stages of the holocaust\". He further notes that \"a recent sophisticated computation estimates excess deaths from 1846 to 1851 as between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000 ... after a careful critique of this, other statisticians arrive at a figure of 1,000,000\".",
"title": "Death toll"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Joel Mokyr's estimates at an aggregated county level range from 1.1 million to 1.5 million deaths between 1846 and 1851. Mokyr produced two sets of data which contained an upper-bound and lower-bound estimate, which showed not much difference in regional patterns. The true figure is likely to lie between the two extremes of half and one and a half million, and the most widely accepted estimate is one million.",
"title": "Death toll"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Detailed statistics of the population of Ireland since 1841 are available at Irish population analysis.",
"title": "Death toll"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Another area of uncertainty lies in the descriptions of disease given by tenants as to the cause of their relatives' deaths. Though the 1851 census has been rightly criticised as underestimating the true extent of mortality, it does provide a framework for the medical history of the Great Famine. The diseases that badly affected the population fell into two categories: famine-induced diseases and diseases of nutritional deficiency. Of the nutritional deficiency diseases, the most commonly experienced were starvation and marasmus, as well as a condition at the time called dropsy. Dropsy (oedema) was a popular name given for the symptoms of several diseases, one of which, kwashiorkor, is associated with starvation.",
"title": "Death toll"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "However, the greatest mortality was not from nutritional deficiency diseases, but from famine-induced ailments. The malnourished are very vulnerable to infections; therefore, these were more severe when they occurred. Measles, diphtheria, diarrhoea, tuberculosis, most respiratory infections, whooping cough, many intestinal parasites, and cholera were all strongly conditioned by nutritional status. Potentially lethal diseases, such as smallpox and influenza, were so virulent that their spread was independent of nutrition. The best example of this phenomenon was fever, which exacted the greatest death toll. In the popular mind, as well as medical opinion, fever and famine were closely related. Social dislocation—the congregation of the hungry at soup kitchens, food depots, and overcrowded workhouses—created conditions that were ideal for spreading infectious diseases such as typhus, typhoid, and relapsing fever.",
"title": "Death toll"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Diarrhoeal diseases were the result of poor hygiene, bad sanitation, and dietary changes. The concluding attack on a population incapacitated by famine was delivered by Asiatic cholera, which had visited Ireland briefly in the 1830s. In the following decade, it spread uncontrollably across Asia, through Europe, and into Britain, finally reaching Ireland in 1849. Some scholars estimate that the population of Ireland was reduced by 20–25%.",
"title": "Death toll"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Ireland's mean age of marriage in 1830 was 23.8 for women and 27.5 for men, where they had once been 21 for women and 25 for men, and those who never married numbered about 10% of the population; in 1840, they had respectively risen to 24.4 and 27.7. In the decades after the Famine, the age of marriage had risen to 28–29 for women and 33 for men, and as many as a third of Irishmen and a quarter of Irishwomen never married, due to low wages and chronic economic problems that discouraged early and universal marriage.",
"title": "After the famine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "One consequence of the increase in the number of orphaned children was that some young women turned to prostitution to provide for themselves. Some of the women who became Wrens of the Curragh were famine orphans.",
"title": "After the famine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "The potato blight would return to Ireland in 1879, though by then the rural cottier tenant farmers and labourers of Ireland had begun the \"Land War\", described as one of the largest agrarian movements to take place in nineteenth-century Europe.",
"title": "After the famine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "By the time the potato blight returned in 1879, The Land League, which was led by Michael Davitt, who was born during the Great Famine and whose family had been evicted when Davitt was only 4 years old, encouraged the mass boycott of \"notorious landlords\" with some members also physically blocking evictions. The policy, however, would soon be suppressed. Despite close to 1000 interned under the 1881 Coercion Act for suspected membership. With the reduction in the rate of homelessness and the increased physical and political networks eroding the landlordism system, the severity of the following shorter famine would be limited.",
"title": "After the famine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "According to the linguist Erick Falc'her-Poyroux, surprisingly, for a country renowned for its rich musical heritage, only a small number of folk songs can be traced back to the demographic and cultural catastrophe brought about by the Great Famine, and he infers from this that the subject was generally avoided for decades among poorer people as it brought back too many sorrowful memories. Also, large areas of the country became uninhabited and the folk song collectors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not collect the songs they heard in the Irish language, as the language of the peasantry was often regarded as dead, or \"not delicate enough for educated ears\". Of the songs that have survived probably the best known is Skibbereen. Emigration has been an important source of inspiration for songs of the Irish during the 20th century.",
"title": "After the famine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "Contemporary opinion was sharply critical of the Russell government's response to and management of the crisis. From the start, there were accusations that the government failed to grasp the magnitude of the disaster. Sir James Graham, who had served as Home Secretary in Sir Robert Peel's late government, wrote to Peel that, in his opinion, \"the real extent and magnitude of the Irish difficulty are underestimated by the Government, and cannot be met by measures within the strict rule of economical science\".",
"title": "Analysis of the government's role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "This criticism was not confined to outside critics. The Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Clarendon, wrote a letter to Russell on 26 April 1849, urging that the government propose additional relief measures: \"I don't think there is another legislature in Europe that would disregard such suffering as now exists in the west of Ireland, or coldly persist in a policy of extermination.\" Also in 1849, the Chief Poor Law Commissioner, Edward Twisleton, resigned in protest over the Rate-in-Aid Act, which provided additional funds for the Poor Law through a 6d in the pound levy on all rateable properties in Ireland. Twisleton testified that \"comparatively trifling sums were required for Britain to spare itself the deep disgrace of permitting its miserable fellow-subjects to die of starvation\". According to Peter Gray in his book The Irish Famine, the government spent £7 million for relief in Ireland between 1845 and 1850, \"representing less than half of one per cent of the British gross national product over five years. Contemporaries noted the sharp contrast with the £20 million compensation given to West Indian slave-owners in the 1830s.\"",
"title": "Analysis of the government's role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "Other critics maintained that, even after the government recognised the scope of the crisis, it failed to take sufficient steps to address it. John Mitchel, one of the leaders of the Young Ireland Movement, wrote in 1860:",
"title": "Analysis of the government's role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "I have called it an artificial famine: that is to say, it was a famine which desolated a rich and fertile island that produced every year abundance and superabundance to sustain all her people and many more. The English, indeed, call the famine a \"dispensation of Providence\"; and ascribe it entirely to the blight on potatoes. But potatoes failed in like manner all over Europe, yet there was no famine save in Ireland. The British account of the matter, then, is first, a fraud; second, a blasphemy. The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine.",
"title": "Analysis of the government's role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "Still, other critics saw reflected in the government's response its attitude to the so-called \"Irish Question\". Nassau Senior, an economics professor at Oxford University, wrote that the Famine \"would not kill more than one million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do any good\". In 1848, Denis Shine Lawlor suggested that Russell was a student of the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser, who had calculated \"how far English colonisation and English policy might be most effectively carried out by Irish starvation\". Charles Trevelyan, the civil servant with most direct responsibility for the government's handling of the famine, described it in 1848 as \"a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence\", which laid bare \"the deep and inveterate root of social evil\"; he affirmed that the Famine was \"the sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure is likely to be effected. God grant that the generation to which this opportunity has been offered may rightly perform its part...\"",
"title": "Analysis of the government's role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "Christine Kinealy has written that \"the major tragedy of the Irish Famine of 1845–1852 marked a watershed in modern Irish history. Its occurrence, however, was neither inevitable nor unavoidable\". The underlying factors which combined to cause the famine were aggravated by an inadequate government response. Kinealy notes that the \"government had to do something to help alleviate the suffering\" but that \"it became apparent that the government was using its information not merely to help it formulate its relief policies, but also as an opportunity to facilitate various long-desired changes within Ireland\".",
"title": "Analysis of the government's role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "Joel Mokyr writes that, \"There is no doubt that Britain could have saved Ireland,\" and compares the £9.5 million the government spent on famine relief in Ireland to the £63.9 million it would spend a few years later on the \"utterly futile\" Crimean War. Mokyr argues that, despite its formal integration into the United Kingdom, Ireland was effectively a foreign country to the British, who were therefore unwilling to spend resources that could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.",
"title": "Analysis of the government's role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "Some also pointed to the structure of the British Empire as a contributing factor. James Anthony Froude wrote that \"England governed Ireland for what she deemed her own interest, making her calculations on the gross balance of her trade ledgers, and leaving moral obligations aside, as if right and wrong had been blotted out of the statute book of the Universe.\" Dennis Clark, an Irish-American historian and critic of empire, claimed the famine was \"the culmination of generations of neglect, misrule and repression. It was an epic of English colonial cruelty and inadequacy. For the landless cabin dwellers, it meant emigration or extinction...\"",
"title": "Analysis of the government's role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "The British government has not expressly apologized for its role in the famine. But in 1997, at a commemoration event in County Cork, the actor Gabriel Byrne read out a message by Prime Minister Tony Blair that acknowledged the inadequacy of the government response. It asserted that \"those who governed in London at the time failed their people through standing by while a crop failure turned into a massive human tragedy\". The message was well received in Ireland, where it was understood as the long-sought-after British apology. Archive documents released in 2021 showed that the message was not in fact written or approved by Blair, who could not be reached by aides at the time. It was therefore approved by Blair's principal private secretary John Holmes on his own initiative.",
"title": "Analysis of the government's role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "Virtually all historians reject the claim that the British government's response to the famine constituted a genocide, their position is partially based on the fact that with regard to famine related deaths, there was a lack of intent to commit genocide. For a mass-death atrocity to be defined as a genocide, it must include the intentional destruction of a people.",
"title": "Analysis of the government's role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "In 1996, the U.S. state of New Jersey included the famine in the \"Holocaust and Genocide Curriculum\" of its secondary schools. In the 1990s, Irish-American lobbying groups, campaigned vigorously to include the study of the Irish Famine in school curriculums, alongside studies of the Holocaust, slavery and other similar atrocities. The New Jersey curriculum was pushed by such lobbying groups and was drafted by the librarian James Mullin. Following criticism, the New Jersey Holocaust Commission requested statements from two academics that the Irish famine was genocide, which was eventually provided by law professors Charles E. Rice and Francis Boyle, who had not been previously known for studying Irish history. They concluded that the British government deliberately pursued a race- and ethnicity-based policy aimed at destroying the Irish people and that the policy of mass starvation amounted to genocide per retrospective application of article 2 of the Hague Convention of 1948.",
"title": "Analysis of the government's role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "Historian Donald Akenson, who has written 24 books on Ireland, stated that \"When you see [the word Holocaust used with regard to the Great Famine], you know that you are encountering famine-porn. It is inevitably part of a presentation that is historically unbalanced and, like other kinds of pornography, is distinguished by a covert (and sometimes overt) appeal to misanthropy and almost always an incitement to hatred.\"",
"title": "Analysis of the government's role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "Irish historian Cormac Ó Gráda rejected the claim that the British government's response to the famine was a genocide and he also stated that \"no academic historian continues to take the claim of 'genocide' seriously\". He argued that \"genocide includes murderous intent, and it must be said that not even the most bigoted and racist commentators of the day sought the extermination of the Irish\", and he also stated that most people in Whitehall \"hoped for better times for Ireland\". Additionally, he stated that the claim of genocide overlooks \"the enormous challenge facing relief agencies, both central and local, public and private\". Ó Gráda thinks that a case of neglect is easier to sustain than a case of genocide.",
"title": "Analysis of the government's role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "Professor of history John Leazer writes that the binary framing of the debate about the British government's, and particularly Trevelyan's, actions as being good or bad is \"unsatisfactory\", and that the entire debate surrounding the question of genocide serves to oversimplify and obfuscate complex factors behind the actions of the government as a whole and individuals within it.",
"title": "Analysis of the government's role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "Ireland's National Famine Memorial is situated in Murrisk Millennium Peace Park, a five-acre park overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in the village of Murrisk, County Mayo at the foot of Croagh Patrick mountain. Designed by Irish artist John Behan, the memorial consists of a bronze sculpture of a coffin ship with skeletons interwoven through the rigging symbolising the many emigrants that did not survive the journey across the ocean to Britain, America and elsewhere. It was unveiled on 20 July 1997 by then-President Mary Robinson. The Famine Commemoration Committee who led the project chose the site in Murrisk as they felt it was \"...entirely fitting that the national famine memorial [..] be located in the west, which suffered most during the Famine with one in four of the population of Connaught dying in those terrible years.\"",
"title": "Memorials"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "The National Famine Commemoration Day is observed annually in Ireland, usually on a Sunday in May.",
"title": "Memorials"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "It is also memorialized in many locations throughout Ireland, especially in those regions of Ireland which suffered the greatest losses, and it is also memorialized overseas, particularly in cities with large populations which are descended from Irish immigrants, such as New York City. These include, at Custom House Quay, Dublin, the thin sculptural figures, by artist Rowan Gillespie, who are portrayed as if they are walking towards the emigration ships which are docked on the Dublin Quayside.",
"title": "Memorials"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "Kindred Spirits, a large stainless steel sculpture of nine eagle feathers by artist Alex Pentek was erected in 2017 in the Irish town of Midleton, County Cork, to thank the Choctaw people for its financial assistance during the famine.",
"title": "Memorials"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "Among the memorials in Ireland are the National Famine Museum and Strokestown Park House in County Roscommon; the Irish Famine Exhibition in Dublin; the Jeanie Johnston: An Irish Famine Story, Dublin; EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum, Dublin; and the Doagh Famine Village in County Donegal.",
"title": "Memorials"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "Among the memorials in the US is the Irish Hunger Memorial near a section of the Manhattan waterfront in New York City, where many Irish arrived and the National Memorial to An Gorta Mór, in Philadelphia, a sculpture suggesting the multitudes with 35 life-size bronze figures arranged in clusters of vignettes. Ireland's Great Hunger Institute, at Quinnipiac University fosters a deeper understanding of the Great Hunger of Ireland and its causes and consequences through a strategic program of lectures, conferences, course offerings and publications. Ireland's Great Hunger Museum, at Quinnipiac University, hosts the world's largest collection of Great Hunger-related art including artefacts and printed materials. An annual Great Famine walk from Doolough to Louisburgh, County Mayo was inaugurated in 1988 and has been led by such notable personalities as Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa and representatives of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. The walk, organised by Afri, takes place on the first or second Saturday of May and links the memory of the Great Hunger with a contemporary Human Rights issue.",
"title": "Memorials"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "Informational notes",
"title": "References"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "Footnotes",
"title": "References"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "Citations",
"title": "References"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "Bibliography",
"title": "References"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "Further reading",
"title": "References"
}
]
| The Great Famine, also known within Ireland as the Great Hunger or simply the Famine and outside Ireland as the Irish Potato Famine, was a period of starvation and disease in Ireland lasting from 1845 to 1852 that constituted a historical social crisis and subsequently had a major impact on Irish society and history as a whole. The most severely affected areas were in the western and southern parts of Ireland—where the Irish language was dominant—and hence the period was contemporaneously known in Irish as an Drochshaol, which literally translates to "the bad life" and loosely translates to "the hard times". The worst year of the famine was 1847, which became known as "Black '47". During the Great Hunger, roughly 1 million people died and more than 1 million more fled the country, causing the country's population to fall by 20–25% between 1841 and 1871. Between 1845 and 1855, at least 2.1 million people left Ireland, primarily on packet ships but also on steamboats and barques—one of the greatest exoduses from a single island in history. The proximate cause of the famine was the infection of potato crops by blight throughout Europe during the 1840s. Blight infection caused 100,000 deaths outside Ireland and influenced much of the unrest that culminated in European Revolutions of 1848. Longer-term reasons for the massive impact of this particular famine included the system of absentee landlordism and single-crop dependence. Initial limited but constructive government actions to alleviate famine distress were ended by a new Whig administration in London, which pursued a laissez-faire economic doctrine, but also because some in power believed in divine providence or that the Irish lacked moral character, with aid only resuming to some degree later. Large amounts of food were exported from Ireland during the famine and the refusal of London to bar such exports, as had been done on previous occasions, was an immediate and continuing source of controversy, contributing to anti-British sentiment and the campaign for independence. Additionally, the famine indirectly resulted in tens of thousands of households being evicted, exacerbated by a provision forbidding access to workhouse aid while in possession of more than one-quarter acre of land. The famine was a defining moment in the history of Ireland, which was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 1801 to 1922. The famine and its effects permanently changed the island's demographic, political, and cultural landscape, producing an estimated 2 million refugees and spurring a century-long population decline. For both the native Irish and those in the resulting diaspora, the famine entered folk memory. The strained relations between many Irish and their ruling British government worsened further because of the famine, heightening ethnic and sectarian tensions and boosting nationalism and republicanism both in Ireland and among Irish emigrants around the world. English documentary maker John Percival said that the famine "became part of the long story of betrayal and exploitation which led to the growing movement in Ireland for independence." Scholar Kirby Miller makes the same point. Debate exists regarding nomenclature for the event, whether to use the term "Famine", "Potato Famine" or "Great Hunger", the last of which some believe most accurately captures the complicated history of the period. The potato blight returned to Europe in 1879 but, by this time, the Land War had begun in Ireland. The movement, organized by the Land League, continued the political campaign for the Three Fs which was issued in 1850 by the Tenant Right League during the Great Famine. When the potato blight returned to Ireland in the 1879 famine, the League boycotted "notorious landlords" and its members physically blocked the evictions of farmers; the consequent reduction in homelessness and house demolition resulted in a drastic reduction in the number of deaths. | 2001-05-11T13:24:07Z | 2023-12-24T14:30:43Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) |
14,727 | Isle of Man | The Isle of Man (Manx: Mannin [ˈmanɪnʲ], also Ellan Vannin [ˈɛlʲan ˈvanɪnʲ]), also known as Mann (/mæn/ man), is a self-governing British Crown Dependency in the Irish Sea between Great Britain and Ireland. As head of state, Charles III holds the title Lord of Mann and is represented by a Lieutenant Governor. The government of the United Kingdom is responsible for the isle's military defence and represents it abroad.
Humans have lived on the island since before 6500 BC. Gaelic cultural influence began in the 5th century AD, when Irish missionaries following the teaching of St. Patrick began settling the island, and the Manx language, a branch of the Goidelic languages, emerged. In 627, King Edwin of Northumbria conquered the Isle of Man along with most of Mercia. In the 9th century, Norsemen established the thalassocratic Kingdom of the Isles, which included the Isle of Man. Magnus III, King of Norway from 1093 to 1103, reigned as King of Mann and the Isles between 1099 and 1103.
In 1266, King Magnus VI of Norway sold his suzerainty over Mann to King Alexander III of Scotland under the Treaty of Perth. After a period of alternating rule by the Kings of Scotland and England, the island came under the feudal lordship of the English Crown in 1399. The lordship revested in the British Crown in 1765, but the island did not become part of the 18th-century Kingdom of Great Britain, nor of its successors, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and the present-day United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It has always retained its internal self-government. In 1881, the Isle of Man Parliament, Tynwald, became the first national legislative body in the world to give women the right to vote in a general election, although this excluded married women.
The Manx economy is bolstered by its status as a tax haven and offshore banking destination. Insurance and online gambling each generate 17% of the GNP, followed by information and communications technology and banking with 9% each. This status has also brought the problems of money laundering, financial crime, and terrorism financing.
Internationally, the Isle of Man is known for the TT Motorcycle Races, and the Manx cat, a breed with short or no tails. In 2016, UNESCO awarded the Isle of Man biosphere reserve status.
The Manx name of the Isle of Man is Ellan Vannin: ellan (Manx pronunciation: [ɛlʲan]), a Manx word meaning "island"; Mannin (IPA: [manɪnʲ]) appears in the genitive case as Vannin (IPA: [vanɪnʲ]), with initial consonant mutation, hence Ellan Vannin, "Island of Mann". The short form used in English is spelled either Mann or Man. The earliest recorded Manx form of the name is Manu or Mana.
The Old Irish form of the name is Manau or Mano. Old Welsh records named it as Manaw, also reflected in Manaw Gododdin, the name for an ancient district in north Britain along the lower Firth of Forth. In the 1st century AD, Pliny the Elder records it as Monapia or Monabia, and Ptolemy (2nd century) as Monœda (Mοναοιδα, Monaoida) or Mοναρινα (Monarina), in Koine Greek. Later Latin references have Mevania or Mænavia (Orosius, 416), and Eubonia or Eumonia by Irish writers. It is found in the Sagas of Icelanders as Mön.
The name is probably cognate with the Welsh name of the island of Anglesey, Ynys Môn, usually derived from a Celtic word for 'mountain' (reflected in Welsh mynydd, Breton menez, and Scottish Gaelic monadh), from a Proto-Celtic *moniyos.
The name was at least secondarily associated with that of Manannán mac Lir in Irish mythology (corresponding to Welsh Manawydan fab Llŷr). In the earliest Irish mythological texts, Manannán is a king of the otherworld, but the 9th-century Sanas Cormaic identifies a euhemerised Manannán as "a famous merchant who resided in, and gave name to, the Isle of Man". Later, a Manannán is recorded as the first king of Mann in a Manx poem (dated 1504).
The island was cut off from the surrounding islands around 8000 BC as sea levels rose following the end of the last ice age. Humans colonised it by travelling by sea some time before 6500 BC. The first occupants were hunter-gatherers and fishermen. Examples of their tools are kept at the Manx Museum.
The Neolithic Period marked the beginning of farming, and the people began to build megalithic monuments, such as Cashtal yn Ard in Maughold parish, King Orry's Grave in Laxey, Mull Hill near Cregneash, and Ballaharra Stones at St John's. There were also the local Ronaldsway and Bann cultures.
During the Bronze Age, the size of burial mounds decreased. The people put bodies into stone-lined graves with ornamental containers. The Bronze Age burial mounds survived as long-lasting markers around the countryside.
The ancient Romans knew of the island and called it Insula Manavia. During the four centuries when Rome ruled the Province of Britannia, the Roman military controlled the Irish Sea, providing safe passage of agricultural goods from the productive farms of Anglesey to Roman settlements at the English – Scottish frontier. Only a few Roman artifacts have been found on Mann, suggesting a lack of strategic value of Mann during the era of Britannia. No Roman lighthouses or signal towers have yet been found on Mann.
Around the 5th century AD, large-scale migration from Ireland precipitated a process of Gaelicisation, evidenced by Ogham inscriptions, and the Manx language developed. It is a Goidelic language closely related to Irish and Scottish Gaelic.
In the 7th century, Mann came under control of the Anglo-Saxon King Edwin of Northumbria, who then launched raids from Mann into Ireland. How much influence the Northumbrians exerted on Mann is unknown, but very few place names on Mann are of Old English origin.
Vikings arrived at the end of the 8th century. They established Tynwald and introduced many land divisions that still exist. In 1266 King Magnus VI of Norway ceded the islands to Alexander III, King of Scots, in the Treaty of Perth. But Scottish rule over Mann did not become firmly established until 1275, when the Manx were defeated in the Battle of Ronaldsway, near Castletown.
In 1290 King Edward I of England sent Walter de Huntercombe to take possession of Mann. It remained in English hands until 1313, when Robert the Bruce took it after besieging Castle Rushen for five weeks. In 1314, it was retaken for the English by John Bacach of Argyll. In 1317, it was retaken for the Scots by Thomas Randolph, 1st Earl of Moray and Lord of the Isle of Man. It was held by the Scots until 1333. For some years thereafter control passed back and forth between the two kingdoms until the English took it for the final time in 1346. The English Crown delegated its rule of the island to a series of lords and magnates. Tynwald passed laws concerning the government of the island in all respects and had control over its finances but was subject to the approval of the Lord of Mann.
The Revestment occurred in 1765.
In 1866, the Isle of Man obtained limited home rule, with partly democratic elections to the House of Keys, but the Legislative Council was appointed by the Crown. Since then, democratic government has been gradually extended.
During both World Wars, the island was used for the internment of people originating from enemy countries.
In recent times, the economy of the island has benefited from regulatory arbitrage in various contexts, such as low taxes, which have attracted wealthy individuals, and which together with arguably lax regulation have attracted industries such as offshore financial services and more recently gambling.
The Isle of Man has designated more than 250 historic sites as registered buildings.
The Isle of Man is an island located in the middle of the northern Irish Sea, almost equidistant from England to the east, Northern Ireland to the west, and Scotland (closest) to the north, while Wales to the south is almost the distance of the Republic of Ireland to the southwest. It is 52 kilometres (32 mi) long and, at its widest point, 22 kilometres (14 mi) wide. It has an area of around 572 square kilometres (221 sq mi). Besides the island of Mann itself, the political unit of the Isle of Man includes some nearby small islands: the seasonally inhabited Calf of Man, Chicken Rock (on which stands an unstaffed lighthouse), St Patrick's Isle and St Michael's Isle. The last two of these are connected to the main island by permanent roads/causeways.
Ranges of hills in the north and south are separated by a central valley. The northern plain, by contrast, is relatively flat, consisting mainly of deposits from glacial advances from western Scotland during colder times. There are more recently deposited shingle beaches at the northernmost point, the Point of Ayre. The island has one mountain higher than 600 metres (2,000 ft), Snaefell, with a height of 620 metres (2,034 ft). According to an old saying, from the summit one can see six kingdoms: those of Mann, Scotland, England, Ireland, Wales, and Heaven. Some versions add a seventh kingdom, that of the sea, or Neptune.
The Isle of Man has a temperate oceanic climate (Köppen Cfb). Average rainfall is higher than averaged over the territory of the British Isles, because the Isle of Man is far enough from Ireland for the prevailing south-westerly winds to accumulate moisture. Average rainfall is highest at Snaefell, where it is around 1,900 millimetres (75 in) a year. At lower levels it can be around 800 millimetres (31 in) a year. In drier spots, the Isle of Man is sunnier than either Ireland or the majority of England at 1,651 hours per year at the official Ronaldsway station. The highest recorded temperature was 28.9 °C (84.0 °F) in Ronaldsway on 12 July 1983. Due to the moderate surface temperatures of the Irish Sea, the island does not receive bursts of heat that sometimes can hit Northern England. The stable water temperature also means that air frost is rare, averaging just ten occasions per year.
On 10 May 2019 Chief Minister Howard Quayle stated that the Isle of Man Government recognises that a state of emergency exists due to the threat of anthropogenic climate change.
The United Kingdom is responsible for the island's defence and ultimately for good governance, and for representing the island in international forums, while the island's own parliament and government have competence over all domestic matters.
The island's parliament, Tynwald, is claimed to have been in continuous existence since 979 or earlier, purportedly making it the oldest continuously governing body in the world, though evidence supports a much later date. Tynwald is a bicameral or tricameral legislature, comprising the House of Keys (directly elected by universal suffrage with a voting age of 16 years) and the Legislative Council (consisting of indirectly elected and ex-officio members). These two bodies also meet together in joint session as Tynwald Court.
The executive branch of government is the Council of Ministers, which is composed of Members of Tynwald (usually Members of the House of Keys, though Members of the Legislative Council may also be appointed as Ministers). It is headed by the Chief Minister.
Vice-regal functions of the head of state are performed by a lieutenant governor.
In various laws of the United Kingdom, "the United Kingdom" is defined to exclude the Isle of Man. Historically, the UK has taken care of its external and defence affairs and retains paramount power to legislate for the Island. However, in 2007, the Isle of Man and the UK signed an agreement that established frameworks for the development of the international identity of the Isle of Man. There is no separate Manx citizenship. Citizenship is covered by UK law, and Manx people are classed as British citizens. There is a long history of relations and cultural exchange between the Isle of Man and Ireland. The Isle of Man's historic Manx language (and its modern revived variant) are closely related to both Scottish Gaelic and the Irish language, and in 1947, Irish Taoiseach Éamon de Valera spearheaded efforts to save the dying Manx language.
The Isle of Man is not part of the United Kingdom; however, the UK takes care of its external and defence affairs. There are no independent military forces on the Isle of Man, although HMS Ramsey was affiliated with the town of the same name. From 1938 to 1955 there existed the Manx Regiment of the British Territorial Army, which saw extensive action during the Second World War. During the English Civil War the 7th Earl of Derby and Lord of Mann James Stanley conscripted 10 men from each parish (170 in total) to fight for the Royalist cause; the majority were killed at the Battle of Wigan Lane in 1651. In 1779, the Manx Fencible Corps, a fencible regiment of three companies, was raised; it was disbanded in 1783 at the end of the American War of Independence. Later, the Royal Manx Fencibles was raised at the time of the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars. The 1st Battalion (of 3 companies) was raised in 1793. A 2nd Battalion (of 10 companies) was raised in 1795, and it saw action during the Irish Rebellion of 1798. The regiment was disbanded in 1802. A third body of Manx Fencibles was raised in 1803 to defend the island during the Napoleonic Wars and to assist the Revenue. It was disbanded in 1811. The Isle of Man Home Guard was raised during the Second World War for home defence. In 2015 a multi-capability recruiting and training unit of the British Army Reserve was established in Douglas.
There is no citizenship of the Isle of Man as such; Isle of Man residents are entitled to British citizenship and can obtain a full UK British passport or British Isle of Man passport.
The Passport Office, Isle of Man, Douglas, accepts and processes applications for the Lieutenant Governor of the Isle of Man, who is formally responsible for issuing Isle of Man–issued British passports, titled "British Islands – Isle of Man". The powers conferred on the UK Secretary of State by the British Nationality Act 1981 extend to and are exercised in the Isle of Man by the Lieutenant Governor.
Isle of Man-issued British passports can presently be issued to any British citizen resident in the Isle of Man, and also to British citizens who have a qualifying close personal connection to the Isle of Man but are now resident either in the UK or in either one of the two other Crown Dependencies.
The Isle of Man was never part of the European Union, nor did it have a special status, and thus it did not take part in the 2016 (Brexit) referendum on the UK's EU membership. However, it was included within the EU's customs area, as part of Protocol 3 of the UK's Act of Accession to the Treaty of Rome, allowing Manx goods to be traded throughout the EU without tariffs.
It was not part of the EU's internal market and there were still limitations on the movement of capital, services and labour.
EU citizens were entitled to travel and reside, but not work, in the island without restriction. British citizens with Manxman status were under the same circumstances and restrictions as any other non-EU European relating country to work in the EU.
The political and diplomatic impacts of Brexit on the island are still uncertain. The UK confirmed that the Crown Dependencies' positions were included in the Brexit negotiations. The Brexit withdrawal agreement explicitly included the Isle of Man in its territorial scope, but makes no other mention of it. The island's government website stated that after the end of the implementation period, the Isle of Man's relationship with the EU would depend on the agreement reached between the UK and the EU on their future relationship.
The Isle of Man is not a member of the Commonwealth of Nations. By virtue of its relationship with the United Kingdom, it takes part in several Commonwealth institutions, including the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and the Commonwealth Games. The Government of the Isle of Man has made calls for a more integrated relationship with the Commonwealth, including more direct representation and enhanced participation in Commonwealth organisations and meetings, including Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings. The Chief Minister of the Isle of Man has said: "A closer connection with the Commonwealth itself would be a welcome further development of the island's international relationships."
Most Manx politicians stand for election as independents rather than as representatives of political parties. Although political parties do exist, their influence is not nearly as strong as in the United Kingdom.
There are three political parties in the Isle of Man:
There are also a number of pressure groups on the island. Mec Vannin advocate the establishment of a sovereign republic. The Positive Action Group campaign for three key elements to be introduced into the governance of the island: open accountable government, rigorous control of public finances, and a fairer society.
Local government on the Isle of Man is based partly on the island's 17 ancient parishes. There are four types of local authorities:
Each of these districts has its own body of commissioners.
The Isle of Man was the last place in the British Isles to legalise same-sex sexual activity. While it had been legal in England since 1967, it remained illegal in the Isle of Man until 1992.
The Isle of Man's former Chief Minister Howard Quayle issued an "unqualified apology" to gay men convicted of same-sex offences under previous Manx laws.
Public education is overseen by the Department of Education, Sport & Culture. Thirty-two primary schools, five secondary schools and the University College Isle of Man function under the department.
Two-thirds of residents of Mann are overweight or obese, four in ten are physically inactive, one-quarter are binge drinkers, one in twelve smoke cigarettes, and about 15% are in poor general health. Healthcare is provided via a public health scheme by the Department of Health and Social Care for residents and visitors from the UK.
The Crime Severity Rate in Mann, which largely measures crimes directed against persons or property, remains substantially less than that in the United Kingdom, although the rate of violent crime has been increasing in recent years. Most violent crime is associated with the trade in illegal drugs.
The Government of Mann has laid out a strategy entailing a "whole-Island approach" to address the serious problems of money laundering, financial crime, and terrorism financing.
The Isle of Man Government maintains five emergency services. These are:
All of these services are controlled directly by the Department of Home Affairs of the Isle of Man Government and are independent of the United Kingdom. Nonetheless, the Isle of Man Constabulary voluntarily submits to inspection by the British inspectorate of police, and the Isle of Man Coastguard contracts His Majesty's Coastguard (UK) for air-sea rescue operations.
The island's sole crematorium is located in Glencrutchery Road, Douglas, and is operated by the Douglas Borough Council. Usually staffed by four, in March 2020 an increase of staff to 12 was announced by the Council leader, responding to the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic, which could require more staff.
The Isle of Man has no capital gains tax, wealth tax, stamp duty, or inheritance tax and a top rate of income tax of 20%. A tax cap is in force: the maximum amount of tax payable by an individual is £200,000 or £400,000 for couples choosing to have their incomes jointly assessed. Personal income is assessed and taxed on a worldwide income basis rather than a remittance basis. This means that all income earned throughout the world is assessable for Manx tax rather than only income earned in or brought into the island. The standard rate of corporation tax for residents and non-residents is 0%. Retail business profits above £500,000 and banking business income are taxed at 10%, and rental (or other) income from land and buildings situated on the Isle of Man is taxed at 20%.
Mann's low corporate tax burden and absence of public registries of corporate ownership provides tax avoidance and tax evasion strategies for individuals and corporations, resulting in a large influx of funds from those in pursuit of tax advantage and financial confidentiality. The relative importance of agriculture, fishing, and tourism in the Isle of Man, the former mainstays of the economy, has accordingly declined. As is typical of the low-tax crown dependencies, Mann's economy features financial services, shell corporations for high-technology companies, online gambling and online gaming, cinema production, and tax havens for high net worth individuals. These activities have brought some high-income jobs to Mann, as hundreds of local residents serve as “straw man" directors and shareholders of shell companies. Similar schemes provide a means for high net worth individuals to reduce their tax obligations and to shield their financial dealings from public scrutiny. As described in the Paradise Papers, the Isle of Man economy features extensive illegal economic activity including tax evasion, money laundering from drug sales, money transfers from weapons sales, and looting of public treasuries of other nation states (particularly Russia). These funds are mostly funneled into the London financial markets. Online gambling sites provided about 10% of the Mann government's revenue in 2014.
There has been an effort to regulate these illicit activities on Mann, though the impact of legal measures instituted by the Mann government remains uncertain. As of June, 2023, Mann remains out of compliance with standards for Anti-Money Laundering & Countering the Financing of Terrorism requirements according to Moneyval, the European Union's Committee of Experts on the Evaluation of Anti-Money Laundering Measures and the Financing of Terrorism
The Isle of Man Department for Enterprise manages the diversified economy in 12 key sectors. The largest sectors by GNP are insurance and online casino operations with 17% of GNP each, followed by ICT and banking with 9% each. The 2016 census lists 41,636 total employed. The largest sectors by employment are "medical and health", "financial and business services", construction, retail and public administration. Manufacturing, focused on aerospace and the food and drink industry, employs almost 2000 workers and contributes about 5% of gross domestic product (GDP). The sector provides laser optics, industrial diamonds, electronics, plastics and aerospace precision engineering. Tourism, agriculture, and fishing, once the mainstays of the economy, now make very little contributions to the island's GDP. The unemployment rate on Man is less than 1%.
Trade takes place mostly with the United Kingdom. The island is in customs union with the UK, and related revenues are pooled and shared under the Common Purse Agreement. This means that the Isle of Man cannot have the lower excise revenues on alcohol and other goods that are enjoyed in the Channel Islands.
The Manx government promotes island locations for making films by offering financial support. Since 1995, over 100 films have been made on the island. Most recently the island has taken a much wider strategy to attract the general digital media industry in film, television, video and esports.
The Isle of Man Government Lottery operated from 1986 to 1997. Since 2 December 1999 the island has participated in the United Kingdom National Lottery. The island is the only jurisdiction outside the United Kingdom where it is possible to play the UK National Lottery. Since 2010 it has also been possible for projects in the Isle of Man to receive national lottery Good Causes Funding. The good causes funding is distributed by the Manx Lottery Trust. Tynwald receives the 12% lottery duty for tickets sold in the island.
Tourist numbers peaked in the first half of the 20th century, prior to the boom in cheap travel to Southern Europe that also saw the decline of tourism in many similar English seaside resorts. The Isle of Man tourism board has recently invested in "Dark Sky Discovery" sites to diversify its tourism industry. It is expected that dark skies will generally be nominated by the public across the UK. However, the Isle of Man tourism board tasked someone from their team to nominate 27 places on the island as a civil task. This cluster of the highest quality "Milky Way" sites is now well promoted within the island. This government push has effectively given the island a headstart in the number of recognised Dark Sky sites. However, this has created a distorted view when compared to the UK where this is not promoted on a national scale. There, Dark Sky sites are expected to be nominated over time by the public across a full range of town, city and countryside locations rather than en masse by government departments.
In 2017 an office of The International Stock Exchange was opened to provide a boost for the island's finance industry.
The main telephone provider on the Isle of Man is Manx Telecom. The island has two mobile operators: Manx Telecom, previously known as Manx Pronto, and Sure. Cloud9 operated as a third mobile operator on the island for a short time but has since withdrawn.
Broadband internet services are available through four local providers: Wi-Manx, Domicilium, Manx Computer Bureau and Manx Telecom. The island does not have its own ITU country code but is accessed via the British country code (+44), and the island's telephone numbers are part of the British telephone numbering plan, with local dialling codes 01624 for landlines and 07524, 07624 and 07924 for mobiles. Calls to the island from the UK, however, are generally charged differently from those within the UK, and may or may not be included in any "inclusive minutes" packages.
In 1996, the Isle of Man Government obtained permission to use the .im national top-level domain (TLD) and has ultimate responsibility for its use. The domain is managed from day to day by Domicilium, an island-based internet service provider. In December 2007, the Manx Electricity Authority and its telecommunications subsidiary, e-llan Communications, commissioned the laying of a new fibre-optic link that connects the island to a worldwide fibre-optic network. In August 2021 it was reported that Elon Musk's satellite internet service, Starlink, had been granted a licence to operate from a ground station on the island.
The Isle of Man has three radio stations: Manx Radio, Energy FM and 3FM.
There is no insular television service, but local transmitters retransmit British mainland digital broadcasts via the free-to-air digital terrestrial service Freeview. The Isle of Man is served by BBC North West for BBC One and BBC Two television services, and ITV Granada for ITV.
Many television services are available by satellite, such as Sky, and Freesat from the group of satellites at 28.2° East, as well as services from a range of other satellites around Europe such as the Astra satellites at 19.2° east and Hot Bird.
The Isle of Man has three newspapers, all weeklies, and all owned by Isle of Man Newspapers, a division of the Edinburgh media company Johnston Press. The Isle of Man Courier (distribution 36,318) is free and distributed to homes on the island. The other two newspapers are Isle of Man Examiner (circulation 13,276) and the Manx Independent (circulation 12,255).
Postal services are the responsibility of the Isle of Man Post Office, which took over from the UK's General Post Office in 1973.
There is a comprehensive bus network, operated by the government-owned bus operator Bus Vannin.
The Isle of Man Sea Terminal in Douglas has regular ferries to and from Heysham and to and from Liverpool, with a more restricted timetable operating in winter. The two vessels are Manannan and Manxman; in 2023 Manxman has now largely taken over from the Ben My Chree. Manxman arrived in 2023, and was made by Hyundai; she was named Manxman by the public in mid 2020. There are also limited summer-only services to and from Belfast and Dublin. The Dublin route also operates at Christmas. At the time of the Isle of Man TT a limited number of sailings operate to and from Larne in Northern Ireland. All ferries are operated by the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company.
The only commercial airport on the island is the Isle of Man Airport at Ronaldsway. There are direct scheduled and chartered flights to numerous airports in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
The island has a total of 688 miles (1,107 km) of public roads, all of which are paved. There is no overriding national speed limit; only local speed limits are set, and some roads have no speed limit. Rules about reckless driving and most other driving regulations are enforced in a similar way to the UK. There is a requirement for regular vehicle examinations for some vehicles (similar to the MoT test in the UK).
The island used to have an extensive narrow-gauge railway system, both steam-operated and electric, but the majority of the steam railway tracks were taken out of service many years ago, and the track removed. As of 2023, there is a steam railway between Douglas and Port Erin, an electric railway between Douglas and Ramsey and an electric mountain railway which climbs Snaefell.
One of the oldest operating horse tram services is located on the sea front in the capital, Douglas. It was founded in 1876.
The Isle of Man has become a centre for emerging private space travel companies. A number of the competitors in the Google Lunar X Prize, a $30 million competition for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the Moon, are based on the island. The team summit for the X Prize was held on the island in October 2010. In January 2011 two research space stations owned by Excalibur Almaz arrived on the island and were kept in an aircraft hangar at the airfield at the former RAF Jurby near Jurby.
The electricity supply on the Isle of Man is run by the Manx Utilities Authority. The Isle of Man is connected to Great Britain's national grid by a 40 MW alternating current link (Isle of Man to England Interconnector). There are also hydroelectric, natural gas and diesel generators. The government has also planned a 700 MW offshore wind farm, roughly half the size of Walney Wind Farm.
Gas for lighting and heating has been supplied to users on the Isle of Man since 1836, firstly as town gas, then as liquefied petroleum gas (LPG); since 2003 natural gas has been available. The future use of hydrogen as a supplementary or substitute fuel is being studied.
In June 2021, the law prohibiting commercial cultivation of cannabis on Ellan Vannin was repealed, and the government of Mann, for the first time, offered licences for production and export of cannabis. In February 2022, Mann resident and local billionaire John Whittaker, through his firm Peel NRE, proposed to spend US$136 million for the construction of warmhouses for cannabis cultivation, and research facilities, and to develop the business. It was announced that zoning permits had been granted for development of the facility. Although the availability of medical cannabis is heavily restricted within the U.K., there has been an effort to develop the cannabis industry on the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey.
The Manx are a Celtic nation.
The culture of the Isle of Man is often promoted as being influenced by its Celtic and, to a lesser extent, its Norse origins. Proximity to the UK, popularity as a UK tourist destination in Victorian times, and immigration from Britain have all meant that the cultures of Great Britain have been influential at least since Revestment. Revival campaigns have attempted to preserve the surviving vestiges of Manx culture after a long period of Anglicisation, and there has been significantly increased interest in the Manx language, history and musical tradition.
The official languages of the Isle of Man are English and Manx. Manx has traditionally been spoken but has been stated to be "critically endangered". However, it now has a growing number of young speakers. It is increasingly evident on the island: for instance, in public notices and its increasing use in the Tynwald ceremony.
Manx is a Goidelic Celtic language and is one of a number of insular Celtic languages spoken in the British Isles. Manx has been officially recognised as a legitimate autochthonous regional language under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, ratified by the United Kingdom on 27 March 2001 on behalf of the Isle of Man government.
Manx is closely related to Irish and Scottish Gaelic but is orthographically sui generis.
On the island, the Manx greetings moghrey mie (good morning) and fastyr mie (good afternoon) can often be heard. As in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, the concepts of "evening" and "afternoon" are referred to with one word. Two other Manx expressions often heard are Gura mie eu ("Thank you"; familiar 2nd person singular form Gura mie ayd) and traa dy liooar, meaning "time enough", which represents a stereotypical view of the Manx attitude to life.
In the 2011 Isle of Man census, approximately 1,800 residents stated that they could read, write, and speak the Manx language.
For centuries, the island's symbol has been the so-called "three legs of Mann" (Manx: Tree Cassyn Vannin), a triskelion of three legs conjoined at the thigh. The Manx triskelion, which dates back with certainty to the late 13th century, is of uncertain origin. It has been suggested that its origin lies in Sicily, an island which has been associated with the triskelion since ancient times.
The symbol appears in the island's official flag and official coat of arms, as well as its currency. The Manx triskelion may be reflected in the island's motto, Quocunque jeceris stabit, which appears as part of the island's coat of arms. The Latin motto translates as "whichever way you throw, it will stand" or "whithersoever you throw it, it will stand". It dates to the late 17th century when it is known to have appeared on the island's coinage. It may be understood to refer to the Caltrop, a military device with one spike always pointing upwards. The motto itself originally featured on the family badge of the Byzantine/Roman General Flavius Belisarius (505 – 565 AD) along with a representation of a caltrop."IOM Stamps – The Three Legs of Man". 20 May 2013. It has also been suggested that the motto originally referred to the poor quality of coinage which was common at the time—as in "however it is tested it will pass".
The ragwort or cushag has been referred to as the Manx national flower.
The predominant religious tradition of the Isle of Man is Christianity, adhered to by 54.7% of the Manx according to the 2021 census. At the same time, 43.8% of the population had no religion, 0.5% adhered to Islam, 0.5% to Buddhism, 0.4% to Hinduism, 0.2% to Judaism, and 0.2% to other religions.
Before the Protestant Reformation, the island had a long history as part of the unified Catholic Church, and in the years following the Reformation, the religious authorities on the island, and later the population of the island, accepted the religious authority of the British monarchy, Anglicanism and the Church of England. The Isle of Man also came under the influence of Irish religious tradition. The island forms a separate diocese called Sodor and Man, which in the distant past comprised the medieval kingdom of Man and the Scottish isles ("Suðreyjar" in Old Norse). Nowadays, it consists of sixteen parishes, and since 1541 has been part of the Province of York.
Other Christian denominations and other religions also operate on the Isle of Man. The second largest denomination is the Methodist Church, whose Isle of Man District is close in numbers to the Anglican diocese. Then, there are eight Catholic parish churches, included in the Catholic Archdiocese of Liverpool, as well as a presence of Eastern Orthodox Christians. Additionally, there are five Baptist churches, four Pentecostal churches, the Salvation Army, a ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, two congregations of Jehovah's Witnesses, two United Reformed churches, as well as other Christian churches.
The Manx Muslim community has a mosque in Douglas, and Jews also have a history on the island. In 2022, the island's first Buddhist temple was established in Baldrine.
In Manx mythology, the island was ruled by the sea god Manannán, who would draw his misty cloak around the island to protect it from invaders. One of the principal folk theories about the origin of the name Mann is that it is named after Manannán.
In the Manx tradition of folklore, there are many stories of mythical creatures and characters. These include the Buggane, a malevolent spirit which according to legend, blew the roof off St Trinian's Church in a fit of rage; the Fenodyree; the Glashtyn; and the Moddey Dhoo, a ghostly black dog which wandered the walls and corridors of Peel Castle.
The Isle of Man is also said to be home to fairies, known locally as "the little folk" or "themselves". There is a famous Fairy Bridge, and it is said to be bad luck if one fails to wish the fairies good morning or afternoon when passing over it. It used to be a tradition to leave a coin on the bridge to ensure good luck. Other types of fairies include the Arkan Sonney.
An old Irish story tells how Lough Neagh was formed when Ireland's legendary giant Fionn mac Cumhaill (commonly anglicised to Finn McCool) ripped up a portion of the land and tossed it at a Scottish rival. He missed and the chunk of earth landed in the Irish Sea, thus creating the island.
Peel Castle has been proposed as a possible location of the Arthurian Avalon or as the location of the Grail Castle, site of Lancelot's encounter with the sword bridge of King Maleagant.
One of the most oft-repeated myths is that people found guilty of witchcraft were rolled down Slieau Whallian, a hill near St John's, in a barrel. However, this is a 19th-century legend derived from a Scottish legend, which in turn comes from a German legend. Separately, a witchcraft museum was opened at the Witches Mill, Castletown in 1951. There has never actually been a witches' coven on that site; the myth was only created with the opening of the museum. However, there has been a strong tradition of herbalism and the use of charms to prevent and cure illness and disease in people and animals.
The music of the Isle of Man reflects Celtic, Norse and other influences, including from its neighbours, Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales. A wide range of music is performed on the island, such as rock, blues, jazz and pop.
Its traditional folk music has undergone a revival since the 1970s, starting with a music festival called Yn Chruinnaght in Ramsey. This was part of a general revival of the Manx language and culture after the death of the last native speaker of Manx in 1974.
Orchestral and song composer Haydn Wood grew up on the Isle of Man, moving there in 1885, aged three years old. The island and its folk tunes inspired Wood's music, resulting in the compositions Manx Rhapsody (Mylecharaine), Manx Countryside Sketches, Manx Overture, and the 1933 tone poem Mannin Veen (Manx for "Dear Isle of Man"), based on four Manx folk tunes and scored for wind band. His older brother Harry Wood (1868–1939) was also a musician: a violinist, composer and conductor who became known as "Manxland's King of Music".
The Isle of Man is mentioned in the Who song "Happy Jack" as the homeland of the song's titular character, who is always in a state of ecstasy, no matter what happens to him. The song "The Craic was 90 in the Isle of Man" by Christy Moore describes a lively visit during the Island's tourism heyday. The Island is also the birthplace of Maurice, Robin and Barry Gibb, of the Bee Gees; a bronze statue of the trio was unveiled on Douglas promenade in July 2021.
In the past, the basic national dish of the island was spuds and herrin, boiled potatoes and herring. This plain dish was supported by the subsistence farmers of the island, who for centuries crofted the land and fished the sea. Chips, cheese and gravy, a dish similar to poutine, is found in most of the island's fast-food outlets, and consists of thick-cut chips, covered in shredded Cheddar cheese and topped with a thick gravy. However, as of the Isle of Man Food & Drink Festival 2018, queen scallops (queenies) have been crowned the Manx national dish with many restaurants, hotels and pubs serving locally farmed queen scallops.
Seafood has traditionally accounted for a large proportion of the local diet. Although commercial fishing has declined in recent years, local delicacies include Manx kippers (smoked herrings) which are produced by the smokeries in Peel on the west coast of the island, albeit mainly from North Sea herring these days. The smokeries also produce other specialities including smoked salmon and bacon.
Crab, lobster and scallops are commercially fished, and the queen scallop is regarded as a particular delicacy, with a light, sweet flavour. Cod, ling and mackerel are often angled for the table, and freshwater trout and salmon can be taken from the local rivers and lakes, supported by the government fish hatchery at Cornaa on the east coast.
Cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry are all commercially farmed; Manx lamb from the hill farms is a popular dish. The Loaghtan, the indigenous breed of Manx sheep, has a rich, dark meat that has found favour with chefs, featuring in dishes on the BBC's MasterChef series.
Manx cheese has also found some success, featuring smoked and herb-flavoured varieties, and is stocked by many of the UK's supermarket chains. Manx cheese took bronze medals in the 2005 British Cheese Awards, and sold 578 tonnes over the year. Manx cheddar has been exported to Canada where it is available in some supermarkets.
Beer is brewed on a commercial scale by Okells Brewery, which was established in 1850 and is the island's largest brewer, and by Bushy's Brewery, Hooded Ram, Odin, Radical Brewing, Noa Brewhouse and Kaneens Brewery. The Isle of Man's Pure Beer Act of 1874, which resembles the German Reinheitsgebot, is still in effect: under this Act, brewers may only use water, malt, sugar and hops in their brews.
The Isle of Man is represented as a nation in the Commonwealth Games and the Island Games and hosted the IV Commonwealth Youth Games in 2011. Manx athletes have won three gold medals at the Commonwealth Games, including the one by cyclist Mark Cavendish in 2006 in the Scratch race. The Island Games were first held on the island in 1985, and again in 2001. FC Isle of Man was founded in 2019 and is a North West Counties League team.
Isle of Man teams and individuals participate in many sports both on and off the island including rugby union, football, gymnastics, field hockey, netball, taekwondo, bowling, obstacle course racing and cricket. The FC Isle of Man will compete in the North West Counties Football League Premier Division in the next league campaign. It being an island, many types of watersports are also popular with residents.
The main international event associated with the island is the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy race, colloquially known as "The TT", which began in 1907. It takes place in late May and early June. The TT is now an international road racing event for motorcycles, which used to be part of the World Championship, and is long considered to be one of the "greatest motorcycle sporting events of the world". Taking place over a two-week period, it has become a festival for motorcycling culture, makes a huge contribution to the island's economy and has become part of Manx identity. For many, the Isle carries the title "road racing capital of the world".
The Manx Grand Prix is a separate motorcycle event for amateurs and private entrants that uses the same 60.70 km (37.72 mi) Snaefell Mountain Course in late August and early September.
Prior to the introduction of football in the 19th century, cammag was the island's traditional sport. It is similar to the Irish hurling and the Scottish game of shinty. Nowadays there is an annual match at St John's.
Built in 1899, to the designs of architect Frank Matcham, and restored in 1976 to its original splendor, the government-owned Gaiety Theatre and Opera House on the Douglas Promenade presents plays, musicals, concerts and comedy shows year-round. Within the Gaiety Theatre Complex, the Broadway Cinema has a capacity of 154 and doubles as a conference venue.
The Palace Cinema is located next to the derelict Castle Mona hotel and is operated by the Sefton Group. It has two screens: Screen One holds 293 customers, while Screen Two is smaller with a capacity of just 95. It was extensively refurbished in August 2011.
Two domestic animals are specifically connected to the Isle of Man, though they are also found elsewhere.
The Manx cat is a breed of cat noted for its genetic mutation resulting in a shortened tail. The length of this tail can range from a few inches, known as a "stumpy", to being completely nonexistent, or "rumpy". Manx cats display a range of colours and usually have somewhat longer hind legs compared to most cats. The cats have been used as a symbol of the Isle of Man on coins and stamps; and at one time the Manx government operated a breeding centre to ensure the continuation of the breed.
The Manx Loaghtan sheep is a breed native to the island. It has dark brown wool and four, or sometimes six, horns. The meat is considered to be a delicacy. There are several flocks on the island and others have been started in England and Jersey.
A more recent arrival on the island is the red-necked wallaby, which is now established on the island following an escape from the Wildlife Park. The local police report an increasing number of wallaby-related calls.
There are also many feral goats in Garff, a matter which was raised in Tynwald Court in January 2018.
In March 2016, the Isle of Man became the first entire territory to be adopted into UNESCO's Network of Biosphere Reserves.
At the 2021 census, the Isle of Man was home to 84,069 people, of whom 26,677 resided in the island's capital, Douglas. The population increased by 755 persons between the 2016 and 2021 censuses.
The Isle of Man Full Census, last held in 2021, has been a decennial occurrence since 1821, with interim censuses being introduced from 1966. It is separate from, but similar to, the Census in the United Kingdom. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Isle of Man (Manx: Mannin [ˈmanɪnʲ], also Ellan Vannin [ˈɛlʲan ˈvanɪnʲ]), also known as Mann (/mæn/ man), is a self-governing British Crown Dependency in the Irish Sea between Great Britain and Ireland. As head of state, Charles III holds the title Lord of Mann and is represented by a Lieutenant Governor. The government of the United Kingdom is responsible for the isle's military defence and represents it abroad.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Humans have lived on the island since before 6500 BC. Gaelic cultural influence began in the 5th century AD, when Irish missionaries following the teaching of St. Patrick began settling the island, and the Manx language, a branch of the Goidelic languages, emerged. In 627, King Edwin of Northumbria conquered the Isle of Man along with most of Mercia. In the 9th century, Norsemen established the thalassocratic Kingdom of the Isles, which included the Isle of Man. Magnus III, King of Norway from 1093 to 1103, reigned as King of Mann and the Isles between 1099 and 1103.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In 1266, King Magnus VI of Norway sold his suzerainty over Mann to King Alexander III of Scotland under the Treaty of Perth. After a period of alternating rule by the Kings of Scotland and England, the island came under the feudal lordship of the English Crown in 1399. The lordship revested in the British Crown in 1765, but the island did not become part of the 18th-century Kingdom of Great Britain, nor of its successors, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and the present-day United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It has always retained its internal self-government. In 1881, the Isle of Man Parliament, Tynwald, became the first national legislative body in the world to give women the right to vote in a general election, although this excluded married women.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The Manx economy is bolstered by its status as a tax haven and offshore banking destination. Insurance and online gambling each generate 17% of the GNP, followed by information and communications technology and banking with 9% each. This status has also brought the problems of money laundering, financial crime, and terrorism financing.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Internationally, the Isle of Man is known for the TT Motorcycle Races, and the Manx cat, a breed with short or no tails. In 2016, UNESCO awarded the Isle of Man biosphere reserve status.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The Manx name of the Isle of Man is Ellan Vannin: ellan (Manx pronunciation: [ɛlʲan]), a Manx word meaning \"island\"; Mannin (IPA: [manɪnʲ]) appears in the genitive case as Vannin (IPA: [vanɪnʲ]), with initial consonant mutation, hence Ellan Vannin, \"Island of Mann\". The short form used in English is spelled either Mann or Man. The earliest recorded Manx form of the name is Manu or Mana.",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The Old Irish form of the name is Manau or Mano. Old Welsh records named it as Manaw, also reflected in Manaw Gododdin, the name for an ancient district in north Britain along the lower Firth of Forth. In the 1st century AD, Pliny the Elder records it as Monapia or Monabia, and Ptolemy (2nd century) as Monœda (Mοναοιδα, Monaoida) or Mοναρινα (Monarina), in Koine Greek. Later Latin references have Mevania or Mænavia (Orosius, 416), and Eubonia or Eumonia by Irish writers. It is found in the Sagas of Icelanders as Mön.",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The name is probably cognate with the Welsh name of the island of Anglesey, Ynys Môn, usually derived from a Celtic word for 'mountain' (reflected in Welsh mynydd, Breton menez, and Scottish Gaelic monadh), from a Proto-Celtic *moniyos.",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The name was at least secondarily associated with that of Manannán mac Lir in Irish mythology (corresponding to Welsh Manawydan fab Llŷr). In the earliest Irish mythological texts, Manannán is a king of the otherworld, but the 9th-century Sanas Cormaic identifies a euhemerised Manannán as \"a famous merchant who resided in, and gave name to, the Isle of Man\". Later, a Manannán is recorded as the first king of Mann in a Manx poem (dated 1504).",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The island was cut off from the surrounding islands around 8000 BC as sea levels rose following the end of the last ice age. Humans colonised it by travelling by sea some time before 6500 BC. The first occupants were hunter-gatherers and fishermen. Examples of their tools are kept at the Manx Museum.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The Neolithic Period marked the beginning of farming, and the people began to build megalithic monuments, such as Cashtal yn Ard in Maughold parish, King Orry's Grave in Laxey, Mull Hill near Cregneash, and Ballaharra Stones at St John's. There were also the local Ronaldsway and Bann cultures.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "During the Bronze Age, the size of burial mounds decreased. The people put bodies into stone-lined graves with ornamental containers. The Bronze Age burial mounds survived as long-lasting markers around the countryside.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The ancient Romans knew of the island and called it Insula Manavia. During the four centuries when Rome ruled the Province of Britannia, the Roman military controlled the Irish Sea, providing safe passage of agricultural goods from the productive farms of Anglesey to Roman settlements at the English – Scottish frontier. Only a few Roman artifacts have been found on Mann, suggesting a lack of strategic value of Mann during the era of Britannia. No Roman lighthouses or signal towers have yet been found on Mann.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Around the 5th century AD, large-scale migration from Ireland precipitated a process of Gaelicisation, evidenced by Ogham inscriptions, and the Manx language developed. It is a Goidelic language closely related to Irish and Scottish Gaelic.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In the 7th century, Mann came under control of the Anglo-Saxon King Edwin of Northumbria, who then launched raids from Mann into Ireland. How much influence the Northumbrians exerted on Mann is unknown, but very few place names on Mann are of Old English origin.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Vikings arrived at the end of the 8th century. They established Tynwald and introduced many land divisions that still exist. In 1266 King Magnus VI of Norway ceded the islands to Alexander III, King of Scots, in the Treaty of Perth. But Scottish rule over Mann did not become firmly established until 1275, when the Manx were defeated in the Battle of Ronaldsway, near Castletown.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In 1290 King Edward I of England sent Walter de Huntercombe to take possession of Mann. It remained in English hands until 1313, when Robert the Bruce took it after besieging Castle Rushen for five weeks. In 1314, it was retaken for the English by John Bacach of Argyll. In 1317, it was retaken for the Scots by Thomas Randolph, 1st Earl of Moray and Lord of the Isle of Man. It was held by the Scots until 1333. For some years thereafter control passed back and forth between the two kingdoms until the English took it for the final time in 1346. The English Crown delegated its rule of the island to a series of lords and magnates. Tynwald passed laws concerning the government of the island in all respects and had control over its finances but was subject to the approval of the Lord of Mann.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The Revestment occurred in 1765.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In 1866, the Isle of Man obtained limited home rule, with partly democratic elections to the House of Keys, but the Legislative Council was appointed by the Crown. Since then, democratic government has been gradually extended.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "During both World Wars, the island was used for the internment of people originating from enemy countries.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In recent times, the economy of the island has benefited from regulatory arbitrage in various contexts, such as low taxes, which have attracted wealthy individuals, and which together with arguably lax regulation have attracted industries such as offshore financial services and more recently gambling.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The Isle of Man has designated more than 250 historic sites as registered buildings.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The Isle of Man is an island located in the middle of the northern Irish Sea, almost equidistant from England to the east, Northern Ireland to the west, and Scotland (closest) to the north, while Wales to the south is almost the distance of the Republic of Ireland to the southwest. It is 52 kilometres (32 mi) long and, at its widest point, 22 kilometres (14 mi) wide. It has an area of around 572 square kilometres (221 sq mi). Besides the island of Mann itself, the political unit of the Isle of Man includes some nearby small islands: the seasonally inhabited Calf of Man, Chicken Rock (on which stands an unstaffed lighthouse), St Patrick's Isle and St Michael's Isle. The last two of these are connected to the main island by permanent roads/causeways.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Ranges of hills in the north and south are separated by a central valley. The northern plain, by contrast, is relatively flat, consisting mainly of deposits from glacial advances from western Scotland during colder times. There are more recently deposited shingle beaches at the northernmost point, the Point of Ayre. The island has one mountain higher than 600 metres (2,000 ft), Snaefell, with a height of 620 metres (2,034 ft). According to an old saying, from the summit one can see six kingdoms: those of Mann, Scotland, England, Ireland, Wales, and Heaven. Some versions add a seventh kingdom, that of the sea, or Neptune.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The Isle of Man has a temperate oceanic climate (Köppen Cfb). Average rainfall is higher than averaged over the territory of the British Isles, because the Isle of Man is far enough from Ireland for the prevailing south-westerly winds to accumulate moisture. Average rainfall is highest at Snaefell, where it is around 1,900 millimetres (75 in) a year. At lower levels it can be around 800 millimetres (31 in) a year. In drier spots, the Isle of Man is sunnier than either Ireland or the majority of England at 1,651 hours per year at the official Ronaldsway station. The highest recorded temperature was 28.9 °C (84.0 °F) in Ronaldsway on 12 July 1983. Due to the moderate surface temperatures of the Irish Sea, the island does not receive bursts of heat that sometimes can hit Northern England. The stable water temperature also means that air frost is rare, averaging just ten occasions per year.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "On 10 May 2019 Chief Minister Howard Quayle stated that the Isle of Man Government recognises that a state of emergency exists due to the threat of anthropogenic climate change.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The United Kingdom is responsible for the island's defence and ultimately for good governance, and for representing the island in international forums, while the island's own parliament and government have competence over all domestic matters.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The island's parliament, Tynwald, is claimed to have been in continuous existence since 979 or earlier, purportedly making it the oldest continuously governing body in the world, though evidence supports a much later date. Tynwald is a bicameral or tricameral legislature, comprising the House of Keys (directly elected by universal suffrage with a voting age of 16 years) and the Legislative Council (consisting of indirectly elected and ex-officio members). These two bodies also meet together in joint session as Tynwald Court.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The executive branch of government is the Council of Ministers, which is composed of Members of Tynwald (usually Members of the House of Keys, though Members of the Legislative Council may also be appointed as Ministers). It is headed by the Chief Minister.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Vice-regal functions of the head of state are performed by a lieutenant governor.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In various laws of the United Kingdom, \"the United Kingdom\" is defined to exclude the Isle of Man. Historically, the UK has taken care of its external and defence affairs and retains paramount power to legislate for the Island. However, in 2007, the Isle of Man and the UK signed an agreement that established frameworks for the development of the international identity of the Isle of Man. There is no separate Manx citizenship. Citizenship is covered by UK law, and Manx people are classed as British citizens. There is a long history of relations and cultural exchange between the Isle of Man and Ireland. The Isle of Man's historic Manx language (and its modern revived variant) are closely related to both Scottish Gaelic and the Irish language, and in 1947, Irish Taoiseach Éamon de Valera spearheaded efforts to save the dying Manx language.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The Isle of Man is not part of the United Kingdom; however, the UK takes care of its external and defence affairs. There are no independent military forces on the Isle of Man, although HMS Ramsey was affiliated with the town of the same name. From 1938 to 1955 there existed the Manx Regiment of the British Territorial Army, which saw extensive action during the Second World War. During the English Civil War the 7th Earl of Derby and Lord of Mann James Stanley conscripted 10 men from each parish (170 in total) to fight for the Royalist cause; the majority were killed at the Battle of Wigan Lane in 1651. In 1779, the Manx Fencible Corps, a fencible regiment of three companies, was raised; it was disbanded in 1783 at the end of the American War of Independence. Later, the Royal Manx Fencibles was raised at the time of the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars. The 1st Battalion (of 3 companies) was raised in 1793. A 2nd Battalion (of 10 companies) was raised in 1795, and it saw action during the Irish Rebellion of 1798. The regiment was disbanded in 1802. A third body of Manx Fencibles was raised in 1803 to defend the island during the Napoleonic Wars and to assist the Revenue. It was disbanded in 1811. The Isle of Man Home Guard was raised during the Second World War for home defence. In 2015 a multi-capability recruiting and training unit of the British Army Reserve was established in Douglas.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "There is no citizenship of the Isle of Man as such; Isle of Man residents are entitled to British citizenship and can obtain a full UK British passport or British Isle of Man passport.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The Passport Office, Isle of Man, Douglas, accepts and processes applications for the Lieutenant Governor of the Isle of Man, who is formally responsible for issuing Isle of Man–issued British passports, titled \"British Islands – Isle of Man\". The powers conferred on the UK Secretary of State by the British Nationality Act 1981 extend to and are exercised in the Isle of Man by the Lieutenant Governor.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Isle of Man-issued British passports can presently be issued to any British citizen resident in the Isle of Man, and also to British citizens who have a qualifying close personal connection to the Isle of Man but are now resident either in the UK or in either one of the two other Crown Dependencies.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The Isle of Man was never part of the European Union, nor did it have a special status, and thus it did not take part in the 2016 (Brexit) referendum on the UK's EU membership. However, it was included within the EU's customs area, as part of Protocol 3 of the UK's Act of Accession to the Treaty of Rome, allowing Manx goods to be traded throughout the EU without tariffs.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "It was not part of the EU's internal market and there were still limitations on the movement of capital, services and labour.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "EU citizens were entitled to travel and reside, but not work, in the island without restriction. British citizens with Manxman status were under the same circumstances and restrictions as any other non-EU European relating country to work in the EU.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The political and diplomatic impacts of Brexit on the island are still uncertain. The UK confirmed that the Crown Dependencies' positions were included in the Brexit negotiations. The Brexit withdrawal agreement explicitly included the Isle of Man in its territorial scope, but makes no other mention of it. The island's government website stated that after the end of the implementation period, the Isle of Man's relationship with the EU would depend on the agreement reached between the UK and the EU on their future relationship.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The Isle of Man is not a member of the Commonwealth of Nations. By virtue of its relationship with the United Kingdom, it takes part in several Commonwealth institutions, including the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and the Commonwealth Games. The Government of the Isle of Man has made calls for a more integrated relationship with the Commonwealth, including more direct representation and enhanced participation in Commonwealth organisations and meetings, including Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings. The Chief Minister of the Isle of Man has said: \"A closer connection with the Commonwealth itself would be a welcome further development of the island's international relationships.\"",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Most Manx politicians stand for election as independents rather than as representatives of political parties. Although political parties do exist, their influence is not nearly as strong as in the United Kingdom.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "There are three political parties in the Isle of Man:",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "There are also a number of pressure groups on the island. Mec Vannin advocate the establishment of a sovereign republic. The Positive Action Group campaign for three key elements to be introduced into the governance of the island: open accountable government, rigorous control of public finances, and a fairer society.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Local government on the Isle of Man is based partly on the island's 17 ancient parishes. There are four types of local authorities:",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Each of these districts has its own body of commissioners.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The Isle of Man was the last place in the British Isles to legalise same-sex sexual activity. While it had been legal in England since 1967, it remained illegal in the Isle of Man until 1992.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The Isle of Man's former Chief Minister Howard Quayle issued an \"unqualified apology\" to gay men convicted of same-sex offences under previous Manx laws.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Public education is overseen by the Department of Education, Sport & Culture. Thirty-two primary schools, five secondary schools and the University College Isle of Man function under the department.",
"title": "Public services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Two-thirds of residents of Mann are overweight or obese, four in ten are physically inactive, one-quarter are binge drinkers, one in twelve smoke cigarettes, and about 15% are in poor general health. Healthcare is provided via a public health scheme by the Department of Health and Social Care for residents and visitors from the UK.",
"title": "Public services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The Crime Severity Rate in Mann, which largely measures crimes directed against persons or property, remains substantially less than that in the United Kingdom, although the rate of violent crime has been increasing in recent years. Most violent crime is associated with the trade in illegal drugs.",
"title": "Public services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The Government of Mann has laid out a strategy entailing a \"whole-Island approach\" to address the serious problems of money laundering, financial crime, and terrorism financing.",
"title": "Public services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "The Isle of Man Government maintains five emergency services. These are:",
"title": "Public services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "All of these services are controlled directly by the Department of Home Affairs of the Isle of Man Government and are independent of the United Kingdom. Nonetheless, the Isle of Man Constabulary voluntarily submits to inspection by the British inspectorate of police, and the Isle of Man Coastguard contracts His Majesty's Coastguard (UK) for air-sea rescue operations.",
"title": "Public services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The island's sole crematorium is located in Glencrutchery Road, Douglas, and is operated by the Douglas Borough Council. Usually staffed by four, in March 2020 an increase of staff to 12 was announced by the Council leader, responding to the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic, which could require more staff.",
"title": "Public services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The Isle of Man has no capital gains tax, wealth tax, stamp duty, or inheritance tax and a top rate of income tax of 20%. A tax cap is in force: the maximum amount of tax payable by an individual is £200,000 or £400,000 for couples choosing to have their incomes jointly assessed. Personal income is assessed and taxed on a worldwide income basis rather than a remittance basis. This means that all income earned throughout the world is assessable for Manx tax rather than only income earned in or brought into the island. The standard rate of corporation tax for residents and non-residents is 0%. Retail business profits above £500,000 and banking business income are taxed at 10%, and rental (or other) income from land and buildings situated on the Isle of Man is taxed at 20%.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Mann's low corporate tax burden and absence of public registries of corporate ownership provides tax avoidance and tax evasion strategies for individuals and corporations, resulting in a large influx of funds from those in pursuit of tax advantage and financial confidentiality. The relative importance of agriculture, fishing, and tourism in the Isle of Man, the former mainstays of the economy, has accordingly declined. As is typical of the low-tax crown dependencies, Mann's economy features financial services, shell corporations for high-technology companies, online gambling and online gaming, cinema production, and tax havens for high net worth individuals. These activities have brought some high-income jobs to Mann, as hundreds of local residents serve as “straw man\" directors and shareholders of shell companies. Similar schemes provide a means for high net worth individuals to reduce their tax obligations and to shield their financial dealings from public scrutiny. As described in the Paradise Papers, the Isle of Man economy features extensive illegal economic activity including tax evasion, money laundering from drug sales, money transfers from weapons sales, and looting of public treasuries of other nation states (particularly Russia). These funds are mostly funneled into the London financial markets. Online gambling sites provided about 10% of the Mann government's revenue in 2014.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "There has been an effort to regulate these illicit activities on Mann, though the impact of legal measures instituted by the Mann government remains uncertain. As of June, 2023, Mann remains out of compliance with standards for Anti-Money Laundering & Countering the Financing of Terrorism requirements according to Moneyval, the European Union's Committee of Experts on the Evaluation of Anti-Money Laundering Measures and the Financing of Terrorism",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "The Isle of Man Department for Enterprise manages the diversified economy in 12 key sectors. The largest sectors by GNP are insurance and online casino operations with 17% of GNP each, followed by ICT and banking with 9% each. The 2016 census lists 41,636 total employed. The largest sectors by employment are \"medical and health\", \"financial and business services\", construction, retail and public administration. Manufacturing, focused on aerospace and the food and drink industry, employs almost 2000 workers and contributes about 5% of gross domestic product (GDP). The sector provides laser optics, industrial diamonds, electronics, plastics and aerospace precision engineering. Tourism, agriculture, and fishing, once the mainstays of the economy, now make very little contributions to the island's GDP. The unemployment rate on Man is less than 1%.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Trade takes place mostly with the United Kingdom. The island is in customs union with the UK, and related revenues are pooled and shared under the Common Purse Agreement. This means that the Isle of Man cannot have the lower excise revenues on alcohol and other goods that are enjoyed in the Channel Islands.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The Manx government promotes island locations for making films by offering financial support. Since 1995, over 100 films have been made on the island. Most recently the island has taken a much wider strategy to attract the general digital media industry in film, television, video and esports.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The Isle of Man Government Lottery operated from 1986 to 1997. Since 2 December 1999 the island has participated in the United Kingdom National Lottery. The island is the only jurisdiction outside the United Kingdom where it is possible to play the UK National Lottery. Since 2010 it has also been possible for projects in the Isle of Man to receive national lottery Good Causes Funding. The good causes funding is distributed by the Manx Lottery Trust. Tynwald receives the 12% lottery duty for tickets sold in the island.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Tourist numbers peaked in the first half of the 20th century, prior to the boom in cheap travel to Southern Europe that also saw the decline of tourism in many similar English seaside resorts. The Isle of Man tourism board has recently invested in \"Dark Sky Discovery\" sites to diversify its tourism industry. It is expected that dark skies will generally be nominated by the public across the UK. However, the Isle of Man tourism board tasked someone from their team to nominate 27 places on the island as a civil task. This cluster of the highest quality \"Milky Way\" sites is now well promoted within the island. This government push has effectively given the island a headstart in the number of recognised Dark Sky sites. However, this has created a distorted view when compared to the UK where this is not promoted on a national scale. There, Dark Sky sites are expected to be nominated over time by the public across a full range of town, city and countryside locations rather than en masse by government departments.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "In 2017 an office of The International Stock Exchange was opened to provide a boost for the island's finance industry.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "The main telephone provider on the Isle of Man is Manx Telecom. The island has two mobile operators: Manx Telecom, previously known as Manx Pronto, and Sure. Cloud9 operated as a third mobile operator on the island for a short time but has since withdrawn.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Broadband internet services are available through four local providers: Wi-Manx, Domicilium, Manx Computer Bureau and Manx Telecom. The island does not have its own ITU country code but is accessed via the British country code (+44), and the island's telephone numbers are part of the British telephone numbering plan, with local dialling codes 01624 for landlines and 07524, 07624 and 07924 for mobiles. Calls to the island from the UK, however, are generally charged differently from those within the UK, and may or may not be included in any \"inclusive minutes\" packages.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "In 1996, the Isle of Man Government obtained permission to use the .im national top-level domain (TLD) and has ultimate responsibility for its use. The domain is managed from day to day by Domicilium, an island-based internet service provider. In December 2007, the Manx Electricity Authority and its telecommunications subsidiary, e-llan Communications, commissioned the laying of a new fibre-optic link that connects the island to a worldwide fibre-optic network. In August 2021 it was reported that Elon Musk's satellite internet service, Starlink, had been granted a licence to operate from a ground station on the island.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The Isle of Man has three radio stations: Manx Radio, Energy FM and 3FM.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "There is no insular television service, but local transmitters retransmit British mainland digital broadcasts via the free-to-air digital terrestrial service Freeview. The Isle of Man is served by BBC North West for BBC One and BBC Two television services, and ITV Granada for ITV.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Many television services are available by satellite, such as Sky, and Freesat from the group of satellites at 28.2° East, as well as services from a range of other satellites around Europe such as the Astra satellites at 19.2° east and Hot Bird.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "The Isle of Man has three newspapers, all weeklies, and all owned by Isle of Man Newspapers, a division of the Edinburgh media company Johnston Press. The Isle of Man Courier (distribution 36,318) is free and distributed to homes on the island. The other two newspapers are Isle of Man Examiner (circulation 13,276) and the Manx Independent (circulation 12,255).",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Postal services are the responsibility of the Isle of Man Post Office, which took over from the UK's General Post Office in 1973.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "There is a comprehensive bus network, operated by the government-owned bus operator Bus Vannin.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "The Isle of Man Sea Terminal in Douglas has regular ferries to and from Heysham and to and from Liverpool, with a more restricted timetable operating in winter. The two vessels are Manannan and Manxman; in 2023 Manxman has now largely taken over from the Ben My Chree. Manxman arrived in 2023, and was made by Hyundai; she was named Manxman by the public in mid 2020. There are also limited summer-only services to and from Belfast and Dublin. The Dublin route also operates at Christmas. At the time of the Isle of Man TT a limited number of sailings operate to and from Larne in Northern Ireland. All ferries are operated by the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "The only commercial airport on the island is the Isle of Man Airport at Ronaldsway. There are direct scheduled and chartered flights to numerous airports in the United Kingdom and Ireland.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "The island has a total of 688 miles (1,107 km) of public roads, all of which are paved. There is no overriding national speed limit; only local speed limits are set, and some roads have no speed limit. Rules about reckless driving and most other driving regulations are enforced in a similar way to the UK. There is a requirement for regular vehicle examinations for some vehicles (similar to the MoT test in the UK).",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "The island used to have an extensive narrow-gauge railway system, both steam-operated and electric, but the majority of the steam railway tracks were taken out of service many years ago, and the track removed. As of 2023, there is a steam railway between Douglas and Port Erin, an electric railway between Douglas and Ramsey and an electric mountain railway which climbs Snaefell.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "One of the oldest operating horse tram services is located on the sea front in the capital, Douglas. It was founded in 1876.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "The Isle of Man has become a centre for emerging private space travel companies. A number of the competitors in the Google Lunar X Prize, a $30 million competition for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the Moon, are based on the island. The team summit for the X Prize was held on the island in October 2010. In January 2011 two research space stations owned by Excalibur Almaz arrived on the island and were kept in an aircraft hangar at the airfield at the former RAF Jurby near Jurby.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "The electricity supply on the Isle of Man is run by the Manx Utilities Authority. The Isle of Man is connected to Great Britain's national grid by a 40 MW alternating current link (Isle of Man to England Interconnector). There are also hydroelectric, natural gas and diesel generators. The government has also planned a 700 MW offshore wind farm, roughly half the size of Walney Wind Farm.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Gas for lighting and heating has been supplied to users on the Isle of Man since 1836, firstly as town gas, then as liquefied petroleum gas (LPG); since 2003 natural gas has been available. The future use of hydrogen as a supplementary or substitute fuel is being studied.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "In June 2021, the law prohibiting commercial cultivation of cannabis on Ellan Vannin was repealed, and the government of Mann, for the first time, offered licences for production and export of cannabis. In February 2022, Mann resident and local billionaire John Whittaker, through his firm Peel NRE, proposed to spend US$136 million for the construction of warmhouses for cannabis cultivation, and research facilities, and to develop the business. It was announced that zoning permits had been granted for development of the facility. Although the availability of medical cannabis is heavily restricted within the U.K., there has been an effort to develop the cannabis industry on the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "The Manx are a Celtic nation.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "The culture of the Isle of Man is often promoted as being influenced by its Celtic and, to a lesser extent, its Norse origins. Proximity to the UK, popularity as a UK tourist destination in Victorian times, and immigration from Britain have all meant that the cultures of Great Britain have been influential at least since Revestment. Revival campaigns have attempted to preserve the surviving vestiges of Manx culture after a long period of Anglicisation, and there has been significantly increased interest in the Manx language, history and musical tradition.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "The official languages of the Isle of Man are English and Manx. Manx has traditionally been spoken but has been stated to be \"critically endangered\". However, it now has a growing number of young speakers. It is increasingly evident on the island: for instance, in public notices and its increasing use in the Tynwald ceremony.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Manx is a Goidelic Celtic language and is one of a number of insular Celtic languages spoken in the British Isles. Manx has been officially recognised as a legitimate autochthonous regional language under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, ratified by the United Kingdom on 27 March 2001 on behalf of the Isle of Man government.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Manx is closely related to Irish and Scottish Gaelic but is orthographically sui generis.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "On the island, the Manx greetings moghrey mie (good morning) and fastyr mie (good afternoon) can often be heard. As in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, the concepts of \"evening\" and \"afternoon\" are referred to with one word. Two other Manx expressions often heard are Gura mie eu (\"Thank you\"; familiar 2nd person singular form Gura mie ayd) and traa dy liooar, meaning \"time enough\", which represents a stereotypical view of the Manx attitude to life.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "In the 2011 Isle of Man census, approximately 1,800 residents stated that they could read, write, and speak the Manx language.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "For centuries, the island's symbol has been the so-called \"three legs of Mann\" (Manx: Tree Cassyn Vannin), a triskelion of three legs conjoined at the thigh. The Manx triskelion, which dates back with certainty to the late 13th century, is of uncertain origin. It has been suggested that its origin lies in Sicily, an island which has been associated with the triskelion since ancient times.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "The symbol appears in the island's official flag and official coat of arms, as well as its currency. The Manx triskelion may be reflected in the island's motto, Quocunque jeceris stabit, which appears as part of the island's coat of arms. The Latin motto translates as \"whichever way you throw, it will stand\" or \"whithersoever you throw it, it will stand\". It dates to the late 17th century when it is known to have appeared on the island's coinage. It may be understood to refer to the Caltrop, a military device with one spike always pointing upwards. The motto itself originally featured on the family badge of the Byzantine/Roman General Flavius Belisarius (505 – 565 AD) along with a representation of a caltrop.\"IOM Stamps – The Three Legs of Man\". 20 May 2013. It has also been suggested that the motto originally referred to the poor quality of coinage which was common at the time—as in \"however it is tested it will pass\".",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "The ragwort or cushag has been referred to as the Manx national flower.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "The predominant religious tradition of the Isle of Man is Christianity, adhered to by 54.7% of the Manx according to the 2021 census. At the same time, 43.8% of the population had no religion, 0.5% adhered to Islam, 0.5% to Buddhism, 0.4% to Hinduism, 0.2% to Judaism, and 0.2% to other religions.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Before the Protestant Reformation, the island had a long history as part of the unified Catholic Church, and in the years following the Reformation, the religious authorities on the island, and later the population of the island, accepted the religious authority of the British monarchy, Anglicanism and the Church of England. The Isle of Man also came under the influence of Irish religious tradition. The island forms a separate diocese called Sodor and Man, which in the distant past comprised the medieval kingdom of Man and the Scottish isles (\"Suðreyjar\" in Old Norse). Nowadays, it consists of sixteen parishes, and since 1541 has been part of the Province of York.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Other Christian denominations and other religions also operate on the Isle of Man. The second largest denomination is the Methodist Church, whose Isle of Man District is close in numbers to the Anglican diocese. Then, there are eight Catholic parish churches, included in the Catholic Archdiocese of Liverpool, as well as a presence of Eastern Orthodox Christians. Additionally, there are five Baptist churches, four Pentecostal churches, the Salvation Army, a ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, two congregations of Jehovah's Witnesses, two United Reformed churches, as well as other Christian churches.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "The Manx Muslim community has a mosque in Douglas, and Jews also have a history on the island. In 2022, the island's first Buddhist temple was established in Baldrine.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "In Manx mythology, the island was ruled by the sea god Manannán, who would draw his misty cloak around the island to protect it from invaders. One of the principal folk theories about the origin of the name Mann is that it is named after Manannán.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "In the Manx tradition of folklore, there are many stories of mythical creatures and characters. These include the Buggane, a malevolent spirit which according to legend, blew the roof off St Trinian's Church in a fit of rage; the Fenodyree; the Glashtyn; and the Moddey Dhoo, a ghostly black dog which wandered the walls and corridors of Peel Castle.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "The Isle of Man is also said to be home to fairies, known locally as \"the little folk\" or \"themselves\". There is a famous Fairy Bridge, and it is said to be bad luck if one fails to wish the fairies good morning or afternoon when passing over it. It used to be a tradition to leave a coin on the bridge to ensure good luck. Other types of fairies include the Arkan Sonney.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "An old Irish story tells how Lough Neagh was formed when Ireland's legendary giant Fionn mac Cumhaill (commonly anglicised to Finn McCool) ripped up a portion of the land and tossed it at a Scottish rival. He missed and the chunk of earth landed in the Irish Sea, thus creating the island.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "Peel Castle has been proposed as a possible location of the Arthurian Avalon or as the location of the Grail Castle, site of Lancelot's encounter with the sword bridge of King Maleagant.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "One of the most oft-repeated myths is that people found guilty of witchcraft were rolled down Slieau Whallian, a hill near St John's, in a barrel. However, this is a 19th-century legend derived from a Scottish legend, which in turn comes from a German legend. Separately, a witchcraft museum was opened at the Witches Mill, Castletown in 1951. There has never actually been a witches' coven on that site; the myth was only created with the opening of the museum. However, there has been a strong tradition of herbalism and the use of charms to prevent and cure illness and disease in people and animals.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "The music of the Isle of Man reflects Celtic, Norse and other influences, including from its neighbours, Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales. A wide range of music is performed on the island, such as rock, blues, jazz and pop.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "Its traditional folk music has undergone a revival since the 1970s, starting with a music festival called Yn Chruinnaght in Ramsey. This was part of a general revival of the Manx language and culture after the death of the last native speaker of Manx in 1974.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "Orchestral and song composer Haydn Wood grew up on the Isle of Man, moving there in 1885, aged three years old. The island and its folk tunes inspired Wood's music, resulting in the compositions Manx Rhapsody (Mylecharaine), Manx Countryside Sketches, Manx Overture, and the 1933 tone poem Mannin Veen (Manx for \"Dear Isle of Man\"), based on four Manx folk tunes and scored for wind band. His older brother Harry Wood (1868–1939) was also a musician: a violinist, composer and conductor who became known as \"Manxland's King of Music\".",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "The Isle of Man is mentioned in the Who song \"Happy Jack\" as the homeland of the song's titular character, who is always in a state of ecstasy, no matter what happens to him. The song \"The Craic was 90 in the Isle of Man\" by Christy Moore describes a lively visit during the Island's tourism heyday. The Island is also the birthplace of Maurice, Robin and Barry Gibb, of the Bee Gees; a bronze statue of the trio was unveiled on Douglas promenade in July 2021.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "In the past, the basic national dish of the island was spuds and herrin, boiled potatoes and herring. This plain dish was supported by the subsistence farmers of the island, who for centuries crofted the land and fished the sea. Chips, cheese and gravy, a dish similar to poutine, is found in most of the island's fast-food outlets, and consists of thick-cut chips, covered in shredded Cheddar cheese and topped with a thick gravy. However, as of the Isle of Man Food & Drink Festival 2018, queen scallops (queenies) have been crowned the Manx national dish with many restaurants, hotels and pubs serving locally farmed queen scallops.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "Seafood has traditionally accounted for a large proportion of the local diet. Although commercial fishing has declined in recent years, local delicacies include Manx kippers (smoked herrings) which are produced by the smokeries in Peel on the west coast of the island, albeit mainly from North Sea herring these days. The smokeries also produce other specialities including smoked salmon and bacon.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "Crab, lobster and scallops are commercially fished, and the queen scallop is regarded as a particular delicacy, with a light, sweet flavour. Cod, ling and mackerel are often angled for the table, and freshwater trout and salmon can be taken from the local rivers and lakes, supported by the government fish hatchery at Cornaa on the east coast.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "Cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry are all commercially farmed; Manx lamb from the hill farms is a popular dish. The Loaghtan, the indigenous breed of Manx sheep, has a rich, dark meat that has found favour with chefs, featuring in dishes on the BBC's MasterChef series.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "Manx cheese has also found some success, featuring smoked and herb-flavoured varieties, and is stocked by many of the UK's supermarket chains. Manx cheese took bronze medals in the 2005 British Cheese Awards, and sold 578 tonnes over the year. Manx cheddar has been exported to Canada where it is available in some supermarkets.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "Beer is brewed on a commercial scale by Okells Brewery, which was established in 1850 and is the island's largest brewer, and by Bushy's Brewery, Hooded Ram, Odin, Radical Brewing, Noa Brewhouse and Kaneens Brewery. The Isle of Man's Pure Beer Act of 1874, which resembles the German Reinheitsgebot, is still in effect: under this Act, brewers may only use water, malt, sugar and hops in their brews.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "The Isle of Man is represented as a nation in the Commonwealth Games and the Island Games and hosted the IV Commonwealth Youth Games in 2011. Manx athletes have won three gold medals at the Commonwealth Games, including the one by cyclist Mark Cavendish in 2006 in the Scratch race. The Island Games were first held on the island in 1985, and again in 2001. FC Isle of Man was founded in 2019 and is a North West Counties League team.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "Isle of Man teams and individuals participate in many sports both on and off the island including rugby union, football, gymnastics, field hockey, netball, taekwondo, bowling, obstacle course racing and cricket. The FC Isle of Man will compete in the North West Counties Football League Premier Division in the next league campaign. It being an island, many types of watersports are also popular with residents.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "The main international event associated with the island is the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy race, colloquially known as \"The TT\", which began in 1907. It takes place in late May and early June. The TT is now an international road racing event for motorcycles, which used to be part of the World Championship, and is long considered to be one of the \"greatest motorcycle sporting events of the world\". Taking place over a two-week period, it has become a festival for motorcycling culture, makes a huge contribution to the island's economy and has become part of Manx identity. For many, the Isle carries the title \"road racing capital of the world\".",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "The Manx Grand Prix is a separate motorcycle event for amateurs and private entrants that uses the same 60.70 km (37.72 mi) Snaefell Mountain Course in late August and early September.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "Prior to the introduction of football in the 19th century, cammag was the island's traditional sport. It is similar to the Irish hurling and the Scottish game of shinty. Nowadays there is an annual match at St John's.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "Built in 1899, to the designs of architect Frank Matcham, and restored in 1976 to its original splendor, the government-owned Gaiety Theatre and Opera House on the Douglas Promenade presents plays, musicals, concerts and comedy shows year-round. Within the Gaiety Theatre Complex, the Broadway Cinema has a capacity of 154 and doubles as a conference venue.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "The Palace Cinema is located next to the derelict Castle Mona hotel and is operated by the Sefton Group. It has two screens: Screen One holds 293 customers, while Screen Two is smaller with a capacity of just 95. It was extensively refurbished in August 2011.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "Two domestic animals are specifically connected to the Isle of Man, though they are also found elsewhere.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "The Manx cat is a breed of cat noted for its genetic mutation resulting in a shortened tail. The length of this tail can range from a few inches, known as a \"stumpy\", to being completely nonexistent, or \"rumpy\". Manx cats display a range of colours and usually have somewhat longer hind legs compared to most cats. The cats have been used as a symbol of the Isle of Man on coins and stamps; and at one time the Manx government operated a breeding centre to ensure the continuation of the breed.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "The Manx Loaghtan sheep is a breed native to the island. It has dark brown wool and four, or sometimes six, horns. The meat is considered to be a delicacy. There are several flocks on the island and others have been started in England and Jersey.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "A more recent arrival on the island is the red-necked wallaby, which is now established on the island following an escape from the Wildlife Park. The local police report an increasing number of wallaby-related calls.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "There are also many feral goats in Garff, a matter which was raised in Tynwald Court in January 2018.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 123,
"text": "In March 2016, the Isle of Man became the first entire territory to be adopted into UNESCO's Network of Biosphere Reserves.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 124,
"text": "At the 2021 census, the Isle of Man was home to 84,069 people, of whom 26,677 resided in the island's capital, Douglas. The population increased by 755 persons between the 2016 and 2021 censuses.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 125,
"text": "The Isle of Man Full Census, last held in 2021, has been a decennial occurrence since 1821, with interim censuses being introduced from 1966. It is separate from, but similar to, the Census in the United Kingdom.",
"title": "Demographics"
}
]
| The Isle of Man, also known as Mann, is a self-governing British Crown Dependency in the Irish Sea between Great Britain and Ireland. As head of state, Charles III holds the title Lord of Mann and is represented by a Lieutenant Governor. The government of the United Kingdom is responsible for the isle's military defence and represents it abroad. Humans have lived on the island since before 6500 BC. Gaelic cultural influence began in the 5th century AD, when Irish missionaries following the teaching of St. Patrick began settling the island, and the Manx language, a branch of the Goidelic languages, emerged. In 627, King Edwin of Northumbria conquered the Isle of Man along with most of Mercia. In the 9th century, Norsemen established the thalassocratic Kingdom of the Isles, which included the Isle of Man. Magnus III, King of Norway from 1093 to 1103, reigned as King of Mann and the Isles between 1099 and 1103. In 1266, King Magnus VI of Norway sold his suzerainty over Mann to King Alexander III of Scotland under the Treaty of Perth. After a period of alternating rule by the Kings of Scotland and England, the island came under the feudal lordship of the English Crown in 1399. The lordship revested in the British Crown in 1765, but the island did not become part of the 18th-century Kingdom of Great Britain, nor of its successors, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and the present-day United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It has always retained its internal self-government. In 1881, the Isle of Man Parliament, Tynwald, became the first national legislative body in the world to give women the right to vote in a general election, although this excluded married women. The Manx economy is bolstered by its status as a tax haven and offshore banking destination. Insurance and online gambling each generate 17% of the GNP, followed by information and communications technology and banking with 9% each. This status has also brought the problems of money laundering, financial crime, and terrorism financing. Internationally, the Isle of Man is known for the TT Motorcycle Races, and the Manx cat, a breed with short or no tails. In 2016, UNESCO awarded the Isle of Man biosphere reserve status. | 2001-09-05T14:58:03Z | 2023-12-29T13:49:32Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_of_Man |
14,729 | Italic languages | The Italic languages form a branch of the Indo-European language family, whose earliest known members were spoken on the Italian Peninsula in the first millennium BC. The most important of the ancient languages was Latin, the official language of ancient Rome, which conquered the other Italic peoples before the common era. The other Italic languages became extinct in the first centuries AD as their speakers were assimilated into the Roman Empire and shifted to some form of Latin. Between the third and eighth centuries AD, Vulgar Latin (perhaps influenced by substrata from the other Italic languages) diversified into the Romance languages, which are the only Italic languages natively spoken today, while Literary Latin also survived.
Besides Latin, the known ancient Italic languages are Faliscan (the closest to Latin), Umbrian and Oscan (or Osco-Umbrian), and South Picene. Other Indo-European languages once spoken in the peninsula whose inclusion in the Italic branch is disputed are Venetic and Siculian. These long-extinct languages are known only from inscriptions in archaeological finds.
In the first millennium BC, several (other) non-Italic languages were spoken in the peninsula, including members of other branches of Indo-European (such as Celtic and Greek) as well as at least one non-Indo-European one, Etruscan.
It is generally believed that those 1st millennium Italic languages descend from Indo-European languages brought by migrants to the peninsula sometime in the 2nd millennium BC. However, the source of those migrations and the history of the languages in the peninsula are still a matter of debate among historians. In particular, it is debated whether the ancient Italic languages all descended from a single Proto-Italic language after its arrival in the region, or whether the migrants brought two or more Indo-European languages that were only distantly related.
With over 800 million native speakers, the Romance languages make Italic the second-most-widely spoken branch of the Indo-European family, after Indo-Iranian. However, in academia the ancient Italic languages form a separate field of study from the medieval and modern Romance languages. This article focuses on the ancient languages. For the others, see Romance studies, and for the subgroup of Italic languages currently spoken see Romance languages.
Most Italic languages (including Romance) are generally written in Old Italic scripts (or the descendant Latin alphabet and its adaptations), which descend from the alphabet used to write the non-Italic Etruscan language, and ultimately from the Greek alphabet. The notable exceptions are Judaeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino), which is sometimes written in the Hebrew, Greek, or Cyrillic script, and some forms of Romanian, which are written in the Cyrillic script.
Historical linguists have generally concluded that the ancient Indo-European languages of the Italian peninsula that were not identifiable as belonging to other branches of Indo-European, such as Greek, belonged to a single branch of the family, parallel for example to Celtic and Germanic. The founder of this theory is Antoine Meillet (1866–1936).
This unitary theory has been criticized by, among others, Alois Walde, Vittore Pisani and Giacomo Devoto, who proposed that the Latino-Faliscan and Osco-Umbrian languages constituted two distinct branches of Indo-European. This view gained acceptance in the second half of the 20th century, though proponents such as Rix would later reject the idea, and the unitary theory remains dominant in contemporary scholarship.
The following classification, proposed by Michiel de Vaan (2008), is generally agreed on, although some scholars have recently rejected the position of Venetic within the Italic branch.
Proto-Italic was probably originally spoken by Italic tribes north of the Alps. In particular, early contacts with Celtic and Germanic speakers are suggested by linguistic evidence.
Bakkum defines Proto-Italic as a "chronological stage" without an independent development of its own, but extending over late Proto-Indo-European and the initial stages of Proto-Latin and Proto-Sabellic. Meiser's dates of 4000 BC to 1800 BC, well before Mycenaean Greek, are described by him as being "as good a guess as anyone's". Schrijver argues for a Proto-Italo-Celtic stage, which he suggests was spoken in "approximately the first half or the middle of the 2nd millennium BC", from which Celtic split off first, then Venetic, before the remainder, Italic, split into Latino-Faliscan and Sabellian.
Italic peoples probably moved towards the Italian Peninsula during the second half of the 2nd millennium BC, gradually reaching the southern regions. Although an equation between archeological and linguistic evidence cannot be established with certainty, the Proto-Italic language is generally associated with the Terramare (1700–1150 BC) and Proto-Villanovan culture (1200–900 BC).
At the start of the Iron Age, around 700 BC, Ionian Greek settlers from Euboea established colonies along the coast of southern Italy. They brought with them the alphabet, which they had learned from the Phoenicians; specifically, what we now call Western Greek alphabet. The invention quickly spread through the whole peninsula, across language and political barriers. Local adaptations (mainly minor letter shape changes and the dropping or addition of a few letters) yielded several Old Italic alphabets.
The inscriptions show that, by 700 BC, many languages were spoken in the region, including members of several branches of Indo-European and several non-Indo-European languages. The most important of the latter was Etruscan, attested by evidence from more than 10,000 inscriptions and some short texts. No relation has been found between Etruscan and any other known language, and there is still no clue about its possible origin (except for inscriptions on the island of Lemnos in the eastern Mediterranean). Other possibly non-Indo-European languages present at the time were Rhaetian in the Alpine region, Ligurian around present-day Genoa, and some unidentified language(s) in Sardinia. Those languages have left some detectable imprint in Latin.
The largest language in southern Italy, except Ionic Greek spoken in the Greek colonies, was Messapian, known due to some 260 inscriptions dating from the 6th and 5th centuries BC. There is a historical connection of Messapian with the Illyrian tribes, added to the archaeological connection in ceramics and metals existing between both peoples, which motivated the hypothesis of linguistic connection. But the evidence of Illyrian inscriptions is reduced to personal names and places, which makes it difficult to support such a hypothesis.
It has also been proposed that the Lusitanian language may have belonged to the Italic family.
In the history of Latin of ancient times, there are several periods:
As the Roman Republic extended its political dominion over the whole of the Italian peninsula, Latin became dominant over the other Italic languages, which ceased to be spoken perhaps sometime in the 1st century AD. From Vulgar Latin, the Romance languages emerged.
The Latin language gradually spread beyond Rome, along with the growth of the power of this state, displacing, beginning in the 4th and 3rd centuries BC, the languages of other Italic tribes, as well as Illyrian, Messapian and Venetic, etc. The Romanisation of the Italian Peninsula was basically complete by the 1st century BC; except for the south of Italy and Sicily, where the dominance of Greek was preserved. The attribution of Ligurian is controversial.
The main debate concerning the origin of the Italic languages mirrors that on the origins of the Greek ones, except that there is no record of any "early Italic" to play the role of Mycenaean Greek.
All we know about the linguistic landscape of Italy is from inscriptions made after the introduction of the alphabet in the peninsula, around 700 BC onwards, and from Greek and Roman writers several centuries later. The oldest known samples come from Umbrian and Faliscan inscriptions from the 7th century BC. Their alphabets were clearly derived from the Etruscan alphabet, which was derived from the Western Greek alphabet not much earlier than that. There is no reliable information about the languages spoken before that time. Some conjectures can be made based on toponyms, but they cannot be verified.
There is no guarantee that the intermediate phases between those old Italic languages and Indo-European will be found. The question of whether Italic originated outside Italy or developed by assimilation of Indo-European and other elements within Italy, approximately on or within its current range there, remains.
An extreme view of some linguists and historians is that there is no such thing as "the Italic branch" of Indo-European. Namely, there never was a unique "Proto-Italic", whose diversification resulted in those languages. Some linguists, like Silvestri and Rix, further argue that no common Proto-Italic can be reconstructed such that (1) its phonological system may have developed into those of Latin and Osco-Umbrian through consistent phonetic changes, and (2) its phonology and morphology can be consistently derived from those of Proto-Indo-European. However, Rix later changed his mind and became an outspoken supporter of Italic as a family.
Those linguists propose instead that the ancestors of the 1st millennium Indo-European languages of Italy were two or more different languages, that separately descended from Indo-European in a more remote past, and separately entered Europe, possibly by different routes and/or in different epochs. That view stems in part from the difficulty in identifying a common Italic homeland in prehistory, or reconstructing an ancestral "Common Italic" or "Proto-Italic" language from which those languages could have descended. Some common features that seem to connect the languages may be just a sprachbund phenomenon – a linguistic convergence due to contact over a long period, as in the most widely accepted version of the Italo-Celtic hypothesis.
General and specific characteristics of the pre-Roman Italic languages:
The most distinctive feature of the Italic languages is the development of the PIE voiced aspirated stops. In initial position, *bʰ-, *dʰ- and *gʷʰ- merged to /f-/, while *gʰ- became /h-/, although Latin also has *gʰ- > /v-/ and /g-/ in special environments.
In medial position, all voiced aspirated stops have a distinct reflex in Latin, with different outcome for -*gʰ- and *gʷʰ- if preceded by a nasal. In Osco-Umbrian, they generally have the same reflexes as in initial position, although Umbrian shows a special development if preceded by a nasal, just as in Latin. Most probably, the voiced aspirated stops went through an intermediate stage *-β-, *-ð-, *-ɣ- and *-ɣʷ- in Proto-Italic.
The voiceless and plain voiced stops (*p, *t, *k, *kʷ; *b, *d, *g, *gʷ) remained unchanged in Latin, except for the minor shift of *gʷ > /v/. In Osco-Umbrian, the labiovelars *kʷ and *gʷ became the labial stops /p/ and /b/, e.g. Oscan pis 'who?' (cf. Latin quis) and bivus 'alive (nom.pl.)' (cf. Latin vivus).
In grammar there are basically three innovations shared by the Osco-Umbrian and the Latino-Faliscan languages:
In turn, these shared innovations are one of the main arguments in favour of an Italic group, questioned by other authors.
Among the Indo-European languages, the Italic languages share a higher percentage of lexicon with the Celtic and the Germanic ones, three of the four traditional "centum" branches of Indo-European (together with Greek).
The following table shows a lexical comparison of several Italic languages:
The asterisk indicates reconstructed forms based on indirect linguistic evidence and not forms directly attested in any inscription.
From the point of view of Proto-Indo-European, the Italic languages are fairly conservative. In phonology, the Italic languages are centum languages by merging the palatals with the velars (Latin centum has a /k/) but keeping the combined group separate from the labio-velars. In morphology, the Italic languages preserve six cases in the noun and the adjective (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, vocative) with traces of a seventh (locative), but the dual of both the noun and the verb has completely disappeared. From the position of both morphological innovations and uniquely shared lexical items, Italic shows the greatest similarities with Celtic and Germanic, with some of the shared lexical correspondences also being found in Baltic and Slavic.
Similar to Celtic languages, the Italic languages are also divided into P- and Q-branches, depending on the reflex of Proto-Indo-European *kʷ. In the languages of the Osco-Umbrian branch, *kʷ gave p, whereas the languages of the Latino-Faliscan branch preserved it (Latin qu [kʷ]).
de Vaan, Michiel (2008). Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages. Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-16797-1. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Italic languages form a branch of the Indo-European language family, whose earliest known members were spoken on the Italian Peninsula in the first millennium BC. The most important of the ancient languages was Latin, the official language of ancient Rome, which conquered the other Italic peoples before the common era. The other Italic languages became extinct in the first centuries AD as their speakers were assimilated into the Roman Empire and shifted to some form of Latin. Between the third and eighth centuries AD, Vulgar Latin (perhaps influenced by substrata from the other Italic languages) diversified into the Romance languages, which are the only Italic languages natively spoken today, while Literary Latin also survived.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Besides Latin, the known ancient Italic languages are Faliscan (the closest to Latin), Umbrian and Oscan (or Osco-Umbrian), and South Picene. Other Indo-European languages once spoken in the peninsula whose inclusion in the Italic branch is disputed are Venetic and Siculian. These long-extinct languages are known only from inscriptions in archaeological finds.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In the first millennium BC, several (other) non-Italic languages were spoken in the peninsula, including members of other branches of Indo-European (such as Celtic and Greek) as well as at least one non-Indo-European one, Etruscan.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "It is generally believed that those 1st millennium Italic languages descend from Indo-European languages brought by migrants to the peninsula sometime in the 2nd millennium BC. However, the source of those migrations and the history of the languages in the peninsula are still a matter of debate among historians. In particular, it is debated whether the ancient Italic languages all descended from a single Proto-Italic language after its arrival in the region, or whether the migrants brought two or more Indo-European languages that were only distantly related.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "With over 800 million native speakers, the Romance languages make Italic the second-most-widely spoken branch of the Indo-European family, after Indo-Iranian. However, in academia the ancient Italic languages form a separate field of study from the medieval and modern Romance languages. This article focuses on the ancient languages. For the others, see Romance studies, and for the subgroup of Italic languages currently spoken see Romance languages.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Most Italic languages (including Romance) are generally written in Old Italic scripts (or the descendant Latin alphabet and its adaptations), which descend from the alphabet used to write the non-Italic Etruscan language, and ultimately from the Greek alphabet. The notable exceptions are Judaeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino), which is sometimes written in the Hebrew, Greek, or Cyrillic script, and some forms of Romanian, which are written in the Cyrillic script.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Historical linguists have generally concluded that the ancient Indo-European languages of the Italian peninsula that were not identifiable as belonging to other branches of Indo-European, such as Greek, belonged to a single branch of the family, parallel for example to Celtic and Germanic. The founder of this theory is Antoine Meillet (1866–1936).",
"title": "History of the concept"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "This unitary theory has been criticized by, among others, Alois Walde, Vittore Pisani and Giacomo Devoto, who proposed that the Latino-Faliscan and Osco-Umbrian languages constituted two distinct branches of Indo-European. This view gained acceptance in the second half of the 20th century, though proponents such as Rix would later reject the idea, and the unitary theory remains dominant in contemporary scholarship.",
"title": "History of the concept"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The following classification, proposed by Michiel de Vaan (2008), is generally agreed on, although some scholars have recently rejected the position of Venetic within the Italic branch.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Proto-Italic was probably originally spoken by Italic tribes north of the Alps. In particular, early contacts with Celtic and Germanic speakers are suggested by linguistic evidence.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Bakkum defines Proto-Italic as a \"chronological stage\" without an independent development of its own, but extending over late Proto-Indo-European and the initial stages of Proto-Latin and Proto-Sabellic. Meiser's dates of 4000 BC to 1800 BC, well before Mycenaean Greek, are described by him as being \"as good a guess as anyone's\". Schrijver argues for a Proto-Italo-Celtic stage, which he suggests was spoken in \"approximately the first half or the middle of the 2nd millennium BC\", from which Celtic split off first, then Venetic, before the remainder, Italic, split into Latino-Faliscan and Sabellian.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Italic peoples probably moved towards the Italian Peninsula during the second half of the 2nd millennium BC, gradually reaching the southern regions. Although an equation between archeological and linguistic evidence cannot be established with certainty, the Proto-Italic language is generally associated with the Terramare (1700–1150 BC) and Proto-Villanovan culture (1200–900 BC).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "At the start of the Iron Age, around 700 BC, Ionian Greek settlers from Euboea established colonies along the coast of southern Italy. They brought with them the alphabet, which they had learned from the Phoenicians; specifically, what we now call Western Greek alphabet. The invention quickly spread through the whole peninsula, across language and political barriers. Local adaptations (mainly minor letter shape changes and the dropping or addition of a few letters) yielded several Old Italic alphabets.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The inscriptions show that, by 700 BC, many languages were spoken in the region, including members of several branches of Indo-European and several non-Indo-European languages. The most important of the latter was Etruscan, attested by evidence from more than 10,000 inscriptions and some short texts. No relation has been found between Etruscan and any other known language, and there is still no clue about its possible origin (except for inscriptions on the island of Lemnos in the eastern Mediterranean). Other possibly non-Indo-European languages present at the time were Rhaetian in the Alpine region, Ligurian around present-day Genoa, and some unidentified language(s) in Sardinia. Those languages have left some detectable imprint in Latin.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The largest language in southern Italy, except Ionic Greek spoken in the Greek colonies, was Messapian, known due to some 260 inscriptions dating from the 6th and 5th centuries BC. There is a historical connection of Messapian with the Illyrian tribes, added to the archaeological connection in ceramics and metals existing between both peoples, which motivated the hypothesis of linguistic connection. But the evidence of Illyrian inscriptions is reduced to personal names and places, which makes it difficult to support such a hypothesis.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "It has also been proposed that the Lusitanian language may have belonged to the Italic family.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In the history of Latin of ancient times, there are several periods:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "As the Roman Republic extended its political dominion over the whole of the Italian peninsula, Latin became dominant over the other Italic languages, which ceased to be spoken perhaps sometime in the 1st century AD. From Vulgar Latin, the Romance languages emerged.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The Latin language gradually spread beyond Rome, along with the growth of the power of this state, displacing, beginning in the 4th and 3rd centuries BC, the languages of other Italic tribes, as well as Illyrian, Messapian and Venetic, etc. The Romanisation of the Italian Peninsula was basically complete by the 1st century BC; except for the south of Italy and Sicily, where the dominance of Greek was preserved. The attribution of Ligurian is controversial.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The main debate concerning the origin of the Italic languages mirrors that on the origins of the Greek ones, except that there is no record of any \"early Italic\" to play the role of Mycenaean Greek.",
"title": "Origin theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "All we know about the linguistic landscape of Italy is from inscriptions made after the introduction of the alphabet in the peninsula, around 700 BC onwards, and from Greek and Roman writers several centuries later. The oldest known samples come from Umbrian and Faliscan inscriptions from the 7th century BC. Their alphabets were clearly derived from the Etruscan alphabet, which was derived from the Western Greek alphabet not much earlier than that. There is no reliable information about the languages spoken before that time. Some conjectures can be made based on toponyms, but they cannot be verified.",
"title": "Origin theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "There is no guarantee that the intermediate phases between those old Italic languages and Indo-European will be found. The question of whether Italic originated outside Italy or developed by assimilation of Indo-European and other elements within Italy, approximately on or within its current range there, remains.",
"title": "Origin theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "An extreme view of some linguists and historians is that there is no such thing as \"the Italic branch\" of Indo-European. Namely, there never was a unique \"Proto-Italic\", whose diversification resulted in those languages. Some linguists, like Silvestri and Rix, further argue that no common Proto-Italic can be reconstructed such that (1) its phonological system may have developed into those of Latin and Osco-Umbrian through consistent phonetic changes, and (2) its phonology and morphology can be consistently derived from those of Proto-Indo-European. However, Rix later changed his mind and became an outspoken supporter of Italic as a family.",
"title": "Origin theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Those linguists propose instead that the ancestors of the 1st millennium Indo-European languages of Italy were two or more different languages, that separately descended from Indo-European in a more remote past, and separately entered Europe, possibly by different routes and/or in different epochs. That view stems in part from the difficulty in identifying a common Italic homeland in prehistory, or reconstructing an ancestral \"Common Italic\" or \"Proto-Italic\" language from which those languages could have descended. Some common features that seem to connect the languages may be just a sprachbund phenomenon – a linguistic convergence due to contact over a long period, as in the most widely accepted version of the Italo-Celtic hypothesis.",
"title": "Origin theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "General and specific characteristics of the pre-Roman Italic languages:",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The most distinctive feature of the Italic languages is the development of the PIE voiced aspirated stops. In initial position, *bʰ-, *dʰ- and *gʷʰ- merged to /f-/, while *gʰ- became /h-/, although Latin also has *gʰ- > /v-/ and /g-/ in special environments.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In medial position, all voiced aspirated stops have a distinct reflex in Latin, with different outcome for -*gʰ- and *gʷʰ- if preceded by a nasal. In Osco-Umbrian, they generally have the same reflexes as in initial position, although Umbrian shows a special development if preceded by a nasal, just as in Latin. Most probably, the voiced aspirated stops went through an intermediate stage *-β-, *-ð-, *-ɣ- and *-ɣʷ- in Proto-Italic.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The voiceless and plain voiced stops (*p, *t, *k, *kʷ; *b, *d, *g, *gʷ) remained unchanged in Latin, except for the minor shift of *gʷ > /v/. In Osco-Umbrian, the labiovelars *kʷ and *gʷ became the labial stops /p/ and /b/, e.g. Oscan pis 'who?' (cf. Latin quis) and bivus 'alive (nom.pl.)' (cf. Latin vivus).",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In grammar there are basically three innovations shared by the Osco-Umbrian and the Latino-Faliscan languages:",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In turn, these shared innovations are one of the main arguments in favour of an Italic group, questioned by other authors.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Among the Indo-European languages, the Italic languages share a higher percentage of lexicon with the Celtic and the Germanic ones, three of the four traditional \"centum\" branches of Indo-European (together with Greek).",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The following table shows a lexical comparison of several Italic languages:",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The asterisk indicates reconstructed forms based on indirect linguistic evidence and not forms directly attested in any inscription.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "From the point of view of Proto-Indo-European, the Italic languages are fairly conservative. In phonology, the Italic languages are centum languages by merging the palatals with the velars (Latin centum has a /k/) but keeping the combined group separate from the labio-velars. In morphology, the Italic languages preserve six cases in the noun and the adjective (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, vocative) with traces of a seventh (locative), but the dual of both the noun and the verb has completely disappeared. From the position of both morphological innovations and uniquely shared lexical items, Italic shows the greatest similarities with Celtic and Germanic, with some of the shared lexical correspondences also being found in Baltic and Slavic.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Similar to Celtic languages, the Italic languages are also divided into P- and Q-branches, depending on the reflex of Proto-Indo-European *kʷ. In the languages of the Osco-Umbrian branch, *kʷ gave p, whereas the languages of the Latino-Faliscan branch preserved it (Latin qu [kʷ]).",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "de Vaan, Michiel (2008). Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages. Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-16797-1.",
"title": "Sources"
}
]
| The Italic languages form a branch of the Indo-European language family, whose earliest known members were spoken on the Italian Peninsula in the first millennium BC. The most important of the ancient languages was Latin, the official language of ancient Rome, which conquered the other Italic peoples before the common era. The other Italic languages became extinct in the first centuries AD as their speakers were assimilated into the Roman Empire and shifted to some form of Latin. Between the third and eighth centuries AD, Vulgar Latin diversified into the Romance languages, which are the only Italic languages natively spoken today, while Literary Latin also survived. Besides Latin, the known ancient Italic languages are Faliscan, Umbrian and Oscan, and South Picene. Other Indo-European languages once spoken in the peninsula whose inclusion in the Italic branch is disputed are Venetic and Siculian. These long-extinct languages are known only from inscriptions in archaeological finds. In the first millennium BC, several (other) non-Italic languages were spoken in the peninsula, including members of other branches of Indo-European as well as at least one non-Indo-European one, Etruscan. It is generally believed that those 1st millennium Italic languages descend from Indo-European languages brought by migrants to the peninsula sometime in the 2nd millennium BC. However, the source of those migrations and the history of the languages in the peninsula are still a matter of debate among historians. In particular, it is debated whether the ancient Italic languages all descended from a single Proto-Italic language after its arrival in the region, or whether the migrants brought two or more Indo-European languages that were only distantly related. With over 800 million native speakers, the Romance languages make Italic the second-most-widely spoken branch of the Indo-European family, after Indo-Iranian. However, in academia the ancient Italic languages form a separate field of study from the medieval and modern Romance languages. This article focuses on the ancient languages. For the others, see Romance studies, and for the subgroup of Italic languages currently spoken see Romance languages. Most Italic languages are generally written in Old Italic scripts, which descend from the alphabet used to write the non-Italic Etruscan language, and ultimately from the Greek alphabet. The notable exceptions are Judaeo-Spanish, which is sometimes written in the Hebrew, Greek, or Cyrillic script, and some forms of Romanian, which are written in the Cyrillic script. | 2001-08-20T15:33:58Z | 2023-12-27T22:32:17Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italic_languages |
14,730 | Internet Relay Chat | Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat and data transfer, including file sharing.
Internet Relay Chat is implemented as an application layer protocol to facilitate communication in the form of text. The chat process works on a client–server networking model. Users connect, using a client—which may be a web app, a standalone desktop program, or embedded into part of a larger program—to an IRC server, which may be part of a larger IRC network. Examples of programs used to connect include Mibbit, IRCCloud, KiwiIRC, and mIRC.
IRC usage has been declining steadily since 2003, losing 60 percent of its users. In April 2011, the top 100 IRC networks served more than 200,000 users at a time.
IRC was created by Jarkko Oikarinen in August 1988 to replace a program called MUT (MultiUser Talk) on a BBS called OuluBox at the University of Oulu in Finland, where he was working at the Department of Information Processing Science. Jarkko intended to extend the BBS software he administered, to allow news in the Usenet style, real time discussions and similar BBS features. The first part he implemented was the chat part, which he did with borrowed parts written by his friends Jyrki Kuoppala and Jukka Pihl. The first IRC network was running on a single server named tolsun.oulu.fi. Oikarinen found inspiration in a chat system known as Bitnet Relay, which operated on the BITNET.
Jyrki Kuoppala pushed Oikarinen to ask Oulu University to free the IRC code so that it also could be run outside of Oulu, and after they finally got it released, Jyrki Kuoppala immediately installed another server. This was the first "IRC network". Oikarinen got some friends at the Helsinki University and Tampere University to start running IRC servers when his number of users increased and other universities soon followed. At this time Oikarinen realized that the rest of the BBS features probably would not fit in his program.
Oikarinen contacted people at the University of Denver and Oregon State University. They had their own IRC network running and wanted to connect to the Finnish network. They had obtained the program from one of Oikarinen's friends, Vijay Subramaniam—the first non-Finnish person to use IRC. IRC then grew larger and got used on the entire Finnish national network—FUNET—and then connected to Nordunet, the Scandinavian branch of the Internet. In November 1988, IRC had spread across the Internet and in the middle of 1989, there were some 40 servers worldwide.
In August 1990, the first major disagreement took place in the IRC world. The "A-net" (Anarchy net) included a server named eris.berkeley.edu. It was all open, required no passwords and had no limit on the number of connects. As Greg "wumpus" Lindahl explains: "it had a wildcard server line, so people were hooking up servers and nick-colliding everyone". The "Eris Free Network", EFnet, made the eris machine the first to be Q-lined (Q for quarantine) from IRC. In wumpus' words again: "Eris refused to remove that line, so I formed EFnet. It wasn't much of a fight; I got all the hubs to join, and almost everyone else got carried along." A-net was formed with the eris servers, while EFnet was formed with the non-eris servers. History showed most servers and users went with EFnet. Once A-net disbanded, the name EFnet became meaningless, and once again it was the one and only IRC network.
Around that time IRC was used to report on the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt throughout a media blackout. It was previously used in a similar fashion during the Gulf War. Chat logs of these and other events are kept in the ibiblio archive.
Another fork effort, the first that made a lasting difference, was initiated by "Wildthang" in the United States in October 1992. (It forked off the EFnet ircd version 2.8.10). It was meant to be just a test network to develop bots on but it quickly grew to a network "for friends and their friends". In Europe and Canada a separate new network was being worked on and in December the French servers connected to the Canadian ones, and by the end of the month, the French and Canadian network was connected to the US one, forming the network that later came to be called "The Undernet".
The "undernetters" wanted to take ircd further in an attempt to make it use less bandwidth and to try to sort out the channel chaos (netsplits and takeovers) that EFnet started to suffer from. For the latter purpose, the Undernet implemented timestamps, new routing and offered the CService—a program that allowed users to register channels and then attempted to protect them from troublemakers. The first server list presented, from 15 February 1993, includes servers from the U.S., Canada, France, Croatia and Japan. On 15 August, the new user count record was set to 57 users.
In May 1993, RFC 1459 was published and details a simple protocol for client/server operation, channels, one-to-one and one-to-many conversations. It is notable that a significant number of extensions like CTCP, colors and formats are not included in the protocol specifications, nor is character encoding, which led various implementations of servers and clients to diverge. Software implementation varied significantly from one network to the other, each network implementing their own policies and standards in their own code bases.
During the summer of 1994, the Undernet was itself forked. The new network was called DALnet (named after its founder: dalvenjah), formed for better user service and more user and channel protections. One of the more significant changes in DALnet was use of longer nicknames (the original ircd limit being 9 letters). DALnet ircd modifications were made by Alexei "Lefler" Kosut. DALnet was thus based on the Undernet ircd server, although the DALnet pioneers were EFnet abandoners. According to James Ng, the initial DALnet people were "ops in #StarTrek sick from the constant splits/lags/takeovers/etc".
DALnet quickly offered global WallOps (IRCop messages that can be seen by users who are +w (/mode NickName +w)), longer nicknames, Q:Lined nicknames (nicknames that cannot be used i.e. ChanServ, IRCop, NickServ, etc.), global K:Lines (ban of one person or an entire domain from a server or the entire network), IRCop only communications: GlobOps, +H mode showing that an IRCop is a "helpop" etc. Much of DALnet's new functions were written in early 1995 by Brian "Morpher" Smith and allow users to own nicknames, control channels, send memos, and more.
In July 1996, after months of flame wars and discussions on the mailing list, there was yet another split due to disagreement in how the development of the ircd should evolve. Most notably, the "European" (most of those servers were in Europe) side that later named itself IRCnet argued for nick and channel delays whereas the EFnet side argued for timestamps. There were also disagreements about policies: the European side had started to establish a set of rules directing what IRCops could and could not do, a point of view opposed by the US side.
Most (not all) of the IRCnet servers were in Europe, while most of the EFnet servers were in the US. This event is also known as "The Great Split" in many IRC societies. EFnet has since (as of August 1998) grown and passed the number of users it had then. In the (northern) autumn of the year 2000, EFnet had some 50,000 users and IRCnet 70,000.
IRC has changed much over its life on the Internet. New server software has added a multitude of new features.
As of 2016, a new standardization effort is under way under a working group called IRCv3, which focuses on more advanced client features like instant notifications, better history support and improved security. As of 2019, no major IRC networks have fully adopted the proposed standard.
As of June 2021, there are 481 different IRC networks known to be operating, of which the open source Libera Chat, founded in May 2021, has the most users, with 20,374 channels on 26 servers; between them, the top 100 IRC networks share over 100 thousand channels operating on about one thousand servers.
After its golden era during the 1990s and early 2000s (240,000 users on QuakeNet in 2004), IRC has seen a significant decline, losing around 60% of users between 2003 and 2012, with users moving to newer social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter, but also to open platforms like XMPP which was developed in 1999. Certain networks like Freenode have not followed the overall trend and have more than quadrupled in size during the same period. However, Freenode, which in 2016 had around 90,000 users, has since declined to about 9,300 users.
The largest IRC networks have traditionally been grouped as the "Big Four"—a designation for networks that top the statistics. The Big Four networks change periodically, but due to the community nature of IRC there are a large number of other networks for users to choose from.
Historically the "Big Four" were:
IRC reached 6 million simultaneous users in 2001 and 10 million users in 2004-2005, dropping to around 350k in 2021.
As of October 2023, the top IRC networks are:
The top 100 IRC networks have around 230k users connected at peak hours.
Timeline of major servers:
IRC is an open protocol that uses TCP and, optionally, TLS. An IRC server can connect to other IRC servers to expand the IRC network. Users access IRC networks by connecting a client to a server. There are many client implementations, such as mIRC, HexChat and irssi, and server implementations, e.g. the original IRCd. Most IRC servers do not require users to register an account but a nickname is required before being connected.
IRC was originally a plain text protocol (although later extended), which on request was assigned port 194/TCP by IANA. However, the de facto standard has always been to run IRC on 6667/TCP and nearby port numbers (for example TCP ports 6660–6669, 7000) to avoid having to run the IRCd software with root privileges.
The protocol specified that characters were 8-bit but did not specify the character encoding the text was supposed to use. This can cause problems when users using different clients and/or different platforms want to converse.
All client-to-server IRC protocols in use today are descended from the protocol implemented in the irc2.4.0 version of the IRC2 server, and documented in RFC 1459. Since RFC 1459 was published, the new features in the irc2.10 implementation led to the publication of several revised protocol documents (RFC 2810, RFC 2811, RFC 2812 and RFC 2813); however, these protocol changes have not been widely adopted among other implementations.
Although many specifications on the IRC protocol have been published, there is no official specification, as the protocol remains dynamic. Virtually no clients and very few servers rely strictly on the above RFCs as a reference.
Microsoft made an extension for IRC in 1998 via the proprietary IRCX. They later stopped distributing software supporting IRCX, instead developing the proprietary MSNP.
The standard structure of a network of IRC servers is a tree. Messages are routed along only necessary branches of the tree but network state is sent to every server and there is generally a high degree of implicit trust between servers. However, this architecture has a number of problems. A misbehaving or malicious server can cause major damage to the network and any changes in structure, whether intentional or a result of conditions on the underlying network, require a net-split and net-join. This results in a lot of network traffic and spurious quit/join messages to users and temporary loss of communication to users on the splitting servers. Adding a server to a large network means a large background bandwidth load on the network and a large memory load on the server. Once established, however, each message to multiple recipients is delivered in a fashion similar to multicast, meaning each message travels a network link exactly once. This is a strength in comparison to non-multicasting protocols such as Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) or Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP).
An IRC daemon can also be used on a local area network (LAN). IRC can thus be used to facilitate communication between people within the local area network (internal communication).
IRC has a line-based structure. Clients send single-line messages to the server, receive replies to those messages and receive copies of some messages sent by other clients. In most clients, users can enter commands by prefixing them with a '/'. Depending on the command, these may either be handled entirely by the client, or (generally for commands the client does not recognize) passed directly to the server, possibly with some modification.
Due to the nature of the protocol, automated systems cannot always correctly pair a sent command with its reply with full reliability and are subject to guessing.
The basic means of communicating to a group of users in an established IRC session is through a channel. Channels on a network can be displayed using the IRC command LIST, which lists all currently available channels that do not have the modes +s or +p set, on that particular network.
Users can join a channel using the JOIN command, in most clients available as /join #channelname. Messages sent to the joined channels are then relayed to all other users.
Channels that are available across an entire IRC network are prefixed with a '#', while those local to a server use '&'. Other less common channel types include '+' channels—'modeless' channels without operators—and '!' channels, a form of timestamped channel on normally non-timestamped networks.
Users and channels may have modes that are represented by individual case-sensitive letters and are set using the MODE command. User modes and channel modes are separate and can use the same letter to mean different things (e.g. user mode "i" is invisible mode while channel mode "i" is invite only.) Modes are usually set and unset using the mode command that takes a target (user or channel), a set of modes to set (+) or unset (-) and any parameters the modes need.
Some channel modes take parameters and other channel modes apply to a user on a channel or add or remove a mask (e.g. a ban mask) from a list associated with the channel rather than applying to the channel as a whole. Modes that apply to users on a channel have an associated symbol that is used to represent the mode in names replies (sent to clients on first joining a channel and use of the names command) and in many clients also used to represent it in the client's displayed list of users in a channel or to display an own indicator for a user's modes.
In order to correctly parse incoming mode messages and track channel state the client must know which mode is of which type and for the modes that apply to a user on a channel which symbol goes with which letter. In early implementations of IRC this had to be hard-coded in the client but there is now a de facto standard extension to the protocol called ISUPPORT that sends this information to the client at connect time using numeric 005.
There is a small design fault in IRC regarding modes that apply to users on channels: the names message used to establish initial channel state can only send one such mode per user on the channel, but multiple such modes can be set on a single user. For example, if a user holds both operator status (+o) and voice status (+v) on a channel, a new client will be unable to see the mode with less priority (i.e. voice). Workarounds for this are possible on both the client and server side; a common solution is to use IRCv3 "multi-prefix" extension.
Many daemons and networks have added extra modes or modified the behavior of modes in the above list.
A channel operator is a client on an IRC channel that manages the channel. IRC channel operators can be easily seen by the a symbol or icon next to their name (varies by client implementation, commonly a "@" symbol prefix, a green circle, or a Latin letter "+o"/"o"). On most networks, an operator can:
There are also users who maintain elevated rights on their local server, or the entire network; these are called IRC operators, sometimes shortened to IRCops or Opers (not to be confused with channel operators). As the implementation of the IRCd varies, so do the privileges of the IRC operator on the given IRCd. RFC 1459 claims that IRC operators are "a necessary evil" to keep a clean state of the network, and as such they need to be able to disconnect and reconnect servers. Additionally, to prevent malicious users or even harmful automated programs from entering IRC, IRC operators are usually allowed to disconnect clients and completely ban IP addresses or complete subnets. Networks that carry services (NickServ et al.) usually allow their IRC operators also to handle basic "ownership" matters. Further privileged rights may include overriding channel bans (being able to join channels they would not be allowed to join, if they were not opered), being able to op themselves on channels where they would not be able without being opered, being auto-opped on channels always and so forth.
A hostmask is a unique identifier of an IRC client connected to an IRC server. IRC servers, services, and other clients, including bots, can use it to identify a specific IRC session.
The format of a hostmask is nick!user@host. The hostmask looks similar to, but should not be confused with an e-mail address.
The nick part is the nickname chosen by the user and may be changed while connected. The user part is the username reported by ident on the client. If ident is not available on the client, the username specified when the client connected is used after being prefixed with a tilde.
The host part is the hostname the client is connecting from. If the IP address of the client cannot be resolved to a valid hostname by the server, it is used instead of the hostname.
Because of the privacy implications of exposing the IP address or hostname of a client, some IRC daemons also provide privacy features, such as InspIRCd or UnrealIRCd's "+x" mode. This hashes a client IP address or masks part of a client's hostname, making it unreadable to users other than IRCops. Users may also have the option of requesting a "virtual host" (or "vhost"), to be displayed in the hostmask to allow further anonymity. Some IRC networks, such as Libera Chat or Freenode, use these as "cloaks" to indicate that a user is affiliated with a group or project.
There are three provisional recognized uniform resource identifier (URI) schemes for Internet Relay Chat: irc, ircs, and irc6. When supported, they allow hyperlinks of various forms, including
(where items enclosed within brackets ([,]) are optional) to be used to (if necessary) connect to the specified host (or network, if known to the IRC client) and join the specified channel. (This can be used within the client itself, or from another application such as a Web browser). irc is the default URI, irc6 specifies a connection to be made using IPv6, and ircs specifies a secure connection.
Per the specification, the usual hash symbol (#) will be prepended to channel names that begin with an alphanumeric character—allowing it to be omitted. Some implementations (for example, mIRC) will do so unconditionally resulting in a (usually unintended) extra (for example, ##channel), if included in the URL.
Some implementations allow multiple channels to be specified, separated by commas.
Issues in the original design of IRC were the amount of shared state data being a limitation on its scalability, the absence of unique user identifications leading to the nickname collision problem, lack of protection from netsplits by means of cyclic routing, the trade-off in scalability for the sake of real-time user presence information, protocol weaknesses providing a platform for abuse, no transparent and optimizable message passing, and no encryption. Some of these issues have been addressed in Modern IRC.
Because IRC connections may be unencrypted and typically span long time periods, they are an attractive target for DoS/DDoS attackers and hackers. Because of this, careful security policy is necessary to ensure that an IRC network is not susceptible to an attack such as a takeover war. IRC networks may also K-line or G-line users or servers that have a harming effect.
Some IRC servers support SSL/TLS connections for security purposes. This helps stop the use of packet sniffer programs to obtain the passwords of IRC users, but has little use beyond this scope due to the public nature of IRC channels. SSL connections require both client and server support (that may require the user to install SSL binaries and IRC client specific patches or modules on their computers). Some networks also use SSL for server-to-server connections, and provide a special channel flag (such as +S) to only allow SSL-connected users on the channel, while disallowing operator identification in clear text, to better utilize the advantages that SSL provides.
IRC served as an early laboratory for many kinds of Internet attacks, such as using fake ICMP unreachable messages to break TCP-based IRC connections (nuking) to annoy users or facilitate takeovers.
One of the most contentious technical issues surrounding IRC implementations, which survives to this day, is the merit of "Nick/Channel Delay" vs. "Timestamp" protocols. Both methods exist to solve the problem of denial-of-service attacks, but take very different approaches. The problem with the original IRC protocol as implemented was that when two servers split and rejoined, the two sides of the network would simply merge their channels. If a user could join on a "split" server, where a channel that existed on the other side of the network was empty, and gain operator status, they would become a channel operator of the "combined" channel after the netsplit ended; if a user took a nickname that existed on the other side of the network, the server would kill both users when rejoining (a "nick collision"). This was often abused to "mass-kill" all users on a channel, thus creating "opless" channels where no operators were present to deal with abuse. Apart from causing problems within IRC, this encouraged people to conduct denial-of-service attacks against IRC servers in order to cause netsplits, which they would then abuse.
The nick delay (ND) and channel delay (CD) strategies aim to prevent abuse by delaying reconnections and renames. After a user signs off and the nickname becomes available, or a channel ceases to exist because all its users parted (as often happens during a netsplit), the server will not allow any user to use that nickname or join that channel, until a certain period of time (the delay) has passed. The idea behind this is that even if a netsplit occurs, it is useless to an abuser because they cannot take the nickname or gain operator status on a channel, and thus no collision of a nickname or "merging" of a channel can occur. To some extent, this inconveniences legitimate users, who might be forced to briefly use a different name after rejoining (appending an underscore is popular).
The timestamp protocol is an alternative to nick/channel delays which resolves collisions using timestamped priority. Every nickname and channel on the network is assigned a timestamp – the date and time when it was created. When a netsplit occurs, two users on each side are free to use the same nickname or channel, but when the two sides are joined, only one can survive. In the case of nicknames, the newer user, according to their TS, is killed; when a channel collides, the members (users on the channel) are merged, but the channel operators on the "losing" side of the split lose their channel operator status.
TS is a much more complicated protocol than ND/CD, both in design and implementation, and despite having gone through several revisions, some implementations still have problems with "desyncs" (where two servers on the same network disagree about the current state of the network), and allowing too much leniency in what was allowed by the "losing" side. Under the original TS protocols, for example, there was no protection against users setting bans or other modes in the losing channel that would then be merged when the split rejoined, even though the users who had set those modes lost their channel operator status. Some modern TS-based IRC servers have also incorporated some form of ND and/or CD in addition to timestamping in an attempt to further curb abuse.
Most networks today use the timestamping approach. The timestamp versus ND/CD disagreements caused several servers to split away from EFnet and form the newer IRCnet. After the split, EFnet moved to a TS protocol, while IRCnet used ND/CD.
In recent versions of the IRCnet ircd, as well as ircds using the TS6 protocol (including Charybdis), ND has been extended/replaced by a mechanism called SAVE. This mechanism assigns every client a UID upon connecting to an IRC server. This ID starts with a number, which is forbidden in nicks (although some ircds, namely IRCnet and InspIRCd, allow clients to switch to their own UID as the nickname).
If two clients with the same nickname join from different sides of a netsplit ("nick collision"), the first server to see this collision will force both clients to change their nick to their UID, thus saving both clients from being disconnected. On IRCnet, the nickname will also be locked for some time (ND) to prevent both clients from changing back to the original nickname, thus colliding again.
Client software exists for various operating systems or software packages, as well as web-based or inside games. Many different clients are available for the various operating systems, including Windows, Unix and Linux, macOS and mobile operating systems (such as iOS and Android). On Windows, mIRC is one of the most popular clients. Some Linux distributions come with an IRC client preinstalled, such as Linux Mint which comes with HexChat preinstalled.
Some programs which are extensible through plug-ins also serve as platforms for IRC clients. For instance, a client called ERC, written entirely in Emacs Lisp, is included in v.22.3 of Emacs. Therefore, any platform that can run Emacs can run ERC.
A number of web browsers have built-in IRC clients, such as:
Web-based clients, such as Mibbit and open source KiwiIRC, can run in most browsers.
Games such as War§ow, Unreal Tournament (up to Unreal Tournament 2004), Uplink, Spring Engine-based games, 0 A.D. and ZDaemon have included IRC.
Ustream's chat interface is IRC with custom authentication as well as Twitch's (formerly Justin.tv).
A typical use of bots in IRC is to provide IRC services or specific functionality within a channel such as to host a chat-based game or provide notifications of external events. However, some IRC bots are used to launch malicious attacks such as denial of service, spamming, or exploitation.
A program that runs as a daemon on a server and functions as a persistent proxy is known as a BNC or bouncer. The purpose is to maintain a connection to an IRC server, acting as a relay between the server and client, or simply to act as a proxy. Should the client lose network connectivity, the BNC may stay connected and archive all traffic for later delivery, allowing the user to resume their IRC session without disrupting their connection to the server.
Furthermore, as a way of obtaining a bouncer-like effect, an IRC client (typically text-based, for example Irssi) may be run on an always-on server to which the user connects via ssh. This also allows devices that only have ssh functionality, but no actual IRC client installed themselves, to connect to the IRC, and it allows sharing of IRC sessions.
To keep the IRC client from quitting when the ssh connection closes, the client can be run inside a terminal multiplexer such as GNU Screen or tmux, thus staying connected to the IRC network(s) constantly and able to log conversation in channels that the user is interested in, or to maintain a channel's presence on the network. Modelled after this setup, in 2004 an IRC client following the client–server, called Smuxi, was launched.
There are numerous search engines available to aid the user in finding what they are looking for on IRC. Generally the search engine consists of two parts, a "back-end" (or "spider/crawler") and a front-end "search engine".
The back-end (spider/webcrawler) is the work horse of the search engine. It is responsible for crawling IRC servers to index the information being sent across them. The information that is indexed usually consists solely of channel text (text that is publicly displayed in public channels). The storage method is usually some sort of relational database, like MySQL or Oracle.
The front-end "search engine" is the user interface to the database. It supplies users with a way to search the database of indexed information to retrieve the data they are looking for. These front-end search engines can also be coded in numerous programming languages.
Most search engines have their own spider that is a single application responsible for crawling IRC and indexing data itself; however, others are "user based" indexers. The latter rely on users to install their "add-on" to their IRC client; the add-on is what sends the database the channel information of whatever channels the user happens to be on.
Many users have implemented their own ad hoc search engines using the logging features built into many IRC clients. These search engines are usually implemented as bots and dedicated to a particular channel or group of associated channels.
IRC still lacks a single globally accepted standard convention for how to transmit characters outside the 7-bit ASCII repertoire. IRC servers normally transfer messages from a client to another client just as byte sequences, without any interpretation or recoding of characters. The IRC protocol (unlike e.g. MIME or HTTP) lacks mechanisms for announcing and negotiating character encoding options. This has put the responsibility for choosing the appropriate character codec on the client. In practice, IRC channels have largely used the same character encodings that were also used by operating systems (in particular Unix derivatives) in the respective language communities:
Today, the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode/ISO 10646 would be the most likely contender for a single future standard character encoding for all IRC communication, if such standard ever relaxed the 510-byte message size restriction. UTF-8 is ASCII compatible and covers the superset of all other commonly used coded character set standards.
Much like conventional P2P file sharing, users can create file servers that allow them to share files with each other by using customised IRC bots or scripts for their IRC client. Often users will group together to distribute warez via a network of IRC bots.
Technically, IRC provides no file transfer mechanisms itself; file sharing is implemented by IRC clients, typically using the Direct Client-to-Client (DCC) protocol, in which file transfers are negotiated through the exchange of private messages between clients. The vast majority of IRC clients feature support for DCC file transfers, hence the view that file sharing is an integral feature of IRC. The commonplace usage of this protocol, however, sometimes also causes DCC spam. DCC commands have also been used to exploit vulnerable clients into performing an action such as disconnecting from the server or exiting the client. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat and data transfer, including file sharing.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Internet Relay Chat is implemented as an application layer protocol to facilitate communication in the form of text. The chat process works on a client–server networking model. Users connect, using a client—which may be a web app, a standalone desktop program, or embedded into part of a larger program—to an IRC server, which may be part of a larger IRC network. Examples of programs used to connect include Mibbit, IRCCloud, KiwiIRC, and mIRC.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "IRC usage has been declining steadily since 2003, losing 60 percent of its users. In April 2011, the top 100 IRC networks served more than 200,000 users at a time.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "IRC was created by Jarkko Oikarinen in August 1988 to replace a program called MUT (MultiUser Talk) on a BBS called OuluBox at the University of Oulu in Finland, where he was working at the Department of Information Processing Science. Jarkko intended to extend the BBS software he administered, to allow news in the Usenet style, real time discussions and similar BBS features. The first part he implemented was the chat part, which he did with borrowed parts written by his friends Jyrki Kuoppala and Jukka Pihl. The first IRC network was running on a single server named tolsun.oulu.fi. Oikarinen found inspiration in a chat system known as Bitnet Relay, which operated on the BITNET.",
"title": " History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Jyrki Kuoppala pushed Oikarinen to ask Oulu University to free the IRC code so that it also could be run outside of Oulu, and after they finally got it released, Jyrki Kuoppala immediately installed another server. This was the first \"IRC network\". Oikarinen got some friends at the Helsinki University and Tampere University to start running IRC servers when his number of users increased and other universities soon followed. At this time Oikarinen realized that the rest of the BBS features probably would not fit in his program.",
"title": " History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Oikarinen contacted people at the University of Denver and Oregon State University. They had their own IRC network running and wanted to connect to the Finnish network. They had obtained the program from one of Oikarinen's friends, Vijay Subramaniam—the first non-Finnish person to use IRC. IRC then grew larger and got used on the entire Finnish national network—FUNET—and then connected to Nordunet, the Scandinavian branch of the Internet. In November 1988, IRC had spread across the Internet and in the middle of 1989, there were some 40 servers worldwide.",
"title": " History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In August 1990, the first major disagreement took place in the IRC world. The \"A-net\" (Anarchy net) included a server named eris.berkeley.edu. It was all open, required no passwords and had no limit on the number of connects. As Greg \"wumpus\" Lindahl explains: \"it had a wildcard server line, so people were hooking up servers and nick-colliding everyone\". The \"Eris Free Network\", EFnet, made the eris machine the first to be Q-lined (Q for quarantine) from IRC. In wumpus' words again: \"Eris refused to remove that line, so I formed EFnet. It wasn't much of a fight; I got all the hubs to join, and almost everyone else got carried along.\" A-net was formed with the eris servers, while EFnet was formed with the non-eris servers. History showed most servers and users went with EFnet. Once A-net disbanded, the name EFnet became meaningless, and once again it was the one and only IRC network.",
"title": " History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Around that time IRC was used to report on the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt throughout a media blackout. It was previously used in a similar fashion during the Gulf War. Chat logs of these and other events are kept in the ibiblio archive.",
"title": " History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Another fork effort, the first that made a lasting difference, was initiated by \"Wildthang\" in the United States in October 1992. (It forked off the EFnet ircd version 2.8.10). It was meant to be just a test network to develop bots on but it quickly grew to a network \"for friends and their friends\". In Europe and Canada a separate new network was being worked on and in December the French servers connected to the Canadian ones, and by the end of the month, the French and Canadian network was connected to the US one, forming the network that later came to be called \"The Undernet\".",
"title": " History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The \"undernetters\" wanted to take ircd further in an attempt to make it use less bandwidth and to try to sort out the channel chaos (netsplits and takeovers) that EFnet started to suffer from. For the latter purpose, the Undernet implemented timestamps, new routing and offered the CService—a program that allowed users to register channels and then attempted to protect them from troublemakers. The first server list presented, from 15 February 1993, includes servers from the U.S., Canada, France, Croatia and Japan. On 15 August, the new user count record was set to 57 users.",
"title": " History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In May 1993, RFC 1459 was published and details a simple protocol for client/server operation, channels, one-to-one and one-to-many conversations. It is notable that a significant number of extensions like CTCP, colors and formats are not included in the protocol specifications, nor is character encoding, which led various implementations of servers and clients to diverge. Software implementation varied significantly from one network to the other, each network implementing their own policies and standards in their own code bases.",
"title": " History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "During the summer of 1994, the Undernet was itself forked. The new network was called DALnet (named after its founder: dalvenjah), formed for better user service and more user and channel protections. One of the more significant changes in DALnet was use of longer nicknames (the original ircd limit being 9 letters). DALnet ircd modifications were made by Alexei \"Lefler\" Kosut. DALnet was thus based on the Undernet ircd server, although the DALnet pioneers were EFnet abandoners. According to James Ng, the initial DALnet people were \"ops in #StarTrek sick from the constant splits/lags/takeovers/etc\".",
"title": " History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "DALnet quickly offered global WallOps (IRCop messages that can be seen by users who are +w (/mode NickName +w)), longer nicknames, Q:Lined nicknames (nicknames that cannot be used i.e. ChanServ, IRCop, NickServ, etc.), global K:Lines (ban of one person or an entire domain from a server or the entire network), IRCop only communications: GlobOps, +H mode showing that an IRCop is a \"helpop\" etc. Much of DALnet's new functions were written in early 1995 by Brian \"Morpher\" Smith and allow users to own nicknames, control channels, send memos, and more.",
"title": " History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In July 1996, after months of flame wars and discussions on the mailing list, there was yet another split due to disagreement in how the development of the ircd should evolve. Most notably, the \"European\" (most of those servers were in Europe) side that later named itself IRCnet argued for nick and channel delays whereas the EFnet side argued for timestamps. There were also disagreements about policies: the European side had started to establish a set of rules directing what IRCops could and could not do, a point of view opposed by the US side.",
"title": " History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Most (not all) of the IRCnet servers were in Europe, while most of the EFnet servers were in the US. This event is also known as \"The Great Split\" in many IRC societies. EFnet has since (as of August 1998) grown and passed the number of users it had then. In the (northern) autumn of the year 2000, EFnet had some 50,000 users and IRCnet 70,000.",
"title": " History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "IRC has changed much over its life on the Internet. New server software has added a multitude of new features.",
"title": " History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "As of 2016, a new standardization effort is under way under a working group called IRCv3, which focuses on more advanced client features like instant notifications, better history support and improved security. As of 2019, no major IRC networks have fully adopted the proposed standard.",
"title": " History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "As of June 2021, there are 481 different IRC networks known to be operating, of which the open source Libera Chat, founded in May 2021, has the most users, with 20,374 channels on 26 servers; between them, the top 100 IRC networks share over 100 thousand channels operating on about one thousand servers.",
"title": " History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "After its golden era during the 1990s and early 2000s (240,000 users on QuakeNet in 2004), IRC has seen a significant decline, losing around 60% of users between 2003 and 2012, with users moving to newer social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter, but also to open platforms like XMPP which was developed in 1999. Certain networks like Freenode have not followed the overall trend and have more than quadrupled in size during the same period. However, Freenode, which in 2016 had around 90,000 users, has since declined to about 9,300 users.",
"title": " History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The largest IRC networks have traditionally been grouped as the \"Big Four\"—a designation for networks that top the statistics. The Big Four networks change periodically, but due to the community nature of IRC there are a large number of other networks for users to choose from.",
"title": " History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Historically the \"Big Four\" were:",
"title": " History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "IRC reached 6 million simultaneous users in 2001 and 10 million users in 2004-2005, dropping to around 350k in 2021.",
"title": " History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "As of October 2023, the top IRC networks are:",
"title": " History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The top 100 IRC networks have around 230k users connected at peak hours.",
"title": " History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Timeline of major servers:",
"title": " History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "IRC is an open protocol that uses TCP and, optionally, TLS. An IRC server can connect to other IRC servers to expand the IRC network. Users access IRC networks by connecting a client to a server. There are many client implementations, such as mIRC, HexChat and irssi, and server implementations, e.g. the original IRCd. Most IRC servers do not require users to register an account but a nickname is required before being connected.",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "IRC was originally a plain text protocol (although later extended), which on request was assigned port 194/TCP by IANA. However, the de facto standard has always been to run IRC on 6667/TCP and nearby port numbers (for example TCP ports 6660–6669, 7000) to avoid having to run the IRCd software with root privileges.",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The protocol specified that characters were 8-bit but did not specify the character encoding the text was supposed to use. This can cause problems when users using different clients and/or different platforms want to converse.",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "All client-to-server IRC protocols in use today are descended from the protocol implemented in the irc2.4.0 version of the IRC2 server, and documented in RFC 1459. Since RFC 1459 was published, the new features in the irc2.10 implementation led to the publication of several revised protocol documents (RFC 2810, RFC 2811, RFC 2812 and RFC 2813); however, these protocol changes have not been widely adopted among other implementations.",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Although many specifications on the IRC protocol have been published, there is no official specification, as the protocol remains dynamic. Virtually no clients and very few servers rely strictly on the above RFCs as a reference.",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Microsoft made an extension for IRC in 1998 via the proprietary IRCX. They later stopped distributing software supporting IRCX, instead developing the proprietary MSNP.",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The standard structure of a network of IRC servers is a tree. Messages are routed along only necessary branches of the tree but network state is sent to every server and there is generally a high degree of implicit trust between servers. However, this architecture has a number of problems. A misbehaving or malicious server can cause major damage to the network and any changes in structure, whether intentional or a result of conditions on the underlying network, require a net-split and net-join. This results in a lot of network traffic and spurious quit/join messages to users and temporary loss of communication to users on the splitting servers. Adding a server to a large network means a large background bandwidth load on the network and a large memory load on the server. Once established, however, each message to multiple recipients is delivered in a fashion similar to multicast, meaning each message travels a network link exactly once. This is a strength in comparison to non-multicasting protocols such as Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) or Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP).",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "An IRC daemon can also be used on a local area network (LAN). IRC can thus be used to facilitate communication between people within the local area network (internal communication).",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "IRC has a line-based structure. Clients send single-line messages to the server, receive replies to those messages and receive copies of some messages sent by other clients. In most clients, users can enter commands by prefixing them with a '/'. Depending on the command, these may either be handled entirely by the client, or (generally for commands the client does not recognize) passed directly to the server, possibly with some modification.",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Due to the nature of the protocol, automated systems cannot always correctly pair a sent command with its reply with full reliability and are subject to guessing.",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The basic means of communicating to a group of users in an established IRC session is through a channel. Channels on a network can be displayed using the IRC command LIST, which lists all currently available channels that do not have the modes +s or +p set, on that particular network.",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Users can join a channel using the JOIN command, in most clients available as /join #channelname. Messages sent to the joined channels are then relayed to all other users.",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Channels that are available across an entire IRC network are prefixed with a '#', while those local to a server use '&'. Other less common channel types include '+' channels—'modeless' channels without operators—and '!' channels, a form of timestamped channel on normally non-timestamped networks.",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Users and channels may have modes that are represented by individual case-sensitive letters and are set using the MODE command. User modes and channel modes are separate and can use the same letter to mean different things (e.g. user mode \"i\" is invisible mode while channel mode \"i\" is invite only.) Modes are usually set and unset using the mode command that takes a target (user or channel), a set of modes to set (+) or unset (-) and any parameters the modes need.",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Some channel modes take parameters and other channel modes apply to a user on a channel or add or remove a mask (e.g. a ban mask) from a list associated with the channel rather than applying to the channel as a whole. Modes that apply to users on a channel have an associated symbol that is used to represent the mode in names replies (sent to clients on first joining a channel and use of the names command) and in many clients also used to represent it in the client's displayed list of users in a channel or to display an own indicator for a user's modes.",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In order to correctly parse incoming mode messages and track channel state the client must know which mode is of which type and for the modes that apply to a user on a channel which symbol goes with which letter. In early implementations of IRC this had to be hard-coded in the client but there is now a de facto standard extension to the protocol called ISUPPORT that sends this information to the client at connect time using numeric 005.",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "There is a small design fault in IRC regarding modes that apply to users on channels: the names message used to establish initial channel state can only send one such mode per user on the channel, but multiple such modes can be set on a single user. For example, if a user holds both operator status (+o) and voice status (+v) on a channel, a new client will be unable to see the mode with less priority (i.e. voice). Workarounds for this are possible on both the client and server side; a common solution is to use IRCv3 \"multi-prefix\" extension.",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Many daemons and networks have added extra modes or modified the behavior of modes in the above list.",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "A channel operator is a client on an IRC channel that manages the channel. IRC channel operators can be easily seen by the a symbol or icon next to their name (varies by client implementation, commonly a \"@\" symbol prefix, a green circle, or a Latin letter \"+o\"/\"o\"). On most networks, an operator can:",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "There are also users who maintain elevated rights on their local server, or the entire network; these are called IRC operators, sometimes shortened to IRCops or Opers (not to be confused with channel operators). As the implementation of the IRCd varies, so do the privileges of the IRC operator on the given IRCd. RFC 1459 claims that IRC operators are \"a necessary evil\" to keep a clean state of the network, and as such they need to be able to disconnect and reconnect servers. Additionally, to prevent malicious users or even harmful automated programs from entering IRC, IRC operators are usually allowed to disconnect clients and completely ban IP addresses or complete subnets. Networks that carry services (NickServ et al.) usually allow their IRC operators also to handle basic \"ownership\" matters. Further privileged rights may include overriding channel bans (being able to join channels they would not be allowed to join, if they were not opered), being able to op themselves on channels where they would not be able without being opered, being auto-opped on channels always and so forth.",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "A hostmask is a unique identifier of an IRC client connected to an IRC server. IRC servers, services, and other clients, including bots, can use it to identify a specific IRC session.",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The format of a hostmask is nick!user@host. The hostmask looks similar to, but should not be confused with an e-mail address.",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The nick part is the nickname chosen by the user and may be changed while connected. The user part is the username reported by ident on the client. If ident is not available on the client, the username specified when the client connected is used after being prefixed with a tilde.",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The host part is the hostname the client is connecting from. If the IP address of the client cannot be resolved to a valid hostname by the server, it is used instead of the hostname.",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Because of the privacy implications of exposing the IP address or hostname of a client, some IRC daemons also provide privacy features, such as InspIRCd or UnrealIRCd's \"+x\" mode. This hashes a client IP address or masks part of a client's hostname, making it unreadable to users other than IRCops. Users may also have the option of requesting a \"virtual host\" (or \"vhost\"), to be displayed in the hostmask to allow further anonymity. Some IRC networks, such as Libera Chat or Freenode, use these as \"cloaks\" to indicate that a user is affiliated with a group or project.",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "There are three provisional recognized uniform resource identifier (URI) schemes for Internet Relay Chat: irc, ircs, and irc6. When supported, they allow hyperlinks of various forms, including",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "(where items enclosed within brackets ([,]) are optional) to be used to (if necessary) connect to the specified host (or network, if known to the IRC client) and join the specified channel. (This can be used within the client itself, or from another application such as a Web browser). irc is the default URI, irc6 specifies a connection to be made using IPv6, and ircs specifies a secure connection.",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Per the specification, the usual hash symbol (#) will be prepended to channel names that begin with an alphanumeric character—allowing it to be omitted. Some implementations (for example, mIRC) will do so unconditionally resulting in a (usually unintended) extra (for example, ##channel), if included in the URL.",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Some implementations allow multiple channels to be specified, separated by commas.",
"title": "Technical information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Issues in the original design of IRC were the amount of shared state data being a limitation on its scalability, the absence of unique user identifications leading to the nickname collision problem, lack of protection from netsplits by means of cyclic routing, the trade-off in scalability for the sake of real-time user presence information, protocol weaknesses providing a platform for abuse, no transparent and optimizable message passing, and no encryption. Some of these issues have been addressed in Modern IRC.",
"title": "Challenges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Because IRC connections may be unencrypted and typically span long time periods, they are an attractive target for DoS/DDoS attackers and hackers. Because of this, careful security policy is necessary to ensure that an IRC network is not susceptible to an attack such as a takeover war. IRC networks may also K-line or G-line users or servers that have a harming effect.",
"title": "Challenges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Some IRC servers support SSL/TLS connections for security purposes. This helps stop the use of packet sniffer programs to obtain the passwords of IRC users, but has little use beyond this scope due to the public nature of IRC channels. SSL connections require both client and server support (that may require the user to install SSL binaries and IRC client specific patches or modules on their computers). Some networks also use SSL for server-to-server connections, and provide a special channel flag (such as +S) to only allow SSL-connected users on the channel, while disallowing operator identification in clear text, to better utilize the advantages that SSL provides.",
"title": "Challenges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "IRC served as an early laboratory for many kinds of Internet attacks, such as using fake ICMP unreachable messages to break TCP-based IRC connections (nuking) to annoy users or facilitate takeovers.",
"title": "Challenges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "One of the most contentious technical issues surrounding IRC implementations, which survives to this day, is the merit of \"Nick/Channel Delay\" vs. \"Timestamp\" protocols. Both methods exist to solve the problem of denial-of-service attacks, but take very different approaches. The problem with the original IRC protocol as implemented was that when two servers split and rejoined, the two sides of the network would simply merge their channels. If a user could join on a \"split\" server, where a channel that existed on the other side of the network was empty, and gain operator status, they would become a channel operator of the \"combined\" channel after the netsplit ended; if a user took a nickname that existed on the other side of the network, the server would kill both users when rejoining (a \"nick collision\"). This was often abused to \"mass-kill\" all users on a channel, thus creating \"opless\" channels where no operators were present to deal with abuse. Apart from causing problems within IRC, this encouraged people to conduct denial-of-service attacks against IRC servers in order to cause netsplits, which they would then abuse.",
"title": "Challenges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The nick delay (ND) and channel delay (CD) strategies aim to prevent abuse by delaying reconnections and renames. After a user signs off and the nickname becomes available, or a channel ceases to exist because all its users parted (as often happens during a netsplit), the server will not allow any user to use that nickname or join that channel, until a certain period of time (the delay) has passed. The idea behind this is that even if a netsplit occurs, it is useless to an abuser because they cannot take the nickname or gain operator status on a channel, and thus no collision of a nickname or \"merging\" of a channel can occur. To some extent, this inconveniences legitimate users, who might be forced to briefly use a different name after rejoining (appending an underscore is popular).",
"title": "Challenges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The timestamp protocol is an alternative to nick/channel delays which resolves collisions using timestamped priority. Every nickname and channel on the network is assigned a timestamp – the date and time when it was created. When a netsplit occurs, two users on each side are free to use the same nickname or channel, but when the two sides are joined, only one can survive. In the case of nicknames, the newer user, according to their TS, is killed; when a channel collides, the members (users on the channel) are merged, but the channel operators on the \"losing\" side of the split lose their channel operator status.",
"title": "Challenges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "TS is a much more complicated protocol than ND/CD, both in design and implementation, and despite having gone through several revisions, some implementations still have problems with \"desyncs\" (where two servers on the same network disagree about the current state of the network), and allowing too much leniency in what was allowed by the \"losing\" side. Under the original TS protocols, for example, there was no protection against users setting bans or other modes in the losing channel that would then be merged when the split rejoined, even though the users who had set those modes lost their channel operator status. Some modern TS-based IRC servers have also incorporated some form of ND and/or CD in addition to timestamping in an attempt to further curb abuse.",
"title": "Challenges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Most networks today use the timestamping approach. The timestamp versus ND/CD disagreements caused several servers to split away from EFnet and form the newer IRCnet. After the split, EFnet moved to a TS protocol, while IRCnet used ND/CD.",
"title": "Challenges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "In recent versions of the IRCnet ircd, as well as ircds using the TS6 protocol (including Charybdis), ND has been extended/replaced by a mechanism called SAVE. This mechanism assigns every client a UID upon connecting to an IRC server. This ID starts with a number, which is forbidden in nicks (although some ircds, namely IRCnet and InspIRCd, allow clients to switch to their own UID as the nickname).",
"title": "Challenges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "If two clients with the same nickname join from different sides of a netsplit (\"nick collision\"), the first server to see this collision will force both clients to change their nick to their UID, thus saving both clients from being disconnected. On IRCnet, the nickname will also be locked for some time (ND) to prevent both clients from changing back to the original nickname, thus colliding again.",
"title": "Challenges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Client software exists for various operating systems or software packages, as well as web-based or inside games. Many different clients are available for the various operating systems, including Windows, Unix and Linux, macOS and mobile operating systems (such as iOS and Android). On Windows, mIRC is one of the most popular clients. Some Linux distributions come with an IRC client preinstalled, such as Linux Mint which comes with HexChat preinstalled.",
"title": "Clients"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Some programs which are extensible through plug-ins also serve as platforms for IRC clients. For instance, a client called ERC, written entirely in Emacs Lisp, is included in v.22.3 of Emacs. Therefore, any platform that can run Emacs can run ERC.",
"title": "Clients"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "A number of web browsers have built-in IRC clients, such as:",
"title": "Clients"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Web-based clients, such as Mibbit and open source KiwiIRC, can run in most browsers.",
"title": "Clients"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Games such as War§ow, Unreal Tournament (up to Unreal Tournament 2004), Uplink, Spring Engine-based games, 0 A.D. and ZDaemon have included IRC.",
"title": "Clients"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Ustream's chat interface is IRC with custom authentication as well as Twitch's (formerly Justin.tv).",
"title": "Clients"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "A typical use of bots in IRC is to provide IRC services or specific functionality within a channel such as to host a chat-based game or provide notifications of external events. However, some IRC bots are used to launch malicious attacks such as denial of service, spamming, or exploitation.",
"title": "Clients"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "A program that runs as a daemon on a server and functions as a persistent proxy is known as a BNC or bouncer. The purpose is to maintain a connection to an IRC server, acting as a relay between the server and client, or simply to act as a proxy. Should the client lose network connectivity, the BNC may stay connected and archive all traffic for later delivery, allowing the user to resume their IRC session without disrupting their connection to the server.",
"title": "Clients"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Furthermore, as a way of obtaining a bouncer-like effect, an IRC client (typically text-based, for example Irssi) may be run on an always-on server to which the user connects via ssh. This also allows devices that only have ssh functionality, but no actual IRC client installed themselves, to connect to the IRC, and it allows sharing of IRC sessions.",
"title": "Clients"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "To keep the IRC client from quitting when the ssh connection closes, the client can be run inside a terminal multiplexer such as GNU Screen or tmux, thus staying connected to the IRC network(s) constantly and able to log conversation in channels that the user is interested in, or to maintain a channel's presence on the network. Modelled after this setup, in 2004 an IRC client following the client–server, called Smuxi, was launched.",
"title": "Clients"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "There are numerous search engines available to aid the user in finding what they are looking for on IRC. Generally the search engine consists of two parts, a \"back-end\" (or \"spider/crawler\") and a front-end \"search engine\".",
"title": "Search engines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "The back-end (spider/webcrawler) is the work horse of the search engine. It is responsible for crawling IRC servers to index the information being sent across them. The information that is indexed usually consists solely of channel text (text that is publicly displayed in public channels). The storage method is usually some sort of relational database, like MySQL or Oracle.",
"title": "Search engines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "The front-end \"search engine\" is the user interface to the database. It supplies users with a way to search the database of indexed information to retrieve the data they are looking for. These front-end search engines can also be coded in numerous programming languages.",
"title": "Search engines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Most search engines have their own spider that is a single application responsible for crawling IRC and indexing data itself; however, others are \"user based\" indexers. The latter rely on users to install their \"add-on\" to their IRC client; the add-on is what sends the database the channel information of whatever channels the user happens to be on.",
"title": "Search engines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Many users have implemented their own ad hoc search engines using the logging features built into many IRC clients. These search engines are usually implemented as bots and dedicated to a particular channel or group of associated channels.",
"title": "Search engines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "IRC still lacks a single globally accepted standard convention for how to transmit characters outside the 7-bit ASCII repertoire. IRC servers normally transfer messages from a client to another client just as byte sequences, without any interpretation or recoding of characters. The IRC protocol (unlike e.g. MIME or HTTP) lacks mechanisms for announcing and negotiating character encoding options. This has put the responsibility for choosing the appropriate character codec on the client. In practice, IRC channels have largely used the same character encodings that were also used by operating systems (in particular Unix derivatives) in the respective language communities:",
"title": "Character encoding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Today, the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode/ISO 10646 would be the most likely contender for a single future standard character encoding for all IRC communication, if such standard ever relaxed the 510-byte message size restriction. UTF-8 is ASCII compatible and covers the superset of all other commonly used coded character set standards.",
"title": "Character encoding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Much like conventional P2P file sharing, users can create file servers that allow them to share files with each other by using customised IRC bots or scripts for their IRC client. Often users will group together to distribute warez via a network of IRC bots.",
"title": "File sharing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Technically, IRC provides no file transfer mechanisms itself; file sharing is implemented by IRC clients, typically using the Direct Client-to-Client (DCC) protocol, in which file transfers are negotiated through the exchange of private messages between clients. The vast majority of IRC clients feature support for DCC file transfers, hence the view that file sharing is an integral feature of IRC. The commonplace usage of this protocol, however, sometimes also causes DCC spam. DCC commands have also been used to exploit vulnerable clients into performing an action such as disconnecting from the server or exiting the client.",
"title": "File sharing"
}
]
| Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat and data transfer, including file sharing. Internet Relay Chat is implemented as an application layer protocol to facilitate communication in the form of text. The chat process works on a client–server networking model. Users connect, using a client—which may be a web app, a standalone desktop program, or embedded into part of a larger program—to an IRC server, which may be part of a larger IRC network. Examples of programs used to connect include Mibbit, IRCCloud, KiwiIRC, and mIRC. IRC usage has been declining steadily since 2003, losing 60 percent of its users. In April 2011, the top 100 IRC networks served more than 200,000 users at a time. | 2001-10-20T01:47:29Z | 2023-12-28T01:45:32Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat |
14,731 | Ideogram | An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek ἰδέα idéa "idea" and γράφω gráphō "to write") is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept, independent of any particular language, and specific words or phrases. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to a physical object, and thus may also be referred to as pictograms.
The numerals and mathematical symbols are ideograms – 1 'one', 2 'two', + 'plus', = 'equals', and so on (compare the section "Mathematics" below). In English, the ampersand & is used for 'and' and (as in many languages) for Latin et (as in &c for et cetera), % for 'percent' ('per cent'), # for 'number' (or 'pound', among other meanings), § for 'section', $ for 'dollar', € for 'euro', £ for 'pound', ° for 'degree', @ for 'at', and so on. The reason they are ideograms rather than logograms is that they do not denote fixed morphemes: they can be read in many different languages, not just English. There is not always only a single way to read them and they are in some cases read as a complex phrase rather than a single word.
In proto-writing, used for inventories and the like, physical objects are represented by stylized or conventionalized pictures, or pictograms. For example, the pictorial Dongba symbols without Geba annotation cannot represent the Naxi language, but are used as a mnemonic for reciting oral literature. Some systems also use ideograms, symbols denoting abstract concepts.
The term "ideogram" is often used to describe symbols of writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian cuneiform and Chinese characters. However, these symbols represent elements of a particular language, mostly words or morphemes (so that they are logograms), rather than objects or concepts. In these writing systems, a variety of strategies were employed in the design of logographic symbols. Pictographic symbols depict the object referred to by the word, such as an icon of a bull denoting the Semitic word ʾālep "ox". Some words denoting abstract concepts may be represented iconically, but most other words are represented using the rebus principle, borrowing a symbol for a similarly-sounding word. Later systems used selected symbols to represent the sounds of the language, for example the adaptation of the logogram for ʾālep "ox" as the letter aleph representing the initial sound of the word, a glottal stop.
Many signs in hieroglyphic as well as in cuneiform writing could be used either logographically or phonetically. For example, the Sumerian sign DIĜIR (𒀭) could represent the word diĝir 'deity', the god An or the word an 'sky'. The Akkadian counterpart could represent the Akkadian stem il- 'deity', the Akkadian word šamu 'sky', or the syllable an.
Although Chinese characters are logograms, two of the smaller classes in the traditional classification are ideographic in origin:
An example of ideograms is the collection of 50 signs developed in the 1970s by the American Institute of Graphic Arts at the request of the US Department of Transportation. The system was initially used to mark airports and gradually became more widespread.
Mathematical symbols are a type of ideogram.
Inspired by inaccurate early descriptions of Chinese and Japanese characters as ideograms, many Western thinkers have sought to design universal written languages, in which symbols denote concepts rather than words. An early proposal was An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668) by John Wilkins. A recent example is the system of Blissymbols, which was devised by Charles K. Bliss in 1949 and currently includes over 2,000 symbols. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek ἰδέα idéa \"idea\" and γράφω gráphō \"to write\") is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept, independent of any particular language, and specific words or phrases. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to a physical object, and thus may also be referred to as pictograms.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The numerals and mathematical symbols are ideograms – 1 'one', 2 'two', + 'plus', = 'equals', and so on (compare the section \"Mathematics\" below). In English, the ampersand & is used for 'and' and (as in many languages) for Latin et (as in &c for et cetera), % for 'percent' ('per cent'), # for 'number' (or 'pound', among other meanings), § for 'section', $ for 'dollar', € for 'euro', £ for 'pound', ° for 'degree', @ for 'at', and so on. The reason they are ideograms rather than logograms is that they do not denote fixed morphemes: they can be read in many different languages, not just English. There is not always only a single way to read them and they are in some cases read as a complex phrase rather than a single word.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In proto-writing, used for inventories and the like, physical objects are represented by stylized or conventionalized pictures, or pictograms. For example, the pictorial Dongba symbols without Geba annotation cannot represent the Naxi language, but are used as a mnemonic for reciting oral literature. Some systems also use ideograms, symbols denoting abstract concepts.",
"title": "Terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The term \"ideogram\" is often used to describe symbols of writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian cuneiform and Chinese characters. However, these symbols represent elements of a particular language, mostly words or morphemes (so that they are logograms), rather than objects or concepts. In these writing systems, a variety of strategies were employed in the design of logographic symbols. Pictographic symbols depict the object referred to by the word, such as an icon of a bull denoting the Semitic word ʾālep \"ox\". Some words denoting abstract concepts may be represented iconically, but most other words are represented using the rebus principle, borrowing a symbol for a similarly-sounding word. Later systems used selected symbols to represent the sounds of the language, for example the adaptation of the logogram for ʾālep \"ox\" as the letter aleph representing the initial sound of the word, a glottal stop.",
"title": "Terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Many signs in hieroglyphic as well as in cuneiform writing could be used either logographically or phonetically. For example, the Sumerian sign DIĜIR (𒀭) could represent the word diĝir 'deity', the god An or the word an 'sky'. The Akkadian counterpart could represent the Akkadian stem il- 'deity', the Akkadian word šamu 'sky', or the syllable an.",
"title": "Terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Although Chinese characters are logograms, two of the smaller classes in the traditional classification are ideographic in origin:",
"title": "Terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "An example of ideograms is the collection of 50 signs developed in the 1970s by the American Institute of Graphic Arts at the request of the US Department of Transportation. The system was initially used to mark airports and gradually became more widespread.",
"title": "Terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Mathematical symbols are a type of ideogram.",
"title": "Mathematics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Inspired by inaccurate early descriptions of Chinese and Japanese characters as ideograms, many Western thinkers have sought to design universal written languages, in which symbols denote concepts rather than words. An early proposal was An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668) by John Wilkins. A recent example is the system of Blissymbols, which was devised by Charles K. Bliss in 1949 and currently includes over 2,000 symbols.",
"title": "Proposed universal languages"
}
]
| An ideogram or ideograph is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept, independent of any particular language, and specific words or phrases. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to a physical object, and thus may also be referred to as pictograms. The numerals and mathematical symbols are ideograms – 1 'one', 2 'two', + 'plus', = 'equals', and so on. In English, the ampersand & is used for 'and' and for Latin et, % for 'percent', # for 'number', § for 'section', $ for 'dollar', € for 'euro', £ for 'pound', ° for 'degree', @ for 'at', and so on. The reason they are ideograms rather than logograms is that they do not denote fixed morphemes: they can be read in many different languages, not just English. There is not always only a single way to read them and they are in some cases read as a complex phrase rather than a single word. | 2001-09-13T19:59:46Z | 2023-12-28T19:14:45Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideogram |
14,732 | Irish Republican Army (1919–1922) | The Irish Republican Army (IRA; Irish: Óglaigh na hÉireann) was an Irish republican revolutionary paramilitary organisation. The ancestor of many groups also known as the Irish Republican Army, and distinguished from them as the "Old IRA", it was descended from the Irish Volunteers, an organisation established on 25 November 1913 that staged the Easter Rising in April 1916. In 1919, the Irish Republic that had been proclaimed during the Easter Rising was formally established by an elected assembly (Dáil Éireann), and the Irish Volunteers were recognised by Dáil Éireann as its legitimate army. Thereafter, the IRA waged a guerrilla campaign against the British occupation of Ireland in the 1919–1921 Irish War of Independence.
Following the signing in 1921 of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which ended the War of Independence, a split occurred within the IRA. Members who supported the treaty formed the nucleus of the Irish National Army. However, the majority of the IRA was opposed to the treaty. The anti-treaty IRA fought a civil war against the Free State Army in 1922–23, with the intention of creating a fully independent all-Ireland republic. Having lost the civil war, this group remained in existence, with the intention of overthrowing the governments of both the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland and achieving the Irish Republic proclaimed in 1916.
The Irish Volunteers, founded in 1913, staged the Easter Rising, which aimed at ending British rule in Ireland, in 1916. Following the suppression of the Rising, thousands of Volunteers were imprisoned or interned, leading to the break-up of the organisation. It was reorganised in 1917 following the release of first the internees and then the prisoners. At the army convention held in Dublin in October 1917, Éamon de Valera was elected president, Michael Collins Director for Organisation and Cathal Brugha Chairman of the Resident Executive, which in effect made him Chief of Staff.
Following the success of Sinn Féin in the general election of 1918 and the setting up of the First Dáil (the legislature of the Irish Republic), Volunteers commenced military action against the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), the paramilitary police force in Ireland, and subsequently against the British Army. It began with the Soloheadbeg Ambush, when members of the Third Tipperary Brigade led by Séumas Robinson, Seán Treacy, Dan Breen and Seán Hogan, seized a quantity of gelignite, killing two RIC constables in the process.
The Dáil leadership worried that the Volunteers would not accept its authority, given that, under their own constitution, they were bound to obey their own executive and no other body. In August 1919, Brugha proposed to the Dáil that the Volunteers be asked to swear allegiance to the Dáil, but one commentator states that another year passed before the movement took an oath of allegiance to the Irish Republic and its government in "August 1920". In sharp contrast, a contemporary in the struggle for Irish independence notes that by late 1919, the term "Irish Republican Army (IRA)" was replacing "Volunteers" in everyday usage. This change is attributed to the Volunteers, having accepted the authority of the Dáil, being referred to as the "army of the Irish Republic", popularly known as the "Irish Republican Army". Already in September 1917, a group of men from counties Clare and Tipperary charged with illegal drilling were claiming to soldiers of the "Irish Republican Army" and refused to recognise the legitimacy of the court, and insisted they should be treated as prisoners of war.
A power struggle continued between Brugha and Collins, both cabinet ministers, over who had the greater influence. Brugha was nominally the superior as Minister for Defence, but Collins's power base came from his position as Director of Organisation of the IRA and from his membership on the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). De Valera resented Collins's clear power and influence, which he saw as coming more from the secretive IRB than from his position as a Teachta Dála (TD) and minister in the Aireacht. Brugha and de Valera both urged the IRA to undertake larger, more conventional military actions for the propaganda effect but were ignored by Collins and Mulcahy. Brugha at one stage proposed the assassination of the entire British cabinet. This was also discounted due to its presumed negative effect on British public opinion. Moreover, many members of the Dáil, notably Arthur Griffith, did not approve of IRA violence and would have preferred a campaign of passive resistance to the British rule. The Dáil belatedly accepted responsibility for IRA actions in April 1921, just three months before the end of the Irish War of Independence.
In practice, the IRA was commanded by Collins, with Richard Mulcahy as second in command. These men were able to issue orders and directives to IRA guerrilla units around the country and at times to send arms and organisers to specific areas. However, because of the localised and irregular character of the war, they were only able to exert limited control over local IRA commanders such as Tom Barry, Liam Lynch in Cork and Seán Mac Eoin in Longford.
The IRA claimed a total strength of 70,000, but only about 3,000 were actively engaged in fighting against the Crown. The IRA distrusted those Irishmen who had fought in the British Army during the First World War as potential informers, but there were a number of exceptions such as Emmet Dalton, Tom Barry and Martin Doyle. The IRA divided its members into three classes, namely "unreliable", "reliable" and "active". The "unreliable" members were those who were nominally IRA members but did not do very much for the struggle, "reliable" members played a supporting role in the war while occasionally fighting and the "active" men those who were engaged in full-time fighting. Of the IRA brigades only about one to two-thirds were considered to be "reliable" while those considered "active" were even smaller. A disproportionate number of the "active" IRA men were teachers, medical students, shoemakers and bootmakers; those engaged in building trades like painters, carpenters and bricklayers; draper's assistants and creamery workers. The Canadian historian Peter Hart wrote "...the guerrillas were disproportionately skilled, trained and urban". Farmers and fishermen tended to be underrepresented in the IRA. Those Irishmen engaged in white-collar trades or working as skilled labourers were much more likely to be involved in cultural nationalist groups like the Gaelic League than farmers or fishermen, and thus to have a stronger sense of Irish nationalism. Furthermore, the authority of the Crown tended to be stronger in towns and cities than in the countryside. Thus, those engaged in Irish nationalist activities in urban areas were much more likely to come into conflict with the Crown, leading to a greater chance of radicalisation. Finally, the British tactic of blowing up the homes of IRA members had the effect of discouraging many farmers from joining the struggle as the destruction of the family farm could easily reduce a farmer and his family to destitution. Of the "active" IRA members, three-quarters were in their late teens or early 20s and only 5% of the "active" men were in the age range of 40 or older. The "active" members were overwhelmingly single men with only 4% being married or engaged in a relationship. The life of an "active" IRA man with the stress of living on the run and constantly being in hiding tended to attract single men who could adjust to this lifestyle far more easily than a man in a relationship. Furthermore, the IRA preferred to recruit single men as it was found that singles could devote themselves more wholeheartedly to the struggle.
Women were active in the republican movement, but almost no women fought with the IRA whose "active" members were almost entirely male. The IRA was not a sectarian group and went out of its way to proclaim it was open to all Irishmen, but its membership was largely Catholic with virtually no Protestants serving as "active" IRA men. Hart wrote that in his study of the IRA membership that he found only three Protestants serving as "active" IRA men between 1919 and 1921. Of the 917 IRA men convicted by British courts under the Defence of the Realm Act in 1919, only one was a Protestant. The majority of those serving in the IRA were practising Catholics, but there was a large minority of "pagans" as atheists or non-practising Catholics who were known in Ireland. The majority of the IRA men serving in metropolitan Britain were permanent residents with very few sent over from Ireland. The majority of the IRA men operating in Britain were Irish-born, but there was a substantial minority who were British-born, something that made them especially insistent on asserting their Irish identity.
The IRA fought a guerrilla war against the Crown forces in Ireland from 1919 to July 1921. The most intense period of the war was from November 1920 onwards. The IRA campaign can broadly be split into three phases. The first, in 1919, involved the re-organisation of the Irish Volunteers as a guerrilla army and only sporadic attacks. Organisers such as Ernie O'Malley were sent around the country to set up viable guerrilla units. On paper, there were 100,000 or so Volunteers enrolled after the conscription crisis of 1918. However, only about 15,000 of these participated in the guerrilla war. In 1919, Collins, the IRA's Director of Intelligence, organised the "Squad"—an assassination unit based in Dublin that killed police involved in intelligence work (the Irish playwright Brendan Behan's father Stephen Behan was a member of the Squad). Typical of Collins's sardonic sense of humour, the Squad was often referred to as his "Twelve Apostles". In addition, there were some arms raids on RIC barracks. By the end of 1919, four Dublin Metropolitan Police and 11 RIC men had been killed. The RIC abandoned most of their smaller rural barracks in late 1919. Around 400 of these were burned in a co-ordinated IRA operation around the country in April 1920.
The second phase of the IRA campaign, roughly from January to July 1920, involved attacks on the fortified police barracks located in the towns. Between January and June 1920, 16 of these were destroyed and 29 badly damaged. Several events of late 1920 greatly escalated the conflict. Firstly, the British declared martial law in parts of the country—allowing for internment and executions of IRA men. Secondly, they deployed paramilitary forces, the Black and Tans and Auxiliary Division, and more British Army personnel into the country. Thus, the third phase of the war (roughly August 1920 – July 1921) involved the IRA taking on a greatly expanded British force, moving away from attacking well-defended barracks and instead using ambush tactics. To this end the IRA was re-organised into "flying columns"—permanent guerrilla units, usually about 20 strong, although sometimes larger. In rural areas, the flying columns usually had bases in remote mountainous areas.
The most high-profile violence of the war took place in Dublin in November 1920 and is still known as Bloody Sunday. In the early hours of the morning, Collins' "Squad" killed 14 British spies. In reprisal, that afternoon, British forces opened fire on a football crowd at Croke Park, killing 14 civilians. Towards the end of the day, two prominent Republicans and a friend of theirs were arrested and killed by Crown Forces.
While most areas of the country saw some violence in 1919–1921, the brunt of the war was fought in Dublin and the southern province of Munster. In Munster, the IRA carried out a significant number of successful actions against British troops, for instance, the ambushing and killing of 16 of 18 Auxiliaries by Tom Barry's column at Kilmicheal in West Cork in November 1920, or Liam Lynch's men killing 13 British soldiers near Millstreet early in the next year. At the Crossbarry Ambush in March 1921, 100 or so of Barry's men fought a sizeable engagement with a British column of 1,200, escaping from the British encircling manoeuvre. In Dublin, the "Squad" and elements of the IRA Dublin Brigade were amalgamated into the "Active Service Unit", under Oscar Traynor, which tried to carry out at least three attacks on British troops a day. Usually, these consisted of shooting or grenade attacks on British patrols. Outside Dublin and Munster, there were only isolated areas of intense activity. For instance, the County Longford IRA under Seán Mac Eoin carried out a number of well-planned ambushes and successfully defended the village of Ballinalee against Black and Tan reprisals in a three-hour gun battle. In County Mayo, large-scale guerrilla action did not break out until spring 1921, when two British forces were ambushed at Carrowkennedy and Tourmakeady. Elsewhere, fighting was more sporadic and less intense.
In Belfast, the war had a character all of its own. The city had a Protestant and unionist majority and IRA actions were responded to with reprisals against the Catholic population, including killings (such as the McMahon killings) and the burning of many homes – as on Belfast's Bloody Sunday. The IRA in Belfast and the North generally, although involved in protecting the Catholic community from loyalists and state forces, undertook a retaliatory arson campaign against factories and commercial premises. The violence in Belfast alone, which continued until October 1922 (long after the truce in the rest of the country), claimed the lives of between 400 and 500 people.
In April 1921, the IRA was again reorganised, in line with the Dáil's endorsement of its actions, along the lines of a regular army. Divisions were created based on region, with commanders being given responsibility, in theory, for large geographical areas. In practice, this had little effect on the localised nature of the guerrilla warfare.
In May 1921, the IRA in Dublin attacked and burned the Custom House. The action was a serious setback as five members were killed and eighty captured.
By the end of the war in July 1921, the IRA was hard-pressed by the deployment of more British troops into the most active areas and a chronic shortage of arms and ammunition. It has been estimated that the IRA had only about 3,000 rifles (mostly captured from the British) during the war, with a larger number of shotguns and pistols. An ambitious plan to buy arms from Italy in 1921 collapsed when the money did not reach the arms dealers. Towards the end of the war, some Thompson submachine guns were imported from the United States; however 450 of these were intercepted by the American authorities and the remainder only reached Ireland shortly before the Truce.
By June 1921, Collins' assessment was that the IRA was within weeks, possibly even days, of collapse. It had few weapons or ammunition left. Moreover, almost 5,000 IRA men had been imprisoned or interned and over 500 killed. Collins and Mulcahy estimated that the number of effective guerrilla fighters was down to 2,000–3,000. However, in the summer of 1921, the war was abruptly ended.
The British recruited hundreds of World War I veterans into the RIC and sent them to Ireland. Because there was initially a shortage of RIC uniforms, the veterans at first wore a combination of dark green RIC uniforms and khaki British Army uniforms, which inspired the nickname "Black and Tans". The brutality of the Black and Tans is now well-known, although the greatest violence attributed to the Crown's forces was often that of the Auxiliary Division of the Constabulary. One of the strongest critics of the Black and Tans was King George V who in May 1921 told Lady Margery Greenwood that "he hated the idea of the Black and Tans."
The IRA was also involved in the destruction of many stately homes in Munster. The Church of Ireland Gazette recorded numerous instances of Unionists and Loyalists being shot, burnt or forced from their homes during the early 1920s. In County Cork between 1920 and 1923 the IRA shot over 200 civilians of whom over 70 (or 36%) were Protestants: five times the percentage of Protestants in the civilian population. This was due to the historical inclination of Protestants towards loyalty to the United Kingdom. A convention of Irish Protestant Churches in Dublin in May 1922 signed a resolution placing "on record" that "hostility to Protestants by reason of their religion has been almost, if not wholly, unknown in the twenty-six counties in which Protestants are in the minority."
Many historic buildings in Ireland were destroyed during the war, most famously the Custom House in Dublin, which was disastrously attacked on de Valera's insistence, to the horror of the more militarily experienced Collins. As he feared, the destruction proved a pyrrhic victory for the Republic, with so many IRA men killed or captured that the IRA in Dublin suffered a severe blow.
This was also a period of social upheaval in Ireland, with frequent strikes as well as other manifestations of class conflict. In this regard, the IRA acted to a large degree as an agent of social control and stability, driven by the need to preserve cross-class unity in the national struggle, and on occasion being used to break strikes.
Assessments of the effectiveness of the IRA's campaign vary. They were never in a position to engage in conventional warfare. The political, military and financial costs of remaining in Ireland were higher than the British government was prepared to pay and this in a sense forced them into negotiations with the Irish political leaders. According to historian Michael Hopkinson, the guerrilla warfare "was often courageous and effective". Historian David Fitzpatrick observes, "The guerrilla fighters...were vastly outnumbered by the forces of the Crown... The success of the Irish Volunteers in surviving so long is therefore noteworthy."
David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, at the time, found himself under increasing pressure (both internationally and from within the British Isles) to try to salvage something from the situation. This was a complete reversal on his earlier position. He had consistently referred to the IRA as a "murder gang" up until then. An unexpected olive branch came from King George V, who, in a speech in Belfast called for reconciliation on all sides, changed the mood and enabled the British and Irish Republican governments to agree to a truce. The Truce was agreed on 11 July 1921. On 8 July, de Valera met General Nevil Macready, the British commander in chief in Ireland and agreed terms. The IRA was to retain its arms and the British Army was to remain in barracks for the duration of peace negotiations. Many IRA officers interpreted the truce only as a temporary break in fighting. They continued to recruit and train volunteers, with the result that the IRA had increased its number to over 72,000 men by early 1922.
Negotiations on an Anglo-Irish Treaty took place in late 1921 in London. The Irish delegation was led by Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins.
The most contentious areas of the Treaty for the IRA were abolition of the Irish Republic declared in 1919, the status of the Irish Free State as a dominion in the British Commonwealth and the British retention of the so-called Treaty Ports on Ireland's south coast. These issues were the cause of a split in the IRA and ultimately, the Irish Civil War.
Under the Government of Ireland Act 1920, Ireland was partitioned, creating Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland. Under the terms of the Anglo-Irish agreement of 6 December 1921, which ended the war (1919–21), Northern Ireland was given the option of withdrawing from the new state, the Irish Free State, and remaining part of the United Kingdom. The Northern Ireland parliament chose to do that. An Irish Boundary Commission was then set up to review the border.
Irish leaders expected that it would so reduce Northern Ireland's size, by transferring nationalist areas to the Irish Free State, as to make it economically unviable. Partition was not by itself the key breaking point between pro- and anti-Treaty campaigners; both sides expected the Boundary Commission to greatly reduce Northern Ireland. Moreover, Michael Collins was planning a clandestine guerrilla campaign against the Northern state using the IRA. In early 1922, he sent IRA units to the border areas and sent arms to northern units. It was only afterwards, when partition was confirmed, that a united Ireland became the preserve of anti-Treaty Republicans.
The IRA leadership was deeply divided over the decision by the Dáil to ratify the Treaty. Despite the fact that Michael Collins – the de facto leader of the IRA – had negotiated the Treaty, many IRA officers were against it. Of the General Headquarters (GHQ) staff, nine members were in favour of the Treaty while four opposed it. The majority of the IRA rank-and-file were against the Treaty; in January–June 1922, their discontent developed into open defiance of the elected civilian Provisional government of Ireland.
Both sides agreed that the IRA's allegiance was to the (elected) Dáil of the Irish Republic, but the anti-Treaty side argued that the decision of the Dáil to accept the Treaty (and set aside the Irish Republic) meant that the IRA no longer owed that body its allegiance. They called for the IRA to withdraw from the authority of the Dáil and to entrust the IRA Executive with control over the army. On 16 January, the first IRA division – the 2nd Southern Division led by Ernie O'Malley – repudiated the authority of the GHQ. A month later, on 18 February, Liam Forde, O/C of the IRA Mid-Limerick Brigade, issued a proclamation stating that: "We no longer recognise the authority of the present head of the army, and renew our allegiance to the existing Irish Republic". This was the first unit of the IRA to break with the pro-Treaty government.
On 22 March, Rory O'Connor held what was to become an infamous press conference and declared that the IRA would no longer obey the Dáil as (he said) it had violated its Oath to uphold the Irish Republic. He went on to say that "we repudiate the Dáil ... We will set up an Executive which will issue orders to the IRA all over the country." In reply to the question on whether this meant they intended to create a military dictatorship, O'Connor said: "You can take it that way if you like."
On 28 March, the (anti-Treaty) IRA Executive issued statement stating that Minister of Defence (Richard Mulcahy) and the Chief-of-Staff (Eoin O'Duffy) no longer exercised any control over the IRA. In addition, it ordered an end to the recruitment to the new military and police forces of the Provisional Government. Furthermore, it instructed all IRA units to reaffirm their allegiance to the Irish Republic on 2 April. The stage was set for civil war over the Treaty.
The pro-treaty IRA soon became the nucleus of the new (regular) Irish National Army created by Collins and Richard Mulcahy. British pressure, and tensions between the pro- and anti-Treaty factions of the IRA, led to a bloody civil war, ending in the defeat of the anti-Treaty faction. On 24 May 1923, Frank Aiken, the (anti-treaty) IRA Chief-of-Staff, called a cease-fire. Many left political activity altogether, but a minority continued to insist that the new Irish Free State, created by the "illegitimate" Treaty, was an illegitimate state. They asserted that their "IRA Army Executive" was the real government of a still-existing Irish Republic. The IRA of the Civil War and subsequent organisations that have used the name claim lineage from that group, which is covered in full at Irish Republican Army (1922–1969).
For information on later organisations using the name Irish Republican Army, see the table below. For a genealogy of organisations using the name IRA after 1922, see List of organisations known as the Irish Republican Army. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Irish Republican Army (IRA; Irish: Óglaigh na hÉireann) was an Irish republican revolutionary paramilitary organisation. The ancestor of many groups also known as the Irish Republican Army, and distinguished from them as the \"Old IRA\", it was descended from the Irish Volunteers, an organisation established on 25 November 1913 that staged the Easter Rising in April 1916. In 1919, the Irish Republic that had been proclaimed during the Easter Rising was formally established by an elected assembly (Dáil Éireann), and the Irish Volunteers were recognised by Dáil Éireann as its legitimate army. Thereafter, the IRA waged a guerrilla campaign against the British occupation of Ireland in the 1919–1921 Irish War of Independence.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Following the signing in 1921 of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which ended the War of Independence, a split occurred within the IRA. Members who supported the treaty formed the nucleus of the Irish National Army. However, the majority of the IRA was opposed to the treaty. The anti-treaty IRA fought a civil war against the Free State Army in 1922–23, with the intention of creating a fully independent all-Ireland republic. Having lost the civil war, this group remained in existence, with the intention of overthrowing the governments of both the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland and achieving the Irish Republic proclaimed in 1916.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The Irish Volunteers, founded in 1913, staged the Easter Rising, which aimed at ending British rule in Ireland, in 1916. Following the suppression of the Rising, thousands of Volunteers were imprisoned or interned, leading to the break-up of the organisation. It was reorganised in 1917 following the release of first the internees and then the prisoners. At the army convention held in Dublin in October 1917, Éamon de Valera was elected president, Michael Collins Director for Organisation and Cathal Brugha Chairman of the Resident Executive, which in effect made him Chief of Staff.",
"title": "Origins"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Following the success of Sinn Féin in the general election of 1918 and the setting up of the First Dáil (the legislature of the Irish Republic), Volunteers commenced military action against the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), the paramilitary police force in Ireland, and subsequently against the British Army. It began with the Soloheadbeg Ambush, when members of the Third Tipperary Brigade led by Séumas Robinson, Seán Treacy, Dan Breen and Seán Hogan, seized a quantity of gelignite, killing two RIC constables in the process.",
"title": "Origins"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Dáil leadership worried that the Volunteers would not accept its authority, given that, under their own constitution, they were bound to obey their own executive and no other body. In August 1919, Brugha proposed to the Dáil that the Volunteers be asked to swear allegiance to the Dáil, but one commentator states that another year passed before the movement took an oath of allegiance to the Irish Republic and its government in \"August 1920\". In sharp contrast, a contemporary in the struggle for Irish independence notes that by late 1919, the term \"Irish Republican Army (IRA)\" was replacing \"Volunteers\" in everyday usage. This change is attributed to the Volunteers, having accepted the authority of the Dáil, being referred to as the \"army of the Irish Republic\", popularly known as the \"Irish Republican Army\". Already in September 1917, a group of men from counties Clare and Tipperary charged with illegal drilling were claiming to soldiers of the \"Irish Republican Army\" and refused to recognise the legitimacy of the court, and insisted they should be treated as prisoners of war.",
"title": "Origins"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "A power struggle continued between Brugha and Collins, both cabinet ministers, over who had the greater influence. Brugha was nominally the superior as Minister for Defence, but Collins's power base came from his position as Director of Organisation of the IRA and from his membership on the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). De Valera resented Collins's clear power and influence, which he saw as coming more from the secretive IRB than from his position as a Teachta Dála (TD) and minister in the Aireacht. Brugha and de Valera both urged the IRA to undertake larger, more conventional military actions for the propaganda effect but were ignored by Collins and Mulcahy. Brugha at one stage proposed the assassination of the entire British cabinet. This was also discounted due to its presumed negative effect on British public opinion. Moreover, many members of the Dáil, notably Arthur Griffith, did not approve of IRA violence and would have preferred a campaign of passive resistance to the British rule. The Dáil belatedly accepted responsibility for IRA actions in April 1921, just three months before the end of the Irish War of Independence.",
"title": "Origins"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In practice, the IRA was commanded by Collins, with Richard Mulcahy as second in command. These men were able to issue orders and directives to IRA guerrilla units around the country and at times to send arms and organisers to specific areas. However, because of the localised and irregular character of the war, they were only able to exert limited control over local IRA commanders such as Tom Barry, Liam Lynch in Cork and Seán Mac Eoin in Longford.",
"title": "Origins"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The IRA claimed a total strength of 70,000, but only about 3,000 were actively engaged in fighting against the Crown. The IRA distrusted those Irishmen who had fought in the British Army during the First World War as potential informers, but there were a number of exceptions such as Emmet Dalton, Tom Barry and Martin Doyle. The IRA divided its members into three classes, namely \"unreliable\", \"reliable\" and \"active\". The \"unreliable\" members were those who were nominally IRA members but did not do very much for the struggle, \"reliable\" members played a supporting role in the war while occasionally fighting and the \"active\" men those who were engaged in full-time fighting. Of the IRA brigades only about one to two-thirds were considered to be \"reliable\" while those considered \"active\" were even smaller. A disproportionate number of the \"active\" IRA men were teachers, medical students, shoemakers and bootmakers; those engaged in building trades like painters, carpenters and bricklayers; draper's assistants and creamery workers. The Canadian historian Peter Hart wrote \"...the guerrillas were disproportionately skilled, trained and urban\". Farmers and fishermen tended to be underrepresented in the IRA. Those Irishmen engaged in white-collar trades or working as skilled labourers were much more likely to be involved in cultural nationalist groups like the Gaelic League than farmers or fishermen, and thus to have a stronger sense of Irish nationalism. Furthermore, the authority of the Crown tended to be stronger in towns and cities than in the countryside. Thus, those engaged in Irish nationalist activities in urban areas were much more likely to come into conflict with the Crown, leading to a greater chance of radicalisation. Finally, the British tactic of blowing up the homes of IRA members had the effect of discouraging many farmers from joining the struggle as the destruction of the family farm could easily reduce a farmer and his family to destitution. Of the \"active\" IRA members, three-quarters were in their late teens or early 20s and only 5% of the \"active\" men were in the age range of 40 or older. The \"active\" members were overwhelmingly single men with only 4% being married or engaged in a relationship. The life of an \"active\" IRA man with the stress of living on the run and constantly being in hiding tended to attract single men who could adjust to this lifestyle far more easily than a man in a relationship. Furthermore, the IRA preferred to recruit single men as it was found that singles could devote themselves more wholeheartedly to the struggle.",
"title": "Origins"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Women were active in the republican movement, but almost no women fought with the IRA whose \"active\" members were almost entirely male. The IRA was not a sectarian group and went out of its way to proclaim it was open to all Irishmen, but its membership was largely Catholic with virtually no Protestants serving as \"active\" IRA men. Hart wrote that in his study of the IRA membership that he found only three Protestants serving as \"active\" IRA men between 1919 and 1921. Of the 917 IRA men convicted by British courts under the Defence of the Realm Act in 1919, only one was a Protestant. The majority of those serving in the IRA were practising Catholics, but there was a large minority of \"pagans\" as atheists or non-practising Catholics who were known in Ireland. The majority of the IRA men serving in metropolitan Britain were permanent residents with very few sent over from Ireland. The majority of the IRA men operating in Britain were Irish-born, but there was a substantial minority who were British-born, something that made them especially insistent on asserting their Irish identity.",
"title": "Origins"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The IRA fought a guerrilla war against the Crown forces in Ireland from 1919 to July 1921. The most intense period of the war was from November 1920 onwards. The IRA campaign can broadly be split into three phases. The first, in 1919, involved the re-organisation of the Irish Volunteers as a guerrilla army and only sporadic attacks. Organisers such as Ernie O'Malley were sent around the country to set up viable guerrilla units. On paper, there were 100,000 or so Volunteers enrolled after the conscription crisis of 1918. However, only about 15,000 of these participated in the guerrilla war. In 1919, Collins, the IRA's Director of Intelligence, organised the \"Squad\"—an assassination unit based in Dublin that killed police involved in intelligence work (the Irish playwright Brendan Behan's father Stephen Behan was a member of the Squad). Typical of Collins's sardonic sense of humour, the Squad was often referred to as his \"Twelve Apostles\". In addition, there were some arms raids on RIC barracks. By the end of 1919, four Dublin Metropolitan Police and 11 RIC men had been killed. The RIC abandoned most of their smaller rural barracks in late 1919. Around 400 of these were burned in a co-ordinated IRA operation around the country in April 1920.",
"title": "Irish War of Independence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The second phase of the IRA campaign, roughly from January to July 1920, involved attacks on the fortified police barracks located in the towns. Between January and June 1920, 16 of these were destroyed and 29 badly damaged. Several events of late 1920 greatly escalated the conflict. Firstly, the British declared martial law in parts of the country—allowing for internment and executions of IRA men. Secondly, they deployed paramilitary forces, the Black and Tans and Auxiliary Division, and more British Army personnel into the country. Thus, the third phase of the war (roughly August 1920 – July 1921) involved the IRA taking on a greatly expanded British force, moving away from attacking well-defended barracks and instead using ambush tactics. To this end the IRA was re-organised into \"flying columns\"—permanent guerrilla units, usually about 20 strong, although sometimes larger. In rural areas, the flying columns usually had bases in remote mountainous areas.",
"title": "Irish War of Independence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The most high-profile violence of the war took place in Dublin in November 1920 and is still known as Bloody Sunday. In the early hours of the morning, Collins' \"Squad\" killed 14 British spies. In reprisal, that afternoon, British forces opened fire on a football crowd at Croke Park, killing 14 civilians. Towards the end of the day, two prominent Republicans and a friend of theirs were arrested and killed by Crown Forces.",
"title": "Irish War of Independence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "While most areas of the country saw some violence in 1919–1921, the brunt of the war was fought in Dublin and the southern province of Munster. In Munster, the IRA carried out a significant number of successful actions against British troops, for instance, the ambushing and killing of 16 of 18 Auxiliaries by Tom Barry's column at Kilmicheal in West Cork in November 1920, or Liam Lynch's men killing 13 British soldiers near Millstreet early in the next year. At the Crossbarry Ambush in March 1921, 100 or so of Barry's men fought a sizeable engagement with a British column of 1,200, escaping from the British encircling manoeuvre. In Dublin, the \"Squad\" and elements of the IRA Dublin Brigade were amalgamated into the \"Active Service Unit\", under Oscar Traynor, which tried to carry out at least three attacks on British troops a day. Usually, these consisted of shooting or grenade attacks on British patrols. Outside Dublin and Munster, there were only isolated areas of intense activity. For instance, the County Longford IRA under Seán Mac Eoin carried out a number of well-planned ambushes and successfully defended the village of Ballinalee against Black and Tan reprisals in a three-hour gun battle. In County Mayo, large-scale guerrilla action did not break out until spring 1921, when two British forces were ambushed at Carrowkennedy and Tourmakeady. Elsewhere, fighting was more sporadic and less intense.",
"title": "Irish War of Independence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In Belfast, the war had a character all of its own. The city had a Protestant and unionist majority and IRA actions were responded to with reprisals against the Catholic population, including killings (such as the McMahon killings) and the burning of many homes – as on Belfast's Bloody Sunday. The IRA in Belfast and the North generally, although involved in protecting the Catholic community from loyalists and state forces, undertook a retaliatory arson campaign against factories and commercial premises. The violence in Belfast alone, which continued until October 1922 (long after the truce in the rest of the country), claimed the lives of between 400 and 500 people.",
"title": "Irish War of Independence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In April 1921, the IRA was again reorganised, in line with the Dáil's endorsement of its actions, along the lines of a regular army. Divisions were created based on region, with commanders being given responsibility, in theory, for large geographical areas. In practice, this had little effect on the localised nature of the guerrilla warfare.",
"title": "Irish War of Independence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In May 1921, the IRA in Dublin attacked and burned the Custom House. The action was a serious setback as five members were killed and eighty captured.",
"title": "Irish War of Independence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "By the end of the war in July 1921, the IRA was hard-pressed by the deployment of more British troops into the most active areas and a chronic shortage of arms and ammunition. It has been estimated that the IRA had only about 3,000 rifles (mostly captured from the British) during the war, with a larger number of shotguns and pistols. An ambitious plan to buy arms from Italy in 1921 collapsed when the money did not reach the arms dealers. Towards the end of the war, some Thompson submachine guns were imported from the United States; however 450 of these were intercepted by the American authorities and the remainder only reached Ireland shortly before the Truce.",
"title": "Irish War of Independence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "By June 1921, Collins' assessment was that the IRA was within weeks, possibly even days, of collapse. It had few weapons or ammunition left. Moreover, almost 5,000 IRA men had been imprisoned or interned and over 500 killed. Collins and Mulcahy estimated that the number of effective guerrilla fighters was down to 2,000–3,000. However, in the summer of 1921, the war was abruptly ended.",
"title": "Irish War of Independence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The British recruited hundreds of World War I veterans into the RIC and sent them to Ireland. Because there was initially a shortage of RIC uniforms, the veterans at first wore a combination of dark green RIC uniforms and khaki British Army uniforms, which inspired the nickname \"Black and Tans\". The brutality of the Black and Tans is now well-known, although the greatest violence attributed to the Crown's forces was often that of the Auxiliary Division of the Constabulary. One of the strongest critics of the Black and Tans was King George V who in May 1921 told Lady Margery Greenwood that \"he hated the idea of the Black and Tans.\"",
"title": "Irish War of Independence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The IRA was also involved in the destruction of many stately homes in Munster. The Church of Ireland Gazette recorded numerous instances of Unionists and Loyalists being shot, burnt or forced from their homes during the early 1920s. In County Cork between 1920 and 1923 the IRA shot over 200 civilians of whom over 70 (or 36%) were Protestants: five times the percentage of Protestants in the civilian population. This was due to the historical inclination of Protestants towards loyalty to the United Kingdom. A convention of Irish Protestant Churches in Dublin in May 1922 signed a resolution placing \"on record\" that \"hostility to Protestants by reason of their religion has been almost, if not wholly, unknown in the twenty-six counties in which Protestants are in the minority.\"",
"title": "Irish War of Independence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Many historic buildings in Ireland were destroyed during the war, most famously the Custom House in Dublin, which was disastrously attacked on de Valera's insistence, to the horror of the more militarily experienced Collins. As he feared, the destruction proved a pyrrhic victory for the Republic, with so many IRA men killed or captured that the IRA in Dublin suffered a severe blow.",
"title": "Irish War of Independence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "This was also a period of social upheaval in Ireland, with frequent strikes as well as other manifestations of class conflict. In this regard, the IRA acted to a large degree as an agent of social control and stability, driven by the need to preserve cross-class unity in the national struggle, and on occasion being used to break strikes.",
"title": "Irish War of Independence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Assessments of the effectiveness of the IRA's campaign vary. They were never in a position to engage in conventional warfare. The political, military and financial costs of remaining in Ireland were higher than the British government was prepared to pay and this in a sense forced them into negotiations with the Irish political leaders. According to historian Michael Hopkinson, the guerrilla warfare \"was often courageous and effective\". Historian David Fitzpatrick observes, \"The guerrilla fighters...were vastly outnumbered by the forces of the Crown... The success of the Irish Volunteers in surviving so long is therefore noteworthy.\"",
"title": "Irish War of Independence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, at the time, found himself under increasing pressure (both internationally and from within the British Isles) to try to salvage something from the situation. This was a complete reversal on his earlier position. He had consistently referred to the IRA as a \"murder gang\" up until then. An unexpected olive branch came from King George V, who, in a speech in Belfast called for reconciliation on all sides, changed the mood and enabled the British and Irish Republican governments to agree to a truce. The Truce was agreed on 11 July 1921. On 8 July, de Valera met General Nevil Macready, the British commander in chief in Ireland and agreed terms. The IRA was to retain its arms and the British Army was to remain in barracks for the duration of peace negotiations. Many IRA officers interpreted the truce only as a temporary break in fighting. They continued to recruit and train volunteers, with the result that the IRA had increased its number to over 72,000 men by early 1922.",
"title": "Truce and treaty"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Negotiations on an Anglo-Irish Treaty took place in late 1921 in London. The Irish delegation was led by Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins.",
"title": "Truce and treaty"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The most contentious areas of the Treaty for the IRA were abolition of the Irish Republic declared in 1919, the status of the Irish Free State as a dominion in the British Commonwealth and the British retention of the so-called Treaty Ports on Ireland's south coast. These issues were the cause of a split in the IRA and ultimately, the Irish Civil War.",
"title": "Truce and treaty"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Under the Government of Ireland Act 1920, Ireland was partitioned, creating Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland. Under the terms of the Anglo-Irish agreement of 6 December 1921, which ended the war (1919–21), Northern Ireland was given the option of withdrawing from the new state, the Irish Free State, and remaining part of the United Kingdom. The Northern Ireland parliament chose to do that. An Irish Boundary Commission was then set up to review the border.",
"title": "Truce and treaty"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Irish leaders expected that it would so reduce Northern Ireland's size, by transferring nationalist areas to the Irish Free State, as to make it economically unviable. Partition was not by itself the key breaking point between pro- and anti-Treaty campaigners; both sides expected the Boundary Commission to greatly reduce Northern Ireland. Moreover, Michael Collins was planning a clandestine guerrilla campaign against the Northern state using the IRA. In early 1922, he sent IRA units to the border areas and sent arms to northern units. It was only afterwards, when partition was confirmed, that a united Ireland became the preserve of anti-Treaty Republicans.",
"title": "Truce and treaty"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The IRA leadership was deeply divided over the decision by the Dáil to ratify the Treaty. Despite the fact that Michael Collins – the de facto leader of the IRA – had negotiated the Treaty, many IRA officers were against it. Of the General Headquarters (GHQ) staff, nine members were in favour of the Treaty while four opposed it. The majority of the IRA rank-and-file were against the Treaty; in January–June 1922, their discontent developed into open defiance of the elected civilian Provisional government of Ireland.",
"title": "IRA and the Anglo-Irish Treaty"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Both sides agreed that the IRA's allegiance was to the (elected) Dáil of the Irish Republic, but the anti-Treaty side argued that the decision of the Dáil to accept the Treaty (and set aside the Irish Republic) meant that the IRA no longer owed that body its allegiance. They called for the IRA to withdraw from the authority of the Dáil and to entrust the IRA Executive with control over the army. On 16 January, the first IRA division – the 2nd Southern Division led by Ernie O'Malley – repudiated the authority of the GHQ. A month later, on 18 February, Liam Forde, O/C of the IRA Mid-Limerick Brigade, issued a proclamation stating that: \"We no longer recognise the authority of the present head of the army, and renew our allegiance to the existing Irish Republic\". This was the first unit of the IRA to break with the pro-Treaty government.",
"title": "IRA and the Anglo-Irish Treaty"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "On 22 March, Rory O'Connor held what was to become an infamous press conference and declared that the IRA would no longer obey the Dáil as (he said) it had violated its Oath to uphold the Irish Republic. He went on to say that \"we repudiate the Dáil ... We will set up an Executive which will issue orders to the IRA all over the country.\" In reply to the question on whether this meant they intended to create a military dictatorship, O'Connor said: \"You can take it that way if you like.\"",
"title": "IRA and the Anglo-Irish Treaty"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "On 28 March, the (anti-Treaty) IRA Executive issued statement stating that Minister of Defence (Richard Mulcahy) and the Chief-of-Staff (Eoin O'Duffy) no longer exercised any control over the IRA. In addition, it ordered an end to the recruitment to the new military and police forces of the Provisional Government. Furthermore, it instructed all IRA units to reaffirm their allegiance to the Irish Republic on 2 April. The stage was set for civil war over the Treaty.",
"title": "IRA and the Anglo-Irish Treaty"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The pro-treaty IRA soon became the nucleus of the new (regular) Irish National Army created by Collins and Richard Mulcahy. British pressure, and tensions between the pro- and anti-Treaty factions of the IRA, led to a bloody civil war, ending in the defeat of the anti-Treaty faction. On 24 May 1923, Frank Aiken, the (anti-treaty) IRA Chief-of-Staff, called a cease-fire. Many left political activity altogether, but a minority continued to insist that the new Irish Free State, created by the \"illegitimate\" Treaty, was an illegitimate state. They asserted that their \"IRA Army Executive\" was the real government of a still-existing Irish Republic. The IRA of the Civil War and subsequent organisations that have used the name claim lineage from that group, which is covered in full at Irish Republican Army (1922–1969).",
"title": "Civil War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "For information on later organisations using the name Irish Republican Army, see the table below. For a genealogy of organisations using the name IRA after 1922, see List of organisations known as the Irish Republican Army.",
"title": "Civil War"
}
]
| The Irish Republican Army was an Irish republican revolutionary paramilitary organisation. The ancestor of many groups also known as the Irish Republican Army, and distinguished from them as the "Old IRA", it was descended from the Irish Volunteers, an organisation established on 25 November 1913 that staged the Easter Rising in April 1916. In 1919, the Irish Republic that had been proclaimed during the Easter Rising was formally established by an elected assembly, and the Irish Volunteers were recognised by Dáil Éireann as its legitimate army. Thereafter, the IRA waged a guerrilla campaign against the British occupation of Ireland in the 1919–1921 Irish War of Independence. Following the signing in 1921 of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which ended the War of Independence, a split occurred within the IRA. Members who supported the treaty formed the nucleus of the Irish National Army. However, the majority of the IRA was opposed to the treaty. The anti-treaty IRA fought a civil war against the Free State Army in 1922–23, with the intention of creating a fully independent all-Ireland republic. Having lost the civil war, this group remained in existence, with the intention of overthrowing the governments of both the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland and achieving the Irish Republic proclaimed in 1916. | 2001-09-18T13:55:55Z | 2023-10-23T02:54:57Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Republican_Army_(1919%E2%80%931922) |
14,734 | Iron | Iron is a chemical element; it has symbol Fe (from Latin ferrum 'iron') and atomic number 26. It is a metal that belongs to the first transition series and group 8 of the periodic table. It is, by mass, the most common element on Earth, just ahead of oxygen (32.1% and 30.1%, respectively), forming much of Earth's outer and inner core. It is the fourth most common element in the Earth's crust, being mainly deposited by meteorites in its metallic state, with its ores also being found there.
Extracting usable metal from iron ores requires kilns or furnaces capable of reaching 1,500 °C (2,730 °F) or higher, about 500 °C (932 °F) higher than that required to smelt copper. Humans started to master that process in Eurasia during the 2nd millennium BCE and the use of iron tools and weapons began to displace copper alloys—in some regions, only around 1200 BCE. That event is considered the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. In the modern world, iron alloys, such as steel, stainless steel, cast iron and special steels, are by far the most common industrial metals, due to their mechanical properties and low cost. The iron and steel industry is thus very important economically, and iron is the cheapest metal, with a price of a few dollars per kilogram or pound.
Pristine and smooth pure iron surfaces are a mirror-like silvery-gray. Iron reacts readily with oxygen and water to produce brown-to-black hydrated iron oxides, commonly known as rust. Unlike the oxides of some other metals that form passivating layers, rust occupies more volume than the metal and thus flakes off, exposing more fresh surfaces for corrosion. High-purity irons (e.g. electrolytic iron) are more resistant to corrosion.
The body of an adult human contains about 4 grams (0.005% body weight) of iron, mostly in hemoglobin and myoglobin. These two proteins play essential roles in vertebrate metabolism, respectively oxygen transport by blood and oxygen storage in muscles. To maintain the necessary levels, human iron metabolism requires a minimum of iron in the diet. Iron is also the metal at the active site of many important redox enzymes dealing with cellular respiration and oxidation and reduction in plants and animals.
Chemically, the most common oxidation states of iron are iron(II) and iron(III). Iron shares many properties of other transition metals, including the other group 8 elements, ruthenium and osmium. Iron forms compounds in a wide range of oxidation states, −4 to +7. Iron also forms many coordination compounds; some of them, such as ferrocene, ferrioxalate, and Prussian blue have substantial industrial, medical, or research applications.
Most notably, Iron is the highest atomic number element that could be created in exothermic nucleosynthesis.
At least four allotropes of iron (differing atom arrangements in the solid) are known, conventionally denoted α, γ, δ, and ε.
The first three forms are observed at ordinary pressures. As molten iron cools past its freezing point of 1538 °C, it crystallizes into its δ allotrope, which has a body-centered cubic (bcc) crystal structure. As it cools further to 1394 °C, it changes to its γ-iron allotrope, a face-centered cubic (fcc) crystal structure, or austenite. At 912 °C and below, the crystal structure again becomes the bcc α-iron allotrope.
The physical properties of iron at very high pressures and temperatures have also been studied extensively, because of their relevance to theories about the cores of the Earth and other planets. Above approximately 10 GPa and temperatures of a few hundred kelvin or less, α-iron changes into another hexagonal close-packed (hcp) structure, which is also known as ε-iron. The higher-temperature γ-phase also changes into ε-iron, but does so at higher pressure.
Some controversial experimental evidence exists for a stable β phase at pressures above 50 GPa and temperatures of at least 1500 K. It is supposed to have an orthorhombic or a double hcp structure. (Confusingly, the term "β-iron" is sometimes also used to refer to α-iron above its Curie point, when it changes from being ferromagnetic to paramagnetic, even though its crystal structure has not changed.)
The inner core of the Earth is generally presumed to consist of an iron-nickel alloy with ε (or β) structure.
The melting and boiling points of iron, along with its enthalpy of atomization, are lower than those of the earlier 3d elements from scandium to chromium, showing the lessened contribution of the 3d electrons to metallic bonding as they are attracted more and more into the inert core by the nucleus; however, they are higher than the values for the previous element manganese because that element has a half-filled 3d sub-shell and consequently its d-electrons are not easily delocalized. This same trend appears for ruthenium but not osmium.
The melting point of iron is experimentally well defined for pressures less than 50 GPa. For greater pressures, published data (as of 2007) still varies by tens of gigapascals and over a thousand kelvin.
Below its Curie point of 770 °C (1,420 °F; 1,040 K), α-iron changes from paramagnetic to ferromagnetic: the spins of the two unpaired electrons in each atom generally align with the spins of its neighbors, creating an overall magnetic field. This happens because the orbitals of those two electrons (dz and dx −. y) do not point toward neighboring atoms in the lattice, and therefore are not involved in metallic bonding.
In the absence of an external source of magnetic field, the atoms get spontaneously partitioned into magnetic domains, about 10 micrometers across, such that the atoms in each domain have parallel spins, but some domains have other orientations. Thus a macroscopic piece of iron will have a nearly zero overall magnetic field.
Application of an external magnetic field causes the domains that are magnetized in the same general direction to grow at the expense of adjacent ones that point in other directions, reinforcing the external field. This effect is exploited in devices that need to channel magnetic fields to fulfill design function, such as electrical transformers, magnetic recording heads, and electric motors. Impurities, lattice defects, or grain and particle boundaries can "pin" the domains in the new positions, so that the effect persists even after the external field is removed – thus turning the iron object into a (permanent) magnet.
Similar behavior is exhibited by some iron compounds, such as the ferrites including the mineral magnetite, a crystalline form of the mixed iron(II,III) oxide Fe3O4 (although the atomic-scale mechanism, ferrimagnetism, is somewhat different). Pieces of magnetite with natural permanent magnetization (lodestones) provided the earliest compasses for navigation. Particles of magnetite were extensively used in magnetic recording media such as core memories, magnetic tapes, floppies, and disks, until they were replaced by cobalt-based materials.
Iron has four stable isotopes: Fe (5.845% of natural iron), Fe (91.754%), Fe (2.119%) and Fe (0.282%). Twenty-four artificial isotopes have also been created. Of these stable isotopes, only Fe has a nuclear spin (−1⁄2). The nuclide Fe theoretically can undergo double electron capture to Cr, but the process has never been observed and only a lower limit on the half-life of 3.1×10 years has been established.
Fe is an extinct radionuclide of long half-life (2.6 million years). It is not found on Earth, but its ultimate decay product is its granddaughter, the stable nuclide Ni. Much of the past work on isotopic composition of iron has focused on the nucleosynthesis of Fe through studies of meteorites and ore formation. In the last decade, advances in mass spectrometry have allowed the detection and quantification of minute, naturally occurring variations in the ratios of the stable isotopes of iron. Much of this work is driven by the Earth and planetary science communities, although applications to biological and industrial systems are emerging.
In phases of the meteorites Semarkona and Chervony Kut, a correlation between the concentration of Ni, the granddaughter of Fe, and the abundance of the stable iron isotopes provided evidence for the existence of Fe at the time of formation of the Solar System. Possibly the energy released by the decay of Fe, along with that released by Al, contributed to the remelting and differentiation of asteroids after their formation 4.6 billion years ago. The abundance of Ni present in extraterrestrial material may bring further insight into the origin and early history of the Solar System.
The most abundant iron isotope Fe is of particular interest to nuclear scientists because it represents the most common endpoint of nucleosynthesis. Since Ni (14 alpha particles) is easily produced from lighter nuclei in the alpha process in nuclear reactions in supernovae (see silicon burning process), it is the endpoint of fusion chains inside extremely massive stars, since addition of another alpha particle, resulting in Zn, requires a great deal more energy. This Ni, which has a half-life of about 6 days, is created in quantity in these stars, but soon decays by two successive positron emissions within supernova decay products in the supernova remnant gas cloud, first to radioactive Co, and then to stable Fe. As such, iron is the most abundant element in the core of red giants, and is the most abundant metal in iron meteorites and in the dense metal cores of planets such as Earth. It is also very common in the universe, relative to other stable metals of approximately the same atomic weight. Iron is the sixth most abundant element in the universe, and the most common refractory element.
Although a further tiny energy gain could be extracted by synthesizing Ni, which has a marginally higher binding energy than Fe, conditions in stars are unsuitable for this process. Element production in supernovas greatly favor iron over nickel, and in any case, Fe still has a lower mass per nucleon than Ni due to its higher fraction of lighter protons. Hence, elements heavier than iron require a supernova for their formation, involving rapid neutron capture by starting Fe nuclei.
In the far future of the universe, assuming that proton decay does not occur, cold fusion occurring via quantum tunnelling would cause the light nuclei in ordinary matter to fuse into Fe nuclei. Fission and alpha-particle emission would then make heavy nuclei decay into iron, converting all stellar-mass objects to cold spheres of pure iron.
Iron's abundance in rocky planets like Earth is due to its abundant production during the runaway fusion and explosion of type Ia supernovae, which scatters the iron into space.
Metallic or native iron is rarely found on the surface of the Earth because it tends to oxidize. However, both the Earth's inner and outer core, which together account for 35% of the mass of the whole Earth, are believed to consist largely of an iron alloy, possibly with nickel. Electric currents in the liquid outer core are believed to be the origin of the Earth's magnetic field. The other terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, and Mars) as well as the Moon are believed to have a metallic core consisting mostly of iron. The M-type asteroids are also believed to be partly or mostly made of metallic iron alloy.
The rare iron meteorites are the main form of natural metallic iron on the Earth's surface. Items made of cold-worked meteoritic iron have been found in various archaeological sites dating from a time when iron smelting had not yet been developed; and the Inuit in Greenland have been reported to use iron from the Cape York meteorite for tools and hunting weapons. About 1 in 20 meteorites consist of the unique iron-nickel minerals taenite (35–80% iron) and kamacite (90–95% iron). Native iron is also rarely found in basalts that have formed from magmas that have come into contact with carbon-rich sedimentary rocks, which have reduced the oxygen fugacity sufficiently for iron to crystallize. This is known as telluric iron and is described from a few localities, such as Disko Island in West Greenland, Yakutia in Russia and Bühl in Germany.
Ferropericlase (Mg,Fe)O, a solid solution of periclase (MgO) and wüstite (FeO), makes up about 20% of the volume of the lower mantle of the Earth, which makes it the second most abundant mineral phase in that region after silicate perovskite (Mg,Fe)SiO3; it also is the major host for iron in the lower mantle. At the bottom of the transition zone of the mantle, the reaction γ-(Mg,Fe)2[SiO4] ↔ (Mg,Fe)[SiO3] + (Mg,Fe)O transforms γ-olivine into a mixture of silicate perovskite and ferropericlase and vice versa. In the literature, this mineral phase of the lower mantle is also often called magnesiowüstite. Silicate perovskite may form up to 93% of the lower mantle, and the magnesium iron form, (Mg,Fe)SiO3, is considered to be the most abundant mineral in the Earth, making up 38% of its volume.
While iron is the most abundant element on Earth, most of this iron is concentrated in the inner and outer cores. The fraction of iron that is in Earth's crust only amounts to about 5% of the overall mass of the crust and is thus only the fourth most abundant element in that layer (after oxygen, silicon, and aluminium).
Most of the iron in the crust is combined with various other elements to form many iron minerals. An important class is the iron oxide minerals such as hematite (Fe2O3), magnetite (Fe3O4), and siderite (FeCO3), which are the major ores of iron. Many igneous rocks also contain the sulfide minerals pyrrhotite and pentlandite. During weathering, iron tends to leach from sulfide deposits as the sulfate and from silicate deposits as the bicarbonate. Both of these are oxidized in aqueous solution and precipitate in even mildly elevated pH as iron(III) oxide.
Large deposits of iron are banded iron formations, a type of rock consisting of repeated thin layers of iron oxides alternating with bands of iron-poor shale and chert. The banded iron formations were laid down in the time between 3,700 million years ago and 1,800 million years ago.
Materials containing finely ground iron(III) oxides or oxide-hydroxides, such as ochre, have been used as yellow, red, and brown pigments since pre-historical times. They contribute as well to the color of various rocks and clays, including entire geological formations like the Painted Hills in Oregon and the Buntsandstein ("colored sandstone", British Bunter). Through Eisensandstein (a jurassic 'iron sandstone', e.g. from Donzdorf in Germany) and Bath stone in the UK, iron compounds are responsible for the yellowish color of many historical buildings and sculptures. The proverbial red color of the surface of Mars is derived from an iron oxide-rich regolith.
Significant amounts of iron occur in the iron sulfide mineral pyrite (FeS2), but it is difficult to extract iron from it and it is therefore not exploited. In fact, iron is so common that production generally focuses only on ores with very high quantities of it.
According to the International Resource Panel's Metal Stocks in Society report, the global stock of iron in use in society is 2,200 kg per capita. More-developed countries differ in this respect from less-developed countries (7,000–14,000 vs 2,000 kg per capita).
Ocean science demonstrated the role of the iron in the ancient seas in both marine biota and climate.
Iron shows the characteristic chemical properties of the transition metals, namely the ability to form variable oxidation states differing by steps of one and a very large coordination and organometallic chemistry: indeed, it was the discovery of an iron compound, ferrocene, that revolutionalized the latter field in the 1950s. Iron is sometimes considered as a prototype for the entire block of transition metals, due to its abundance and the immense role it has played in the technological progress of humanity. Its 26 electrons are arranged in the configuration [Ar]3d4s, of which the 3d and 4s electrons are relatively close in energy, and thus a number of electrons can be ionized.
Iron forms compounds mainly in the oxidation states +2 (iron(II), "ferrous") and +3 (iron(III), "ferric"). Iron also occurs in higher oxidation states, e.g., the purple potassium ferrate (K2FeO4), which contains iron in its +6 oxidation state. The anion [FeO4] with iron in its +7 oxidation state, along with an iron(V)-peroxo isomer, has been detected by infrared spectroscopy at 4 K after cocondensation of laser-ablated Fe atoms with a mixture of O2/Ar. Iron(IV) is a common intermediate in many biochemical oxidation reactions. Numerous organoiron compounds contain formal oxidation states of +1, 0, −1, or even −2. The oxidation states and other bonding properties are often assessed using the technique of Mössbauer spectroscopy. Many mixed valence compounds contain both iron(II) and iron(III) centers, such as magnetite and Prussian blue (Fe4(Fe[CN]6)3). The latter is used as the traditional "blue" in blueprints.
Iron is the first of the transition metals that cannot reach its group oxidation state of +8, although its heavier congeners ruthenium and osmium can, with ruthenium having more difficulty than osmium. Ruthenium exhibits an aqueous cationic chemistry in its low oxidation states similar to that of iron, but osmium does not, favoring high oxidation states in which it forms anionic complexes. In the second half of the 3d transition series, vertical similarities down the groups compete with the horizontal similarities of iron with its neighbors cobalt and nickel in the periodic table, which are also ferromagnetic at room temperature and share similar chemistry. As such, iron, cobalt, and nickel are sometimes grouped together as the iron triad.
Unlike many other metals, iron does not form amalgams with mercury. As a result, mercury is traded in standardized 76 pound flasks (34 kg) made of iron.
Iron is by far the most reactive element in its group; it is pyrophoric when finely divided and dissolves easily in dilute acids, giving Fe. However, it does not react with concentrated nitric acid and other oxidizing acids due to the formation of an impervious oxide layer, which can nevertheless react with hydrochloric acid. High-purity iron, called electrolytic iron, is considered to be resistant to rust, due to its oxide layer.
Iron forms various oxide and hydroxide compounds; the most common are iron(II,III) oxide (Fe3O4), and iron(III) oxide (Fe2O3). Iron(II) oxide also exists, though it is unstable at room temperature. Despite their names, they are actually all non-stoichiometric compounds whose compositions may vary. These oxides are the principal ores for the production of iron (see bloomery and blast furnace). They are also used in the production of ferrites, useful magnetic storage media in computers, and pigments. The best known sulfide is iron pyrite (FeS2), also known as fool's gold owing to its golden luster. It is not an iron(IV) compound, but is actually an iron(II) polysulfide containing Fe and S2 ions in a distorted sodium chloride structure.
The binary ferrous and ferric halides are well-known. The ferrous halides typically arise from treating iron metal with the corresponding hydrohalic acid to give the corresponding hydrated salts.
Iron reacts with fluorine, chlorine, and bromine to give the corresponding ferric halides, ferric chloride being the most common.
Ferric iodide is an exception, being thermodynamically unstable due to the oxidizing power of Fe and the high reducing power of I:
Ferric iodide, a black solid, is not stable in ordinary conditions, but can be prepared through the reaction of iron pentacarbonyl with iodine and carbon monoxide in the presence of hexane and light at the temperature of −20 °C, with oxygen and water excluded.Complexes of ferric iodide with some soft bases are known to be stable compounds.
The standard reduction potentials in acidic aqueous solution for some common iron ions are given below:
The red-purple tetrahedral ferrate(VI) anion is such a strong oxidizing agent that it oxidizes ammonia to nitrogen (N2) and water to oxygen
The pale-violet hexaquo complex [Fe(H2O)6] is an acid such that above pH 0 it is fully hydrolyzed:
As pH rises above 0 the above yellow hydrolyzed species form and as it rises above 2–3, reddish-brown hydrous iron(III) oxide precipitates out of solution. Although Fe has a d configuration, its absorption spectrum is not like that of Mn with its weak, spin-forbidden d–d bands, because Fe has higher positive charge and is more polarizing, lowering the energy of its ligand-to-metal charge transfer absorptions. Thus, all the above complexes are rather strongly colored, with the single exception of the hexaquo ion – and even that has a spectrum dominated by charge transfer in the near ultraviolet region. On the other hand, the pale green iron(II) hexaquo ion [Fe(H2O)6] does not undergo appreciable hydrolysis. Carbon dioxide is not evolved when carbonate anions are added, which instead results in white iron(II) carbonate being precipitated out. In excess carbon dioxide this forms the slightly soluble bicarbonate, which occurs commonly in groundwater, but it oxidises quickly in air to form iron(III) oxide that accounts for the brown deposits present in a sizeable number of streams.
Due to its electronic structure, iron has a very large coordination and organometallic chemistry.
Many coordination compounds of iron are known. A typical six-coordinate anion is hexachloroferrate(III), [FeCl6], found in the mixed salt tetrakis(methylammonium) hexachloroferrate(III) chloride. Complexes with multiple bidentate ligands have geometric isomers. For example, the trans-chlorohydridobis(bis-1,2-(diphenylphosphino)ethane)iron(II) complex is used as a starting material for compounds with the Fe(dppe)2 moiety. The ferrioxalate ion with three oxalate ligands (shown at right) displays helical chirality with its two non-superposable geometries labelled Λ (lambda) for the left-handed screw axis and Δ (delta) for the right-handed screw axis, in line with IUPAC conventions. Potassium ferrioxalate is used in chemical actinometry and along with its sodium salt undergoes photoreduction applied in old-style photographic processes. The dihydrate of iron(II) oxalate has a polymeric structure with co-planar oxalate ions bridging between iron centres with the water of crystallisation located forming the caps of each octahedron, as illustrated below.
Iron(III) complexes are quite similar to those of chromium(III) with the exception of iron(III)'s preference for O-donor instead of N-donor ligands. The latter tend to be rather more unstable than iron(II) complexes and often dissociate in water. Many Fe–O complexes show intense colors and are used as tests for phenols or enols. For example, in the ferric chloride test, used to determine the presence of phenols, iron(III) chloride reacts with a phenol to form a deep violet complex:
Among the halide and pseudohalide complexes, fluoro complexes of iron(III) are the most stable, with the colorless [FeF5(H2O)] being the most stable in aqueous solution. Chloro complexes are less stable and favor tetrahedral coordination as in [FeCl4]; [FeBr4] and [FeI4] are reduced easily to iron(II). Thiocyanate is a common test for the presence of iron(III) as it forms the blood-red [Fe(SCN)(H2O)5]. Like manganese(II), most iron(III) complexes are high-spin, the exceptions being those with ligands that are high in the spectrochemical series such as cyanide. An example of a low-spin iron(III) complex is [Fe(CN)6]. Iron shows a great variety of electronic spin states, including every possible spin quantum number value for a d-block element from 0 (diamagnetic) to 5⁄2 (5 unpaired electrons). This value is always half the number of unpaired electrons. Complexes with zero to two unpaired electrons are considered low-spin and those with four or five are considered high-spin.
Iron(II) complexes are less stable than iron(III) complexes but the preference for O-donor ligands is less marked, so that for example [Fe(NH3)6] is known while [Fe(NH3)6] is not. They have a tendency to be oxidized to iron(III) but this can be moderated by low pH and the specific ligands used.
Organoiron chemistry is the study of organometallic compounds of iron, where carbon atoms are covalently bound to the metal atom. They are many and varied, including cyanide complexes, carbonyl complexes, sandwich and half-sandwich compounds.
Prussian blue or "ferric ferrocyanide", Fe4[Fe(CN)6]3, is an old and well-known iron-cyanide complex, extensively used as pigment and in several other applications. Its formation can be used as a simple wet chemistry test to distinguish between aqueous solutions of Fe and Fe as they react (respectively) with potassium ferricyanide and potassium ferrocyanide to form Prussian blue.
Another old example of an organoiron compound is iron pentacarbonyl, Fe(CO)5, in which a neutral iron atom is bound to the carbon atoms of five carbon monoxide molecules. The compound can be used to make carbonyl iron powder, a highly reactive form of metallic iron. Thermolysis of iron pentacarbonyl gives triiron dodecacarbonyl, Fe3(CO)12, a complex with a cluster of three iron atoms at its core. Collman's reagent, disodium tetracarbonylferrate, is a useful reagent for organic chemistry; it contains iron in the −2 oxidation state. Cyclopentadienyliron dicarbonyl dimer contains iron in the rare +1 oxidation state.
A landmark in this field was the discovery in 1951 of the remarkably stable sandwich compound ferrocene Fe(C5H5)2, by Pauson and Kealy and independently by Miller and colleagues, whose surprising molecular structure was determined only a year later by Woodward and Wilkinson and Fischer. Ferrocene is still one of the most important tools and models in this class.
Iron-centered organometallic species are used as catalysts. The Knölker complex, for example, is a transfer hydrogenation catalyst for ketones.
The iron compounds produced on the largest scale in industry are iron(II) sulfate (FeSO4·7H2O) and iron(III) chloride (FeCl3). The former is one of the most readily available sources of iron(II), but is less stable to aerial oxidation than Mohr's salt ((NH4)2Fe(SO4)2·6H2O). Iron(II) compounds tend to be oxidized to iron(III) compounds in the air.
Iron is one of the elements undoubtedly known to the ancient world. It has been worked, or wrought, for millennia. However, iron artefacts of great age are much rarer than objects made of gold or silver due to the ease with which iron corrodes. The technology developed slowly, and even after the discovery of smelting it took many centuries for iron to replace bronze as the metal of choice for tools and weapons.
Beads made from meteoric iron in 3500 BC or earlier were found in Gerzeh, Egypt by G.A. Wainwright. The beads contain 7.5% nickel, which is a signature of meteoric origin since iron found in the Earth's crust generally has only minuscule nickel impurities.
Meteoric iron was highly regarded due to its origin in the heavens and was often used to forge weapons and tools. For example, a dagger made of meteoric iron was found in the tomb of Tutankhamun, containing similar proportions of iron, cobalt, and nickel to a meteorite discovered in the area, deposited by an ancient meteor shower. Items that were likely made of iron by Egyptians date from 3000 to 2500 BC.
Meteoritic iron is comparably soft and ductile and easily cold forged but may get brittle when heated because of the nickel content.
The first iron production started in the Middle Bronze Age, but it took several centuries before iron displaced bronze. Samples of smelted iron from Asmar, Mesopotamia and Tall Chagar Bazaar in northern Syria were made sometime between 3000 and 2700 BC. The Hittites established an empire in north-central Anatolia around 1600 BC. They appear to be the first to understand the production of iron from its ores and regard it highly in their society. The Hittites began to smelt iron between 1500 and 1200 BC and the practice spread to the rest of the Near East after their empire fell in 1180 BC. The subsequent period is called the Iron Age.
Artifacts of smelted iron are found in India dating from 1800 to 1200 BC, and in the Levant from about 1500 BC (suggesting smelting in Anatolia or the Caucasus). Alleged references (compare history of metallurgy in South Asia) to iron in the Indian Vedas have been used for claims of a very early usage of iron in India respectively to date the texts as such. The rigveda term ayas (metal) refers to copper, while iron which is called as śyāma ayas, literally "black copper", first is mentioned in the post-rigvedic Atharvaveda.
Some archaeological evidence suggests iron was smelted in Zimbabwe and southeast Africa as early as the eighth century BC. Iron working was introduced to Greece in the late 11th century BC, from which it spread quickly throughout Europe.
The spread of ironworking in Central and Western Europe is associated with Celtic expansion. According to Pliny the Elder, iron use was common in the Roman era. In the lands of what is now considered China, iron appears approximately 700–500 BC. Iron smelting may have been introduced into China through Central Asia. The earliest evidence of the use of a blast furnace in China dates to the 1st century AD, and cupola furnaces were used as early as the Warring States period (403–221 BC). Usage of the blast and cupola furnace remained widespread during the Tang and Song dynasties.
During the Industrial Revolution in Britain, Henry Cort began refining iron from pig iron to wrought iron (or bar iron) using innovative production systems. In 1783 he patented the puddling process for refining iron ore. It was later improved by others, including Joseph Hall.
Cast iron was first produced in China during 5th century BC, but was hardly in Europe until the medieval period. The earliest cast iron artifacts were discovered by archaeologists in what is now modern Luhe County, Jiangsu in China. Cast iron was used in ancient China for warfare, agriculture, and architecture. During the medieval period, means were found in Europe of producing wrought iron from cast iron (in this context known as pig iron) using finery forges. For all these processes, charcoal was required as fuel.
Medieval blast furnaces were about 10 feet (3.0 m) tall and made of fireproof brick; forced air was usually provided by hand-operated bellows. Modern blast furnaces have grown much bigger, with hearths fourteen meters in diameter that allow them to produce thousands of tons of iron each day, but essentially operate in much the same way as they did during medieval times.
In 1709, Abraham Darby I established a coke-fired blast furnace to produce cast iron, replacing charcoal, although continuing to use blast furnaces. The ensuing availability of inexpensive iron was one of the factors leading to the Industrial Revolution. Toward the end of the 18th century, cast iron began to replace wrought iron for certain purposes, because it was cheaper. Carbon content in iron was not implicated as the reason for the differences in properties of wrought iron, cast iron, and steel until the 18th century.
Since iron was becoming cheaper and more plentiful, it also became a major structural material following the building of the innovative first iron bridge in 1778. This bridge still stands today as a monument to the role iron played in the Industrial Revolution. Following this, iron was used in rails, boats, ships, aqueducts, and buildings, as well as in iron cylinders in steam engines. Railways have been central to the formation of modernity and ideas of progress and various languages refer to railways as iron road (e.g. French chemin de fer, German Eisenbahn, Turkish demiryolu, Russian железная дорога, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean 鐵道, Vietnamese đường sắt).
Steel (with smaller carbon content than pig iron but more than wrought iron) was first produced in antiquity by using a bloomery. Blacksmiths in Luristan in western Persia were making good steel by 1000 BC. Then improved versions, Wootz steel by India and Damascus steel were developed around 300 BC and AD 500 respectively. These methods were specialized, and so steel did not become a major commodity until the 1850s.
New methods of producing it by carburizing bars of iron in the cementation process were devised in the 17th century. In the Industrial Revolution, new methods of producing bar iron without charcoal were devised and these were later applied to produce steel. In the late 1850s, Henry Bessemer invented a new steelmaking process, involving blowing air through molten pig iron, to produce mild steel. This made steel much more economical, thereby leading to wrought iron no longer being produced in large quantities.
In 1774, Antoine Lavoisier used the reaction of water steam with metallic iron inside an incandescent iron tube to produce hydrogen in his experiments leading to the demonstration of the conservation of mass, which was instrumental in changing chemistry from a qualitative science to a quantitative one.
Iron plays a certain role in mythology and has found various usage as a metaphor and in folklore. The Greek poet Hesiod's Works and Days (lines 109–201) lists different ages of man named after metals like gold, silver, bronze and iron to account for successive ages of humanity. The Iron Age was closely related with Rome, and in Ovid's Metamorphoses
The Virtues, in despair, quit the earth; and the depravity of man becomes universal and complete. Hard steel succeeded then.
An example of the importance of iron's symbolic role may be found in the German Campaign of 1813. Frederick William III commissioned then the first Iron Cross as military decoration. Berlin iron jewellery reached its peak production between 1813 and 1815, when the Prussian royal family urged citizens to donate gold and silver jewellery for military funding. The inscription Ich gab Gold für Eisen (I gave gold for iron) was used as well in later war efforts.
For a few limited purposes when it is needed, pure iron is produced in the laboratory in small quantities by reducing the pure oxide or hydroxide with hydrogen, or forming iron pentacarbonyl and heating it to 250 °C so that it decomposes to form pure iron powder. Another method is electrolysis of ferrous chloride onto an iron cathode.
Nowadays, the industrial production of iron or steel consists of two main stages. In the first stage, iron ore is reduced with coke in a blast furnace, and the molten metal is separated from gross impurities such as silicate minerals. This stage yields an alloy—pig iron—that contains relatively large amounts of carbon. In the second stage, the amount of carbon in the pig iron is lowered by oxidation to yield wrought iron, steel, or cast iron. Other metals can be added at this stage to form alloy steels.
The blast furnace is loaded with iron ores, usually hematite Fe2O3 or magnetite Fe3O4, along with coke (coal that has been separately baked to remove volatile components) and flux (limestone or dolomite). "Blasts" of air pre-heated to 900 °C (sometimes with oxygen enrichment) is blown through the mixture, in sufficient amount to turn the carbon into carbon monoxide:
This reaction raises the temperature to about 2000 °C. The carbon monoxide reduces the iron ore to metallic iron
Some iron in the high-temperature lower region of the furnace reacts directly with the coke:
The flux removes silicaceous minerals in the ore, which would otherwise clog the furnace: The heat of the furnace decomposes the carbonates to calcium oxide, which reacts with any excess silica to form a slag composed of calcium silicate CaSiO3 or other products. At the furnace's temperature, the metal and the slag are both molten. They collect at the bottom as two immiscible liquid layers (with the slag on top), that are then easily separated. The slag can be used as a material in road construction or to improve mineral-poor soils for agriculture.
Steelmaking thus remains one of the largest industrial contributors of CO2 emissions in the world.
The pig iron produced by the blast furnace process contains up to 4–5% carbon (by mass), with small amounts of other impurities like sulfur, magnesium, phosphorus, and manganese. This high level of carbon makes it relatively weak and brittle. Reducing the amount of carbon to 0.002–2.1% produces steel, which may be up to 1000 times harder than pure iron. A great variety of steel articles can then be made by cold working, hot rolling, forging, machining, etc. Removing the impurities from pig iron, but leaving 2–4% carbon, results in cast iron, which is cast by foundries into articles such as stoves, pipes, radiators, lamp-posts, and rails.
Steel products often undergo various heat treatments after they are forged to shape. Annealing consists of heating them to 700–800 °C for several hours and then gradual cooling. It makes the steel softer and more workable.
Owing to environmental concerns, alternative methods of processing iron have been developed. "Direct iron reduction" reduces iron ore to a ferrous lump called "sponge" iron or "direct" iron that is suitable for steelmaking. Two main reactions comprise the direct reduction process:
Natural gas is partially oxidized (with heat and a catalyst):
Iron ore is then treated with these gases in a furnace, producing solid sponge iron:
Silica is removed by adding a limestone flux as described above.
Ignition of a mixture of aluminium powder and iron oxide yields metallic iron via the thermite reaction:
Alternatively pig iron may be made into steel (with up to about 2% carbon) or wrought iron (commercially pure iron). Various processes have been used for this, including finery forges, puddling furnaces, Bessemer converters, open hearth furnaces, basic oxygen furnaces, and electric arc furnaces. In all cases, the objective is to oxidize some or all of the carbon, together with other impurities. On the other hand, other metals may be added to make alloy steels.
Molten oxide electrolysis uses an alloy of chromium, iron and other metals that does not react with oxygen and a liquid iron cathode while the electrolyte is a mixture of molten metal oxides into which iron ore is dissolved. The current keeps the electrolyte molten, and reduces the iron oxide. In addition to pure liquid iron, put oxygen is also produced, which can be sold to offset part of the cost. Production cell size is variable and can be much smaller than conventional furnaces. The only cardon dioxide emissions come from the electricity used to heat and reduce the metal.
Iron is the most widely used of all the metals, accounting for over 90% of worldwide metal production. Its low cost and high strength often make it the material of choice to withstand stress or transmit forces, such as the construction of machinery and machine tools, rails, automobiles, ship hulls, concrete reinforcing bars, and the load-carrying framework of buildings. Since pure iron is quite soft, it is most commonly combined with alloying elements to make steel.
The mechanical properties of iron and its alloys are extremely relevant to their structural applications. Those properties can be evaluated in various ways, including the Brinell test, the Rockwell test and the Vickers hardness test.
The properties of pure iron are often used to calibrate measurements or to compare tests. However, the mechanical properties of iron are significantly affected by the sample's purity: pure, single crystals of iron are actually softer than aluminium, and the purest industrially produced iron (99.99%) has a hardness of 20–30 Brinell. The pure iron (99.9%～99.999%), especially called electrolytic iron, is industrially produced by electrolytic refining.
An increase in the carbon content will cause a significant increase in the hardness and tensile strength of iron. Maximum hardness of 65 Rc is achieved with a 0.6% carbon content, although the alloy has low tensile strength. Because of the softness of iron, it is much easier to work with than its heavier congeners ruthenium and osmium.
α-Iron is a fairly soft metal that can dissolve only a small concentration of carbon (no more than 0.021% by mass at 910 °C). Austenite (γ-iron) is similarly soft and metallic but can dissolve considerably more carbon (as much as 2.04% by mass at 1146 °C). This form of iron is used in the type of stainless steel used for making cutlery, and hospital and food-service equipment.
Commercially available iron is classified based on purity and the abundance of additives. Pig iron has 3.5–4.5% carbon and contains varying amounts of contaminants such as sulfur, silicon and phosphorus. Pig iron is not a saleable product, but rather an intermediate step in the production of cast iron and steel. The reduction of contaminants in pig iron that negatively affect material properties, such as sulfur and phosphorus, yields cast iron containing 2–4% carbon, 1–6% silicon, and small amounts of manganese. Pig iron has a melting point in the range of 1420–1470 K, which is lower than either of its two main components, and makes it the first product to be melted when carbon and iron are heated together. Its mechanical properties vary greatly and depend on the form the carbon takes in the alloy.
"White" cast irons contain their carbon in the form of cementite, or iron carbide (Fe3C). This hard, brittle compound dominates the mechanical properties of white cast irons, rendering them hard, but unresistant to shock. The broken surface of a white cast iron is full of fine facets of the broken iron carbide, a very pale, silvery, shiny material, hence the appellation. Cooling a mixture of iron with 0.8% carbon slowly below 723 °C to room temperature results in separate, alternating layers of cementite and α-iron, which is soft and malleable and is called pearlite for its appearance. Rapid cooling, on the other hand, does not allow time for this separation and creates hard and brittle martensite. The steel can then be tempered by reheating to a temperature in between, changing the proportions of pearlite and martensite. The end product below 0.8% carbon content is a pearlite-αFe mixture, and that above 0.8% carbon content is a pearlite-cementite mixture.
In gray iron the carbon exists as separate, fine flakes of graphite, and also renders the material brittle due to the sharp edged flakes of graphite that produce stress concentration sites within the material. A newer variant of gray iron, referred to as ductile iron, is specially treated with trace amounts of magnesium to alter the shape of graphite to spheroids, or nodules, reducing the stress concentrations and vastly increasing the toughness and strength of the material.
Wrought iron contains less than 0.25% carbon but large amounts of slag that give it a fibrous characteristic. It is a tough, malleable product, but not as fusible as pig iron. If honed to an edge, it loses it quickly. Wrought iron is characterized by the presence of fine fibers of slag entrapped within the metal. Wrought iron is more corrosion resistant than steel. It has been almost completely replaced by mild steel for traditional "wrought iron" products and blacksmithing.
Mild steel corrodes more readily than wrought iron, but is cheaper and more widely available. Carbon steel contains 2.0% carbon or less, with small amounts of manganese, sulfur, phosphorus, and silicon. Alloy steels contain varying amounts of carbon as well as other metals, such as chromium, vanadium, molybdenum, nickel, tungsten, etc. Their alloy content raises their cost, and so they are usually only employed for specialist uses. One common alloy steel, though, is stainless steel. Recent developments in ferrous metallurgy have produced a growing range of microalloyed steels, also termed 'HSLA' or high-strength, low alloy steels, containing tiny additions to produce high strengths and often spectacular toughness at minimal cost.
Alloys with high purity elemental makeups (such as alloys of electrolytic iron) have specifically enhanced properties such as ductility, tensile strength, toughness, fatigue strength, heat resistance, and corrosion resistance.
Apart from traditional applications, iron is also used for protection from ionizing radiation. Although it is lighter than another traditional protection material, lead, it is much stronger mechanically. The attenuation of radiation as a function of energy is shown in the graph.
The main disadvantage of iron and steel is that pure iron, and most of its alloys, suffer badly from rust if not protected in some way, a cost amounting to over 1% of the world's economy. Painting, galvanization, passivation, plastic coating and bluing are all used to protect iron from rust by excluding water and oxygen or by cathodic protection. The mechanism of the rusting of iron is as follows:
The electrolyte is usually iron(II) sulfate in urban areas (formed when atmospheric sulfur dioxide attacks iron), and salt particles in the atmosphere in seaside areas.
Because Fe is inexpensive and nontoxic, much effort has been devoted to the development of Fe-based catalysts and reagents. Iron is however less common as a catalyst in commercial processes than more expensive metals. In biology, Fe-containing enzymes are pervasive.
Iron catalysts are traditionally used in the Haber–Bosch process for the production of ammonia and the Fischer–Tropsch process for conversion of carbon monoxide to hydrocarbons for fuels and lubricants. Powdered iron in an acidic medium is used in the Bechamp reduction, the conversion of nitrobenzene to aniline.
Iron(III) oxide mixed with aluminium powder can be ignited to create a thermite reaction, used in welding large iron parts (like rails) and purifying ores. Iron(III) oxide and oxyhydroxide are used as reddish and ocher pigments.
Iron(III) chloride finds use in water purification and sewage treatment, in the dyeing of cloth, as a coloring agent in paints, as an additive in animal feed, and as an etchant for copper in the manufacture of printed circuit boards. It can also be dissolved in alcohol to form tincture of iron, which is used as a medicine to stop bleeding in canaries.
Iron(II) sulfate is used as a precursor to other iron compounds. It is also used to reduce chromate in cement. It is used to fortify foods and treat iron deficiency anemia. Iron(III) sulfate is used in settling minute sewage particles in tank water. Iron(II) chloride is used as a reducing flocculating agent, in the formation of iron complexes and magnetic iron oxides, and as a reducing agent in organic synthesis.
Sodium nitroprusside is a drug used as a vasodilator. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.
Iron is required for life. The iron–sulfur clusters are pervasive and include nitrogenase, the enzymes responsible for biological nitrogen fixation. Iron-containing proteins participate in transport, storage and use of oxygen. Iron proteins are involved in electron transfer.
Examples of iron-containing proteins in higher organisms include hemoglobin, cytochrome (see high-valent iron), and catalase. The average adult human contains about 0.005% body weight of iron, or about four grams, of which three quarters is in hemoglobin – a level that remains constant despite only about one milligram of iron being absorbed each day, because the human body recycles its hemoglobin for the iron content.
Microbial growth may be assisted by oxidation of iron(II) or by reduction of iron (III).
Iron acquisition poses a problem for aerobic organisms because ferric iron is poorly soluble near neutral pH. Thus, these organisms have developed means to absorb iron as complexes, sometimes taking up ferrous iron before oxidising it back to ferric iron. In particular, bacteria have evolved very high-affinity sequestering agents called siderophores.
After uptake in human cells, iron storage is precisely regulated. A major component of this regulation is the protein transferrin, which binds iron ions absorbed from the duodenum and carries it in the blood to cells. Transferrin contains Fe in the middle of a distorted octahedron, bonded to one nitrogen, three oxygens and a chelating carbonate anion that traps the Fe ion: it has such a high stability constant that it is very effective at taking up Fe ions even from the most stable complexes. At the bone marrow, transferrin is reduced from Fe and Fe and stored as ferritin to be incorporated into hemoglobin.
The most commonly known and studied bioinorganic iron compounds (biological iron molecules) are the heme proteins: examples are hemoglobin, myoglobin, and cytochrome P450. These compounds participate in transporting gases, building enzymes, and transferring electrons. Metalloproteins are a group of proteins with metal ion cofactors. Some examples of iron metalloproteins are ferritin and rubredoxin. Many enzymes vital to life contain iron, such as catalase, lipoxygenases, and IRE-BP.
Hemoglobin is an oxygen carrier that occurs in red blood cells and contributes their color, transporting oxygen in the arteries from the lungs to the muscles where it is transferred to myoglobin, which stores it until it is needed for the metabolic oxidation of glucose, generating energy. Here the hemoglobin binds to carbon dioxide, produced when glucose is oxidized, which is transported through the veins by hemoglobin (predominantly as bicarbonate anions) back to the lungs where it is exhaled. In hemoglobin, the iron is in one of four heme groups and has six possible coordination sites; four are occupied by nitrogen atoms in a porphyrin ring, the fifth by an imidazole nitrogen in a histidine residue of one of the protein chains attached to the heme group, and the sixth is reserved for the oxygen molecule it can reversibly bind to. When hemoglobin is not attached to oxygen (and is then called deoxyhemoglobin), the Fe ion at the center of the heme group (in the hydrophobic protein interior) is in a high-spin configuration. It is thus too large to fit inside the porphyrin ring, which bends instead into a dome with the Fe ion about 55 picometers above it. In this configuration, the sixth coordination site reserved for the oxygen is blocked by another histidine residue.
When deoxyhemoglobin picks up an oxygen molecule, this histidine residue moves away and returns once the oxygen is securely attached to form a hydrogen bond with it. This results in the Fe ion switching to a low-spin configuration, resulting in a 20% decrease in ionic radius so that now it can fit into the porphyrin ring, which becomes planar. (Additionally, this hydrogen bonding results in the tilting of the oxygen molecule, resulting in a Fe–O–O bond angle of around 120° that avoids the formation of Fe–O–Fe or Fe–O2–Fe bridges that would lead to electron transfer, the oxidation of Fe to Fe, and the destruction of hemoglobin.) This results in a movement of all the protein chains that leads to the other subunits of hemoglobin changing shape to a form with larger oxygen affinity. Thus, when deoxyhemoglobin takes up oxygen, its affinity for more oxygen increases, and vice versa. Myoglobin, on the other hand, contains only one heme group and hence this cooperative effect cannot occur. Thus, while hemoglobin is almost saturated with oxygen in the high partial pressures of oxygen found in the lungs, its affinity for oxygen is much lower than that of myoglobin, which oxygenates even at low partial pressures of oxygen found in muscle tissue. As described by the Bohr effect (named after Christian Bohr, the father of Niels Bohr), the oxygen affinity of hemoglobin diminishes in the presence of carbon dioxide.
Carbon monoxide and phosphorus trifluoride are poisonous to humans because they bind to hemoglobin similarly to oxygen, but with much more strength, so that oxygen can no longer be transported throughout the body. Hemoglobin bound to carbon monoxide is known as carboxyhemoglobin. This effect also plays a minor role in the toxicity of cyanide, but there the major effect is by far its interference with the proper functioning of the electron transport protein cytochrome a. The cytochrome proteins also involve heme groups and are involved in the metabolic oxidation of glucose by oxygen. The sixth coordination site is then occupied by either another imidazole nitrogen or a methionine sulfur, so that these proteins are largely inert to oxygen – with the exception of cytochrome a, which bonds directly to oxygen and thus is very easily poisoned by cyanide. Here, the electron transfer takes place as the iron remains in low spin but changes between the +2 and +3 oxidation states. Since the reduction potential of each step is slightly greater than the previous one, the energy is released step-by-step and can thus be stored in adenosine triphosphate. Cytochrome a is slightly distinct, as it occurs at the mitochondrial membrane, binds directly to oxygen, and transports protons as well as electrons, as follows:
Although the heme proteins are the most important class of iron-containing proteins, the iron–sulfur proteins are also very important, being involved in electron transfer, which is possible since iron can exist stably in either the +2 or +3 oxidation states. These have one, two, four, or eight iron atoms that are each approximately tetrahedrally coordinated to four sulfur atoms; because of this tetrahedral coordination, they always have high-spin iron. The simplest of such compounds is rubredoxin, which has only one iron atom coordinated to four sulfur atoms from cysteine residues in the surrounding peptide chains. Another important class of iron–sulfur proteins is the ferredoxins, which have multiple iron atoms. Transferrin does not belong to either of these classes.
The ability of sea mussels to maintain their grip on rocks in the ocean is facilitated by their use of organometallic iron-based bonds in their protein-rich cuticles. Based on synthetic replicas, the presence of iron in these structures increased elastic modulus 770 times, tensile strength 58 times, and toughness 92 times. The amount of stress required to permanently damage them increased 76 times.
Iron is pervasive, but particularly rich sources of dietary iron include red meat, oysters, beans, poultry, fish, leaf vegetables, watercress, tofu, and blackstrap molasses. Bread and breakfast cereals are sometimes specifically fortified with iron.
Iron provided by dietary supplements is often found as iron(II) fumarate, although iron(II) sulfate is cheaper and is absorbed equally well. Elemental iron, or reduced iron, despite being absorbed at only one-third to two-thirds the efficiency (relative to iron sulfate), is often added to foods such as breakfast cereals or enriched wheat flour. Iron is most available to the body when chelated to amino acids and is also available for use as a common iron supplement. Glycine, the least expensive amino acid, is most often used to produce iron glycinate supplements.
The U.S. Institute of Medicine (IOM) updated Estimated Average Requirements (EARs) and Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDAs) for iron in 2001. The current EAR for iron for women ages 14–18 is 7.9 mg/day, 8.1 for ages 19–50 and 5.0 thereafter (post menopause). For men the EAR is 6.0 mg/day for ages 19 and up. The RDA is 15.0 mg/day for women ages 15–18, 18.0 for 19–50 and 8.0 thereafter. For men, 8.0 mg/day for ages 19 and up. RDAs are higher than EARs so as to identify amounts that will cover people with higher than average requirements. RDA for pregnancy is 27 mg/day and, for lactation, 9 mg/day. For children ages 1–3 years 7 mg/day, 10 for ages 4–8 and 8 for ages 9–13. As for safety, the IOM also sets Tolerable upper intake levels (ULs) for vitamins and minerals when evidence is sufficient. In the case of iron the UL is set at 45 mg/day. Collectively the EARs, RDAs and ULs are referred to as Dietary Reference Intakes.
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) refers to the collective set of information as Dietary Reference Values, with Population Reference Intake (PRI) instead of RDA, and Average Requirement instead of EAR. AI and UL defined the same as in United States. For women the PRI is 13 mg/day ages 15–17 years, 16 mg/day for women ages 18 and up who are premenopausal and 11 mg/day postmenopausal. For pregnancy and lactation, 16 mg/day. For men the PRI is 11 mg/day ages 15 and older. For children ages 1 to 14 the PRI increases from 7 to 11 mg/day. The PRIs are higher than the U.S. RDAs, with the exception of pregnancy. The EFSA reviewed the same safety question did not establish a UL.
Infants may require iron supplements if they are bottle-fed cow's milk. Frequent blood donors are at risk of low iron levels and are often advised to supplement their iron intake.
For U.S. food and dietary supplement labeling purposes the amount in a serving is expressed as a percent of Daily Value (%DV). For iron labeling purposes 100% of the Daily Value was 18 mg, and as of May 27, 2016 remained unchanged at 18 mg. A table of the old and new adult daily values is provided at Reference Daily Intake.
Iron deficiency is the most common nutritional deficiency in the world. When loss of iron is not adequately compensated by adequate dietary iron intake, a state of latent iron deficiency occurs, which over time leads to iron-deficiency anemia if left untreated, which is characterised by an insufficient number of red blood cells and an insufficient amount of hemoglobin. Children, pre-menopausal women (women of child-bearing age), and people with poor diet are most susceptible to the disease. Most cases of iron-deficiency anemia are mild, but if not treated can cause problems like fast or irregular heartbeat, complications during pregnancy, and delayed growth in infants and children.
The brain is resistant to acute iron deficiency due to the slow transport of iron through the blood brain barrier. Acute fluctuations in iron status (marked by serum ferritin levels) do not reflect brain iron status, but prolonged nutritional iron deficiency is suspected to reduce brain iron concentrations over time. In the brain, iron plays a role in oxygen transport, myelin synthesis, mitochondrial respiration, and as a cofactor for neurotransmitter synthesis and metabolism. Animal models of nutritional iron deficiency report biomolecular changes resembling those seen in Parkinson's and Huntington's disease. However, age-related accumulation of iron in the brain has also been linked to the development of Parkinson's.
Iron uptake is tightly regulated by the human body, which has no regulated physiological means of excreting iron. Only small amounts of iron are lost daily due to mucosal and skin epithelial cell sloughing, so control of iron levels is primarily accomplished by regulating uptake. Regulation of iron uptake is impaired in some people as a result of a genetic defect that maps to the HLA-H gene region on chromosome 6 and leads to abnormally low levels of hepcidin, a key regulator of the entry of iron into the circulatory system in mammals. In these people, excessive iron intake can result in iron overload disorders, known medically as hemochromatosis. Many people have an undiagnosed genetic susceptibility to iron overload, and are not aware of a family history of the problem. For this reason, people should not take iron supplements unless they suffer from iron deficiency and have consulted a doctor. Hemochromatosis is estimated to be the cause of 0.3 to 0.8% of all metabolic diseases of Caucasians.
Overdoses of ingested iron can cause excessive levels of free iron in the blood. High blood levels of free ferrous iron react with peroxides to produce highly reactive free radicals that can damage DNA, proteins, lipids, and other cellular components. Iron toxicity occurs when the cell contains free iron, which generally occurs when iron levels exceed the availability of transferrin to bind the iron. Damage to the cells of the gastrointestinal tract can also prevent them from regulating iron absorption, leading to further increases in blood levels. Iron typically damages cells in the heart, liver and elsewhere, causing adverse effects that include coma, metabolic acidosis, shock, liver failure, coagulopathy, long-term organ damage, and even death. Humans experience iron toxicity when the iron exceeds 20 milligrams for every kilogram of body mass; 60 milligrams per kilogram is considered a lethal dose. Overconsumption of iron, often the result of children eating large quantities of ferrous sulfate tablets intended for adult consumption, is one of the most common toxicological causes of death in children under six. The Dietary Reference Intake (DRI) sets the Tolerable Upper Intake Level (UL) for adults at 45 mg/day. For children under fourteen years old the UL is 40 mg/day.
The medical management of iron toxicity is complicated, and can include use of a specific chelating agent called deferoxamine to bind and expel excess iron from the body.
Some research has suggested that low thalamic iron levels may play a role in the pathophysiology of ADHD. Some researchers have found that iron supplementation can be effective especially in the inattentive subtype of the disorder. One study also showed that iron may be able to decrease the risk of cardiovascular events during treatment with ADHD drugs.
Some researchers in the 2000s suggested a link between low levels of iron in the blood and ADHD. A 2012 study found no such correlation.
The role of iron in cancer defense can be described as a "double-edged sword" because of its pervasive presence in non-pathological processes. People having chemotherapy may develop iron deficiency and anemia, for which intravenous iron therapy is used to restore iron levels. Iron overload, which may occur from high consumption of red meat, may initiate tumor growth and increase susceptibility to cancer onset, particularly for colorectal cancer.
Iron plays an essential role in marine systems and can act as a limiting nutrient for planktonic activity. Because of this, too much of a decrease in iron may lead to a decrease in growth rates in phytoplanktonic organisms such as diatoms. Iron can also be oxidized by marine microbes under conditions that are high in iron and low in oxygen.
Iron can enter marine systems through adjoining rivers and directly from the atmosphere. Once iron enters the ocean, it can be distributed throughout the water column through ocean mixing and through recycling on the cellular level. In the arctic, sea ice plays a major role in the store and distribution of iron in the ocean, depleting oceanic iron as it freezes in the winter and releasing it back into the water when thawing occurs in the summer. The iron cycle can fluctuate the forms of iron from aqueous to particle forms altering the availability of iron to primary producers. Increased light and warmth increases the amount of iron that is in forms that are usable by primary producers. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Iron is a chemical element; it has symbol Fe (from Latin ferrum 'iron') and atomic number 26. It is a metal that belongs to the first transition series and group 8 of the periodic table. It is, by mass, the most common element on Earth, just ahead of oxygen (32.1% and 30.1%, respectively), forming much of Earth's outer and inner core. It is the fourth most common element in the Earth's crust, being mainly deposited by meteorites in its metallic state, with its ores also being found there.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Extracting usable metal from iron ores requires kilns or furnaces capable of reaching 1,500 °C (2,730 °F) or higher, about 500 °C (932 °F) higher than that required to smelt copper. Humans started to master that process in Eurasia during the 2nd millennium BCE and the use of iron tools and weapons began to displace copper alloys—in some regions, only around 1200 BCE. That event is considered the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. In the modern world, iron alloys, such as steel, stainless steel, cast iron and special steels, are by far the most common industrial metals, due to their mechanical properties and low cost. The iron and steel industry is thus very important economically, and iron is the cheapest metal, with a price of a few dollars per kilogram or pound.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Pristine and smooth pure iron surfaces are a mirror-like silvery-gray. Iron reacts readily with oxygen and water to produce brown-to-black hydrated iron oxides, commonly known as rust. Unlike the oxides of some other metals that form passivating layers, rust occupies more volume than the metal and thus flakes off, exposing more fresh surfaces for corrosion. High-purity irons (e.g. electrolytic iron) are more resistant to corrosion.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The body of an adult human contains about 4 grams (0.005% body weight) of iron, mostly in hemoglobin and myoglobin. These two proteins play essential roles in vertebrate metabolism, respectively oxygen transport by blood and oxygen storage in muscles. To maintain the necessary levels, human iron metabolism requires a minimum of iron in the diet. Iron is also the metal at the active site of many important redox enzymes dealing with cellular respiration and oxidation and reduction in plants and animals.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Chemically, the most common oxidation states of iron are iron(II) and iron(III). Iron shares many properties of other transition metals, including the other group 8 elements, ruthenium and osmium. Iron forms compounds in a wide range of oxidation states, −4 to +7. Iron also forms many coordination compounds; some of them, such as ferrocene, ferrioxalate, and Prussian blue have substantial industrial, medical, or research applications.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Most notably, Iron is the highest atomic number element that could be created in exothermic nucleosynthesis.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "At least four allotropes of iron (differing atom arrangements in the solid) are known, conventionally denoted α, γ, δ, and ε.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The first three forms are observed at ordinary pressures. As molten iron cools past its freezing point of 1538 °C, it crystallizes into its δ allotrope, which has a body-centered cubic (bcc) crystal structure. As it cools further to 1394 °C, it changes to its γ-iron allotrope, a face-centered cubic (fcc) crystal structure, or austenite. At 912 °C and below, the crystal structure again becomes the bcc α-iron allotrope.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The physical properties of iron at very high pressures and temperatures have also been studied extensively, because of their relevance to theories about the cores of the Earth and other planets. Above approximately 10 GPa and temperatures of a few hundred kelvin or less, α-iron changes into another hexagonal close-packed (hcp) structure, which is also known as ε-iron. The higher-temperature γ-phase also changes into ε-iron, but does so at higher pressure.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Some controversial experimental evidence exists for a stable β phase at pressures above 50 GPa and temperatures of at least 1500 K. It is supposed to have an orthorhombic or a double hcp structure. (Confusingly, the term \"β-iron\" is sometimes also used to refer to α-iron above its Curie point, when it changes from being ferromagnetic to paramagnetic, even though its crystal structure has not changed.)",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The inner core of the Earth is generally presumed to consist of an iron-nickel alloy with ε (or β) structure.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The melting and boiling points of iron, along with its enthalpy of atomization, are lower than those of the earlier 3d elements from scandium to chromium, showing the lessened contribution of the 3d electrons to metallic bonding as they are attracted more and more into the inert core by the nucleus; however, they are higher than the values for the previous element manganese because that element has a half-filled 3d sub-shell and consequently its d-electrons are not easily delocalized. This same trend appears for ruthenium but not osmium.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The melting point of iron is experimentally well defined for pressures less than 50 GPa. For greater pressures, published data (as of 2007) still varies by tens of gigapascals and over a thousand kelvin.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Below its Curie point of 770 °C (1,420 °F; 1,040 K), α-iron changes from paramagnetic to ferromagnetic: the spins of the two unpaired electrons in each atom generally align with the spins of its neighbors, creating an overall magnetic field. This happens because the orbitals of those two electrons (dz and dx −. y) do not point toward neighboring atoms in the lattice, and therefore are not involved in metallic bonding.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In the absence of an external source of magnetic field, the atoms get spontaneously partitioned into magnetic domains, about 10 micrometers across, such that the atoms in each domain have parallel spins, but some domains have other orientations. Thus a macroscopic piece of iron will have a nearly zero overall magnetic field.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Application of an external magnetic field causes the domains that are magnetized in the same general direction to grow at the expense of adjacent ones that point in other directions, reinforcing the external field. This effect is exploited in devices that need to channel magnetic fields to fulfill design function, such as electrical transformers, magnetic recording heads, and electric motors. Impurities, lattice defects, or grain and particle boundaries can \"pin\" the domains in the new positions, so that the effect persists even after the external field is removed – thus turning the iron object into a (permanent) magnet.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Similar behavior is exhibited by some iron compounds, such as the ferrites including the mineral magnetite, a crystalline form of the mixed iron(II,III) oxide Fe3O4 (although the atomic-scale mechanism, ferrimagnetism, is somewhat different). Pieces of magnetite with natural permanent magnetization (lodestones) provided the earliest compasses for navigation. Particles of magnetite were extensively used in magnetic recording media such as core memories, magnetic tapes, floppies, and disks, until they were replaced by cobalt-based materials.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Iron has four stable isotopes: Fe (5.845% of natural iron), Fe (91.754%), Fe (2.119%) and Fe (0.282%). Twenty-four artificial isotopes have also been created. Of these stable isotopes, only Fe has a nuclear spin (−1⁄2). The nuclide Fe theoretically can undergo double electron capture to Cr, but the process has never been observed and only a lower limit on the half-life of 3.1×10 years has been established.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Fe is an extinct radionuclide of long half-life (2.6 million years). It is not found on Earth, but its ultimate decay product is its granddaughter, the stable nuclide Ni. Much of the past work on isotopic composition of iron has focused on the nucleosynthesis of Fe through studies of meteorites and ore formation. In the last decade, advances in mass spectrometry have allowed the detection and quantification of minute, naturally occurring variations in the ratios of the stable isotopes of iron. Much of this work is driven by the Earth and planetary science communities, although applications to biological and industrial systems are emerging.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In phases of the meteorites Semarkona and Chervony Kut, a correlation between the concentration of Ni, the granddaughter of Fe, and the abundance of the stable iron isotopes provided evidence for the existence of Fe at the time of formation of the Solar System. Possibly the energy released by the decay of Fe, along with that released by Al, contributed to the remelting and differentiation of asteroids after their formation 4.6 billion years ago. The abundance of Ni present in extraterrestrial material may bring further insight into the origin and early history of the Solar System.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The most abundant iron isotope Fe is of particular interest to nuclear scientists because it represents the most common endpoint of nucleosynthesis. Since Ni (14 alpha particles) is easily produced from lighter nuclei in the alpha process in nuclear reactions in supernovae (see silicon burning process), it is the endpoint of fusion chains inside extremely massive stars, since addition of another alpha particle, resulting in Zn, requires a great deal more energy. This Ni, which has a half-life of about 6 days, is created in quantity in these stars, but soon decays by two successive positron emissions within supernova decay products in the supernova remnant gas cloud, first to radioactive Co, and then to stable Fe. As such, iron is the most abundant element in the core of red giants, and is the most abundant metal in iron meteorites and in the dense metal cores of planets such as Earth. It is also very common in the universe, relative to other stable metals of approximately the same atomic weight. Iron is the sixth most abundant element in the universe, and the most common refractory element.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Although a further tiny energy gain could be extracted by synthesizing Ni, which has a marginally higher binding energy than Fe, conditions in stars are unsuitable for this process. Element production in supernovas greatly favor iron over nickel, and in any case, Fe still has a lower mass per nucleon than Ni due to its higher fraction of lighter protons. Hence, elements heavier than iron require a supernova for their formation, involving rapid neutron capture by starting Fe nuclei.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In the far future of the universe, assuming that proton decay does not occur, cold fusion occurring via quantum tunnelling would cause the light nuclei in ordinary matter to fuse into Fe nuclei. Fission and alpha-particle emission would then make heavy nuclei decay into iron, converting all stellar-mass objects to cold spheres of pure iron.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Iron's abundance in rocky planets like Earth is due to its abundant production during the runaway fusion and explosion of type Ia supernovae, which scatters the iron into space.",
"title": "Origin and occurrence in nature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Metallic or native iron is rarely found on the surface of the Earth because it tends to oxidize. However, both the Earth's inner and outer core, which together account for 35% of the mass of the whole Earth, are believed to consist largely of an iron alloy, possibly with nickel. Electric currents in the liquid outer core are believed to be the origin of the Earth's magnetic field. The other terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, and Mars) as well as the Moon are believed to have a metallic core consisting mostly of iron. The M-type asteroids are also believed to be partly or mostly made of metallic iron alloy.",
"title": "Origin and occurrence in nature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The rare iron meteorites are the main form of natural metallic iron on the Earth's surface. Items made of cold-worked meteoritic iron have been found in various archaeological sites dating from a time when iron smelting had not yet been developed; and the Inuit in Greenland have been reported to use iron from the Cape York meteorite for tools and hunting weapons. About 1 in 20 meteorites consist of the unique iron-nickel minerals taenite (35–80% iron) and kamacite (90–95% iron). Native iron is also rarely found in basalts that have formed from magmas that have come into contact with carbon-rich sedimentary rocks, which have reduced the oxygen fugacity sufficiently for iron to crystallize. This is known as telluric iron and is described from a few localities, such as Disko Island in West Greenland, Yakutia in Russia and Bühl in Germany.",
"title": "Origin and occurrence in nature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Ferropericlase (Mg,Fe)O, a solid solution of periclase (MgO) and wüstite (FeO), makes up about 20% of the volume of the lower mantle of the Earth, which makes it the second most abundant mineral phase in that region after silicate perovskite (Mg,Fe)SiO3; it also is the major host for iron in the lower mantle. At the bottom of the transition zone of the mantle, the reaction γ-(Mg,Fe)2[SiO4] ↔ (Mg,Fe)[SiO3] + (Mg,Fe)O transforms γ-olivine into a mixture of silicate perovskite and ferropericlase and vice versa. In the literature, this mineral phase of the lower mantle is also often called magnesiowüstite. Silicate perovskite may form up to 93% of the lower mantle, and the magnesium iron form, (Mg,Fe)SiO3, is considered to be the most abundant mineral in the Earth, making up 38% of its volume.",
"title": "Origin and occurrence in nature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "While iron is the most abundant element on Earth, most of this iron is concentrated in the inner and outer cores. The fraction of iron that is in Earth's crust only amounts to about 5% of the overall mass of the crust and is thus only the fourth most abundant element in that layer (after oxygen, silicon, and aluminium).",
"title": "Origin and occurrence in nature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Most of the iron in the crust is combined with various other elements to form many iron minerals. An important class is the iron oxide minerals such as hematite (Fe2O3), magnetite (Fe3O4), and siderite (FeCO3), which are the major ores of iron. Many igneous rocks also contain the sulfide minerals pyrrhotite and pentlandite. During weathering, iron tends to leach from sulfide deposits as the sulfate and from silicate deposits as the bicarbonate. Both of these are oxidized in aqueous solution and precipitate in even mildly elevated pH as iron(III) oxide.",
"title": "Origin and occurrence in nature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Large deposits of iron are banded iron formations, a type of rock consisting of repeated thin layers of iron oxides alternating with bands of iron-poor shale and chert. The banded iron formations were laid down in the time between 3,700 million years ago and 1,800 million years ago.",
"title": "Origin and occurrence in nature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Materials containing finely ground iron(III) oxides or oxide-hydroxides, such as ochre, have been used as yellow, red, and brown pigments since pre-historical times. They contribute as well to the color of various rocks and clays, including entire geological formations like the Painted Hills in Oregon and the Buntsandstein (\"colored sandstone\", British Bunter). Through Eisensandstein (a jurassic 'iron sandstone', e.g. from Donzdorf in Germany) and Bath stone in the UK, iron compounds are responsible for the yellowish color of many historical buildings and sculptures. The proverbial red color of the surface of Mars is derived from an iron oxide-rich regolith.",
"title": "Origin and occurrence in nature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Significant amounts of iron occur in the iron sulfide mineral pyrite (FeS2), but it is difficult to extract iron from it and it is therefore not exploited. In fact, iron is so common that production generally focuses only on ores with very high quantities of it.",
"title": "Origin and occurrence in nature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "According to the International Resource Panel's Metal Stocks in Society report, the global stock of iron in use in society is 2,200 kg per capita. More-developed countries differ in this respect from less-developed countries (7,000–14,000 vs 2,000 kg per capita).",
"title": "Origin and occurrence in nature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Ocean science demonstrated the role of the iron in the ancient seas in both marine biota and climate.",
"title": "Origin and occurrence in nature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Iron shows the characteristic chemical properties of the transition metals, namely the ability to form variable oxidation states differing by steps of one and a very large coordination and organometallic chemistry: indeed, it was the discovery of an iron compound, ferrocene, that revolutionalized the latter field in the 1950s. Iron is sometimes considered as a prototype for the entire block of transition metals, due to its abundance and the immense role it has played in the technological progress of humanity. Its 26 electrons are arranged in the configuration [Ar]3d4s, of which the 3d and 4s electrons are relatively close in energy, and thus a number of electrons can be ionized.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Iron forms compounds mainly in the oxidation states +2 (iron(II), \"ferrous\") and +3 (iron(III), \"ferric\"). Iron also occurs in higher oxidation states, e.g., the purple potassium ferrate (K2FeO4), which contains iron in its +6 oxidation state. The anion [FeO4] with iron in its +7 oxidation state, along with an iron(V)-peroxo isomer, has been detected by infrared spectroscopy at 4 K after cocondensation of laser-ablated Fe atoms with a mixture of O2/Ar. Iron(IV) is a common intermediate in many biochemical oxidation reactions. Numerous organoiron compounds contain formal oxidation states of +1, 0, −1, or even −2. The oxidation states and other bonding properties are often assessed using the technique of Mössbauer spectroscopy. Many mixed valence compounds contain both iron(II) and iron(III) centers, such as magnetite and Prussian blue (Fe4(Fe[CN]6)3). The latter is used as the traditional \"blue\" in blueprints.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Iron is the first of the transition metals that cannot reach its group oxidation state of +8, although its heavier congeners ruthenium and osmium can, with ruthenium having more difficulty than osmium. Ruthenium exhibits an aqueous cationic chemistry in its low oxidation states similar to that of iron, but osmium does not, favoring high oxidation states in which it forms anionic complexes. In the second half of the 3d transition series, vertical similarities down the groups compete with the horizontal similarities of iron with its neighbors cobalt and nickel in the periodic table, which are also ferromagnetic at room temperature and share similar chemistry. As such, iron, cobalt, and nickel are sometimes grouped together as the iron triad.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Unlike many other metals, iron does not form amalgams with mercury. As a result, mercury is traded in standardized 76 pound flasks (34 kg) made of iron.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Iron is by far the most reactive element in its group; it is pyrophoric when finely divided and dissolves easily in dilute acids, giving Fe. However, it does not react with concentrated nitric acid and other oxidizing acids due to the formation of an impervious oxide layer, which can nevertheless react with hydrochloric acid. High-purity iron, called electrolytic iron, is considered to be resistant to rust, due to its oxide layer.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Iron forms various oxide and hydroxide compounds; the most common are iron(II,III) oxide (Fe3O4), and iron(III) oxide (Fe2O3). Iron(II) oxide also exists, though it is unstable at room temperature. Despite their names, they are actually all non-stoichiometric compounds whose compositions may vary. These oxides are the principal ores for the production of iron (see bloomery and blast furnace). They are also used in the production of ferrites, useful magnetic storage media in computers, and pigments. The best known sulfide is iron pyrite (FeS2), also known as fool's gold owing to its golden luster. It is not an iron(IV) compound, but is actually an iron(II) polysulfide containing Fe and S2 ions in a distorted sodium chloride structure.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "The binary ferrous and ferric halides are well-known. The ferrous halides typically arise from treating iron metal with the corresponding hydrohalic acid to give the corresponding hydrated salts.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Iron reacts with fluorine, chlorine, and bromine to give the corresponding ferric halides, ferric chloride being the most common.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Ferric iodide is an exception, being thermodynamically unstable due to the oxidizing power of Fe and the high reducing power of I:",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Ferric iodide, a black solid, is not stable in ordinary conditions, but can be prepared through the reaction of iron pentacarbonyl with iodine and carbon monoxide in the presence of hexane and light at the temperature of −20 °C, with oxygen and water excluded.Complexes of ferric iodide with some soft bases are known to be stable compounds.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The standard reduction potentials in acidic aqueous solution for some common iron ions are given below:",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The red-purple tetrahedral ferrate(VI) anion is such a strong oxidizing agent that it oxidizes ammonia to nitrogen (N2) and water to oxygen",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The pale-violet hexaquo complex [Fe(H2O)6] is an acid such that above pH 0 it is fully hydrolyzed:",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "As pH rises above 0 the above yellow hydrolyzed species form and as it rises above 2–3, reddish-brown hydrous iron(III) oxide precipitates out of solution. Although Fe has a d configuration, its absorption spectrum is not like that of Mn with its weak, spin-forbidden d–d bands, because Fe has higher positive charge and is more polarizing, lowering the energy of its ligand-to-metal charge transfer absorptions. Thus, all the above complexes are rather strongly colored, with the single exception of the hexaquo ion – and even that has a spectrum dominated by charge transfer in the near ultraviolet region. On the other hand, the pale green iron(II) hexaquo ion [Fe(H2O)6] does not undergo appreciable hydrolysis. Carbon dioxide is not evolved when carbonate anions are added, which instead results in white iron(II) carbonate being precipitated out. In excess carbon dioxide this forms the slightly soluble bicarbonate, which occurs commonly in groundwater, but it oxidises quickly in air to form iron(III) oxide that accounts for the brown deposits present in a sizeable number of streams.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Due to its electronic structure, iron has a very large coordination and organometallic chemistry.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Many coordination compounds of iron are known. A typical six-coordinate anion is hexachloroferrate(III), [FeCl6], found in the mixed salt tetrakis(methylammonium) hexachloroferrate(III) chloride. Complexes with multiple bidentate ligands have geometric isomers. For example, the trans-chlorohydridobis(bis-1,2-(diphenylphosphino)ethane)iron(II) complex is used as a starting material for compounds with the Fe(dppe)2 moiety. The ferrioxalate ion with three oxalate ligands (shown at right) displays helical chirality with its two non-superposable geometries labelled Λ (lambda) for the left-handed screw axis and Δ (delta) for the right-handed screw axis, in line with IUPAC conventions. Potassium ferrioxalate is used in chemical actinometry and along with its sodium salt undergoes photoreduction applied in old-style photographic processes. The dihydrate of iron(II) oxalate has a polymeric structure with co-planar oxalate ions bridging between iron centres with the water of crystallisation located forming the caps of each octahedron, as illustrated below.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Iron(III) complexes are quite similar to those of chromium(III) with the exception of iron(III)'s preference for O-donor instead of N-donor ligands. The latter tend to be rather more unstable than iron(II) complexes and often dissociate in water. Many Fe–O complexes show intense colors and are used as tests for phenols or enols. For example, in the ferric chloride test, used to determine the presence of phenols, iron(III) chloride reacts with a phenol to form a deep violet complex:",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Among the halide and pseudohalide complexes, fluoro complexes of iron(III) are the most stable, with the colorless [FeF5(H2O)] being the most stable in aqueous solution. Chloro complexes are less stable and favor tetrahedral coordination as in [FeCl4]; [FeBr4] and [FeI4] are reduced easily to iron(II). Thiocyanate is a common test for the presence of iron(III) as it forms the blood-red [Fe(SCN)(H2O)5]. Like manganese(II), most iron(III) complexes are high-spin, the exceptions being those with ligands that are high in the spectrochemical series such as cyanide. An example of a low-spin iron(III) complex is [Fe(CN)6]. Iron shows a great variety of electronic spin states, including every possible spin quantum number value for a d-block element from 0 (diamagnetic) to 5⁄2 (5 unpaired electrons). This value is always half the number of unpaired electrons. Complexes with zero to two unpaired electrons are considered low-spin and those with four or five are considered high-spin.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Iron(II) complexes are less stable than iron(III) complexes but the preference for O-donor ligands is less marked, so that for example [Fe(NH3)6] is known while [Fe(NH3)6] is not. They have a tendency to be oxidized to iron(III) but this can be moderated by low pH and the specific ligands used.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Organoiron chemistry is the study of organometallic compounds of iron, where carbon atoms are covalently bound to the metal atom. They are many and varied, including cyanide complexes, carbonyl complexes, sandwich and half-sandwich compounds.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Prussian blue or \"ferric ferrocyanide\", Fe4[Fe(CN)6]3, is an old and well-known iron-cyanide complex, extensively used as pigment and in several other applications. Its formation can be used as a simple wet chemistry test to distinguish between aqueous solutions of Fe and Fe as they react (respectively) with potassium ferricyanide and potassium ferrocyanide to form Prussian blue.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Another old example of an organoiron compound is iron pentacarbonyl, Fe(CO)5, in which a neutral iron atom is bound to the carbon atoms of five carbon monoxide molecules. The compound can be used to make carbonyl iron powder, a highly reactive form of metallic iron. Thermolysis of iron pentacarbonyl gives triiron dodecacarbonyl, Fe3(CO)12, a complex with a cluster of three iron atoms at its core. Collman's reagent, disodium tetracarbonylferrate, is a useful reagent for organic chemistry; it contains iron in the −2 oxidation state. Cyclopentadienyliron dicarbonyl dimer contains iron in the rare +1 oxidation state.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "A landmark in this field was the discovery in 1951 of the remarkably stable sandwich compound ferrocene Fe(C5H5)2, by Pauson and Kealy and independently by Miller and colleagues, whose surprising molecular structure was determined only a year later by Woodward and Wilkinson and Fischer. Ferrocene is still one of the most important tools and models in this class.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Iron-centered organometallic species are used as catalysts. The Knölker complex, for example, is a transfer hydrogenation catalyst for ketones.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The iron compounds produced on the largest scale in industry are iron(II) sulfate (FeSO4·7H2O) and iron(III) chloride (FeCl3). The former is one of the most readily available sources of iron(II), but is less stable to aerial oxidation than Mohr's salt ((NH4)2Fe(SO4)2·6H2O). Iron(II) compounds tend to be oxidized to iron(III) compounds in the air.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Iron is one of the elements undoubtedly known to the ancient world. It has been worked, or wrought, for millennia. However, iron artefacts of great age are much rarer than objects made of gold or silver due to the ease with which iron corrodes. The technology developed slowly, and even after the discovery of smelting it took many centuries for iron to replace bronze as the metal of choice for tools and weapons.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Beads made from meteoric iron in 3500 BC or earlier were found in Gerzeh, Egypt by G.A. Wainwright. The beads contain 7.5% nickel, which is a signature of meteoric origin since iron found in the Earth's crust generally has only minuscule nickel impurities.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Meteoric iron was highly regarded due to its origin in the heavens and was often used to forge weapons and tools. For example, a dagger made of meteoric iron was found in the tomb of Tutankhamun, containing similar proportions of iron, cobalt, and nickel to a meteorite discovered in the area, deposited by an ancient meteor shower. Items that were likely made of iron by Egyptians date from 3000 to 2500 BC.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Meteoritic iron is comparably soft and ductile and easily cold forged but may get brittle when heated because of the nickel content.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "The first iron production started in the Middle Bronze Age, but it took several centuries before iron displaced bronze. Samples of smelted iron from Asmar, Mesopotamia and Tall Chagar Bazaar in northern Syria were made sometime between 3000 and 2700 BC. The Hittites established an empire in north-central Anatolia around 1600 BC. They appear to be the first to understand the production of iron from its ores and regard it highly in their society. The Hittites began to smelt iron between 1500 and 1200 BC and the practice spread to the rest of the Near East after their empire fell in 1180 BC. The subsequent period is called the Iron Age.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Artifacts of smelted iron are found in India dating from 1800 to 1200 BC, and in the Levant from about 1500 BC (suggesting smelting in Anatolia or the Caucasus). Alleged references (compare history of metallurgy in South Asia) to iron in the Indian Vedas have been used for claims of a very early usage of iron in India respectively to date the texts as such. The rigveda term ayas (metal) refers to copper, while iron which is called as śyāma ayas, literally \"black copper\", first is mentioned in the post-rigvedic Atharvaveda.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Some archaeological evidence suggests iron was smelted in Zimbabwe and southeast Africa as early as the eighth century BC. Iron working was introduced to Greece in the late 11th century BC, from which it spread quickly throughout Europe.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The spread of ironworking in Central and Western Europe is associated with Celtic expansion. According to Pliny the Elder, iron use was common in the Roman era. In the lands of what is now considered China, iron appears approximately 700–500 BC. Iron smelting may have been introduced into China through Central Asia. The earliest evidence of the use of a blast furnace in China dates to the 1st century AD, and cupola furnaces were used as early as the Warring States period (403–221 BC). Usage of the blast and cupola furnace remained widespread during the Tang and Song dynasties.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "During the Industrial Revolution in Britain, Henry Cort began refining iron from pig iron to wrought iron (or bar iron) using innovative production systems. In 1783 he patented the puddling process for refining iron ore. It was later improved by others, including Joseph Hall.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Cast iron was first produced in China during 5th century BC, but was hardly in Europe until the medieval period. The earliest cast iron artifacts were discovered by archaeologists in what is now modern Luhe County, Jiangsu in China. Cast iron was used in ancient China for warfare, agriculture, and architecture. During the medieval period, means were found in Europe of producing wrought iron from cast iron (in this context known as pig iron) using finery forges. For all these processes, charcoal was required as fuel.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Medieval blast furnaces were about 10 feet (3.0 m) tall and made of fireproof brick; forced air was usually provided by hand-operated bellows. Modern blast furnaces have grown much bigger, with hearths fourteen meters in diameter that allow them to produce thousands of tons of iron each day, but essentially operate in much the same way as they did during medieval times.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "In 1709, Abraham Darby I established a coke-fired blast furnace to produce cast iron, replacing charcoal, although continuing to use blast furnaces. The ensuing availability of inexpensive iron was one of the factors leading to the Industrial Revolution. Toward the end of the 18th century, cast iron began to replace wrought iron for certain purposes, because it was cheaper. Carbon content in iron was not implicated as the reason for the differences in properties of wrought iron, cast iron, and steel until the 18th century.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Since iron was becoming cheaper and more plentiful, it also became a major structural material following the building of the innovative first iron bridge in 1778. This bridge still stands today as a monument to the role iron played in the Industrial Revolution. Following this, iron was used in rails, boats, ships, aqueducts, and buildings, as well as in iron cylinders in steam engines. Railways have been central to the formation of modernity and ideas of progress and various languages refer to railways as iron road (e.g. French chemin de fer, German Eisenbahn, Turkish demiryolu, Russian железная дорога, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean 鐵道, Vietnamese đường sắt).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Steel (with smaller carbon content than pig iron but more than wrought iron) was first produced in antiquity by using a bloomery. Blacksmiths in Luristan in western Persia were making good steel by 1000 BC. Then improved versions, Wootz steel by India and Damascus steel were developed around 300 BC and AD 500 respectively. These methods were specialized, and so steel did not become a major commodity until the 1850s.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "New methods of producing it by carburizing bars of iron in the cementation process were devised in the 17th century. In the Industrial Revolution, new methods of producing bar iron without charcoal were devised and these were later applied to produce steel. In the late 1850s, Henry Bessemer invented a new steelmaking process, involving blowing air through molten pig iron, to produce mild steel. This made steel much more economical, thereby leading to wrought iron no longer being produced in large quantities.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "In 1774, Antoine Lavoisier used the reaction of water steam with metallic iron inside an incandescent iron tube to produce hydrogen in his experiments leading to the demonstration of the conservation of mass, which was instrumental in changing chemistry from a qualitative science to a quantitative one.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Iron plays a certain role in mythology and has found various usage as a metaphor and in folklore. The Greek poet Hesiod's Works and Days (lines 109–201) lists different ages of man named after metals like gold, silver, bronze and iron to account for successive ages of humanity. The Iron Age was closely related with Rome, and in Ovid's Metamorphoses",
"title": "Symbolic role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "The Virtues, in despair, quit the earth; and the depravity of man becomes universal and complete. Hard steel succeeded then.",
"title": "Symbolic role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "An example of the importance of iron's symbolic role may be found in the German Campaign of 1813. Frederick William III commissioned then the first Iron Cross as military decoration. Berlin iron jewellery reached its peak production between 1813 and 1815, when the Prussian royal family urged citizens to donate gold and silver jewellery for military funding. The inscription Ich gab Gold für Eisen (I gave gold for iron) was used as well in later war efforts.",
"title": "Symbolic role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "For a few limited purposes when it is needed, pure iron is produced in the laboratory in small quantities by reducing the pure oxide or hydroxide with hydrogen, or forming iron pentacarbonyl and heating it to 250 °C so that it decomposes to form pure iron powder. Another method is electrolysis of ferrous chloride onto an iron cathode.",
"title": "Production of metallic iron"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Nowadays, the industrial production of iron or steel consists of two main stages. In the first stage, iron ore is reduced with coke in a blast furnace, and the molten metal is separated from gross impurities such as silicate minerals. This stage yields an alloy—pig iron—that contains relatively large amounts of carbon. In the second stage, the amount of carbon in the pig iron is lowered by oxidation to yield wrought iron, steel, or cast iron. Other metals can be added at this stage to form alloy steels.",
"title": "Production of metallic iron"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "The blast furnace is loaded with iron ores, usually hematite Fe2O3 or magnetite Fe3O4, along with coke (coal that has been separately baked to remove volatile components) and flux (limestone or dolomite). \"Blasts\" of air pre-heated to 900 °C (sometimes with oxygen enrichment) is blown through the mixture, in sufficient amount to turn the carbon into carbon monoxide:",
"title": "Production of metallic iron"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "This reaction raises the temperature to about 2000 °C. The carbon monoxide reduces the iron ore to metallic iron",
"title": "Production of metallic iron"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Some iron in the high-temperature lower region of the furnace reacts directly with the coke:",
"title": "Production of metallic iron"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "The flux removes silicaceous minerals in the ore, which would otherwise clog the furnace: The heat of the furnace decomposes the carbonates to calcium oxide, which reacts with any excess silica to form a slag composed of calcium silicate CaSiO3 or other products. At the furnace's temperature, the metal and the slag are both molten. They collect at the bottom as two immiscible liquid layers (with the slag on top), that are then easily separated. The slag can be used as a material in road construction or to improve mineral-poor soils for agriculture.",
"title": "Production of metallic iron"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Steelmaking thus remains one of the largest industrial contributors of CO2 emissions in the world.",
"title": "Production of metallic iron"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "The pig iron produced by the blast furnace process contains up to 4–5% carbon (by mass), with small amounts of other impurities like sulfur, magnesium, phosphorus, and manganese. This high level of carbon makes it relatively weak and brittle. Reducing the amount of carbon to 0.002–2.1% produces steel, which may be up to 1000 times harder than pure iron. A great variety of steel articles can then be made by cold working, hot rolling, forging, machining, etc. Removing the impurities from pig iron, but leaving 2–4% carbon, results in cast iron, which is cast by foundries into articles such as stoves, pipes, radiators, lamp-posts, and rails.",
"title": "Production of metallic iron"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Steel products often undergo various heat treatments after they are forged to shape. Annealing consists of heating them to 700–800 °C for several hours and then gradual cooling. It makes the steel softer and more workable.",
"title": "Production of metallic iron"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Owing to environmental concerns, alternative methods of processing iron have been developed. \"Direct iron reduction\" reduces iron ore to a ferrous lump called \"sponge\" iron or \"direct\" iron that is suitable for steelmaking. Two main reactions comprise the direct reduction process:",
"title": "Production of metallic iron"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Natural gas is partially oxidized (with heat and a catalyst):",
"title": "Production of metallic iron"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Iron ore is then treated with these gases in a furnace, producing solid sponge iron:",
"title": "Production of metallic iron"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Silica is removed by adding a limestone flux as described above.",
"title": "Production of metallic iron"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Ignition of a mixture of aluminium powder and iron oxide yields metallic iron via the thermite reaction:",
"title": "Production of metallic iron"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Alternatively pig iron may be made into steel (with up to about 2% carbon) or wrought iron (commercially pure iron). Various processes have been used for this, including finery forges, puddling furnaces, Bessemer converters, open hearth furnaces, basic oxygen furnaces, and electric arc furnaces. In all cases, the objective is to oxidize some or all of the carbon, together with other impurities. On the other hand, other metals may be added to make alloy steels.",
"title": "Production of metallic iron"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Molten oxide electrolysis uses an alloy of chromium, iron and other metals that does not react with oxygen and a liquid iron cathode while the electrolyte is a mixture of molten metal oxides into which iron ore is dissolved. The current keeps the electrolyte molten, and reduces the iron oxide. In addition to pure liquid iron, put oxygen is also produced, which can be sold to offset part of the cost. Production cell size is variable and can be much smaller than conventional furnaces. The only cardon dioxide emissions come from the electricity used to heat and reduce the metal.",
"title": "Production of metallic iron"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "Iron is the most widely used of all the metals, accounting for over 90% of worldwide metal production. Its low cost and high strength often make it the material of choice to withstand stress or transmit forces, such as the construction of machinery and machine tools, rails, automobiles, ship hulls, concrete reinforcing bars, and the load-carrying framework of buildings. Since pure iron is quite soft, it is most commonly combined with alloying elements to make steel.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "The mechanical properties of iron and its alloys are extremely relevant to their structural applications. Those properties can be evaluated in various ways, including the Brinell test, the Rockwell test and the Vickers hardness test.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "The properties of pure iron are often used to calibrate measurements or to compare tests. However, the mechanical properties of iron are significantly affected by the sample's purity: pure, single crystals of iron are actually softer than aluminium, and the purest industrially produced iron (99.99%) has a hardness of 20–30 Brinell. The pure iron (99.9%～99.999%), especially called electrolytic iron, is industrially produced by electrolytic refining.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "An increase in the carbon content will cause a significant increase in the hardness and tensile strength of iron. Maximum hardness of 65 Rc is achieved with a 0.6% carbon content, although the alloy has low tensile strength. Because of the softness of iron, it is much easier to work with than its heavier congeners ruthenium and osmium.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "α-Iron is a fairly soft metal that can dissolve only a small concentration of carbon (no more than 0.021% by mass at 910 °C). Austenite (γ-iron) is similarly soft and metallic but can dissolve considerably more carbon (as much as 2.04% by mass at 1146 °C). This form of iron is used in the type of stainless steel used for making cutlery, and hospital and food-service equipment.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "Commercially available iron is classified based on purity and the abundance of additives. Pig iron has 3.5–4.5% carbon and contains varying amounts of contaminants such as sulfur, silicon and phosphorus. Pig iron is not a saleable product, but rather an intermediate step in the production of cast iron and steel. The reduction of contaminants in pig iron that negatively affect material properties, such as sulfur and phosphorus, yields cast iron containing 2–4% carbon, 1–6% silicon, and small amounts of manganese. Pig iron has a melting point in the range of 1420–1470 K, which is lower than either of its two main components, and makes it the first product to be melted when carbon and iron are heated together. Its mechanical properties vary greatly and depend on the form the carbon takes in the alloy.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "\"White\" cast irons contain their carbon in the form of cementite, or iron carbide (Fe3C). This hard, brittle compound dominates the mechanical properties of white cast irons, rendering them hard, but unresistant to shock. The broken surface of a white cast iron is full of fine facets of the broken iron carbide, a very pale, silvery, shiny material, hence the appellation. Cooling a mixture of iron with 0.8% carbon slowly below 723 °C to room temperature results in separate, alternating layers of cementite and α-iron, which is soft and malleable and is called pearlite for its appearance. Rapid cooling, on the other hand, does not allow time for this separation and creates hard and brittle martensite. The steel can then be tempered by reheating to a temperature in between, changing the proportions of pearlite and martensite. The end product below 0.8% carbon content is a pearlite-αFe mixture, and that above 0.8% carbon content is a pearlite-cementite mixture.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "In gray iron the carbon exists as separate, fine flakes of graphite, and also renders the material brittle due to the sharp edged flakes of graphite that produce stress concentration sites within the material. A newer variant of gray iron, referred to as ductile iron, is specially treated with trace amounts of magnesium to alter the shape of graphite to spheroids, or nodules, reducing the stress concentrations and vastly increasing the toughness and strength of the material.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "Wrought iron contains less than 0.25% carbon but large amounts of slag that give it a fibrous characteristic. It is a tough, malleable product, but not as fusible as pig iron. If honed to an edge, it loses it quickly. Wrought iron is characterized by the presence of fine fibers of slag entrapped within the metal. Wrought iron is more corrosion resistant than steel. It has been almost completely replaced by mild steel for traditional \"wrought iron\" products and blacksmithing.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "Mild steel corrodes more readily than wrought iron, but is cheaper and more widely available. Carbon steel contains 2.0% carbon or less, with small amounts of manganese, sulfur, phosphorus, and silicon. Alloy steels contain varying amounts of carbon as well as other metals, such as chromium, vanadium, molybdenum, nickel, tungsten, etc. Their alloy content raises their cost, and so they are usually only employed for specialist uses. One common alloy steel, though, is stainless steel. Recent developments in ferrous metallurgy have produced a growing range of microalloyed steels, also termed 'HSLA' or high-strength, low alloy steels, containing tiny additions to produce high strengths and often spectacular toughness at minimal cost.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "Alloys with high purity elemental makeups (such as alloys of electrolytic iron) have specifically enhanced properties such as ductility, tensile strength, toughness, fatigue strength, heat resistance, and corrosion resistance.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "Apart from traditional applications, iron is also used for protection from ionizing radiation. Although it is lighter than another traditional protection material, lead, it is much stronger mechanically. The attenuation of radiation as a function of energy is shown in the graph.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "The main disadvantage of iron and steel is that pure iron, and most of its alloys, suffer badly from rust if not protected in some way, a cost amounting to over 1% of the world's economy. Painting, galvanization, passivation, plastic coating and bluing are all used to protect iron from rust by excluding water and oxygen or by cathodic protection. The mechanism of the rusting of iron is as follows:",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "The electrolyte is usually iron(II) sulfate in urban areas (formed when atmospheric sulfur dioxide attacks iron), and salt particles in the atmosphere in seaside areas.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "Because Fe is inexpensive and nontoxic, much effort has been devoted to the development of Fe-based catalysts and reagents. Iron is however less common as a catalyst in commercial processes than more expensive metals. In biology, Fe-containing enzymes are pervasive.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "Iron catalysts are traditionally used in the Haber–Bosch process for the production of ammonia and the Fischer–Tropsch process for conversion of carbon monoxide to hydrocarbons for fuels and lubricants. Powdered iron in an acidic medium is used in the Bechamp reduction, the conversion of nitrobenzene to aniline.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "Iron(III) oxide mixed with aluminium powder can be ignited to create a thermite reaction, used in welding large iron parts (like rails) and purifying ores. Iron(III) oxide and oxyhydroxide are used as reddish and ocher pigments.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "Iron(III) chloride finds use in water purification and sewage treatment, in the dyeing of cloth, as a coloring agent in paints, as an additive in animal feed, and as an etchant for copper in the manufacture of printed circuit boards. It can also be dissolved in alcohol to form tincture of iron, which is used as a medicine to stop bleeding in canaries.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "Iron(II) sulfate is used as a precursor to other iron compounds. It is also used to reduce chromate in cement. It is used to fortify foods and treat iron deficiency anemia. Iron(III) sulfate is used in settling minute sewage particles in tank water. Iron(II) chloride is used as a reducing flocculating agent, in the formation of iron complexes and magnetic iron oxides, and as a reducing agent in organic synthesis.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "Sodium nitroprusside is a drug used as a vasodilator. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "Iron is required for life. The iron–sulfur clusters are pervasive and include nitrogenase, the enzymes responsible for biological nitrogen fixation. Iron-containing proteins participate in transport, storage and use of oxygen. Iron proteins are involved in electron transfer.",
"title": "Biological and pathological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "Examples of iron-containing proteins in higher organisms include hemoglobin, cytochrome (see high-valent iron), and catalase. The average adult human contains about 0.005% body weight of iron, or about four grams, of which three quarters is in hemoglobin – a level that remains constant despite only about one milligram of iron being absorbed each day, because the human body recycles its hemoglobin for the iron content.",
"title": "Biological and pathological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "Microbial growth may be assisted by oxidation of iron(II) or by reduction of iron (III).",
"title": "Biological and pathological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "Iron acquisition poses a problem for aerobic organisms because ferric iron is poorly soluble near neutral pH. Thus, these organisms have developed means to absorb iron as complexes, sometimes taking up ferrous iron before oxidising it back to ferric iron. In particular, bacteria have evolved very high-affinity sequestering agents called siderophores.",
"title": "Biological and pathological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "After uptake in human cells, iron storage is precisely regulated. A major component of this regulation is the protein transferrin, which binds iron ions absorbed from the duodenum and carries it in the blood to cells. Transferrin contains Fe in the middle of a distorted octahedron, bonded to one nitrogen, three oxygens and a chelating carbonate anion that traps the Fe ion: it has such a high stability constant that it is very effective at taking up Fe ions even from the most stable complexes. At the bone marrow, transferrin is reduced from Fe and Fe and stored as ferritin to be incorporated into hemoglobin.",
"title": "Biological and pathological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "The most commonly known and studied bioinorganic iron compounds (biological iron molecules) are the heme proteins: examples are hemoglobin, myoglobin, and cytochrome P450. These compounds participate in transporting gases, building enzymes, and transferring electrons. Metalloproteins are a group of proteins with metal ion cofactors. Some examples of iron metalloproteins are ferritin and rubredoxin. Many enzymes vital to life contain iron, such as catalase, lipoxygenases, and IRE-BP.",
"title": "Biological and pathological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "Hemoglobin is an oxygen carrier that occurs in red blood cells and contributes their color, transporting oxygen in the arteries from the lungs to the muscles where it is transferred to myoglobin, which stores it until it is needed for the metabolic oxidation of glucose, generating energy. Here the hemoglobin binds to carbon dioxide, produced when glucose is oxidized, which is transported through the veins by hemoglobin (predominantly as bicarbonate anions) back to the lungs where it is exhaled. In hemoglobin, the iron is in one of four heme groups and has six possible coordination sites; four are occupied by nitrogen atoms in a porphyrin ring, the fifth by an imidazole nitrogen in a histidine residue of one of the protein chains attached to the heme group, and the sixth is reserved for the oxygen molecule it can reversibly bind to. When hemoglobin is not attached to oxygen (and is then called deoxyhemoglobin), the Fe ion at the center of the heme group (in the hydrophobic protein interior) is in a high-spin configuration. It is thus too large to fit inside the porphyrin ring, which bends instead into a dome with the Fe ion about 55 picometers above it. In this configuration, the sixth coordination site reserved for the oxygen is blocked by another histidine residue.",
"title": "Biological and pathological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "When deoxyhemoglobin picks up an oxygen molecule, this histidine residue moves away and returns once the oxygen is securely attached to form a hydrogen bond with it. This results in the Fe ion switching to a low-spin configuration, resulting in a 20% decrease in ionic radius so that now it can fit into the porphyrin ring, which becomes planar. (Additionally, this hydrogen bonding results in the tilting of the oxygen molecule, resulting in a Fe–O–O bond angle of around 120° that avoids the formation of Fe–O–Fe or Fe–O2–Fe bridges that would lead to electron transfer, the oxidation of Fe to Fe, and the destruction of hemoglobin.) This results in a movement of all the protein chains that leads to the other subunits of hemoglobin changing shape to a form with larger oxygen affinity. Thus, when deoxyhemoglobin takes up oxygen, its affinity for more oxygen increases, and vice versa. Myoglobin, on the other hand, contains only one heme group and hence this cooperative effect cannot occur. Thus, while hemoglobin is almost saturated with oxygen in the high partial pressures of oxygen found in the lungs, its affinity for oxygen is much lower than that of myoglobin, which oxygenates even at low partial pressures of oxygen found in muscle tissue. As described by the Bohr effect (named after Christian Bohr, the father of Niels Bohr), the oxygen affinity of hemoglobin diminishes in the presence of carbon dioxide.",
"title": "Biological and pathological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "Carbon monoxide and phosphorus trifluoride are poisonous to humans because they bind to hemoglobin similarly to oxygen, but with much more strength, so that oxygen can no longer be transported throughout the body. Hemoglobin bound to carbon monoxide is known as carboxyhemoglobin. This effect also plays a minor role in the toxicity of cyanide, but there the major effect is by far its interference with the proper functioning of the electron transport protein cytochrome a. The cytochrome proteins also involve heme groups and are involved in the metabolic oxidation of glucose by oxygen. The sixth coordination site is then occupied by either another imidazole nitrogen or a methionine sulfur, so that these proteins are largely inert to oxygen – with the exception of cytochrome a, which bonds directly to oxygen and thus is very easily poisoned by cyanide. Here, the electron transfer takes place as the iron remains in low spin but changes between the +2 and +3 oxidation states. Since the reduction potential of each step is slightly greater than the previous one, the energy is released step-by-step and can thus be stored in adenosine triphosphate. Cytochrome a is slightly distinct, as it occurs at the mitochondrial membrane, binds directly to oxygen, and transports protons as well as electrons, as follows:",
"title": "Biological and pathological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 123,
"text": "Although the heme proteins are the most important class of iron-containing proteins, the iron–sulfur proteins are also very important, being involved in electron transfer, which is possible since iron can exist stably in either the +2 or +3 oxidation states. These have one, two, four, or eight iron atoms that are each approximately tetrahedrally coordinated to four sulfur atoms; because of this tetrahedral coordination, they always have high-spin iron. The simplest of such compounds is rubredoxin, which has only one iron atom coordinated to four sulfur atoms from cysteine residues in the surrounding peptide chains. Another important class of iron–sulfur proteins is the ferredoxins, which have multiple iron atoms. Transferrin does not belong to either of these classes.",
"title": "Biological and pathological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 124,
"text": "The ability of sea mussels to maintain their grip on rocks in the ocean is facilitated by their use of organometallic iron-based bonds in their protein-rich cuticles. Based on synthetic replicas, the presence of iron in these structures increased elastic modulus 770 times, tensile strength 58 times, and toughness 92 times. The amount of stress required to permanently damage them increased 76 times.",
"title": "Biological and pathological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 125,
"text": "Iron is pervasive, but particularly rich sources of dietary iron include red meat, oysters, beans, poultry, fish, leaf vegetables, watercress, tofu, and blackstrap molasses. Bread and breakfast cereals are sometimes specifically fortified with iron.",
"title": "Biological and pathological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 126,
"text": "Iron provided by dietary supplements is often found as iron(II) fumarate, although iron(II) sulfate is cheaper and is absorbed equally well. Elemental iron, or reduced iron, despite being absorbed at only one-third to two-thirds the efficiency (relative to iron sulfate), is often added to foods such as breakfast cereals or enriched wheat flour. Iron is most available to the body when chelated to amino acids and is also available for use as a common iron supplement. Glycine, the least expensive amino acid, is most often used to produce iron glycinate supplements.",
"title": "Biological and pathological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 127,
"text": "The U.S. Institute of Medicine (IOM) updated Estimated Average Requirements (EARs) and Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDAs) for iron in 2001. The current EAR for iron for women ages 14–18 is 7.9 mg/day, 8.1 for ages 19–50 and 5.0 thereafter (post menopause). For men the EAR is 6.0 mg/day for ages 19 and up. The RDA is 15.0 mg/day for women ages 15–18, 18.0 for 19–50 and 8.0 thereafter. For men, 8.0 mg/day for ages 19 and up. RDAs are higher than EARs so as to identify amounts that will cover people with higher than average requirements. RDA for pregnancy is 27 mg/day and, for lactation, 9 mg/day. For children ages 1–3 years 7 mg/day, 10 for ages 4–8 and 8 for ages 9–13. As for safety, the IOM also sets Tolerable upper intake levels (ULs) for vitamins and minerals when evidence is sufficient. In the case of iron the UL is set at 45 mg/day. Collectively the EARs, RDAs and ULs are referred to as Dietary Reference Intakes.",
"title": "Biological and pathological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 128,
"text": "The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) refers to the collective set of information as Dietary Reference Values, with Population Reference Intake (PRI) instead of RDA, and Average Requirement instead of EAR. AI and UL defined the same as in United States. For women the PRI is 13 mg/day ages 15–17 years, 16 mg/day for women ages 18 and up who are premenopausal and 11 mg/day postmenopausal. For pregnancy and lactation, 16 mg/day. For men the PRI is 11 mg/day ages 15 and older. For children ages 1 to 14 the PRI increases from 7 to 11 mg/day. The PRIs are higher than the U.S. RDAs, with the exception of pregnancy. The EFSA reviewed the same safety question did not establish a UL.",
"title": "Biological and pathological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 129,
"text": "Infants may require iron supplements if they are bottle-fed cow's milk. Frequent blood donors are at risk of low iron levels and are often advised to supplement their iron intake.",
"title": "Biological and pathological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 130,
"text": "For U.S. food and dietary supplement labeling purposes the amount in a serving is expressed as a percent of Daily Value (%DV). For iron labeling purposes 100% of the Daily Value was 18 mg, and as of May 27, 2016 remained unchanged at 18 mg. A table of the old and new adult daily values is provided at Reference Daily Intake.",
"title": "Biological and pathological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 131,
"text": "Iron deficiency is the most common nutritional deficiency in the world. When loss of iron is not adequately compensated by adequate dietary iron intake, a state of latent iron deficiency occurs, which over time leads to iron-deficiency anemia if left untreated, which is characterised by an insufficient number of red blood cells and an insufficient amount of hemoglobin. Children, pre-menopausal women (women of child-bearing age), and people with poor diet are most susceptible to the disease. Most cases of iron-deficiency anemia are mild, but if not treated can cause problems like fast or irregular heartbeat, complications during pregnancy, and delayed growth in infants and children.",
"title": "Biological and pathological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 132,
"text": "The brain is resistant to acute iron deficiency due to the slow transport of iron through the blood brain barrier. Acute fluctuations in iron status (marked by serum ferritin levels) do not reflect brain iron status, but prolonged nutritional iron deficiency is suspected to reduce brain iron concentrations over time. In the brain, iron plays a role in oxygen transport, myelin synthesis, mitochondrial respiration, and as a cofactor for neurotransmitter synthesis and metabolism. Animal models of nutritional iron deficiency report biomolecular changes resembling those seen in Parkinson's and Huntington's disease. However, age-related accumulation of iron in the brain has also been linked to the development of Parkinson's.",
"title": "Biological and pathological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 133,
"text": "Iron uptake is tightly regulated by the human body, which has no regulated physiological means of excreting iron. Only small amounts of iron are lost daily due to mucosal and skin epithelial cell sloughing, so control of iron levels is primarily accomplished by regulating uptake. Regulation of iron uptake is impaired in some people as a result of a genetic defect that maps to the HLA-H gene region on chromosome 6 and leads to abnormally low levels of hepcidin, a key regulator of the entry of iron into the circulatory system in mammals. In these people, excessive iron intake can result in iron overload disorders, known medically as hemochromatosis. Many people have an undiagnosed genetic susceptibility to iron overload, and are not aware of a family history of the problem. For this reason, people should not take iron supplements unless they suffer from iron deficiency and have consulted a doctor. Hemochromatosis is estimated to be the cause of 0.3 to 0.8% of all metabolic diseases of Caucasians.",
"title": "Biological and pathological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 134,
"text": "Overdoses of ingested iron can cause excessive levels of free iron in the blood. High blood levels of free ferrous iron react with peroxides to produce highly reactive free radicals that can damage DNA, proteins, lipids, and other cellular components. Iron toxicity occurs when the cell contains free iron, which generally occurs when iron levels exceed the availability of transferrin to bind the iron. Damage to the cells of the gastrointestinal tract can also prevent them from regulating iron absorption, leading to further increases in blood levels. Iron typically damages cells in the heart, liver and elsewhere, causing adverse effects that include coma, metabolic acidosis, shock, liver failure, coagulopathy, long-term organ damage, and even death. Humans experience iron toxicity when the iron exceeds 20 milligrams for every kilogram of body mass; 60 milligrams per kilogram is considered a lethal dose. Overconsumption of iron, often the result of children eating large quantities of ferrous sulfate tablets intended for adult consumption, is one of the most common toxicological causes of death in children under six. The Dietary Reference Intake (DRI) sets the Tolerable Upper Intake Level (UL) for adults at 45 mg/day. For children under fourteen years old the UL is 40 mg/day.",
"title": "Biological and pathological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 135,
"text": "The medical management of iron toxicity is complicated, and can include use of a specific chelating agent called deferoxamine to bind and expel excess iron from the body.",
"title": "Biological and pathological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 136,
"text": "Some research has suggested that low thalamic iron levels may play a role in the pathophysiology of ADHD. Some researchers have found that iron supplementation can be effective especially in the inattentive subtype of the disorder. One study also showed that iron may be able to decrease the risk of cardiovascular events during treatment with ADHD drugs.",
"title": "Biological and pathological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 137,
"text": "Some researchers in the 2000s suggested a link between low levels of iron in the blood and ADHD. A 2012 study found no such correlation.",
"title": "Biological and pathological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 138,
"text": "The role of iron in cancer defense can be described as a \"double-edged sword\" because of its pervasive presence in non-pathological processes. People having chemotherapy may develop iron deficiency and anemia, for which intravenous iron therapy is used to restore iron levels. Iron overload, which may occur from high consumption of red meat, may initiate tumor growth and increase susceptibility to cancer onset, particularly for colorectal cancer.",
"title": "Biological and pathological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 139,
"text": "Iron plays an essential role in marine systems and can act as a limiting nutrient for planktonic activity. Because of this, too much of a decrease in iron may lead to a decrease in growth rates in phytoplanktonic organisms such as diatoms. Iron can also be oxidized by marine microbes under conditions that are high in iron and low in oxygen.",
"title": "Biological and pathological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 140,
"text": "Iron can enter marine systems through adjoining rivers and directly from the atmosphere. Once iron enters the ocean, it can be distributed throughout the water column through ocean mixing and through recycling on the cellular level. In the arctic, sea ice plays a major role in the store and distribution of iron in the ocean, depleting oceanic iron as it freezes in the winter and releasing it back into the water when thawing occurs in the summer. The iron cycle can fluctuate the forms of iron from aqueous to particle forms altering the availability of iron to primary producers. Increased light and warmth increases the amount of iron that is in forms that are usable by primary producers.",
"title": "Biological and pathological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 141,
"text": "",
"title": "External links"
}
]
| Iron is a chemical element; it has symbol Fe and atomic number 26. It is a metal that belongs to the first transition series and group 8 of the periodic table. It is, by mass, the most common element on Earth, just ahead of oxygen, forming much of Earth's outer and inner core. It is the fourth most common element in the Earth's crust, being mainly deposited by meteorites in its metallic state, with its ores also being found there. Extracting usable metal from iron ores requires kilns or furnaces capable of reaching 1,500 °C (2,730 °F) or higher, about 500 °C (932 °F) higher than that required to smelt copper. Humans started to master that process in Eurasia during the 2nd millennium BCE and the use of iron tools and weapons began to displace copper alloys—in some regions, only around 1200 BCE. That event is considered the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. In the modern world, iron alloys, such as steel, stainless steel, cast iron and special steels, are by far the most common industrial metals, due to their mechanical properties and low cost. The iron and steel industry is thus very important economically, and iron is the cheapest metal, with a price of a few dollars per kilogram or pound. Pristine and smooth pure iron surfaces are a mirror-like silvery-gray. Iron reacts readily with oxygen and water to produce brown-to-black hydrated iron oxides, commonly known as rust. Unlike the oxides of some other metals that form passivating layers, rust occupies more volume than the metal and thus flakes off, exposing more fresh surfaces for corrosion. High-purity irons are more resistant to corrosion. The body of an adult human contains about 4 grams of iron, mostly in hemoglobin and myoglobin. These two proteins play essential roles in vertebrate metabolism, respectively oxygen transport by blood and oxygen storage in muscles. To maintain the necessary levels, human iron metabolism requires a minimum of iron in the diet. Iron is also the metal at the active site of many important redox enzymes dealing with cellular respiration and oxidation and reduction in plants and animals. Chemically, the most common oxidation states of iron are iron(II) and iron(III). Iron shares many properties of other transition metals, including the other group 8 elements, ruthenium and osmium. Iron forms compounds in a wide range of oxidation states, −4 to +7. Iron also forms many coordination compounds; some of them, such as ferrocene, ferrioxalate, and Prussian blue have substantial industrial, medical, or research applications. Most notably, Iron is the highest atomic number element that could be created in exothermic nucleosynthesis. | 2001-10-07T18:58:50Z | 2023-12-27T06:26:00Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron |
14,735 | IEEE 802.15 | IEEE 802.15 is a working group of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) IEEE 802 standards committee which specifies Wireless Specialty Networks (WSN) standards. The working group was formerly known as Working Group for Wireless Personal Area Networks.
The number of Task Groups in IEEE 802.15 varies based on the number of active projects. The current list of active projects can be found on the IEEE 802.15 web site.
Task group one is based on Bluetooth technology. It defines physical layer (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) specification for wireless connectivity with fixed, portable and moving devices within or entering personal operating space. Standards were issued in 2002 and 2005.
Task group two addresses the coexistence of wireless personal area networks (WPAN) with other wireless devices operating in unlicensed frequency bands such as wireless local area networks (WLAN). The IEEE 802.15.2-2003 standard was published in 2003 and task group two went into "hibernation".
IEEE 802.15.3-2003 is a MAC and PHY standard for high-rate (11 to 55 Mbit/s) WPANs. The standard can be downloaded via the IEEE Get program, which is funded by IEEE 802 volunteers.
IEEE P802.15.3a was an attempt to provide a higher speed ultra-wideband PHY enhancement amendment to IEEE 802.15.3 for applications that involve imaging and multimedia. The members of the task group were not able to come to an agreement choosing between two technology proposals, Multi-band Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (MB-OFDM) and Direct Sequence UWB (DS-UWB), backed by two different industry alliances and was withdrawn in January 2006. Documents related to the development of IEEE 802.15.3a are archived on the IEEE document server.
IEEE 802.15.3b-2005 amendment was released on May 5, 2006. It enhanced 802.15.3 to improve implementation and interoperability of the MAC. This amendment includes many optimizations, corrected errors, clarified ambiguities, and added editorial clarifications while preserving backward compatibility. Among other changes, the amendment defined the following new features:
IEEE 802.15.3c-2009 was published on September 11, 2009. The task group TG3c developed a millimeter-wave-based alternative physical layer (PHY) for the existing 802.15.3 Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) Standard 802.15.3-2003. The IEEE 802.15.3 Task Group 3c (TG3c) was formed in March 2005. This mmWave WPAN is defined to operate in the 57–66 GHz range. Depending on the geographical region, anywhere from 2 to 9 GHz of bandwidth is available (for example, 57–64 GHz is available as unlicensed band defined by FCC 47 CFR 15.255 in North America). The millimeter-wave WPAN allows very high data rate, short range (10 m) for applications including high-speed internet access, streaming content download (video on demand, HDTV, home theater, etc.), real-time streaming and wireless data bus for cable replacement. A total of three PHY modes were defined in the standard:
IEEE Std 802.15.3d-2017 defines an alternative physical layer (PHY) at the lower THz frequency range between 252 GHz and 325 GHz for switched point-to-point links is defined in this amendment. Two PHY modes are defined that enable data rates of up to 100 Gb/s using eight different bandwidths between 2.16 GHz and 69.12 GHz.
IEEE Std 802.15.3e-2017 provides an alternative physical layer (PHY) and a modified medium access control (MAC) layer is defined in this amendment. Two PHY modes have been defined that enable data rates up to 100 Gb/s using the 60 GHz band. MIMO and aggregation methods have been defined to increase the maximum achievable communication speeds. Stack acknowledgment has been defined to improve the medium access control (MAC) efficiency when used in a point-to-point (P2P) topology between two devices.
IEEE Std 802.15.3f-2017 extends the RF channelization of the millimeter wave PHYs to allow for use of the spectrum up to 71 GHz. 802.15.3f was initiated because several regulatory domains extended the licensed exempt 60 GHz bands up to 71 GHz.
IEEE 802.15.4-2003 (Low Rate WPAN) deals with low data rate but very long battery life (months or even years) and very low complexity. The standard defines both the physical (Layer 1) and data-link (Layer 2) layers of the OSI model. The first edition of the 802.15.4 standard was released in May 2003. Several standardized and proprietary networks (or mesh) layer protocols run over 802.15.4-based networks, including IEEE 802.15.5, Zigbee, Thread, 6LoWPAN, WirelessHART, and ISA100.11a.
IEEE 802.15.4a (formally called IEEE 802.15.4a-2007) is an amendment to IEEE 802.15.4 specifying additional physical layers (PHYs) to the original standard. The principal interest was in providing higher precision ranging and localization capability (1 meter accuracy and better), higher aggregate throughput, adding scalability to data rates, longer range, and lower power consumption and cost. The selected baselines are two optional PHYs consisting of a UWB Pulse Radio (operating in unlicensed UWB spectrum) and a Chirp Spread Spectrum (operating in unlicensed 2.4 GHz spectrum). The Pulsed UWB Radio is based on Continuous Pulsed UWB technology (see C-UWB) and will be able to deliver communications and high precision ranging.
IEEE 802.15.4b was approved in June 2006 and was published in September 2006 as IEEE 802.15.4-2006. The IEEE 802.15 task group 4b was chartered to create a project for specific enhancements and clarifications to the IEEE 802.15.4-2003 standard, such as resolving ambiguities, reducing unnecessary complexity, increasing flexibility in security key usage, considerations for newly available frequency allocations, and others.
IEEE 802.15.4c was approved in 2008 and was published in January 2009. This defines a PHY amendment that adds new RF spectrum specifications to address the Chinese regulatory changes which have opened the 314-316 MHz, 430-434 MHz, and 779-787 MHz bands for Wireless PAN use within China.
The IEEE 802.15 Task Group 4d was chartered to define an amendment to the 802.15.4-2006 standard. The amendment defines a new PHY and such changes to the MAC as are necessary to support a new frequency allocation (950 MHz -956 MHz) in Japan while coexisting with passive tag systems in the band.
The IEEE 802.15 Task Group 4e is chartered to define a MAC amendment to the existing standard 802.15.4-2006. The intent of this amendment is to enhance and add functionality to the 802.15.4-2006 MAC to a) better support the industrial markets and b) permit compatibility with modifications being proposed within the Chinese WPAN. Specific enhancements were made to add channel hopping and a variable time slot option compatible with ISA100.11a. These changes were approved in 2011.
The IEEE 802.15.4f Active RFID System Task Group is chartered to define new wireless Physical (PHY) layer(s) and enhancements to the 802.15.4-2006 standard MAC layer which are required to support new PHY(s) for active RFID system bi-directional and location determination applications.
IEEE 802.15.4g Smart Utility Networks (SUN) Task Group is chartered to create a PHY amendment to 802.15.4 to provide a standard that facilitates very large-scale process control applications such as the utility smart grid network capable of supporting large, geographically diverse networks with minimal infrastructure, with potentially millions of fixed endpoints. In 2012 they released the 802.15.4g radio standard. The Telecommunications Industry Association TR-51 committee develops standards for similar applications.
Approved in 2020, amendment to the UWB PHYs (e.g. with coding options) to increase accuracy and exchange ranging related information between the participating devices.
IEEE 802.15.5 provides the architectural framework enabling WPAN devices to promote interoperable, stable, and scalable wireless mesh networking. This standard is composed of two parts: low-rate WPAN mesh and high-rate WPAN mesh networks. The low-rate mesh is built on IEEE 802.15.4-2006 MAC, while the high rate mesh utilizes IEEE 802.15.3/3b MAC. The common features of both meshes include network initialization, addressing, and multi-hop unicasting. In addition, the low-rate mesh supports multicasting, reliable broadcasting, portability support, trace route and energy saving function, and the high-rate mesh supports multihop time-guaranteed service.
Mesh networking for IEEE 802.15.1 networks is beyond scope of IEEE 802.15.5 and is carried within the Bluetooth mesh working group.
In December 2011, the IEEE 802.15.6 task group approved a draft of a standard for Body Area Network (BAN) technologies. The draft was approved on 22 July 2011 by Letter Ballot to start the Sponsor Ballot process. Task Group 6 was formed in November 2007 to focus on a low-power and short-range wireless standard to be optimized for devices and operation on, in, or around the human body (but not limited to humans) to serve a variety of applications including medical, consumer electronics, and personal entertainment.
The inaugural meeting for Task Group 7 was held during January 2009, where it was chartered to write standards for free-space optical communication using visible light. The 802.15.7-2011 Standard was published in September 2011. In 2015, a new task group was launched to revise the 802.15.7 standard, with several new PHY layers and MAC routines to support optical camera communications (OCC) and light fidelity (LiFi). As the new draft became too large, in March 2017, the 802.15 Working Group decided to continue 802.15.7 with OCC only, which is broadcast only, and to create a new task group 802.15.13 to work on a new standard for LiFi, which obviously needed a significantly revised MAC layer, besides new PHYs. The revision of 802.15.7-2018 was published in April 2019. In September 2020, a new PAR was approved, and a new task group started to work on a first amendment P802.15.7a aiming at increased data rate and longer range for OCC.
IEEE P802.15.8 received IEEE Standards Board approval on 29 March 2012 to form a Task Group to develop a standard for Peer Aware Communications (PAC) optimized for peer-to-peer and infrastructure-less communications with fully distributed coordination operating in bands below 11 GHz. The proposed standard is targeting data rates greater than 100 kbit/s with scalable data rates up to 10 Mbit/s. Features of the proposed include:
The draft standard is under development, more information can be found on the IEEE 802.15 Task Group 8 web page.
IEEE P802.15.9 received IEEE Standards Board approval on 7 December 2011 to form a Task Group to develop a recommended practice for the transport of Key Management Protocol (KMP) datagrams. The recommended practice will define a message framework based on Information Elements as a transport method for key management protocol (KMP) datagrams and guidelines for the use of some existing KMPs with IEEE Std 802.15.4. The recommended practice will not create a new KMP.
While IEEE Std 802.15.4 has always supported datagram security, it has not provided a mechanism for establishing the keys used by this feature. Lack of key management support in IEEE Std 802.15.4 can result in weak keys, which is a common avenue for attacking the security system. Adding KMP support is critical to a proper security framework. Some of the existing KMPs that it may address are IETF's PANA, HIP, IKEv2, IEEE Std 802.1X, and 4-Way-Handshake.
The draft recommended practice is under development, more information can be found on the IEEE 802.15 web page.
IEEE P802.15.10 received IEEE Standards Board approval on 23 August 2013 to form a Task Group to develop a recommended practice for routing packets in dynamically changing 802.15.4 wireless networks (changes on the order of a minute time frame), with minimal impact to route handling. The goal is to extend the coverage area as the number of nodes increase. The route related capabilities that the recommended practice will provide include the following:
The draft recommended practice is under development; more information can be found on the IEEE 802.15.10 web page.
The first meeting of Task Group 13 was held during March 2017, aiming at a new standard on light fidelity (LiFi), i.e. mobile communications by using the light. The aim is to address industrial applications, i.e. ultra-reliable, low-latency connectivity with negligible jitter for next-generation IoT. Compared to 802.15.7, the group decided to rewrite the standard entirely, based on existing and new contributions, to meet those targets. The group first worked on a low-power pulsed modulation PHY (PM-PHY) using On-Off-Keying (OOK) with frequency-domain equalization (FDE) and also a high-bandwidth PHY (HB-PHY) based on orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) adopted from ITU-T G.9991. The group also decided to implement mobility by considering access points in the infrastructure and mobile users in the service area as inputs and outputs of a distributed multiple-input multiple-output (D-MIMO) link. 802.15.13 supports D-MIMO natively with a minimalistic design, suitable for specialty applications. It is implementable on low-cost FPGAs and off-the-shelf computing hardware. The Working Group letter ballot and the IEEE SA Ballot were started in November 2019 and November 2020, respectively. Publication is expected mid of 2022.
The IEEE P802.15 Wireless Next Generation Standing Committee (SCwng) is chartered to facilitate and stimulate presentations and discussions on new wireless related technologies that may be subject for new 802.15 standardization projects or to address the whole 802.15 work group with issues or concerns with techniques or technologies. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "IEEE 802.15 is a working group of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) IEEE 802 standards committee which specifies Wireless Specialty Networks (WSN) standards. The working group was formerly known as Working Group for Wireless Personal Area Networks.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The number of Task Groups in IEEE 802.15 varies based on the number of active projects. The current list of active projects can be found on the IEEE 802.15 web site.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Task group one is based on Bluetooth technology. It defines physical layer (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) specification for wireless connectivity with fixed, portable and moving devices within or entering personal operating space. Standards were issued in 2002 and 2005.",
"title": "IEEE 802.15.1: WPAN / Bluetooth"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Task group two addresses the coexistence of wireless personal area networks (WPAN) with other wireless devices operating in unlicensed frequency bands such as wireless local area networks (WLAN). The IEEE 802.15.2-2003 standard was published in 2003 and task group two went into \"hibernation\".",
"title": "IEEE 802.15.2: Coexistence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "IEEE 802.15.3-2003 is a MAC and PHY standard for high-rate (11 to 55 Mbit/s) WPANs. The standard can be downloaded via the IEEE Get program, which is funded by IEEE 802 volunteers.",
"title": "IEEE 802.15.3: High Rate WPAN"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "IEEE P802.15.3a was an attempt to provide a higher speed ultra-wideband PHY enhancement amendment to IEEE 802.15.3 for applications that involve imaging and multimedia. The members of the task group were not able to come to an agreement choosing between two technology proposals, Multi-band Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (MB-OFDM) and Direct Sequence UWB (DS-UWB), backed by two different industry alliances and was withdrawn in January 2006. Documents related to the development of IEEE 802.15.3a are archived on the IEEE document server.",
"title": "IEEE 802.15.3: High Rate WPAN"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "IEEE 802.15.3b-2005 amendment was released on May 5, 2006. It enhanced 802.15.3 to improve implementation and interoperability of the MAC. This amendment includes many optimizations, corrected errors, clarified ambiguities, and added editorial clarifications while preserving backward compatibility. Among other changes, the amendment defined the following new features:",
"title": "IEEE 802.15.3: High Rate WPAN"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "IEEE 802.15.3c-2009 was published on September 11, 2009. The task group TG3c developed a millimeter-wave-based alternative physical layer (PHY) for the existing 802.15.3 Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) Standard 802.15.3-2003. The IEEE 802.15.3 Task Group 3c (TG3c) was formed in March 2005. This mmWave WPAN is defined to operate in the 57–66 GHz range. Depending on the geographical region, anywhere from 2 to 9 GHz of bandwidth is available (for example, 57–64 GHz is available as unlicensed band defined by FCC 47 CFR 15.255 in North America). The millimeter-wave WPAN allows very high data rate, short range (10 m) for applications including high-speed internet access, streaming content download (video on demand, HDTV, home theater, etc.), real-time streaming and wireless data bus for cable replacement. A total of three PHY modes were defined in the standard:",
"title": "IEEE 802.15.3: High Rate WPAN"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "IEEE Std 802.15.3d-2017 defines an alternative physical layer (PHY) at the lower THz frequency range between 252 GHz and 325 GHz for switched point-to-point links is defined in this amendment. Two PHY modes are defined that enable data rates of up to 100 Gb/s using eight different bandwidths between 2.16 GHz and 69.12 GHz.",
"title": "IEEE 802.15.3: High Rate WPAN"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "IEEE Std 802.15.3e-2017 provides an alternative physical layer (PHY) and a modified medium access control (MAC) layer is defined in this amendment. Two PHY modes have been defined that enable data rates up to 100 Gb/s using the 60 GHz band. MIMO and aggregation methods have been defined to increase the maximum achievable communication speeds. Stack acknowledgment has been defined to improve the medium access control (MAC) efficiency when used in a point-to-point (P2P) topology between two devices.",
"title": "IEEE 802.15.3: High Rate WPAN"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "IEEE Std 802.15.3f-2017 extends the RF channelization of the millimeter wave PHYs to allow for use of the spectrum up to 71 GHz. 802.15.3f was initiated because several regulatory domains extended the licensed exempt 60 GHz bands up to 71 GHz.",
"title": "IEEE 802.15.3: High Rate WPAN"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "IEEE 802.15.4-2003 (Low Rate WPAN) deals with low data rate but very long battery life (months or even years) and very low complexity. The standard defines both the physical (Layer 1) and data-link (Layer 2) layers of the OSI model. The first edition of the 802.15.4 standard was released in May 2003. Several standardized and proprietary networks (or mesh) layer protocols run over 802.15.4-based networks, including IEEE 802.15.5, Zigbee, Thread, 6LoWPAN, WirelessHART, and ISA100.11a.",
"title": "IEEE 802.15.4: Low Rate WPAN"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "IEEE 802.15.4a (formally called IEEE 802.15.4a-2007) is an amendment to IEEE 802.15.4 specifying additional physical layers (PHYs) to the original standard. The principal interest was in providing higher precision ranging and localization capability (1 meter accuracy and better), higher aggregate throughput, adding scalability to data rates, longer range, and lower power consumption and cost. The selected baselines are two optional PHYs consisting of a UWB Pulse Radio (operating in unlicensed UWB spectrum) and a Chirp Spread Spectrum (operating in unlicensed 2.4 GHz spectrum). The Pulsed UWB Radio is based on Continuous Pulsed UWB technology (see C-UWB) and will be able to deliver communications and high precision ranging.",
"title": "IEEE 802.15.4: Low Rate WPAN"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "IEEE 802.15.4b was approved in June 2006 and was published in September 2006 as IEEE 802.15.4-2006. The IEEE 802.15 task group 4b was chartered to create a project for specific enhancements and clarifications to the IEEE 802.15.4-2003 standard, such as resolving ambiguities, reducing unnecessary complexity, increasing flexibility in security key usage, considerations for newly available frequency allocations, and others.",
"title": "IEEE 802.15.4: Low Rate WPAN"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "IEEE 802.15.4c was approved in 2008 and was published in January 2009. This defines a PHY amendment that adds new RF spectrum specifications to address the Chinese regulatory changes which have opened the 314-316 MHz, 430-434 MHz, and 779-787 MHz bands for Wireless PAN use within China.",
"title": "IEEE 802.15.4: Low Rate WPAN"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The IEEE 802.15 Task Group 4d was chartered to define an amendment to the 802.15.4-2006 standard. The amendment defines a new PHY and such changes to the MAC as are necessary to support a new frequency allocation (950 MHz -956 MHz) in Japan while coexisting with passive tag systems in the band.",
"title": "IEEE 802.15.4: Low Rate WPAN"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The IEEE 802.15 Task Group 4e is chartered to define a MAC amendment to the existing standard 802.15.4-2006. The intent of this amendment is to enhance and add functionality to the 802.15.4-2006 MAC to a) better support the industrial markets and b) permit compatibility with modifications being proposed within the Chinese WPAN. Specific enhancements were made to add channel hopping and a variable time slot option compatible with ISA100.11a. These changes were approved in 2011.",
"title": "IEEE 802.15.4: Low Rate WPAN"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The IEEE 802.15.4f Active RFID System Task Group is chartered to define new wireless Physical (PHY) layer(s) and enhancements to the 802.15.4-2006 standard MAC layer which are required to support new PHY(s) for active RFID system bi-directional and location determination applications.",
"title": "IEEE 802.15.4: Low Rate WPAN"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "IEEE 802.15.4g Smart Utility Networks (SUN) Task Group is chartered to create a PHY amendment to 802.15.4 to provide a standard that facilitates very large-scale process control applications such as the utility smart grid network capable of supporting large, geographically diverse networks with minimal infrastructure, with potentially millions of fixed endpoints. In 2012 they released the 802.15.4g radio standard. The Telecommunications Industry Association TR-51 committee develops standards for similar applications.",
"title": "IEEE 802.15.4: Low Rate WPAN"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Approved in 2020, amendment to the UWB PHYs (e.g. with coding options) to increase accuracy and exchange ranging related information between the participating devices.",
"title": "IEEE 802.15.4: Low Rate WPAN"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "IEEE 802.15.5 provides the architectural framework enabling WPAN devices to promote interoperable, stable, and scalable wireless mesh networking. This standard is composed of two parts: low-rate WPAN mesh and high-rate WPAN mesh networks. The low-rate mesh is built on IEEE 802.15.4-2006 MAC, while the high rate mesh utilizes IEEE 802.15.3/3b MAC. The common features of both meshes include network initialization, addressing, and multi-hop unicasting. In addition, the low-rate mesh supports multicasting, reliable broadcasting, portability support, trace route and energy saving function, and the high-rate mesh supports multihop time-guaranteed service.",
"title": "IEEE 802.15.5: Mesh Networking"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Mesh networking for IEEE 802.15.1 networks is beyond scope of IEEE 802.15.5 and is carried within the Bluetooth mesh working group.",
"title": "IEEE 802.15.5: Mesh Networking"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In December 2011, the IEEE 802.15.6 task group approved a draft of a standard for Body Area Network (BAN) technologies. The draft was approved on 22 July 2011 by Letter Ballot to start the Sponsor Ballot process. Task Group 6 was formed in November 2007 to focus on a low-power and short-range wireless standard to be optimized for devices and operation on, in, or around the human body (but not limited to humans) to serve a variety of applications including medical, consumer electronics, and personal entertainment.",
"title": "IEEE 802.15.6: Body Area Networks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The inaugural meeting for Task Group 7 was held during January 2009, where it was chartered to write standards for free-space optical communication using visible light. The 802.15.7-2011 Standard was published in September 2011. In 2015, a new task group was launched to revise the 802.15.7 standard, with several new PHY layers and MAC routines to support optical camera communications (OCC) and light fidelity (LiFi). As the new draft became too large, in March 2017, the 802.15 Working Group decided to continue 802.15.7 with OCC only, which is broadcast only, and to create a new task group 802.15.13 to work on a new standard for LiFi, which obviously needed a significantly revised MAC layer, besides new PHYs. The revision of 802.15.7-2018 was published in April 2019. In September 2020, a new PAR was approved, and a new task group started to work on a first amendment P802.15.7a aiming at increased data rate and longer range for OCC.",
"title": "IEEE 802.15.7: Visible Light Communication"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "IEEE P802.15.8 received IEEE Standards Board approval on 29 March 2012 to form a Task Group to develop a standard for Peer Aware Communications (PAC) optimized for peer-to-peer and infrastructure-less communications with fully distributed coordination operating in bands below 11 GHz. The proposed standard is targeting data rates greater than 100 kbit/s with scalable data rates up to 10 Mbit/s. Features of the proposed include:",
"title": "IEEE P802.15.8: Peer Aware Communications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The draft standard is under development, more information can be found on the IEEE 802.15 Task Group 8 web page.",
"title": "IEEE P802.15.8: Peer Aware Communications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "IEEE P802.15.9 received IEEE Standards Board approval on 7 December 2011 to form a Task Group to develop a recommended practice for the transport of Key Management Protocol (KMP) datagrams. The recommended practice will define a message framework based on Information Elements as a transport method for key management protocol (KMP) datagrams and guidelines for the use of some existing KMPs with IEEE Std 802.15.4. The recommended practice will not create a new KMP.",
"title": "IEEE P802.15.9: Key Management Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "While IEEE Std 802.15.4 has always supported datagram security, it has not provided a mechanism for establishing the keys used by this feature. Lack of key management support in IEEE Std 802.15.4 can result in weak keys, which is a common avenue for attacking the security system. Adding KMP support is critical to a proper security framework. Some of the existing KMPs that it may address are IETF's PANA, HIP, IKEv2, IEEE Std 802.1X, and 4-Way-Handshake.",
"title": "IEEE P802.15.9: Key Management Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The draft recommended practice is under development, more information can be found on the IEEE 802.15 web page.",
"title": "IEEE P802.15.9: Key Management Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "IEEE P802.15.10 received IEEE Standards Board approval on 23 August 2013 to form a Task Group to develop a recommended practice for routing packets in dynamically changing 802.15.4 wireless networks (changes on the order of a minute time frame), with minimal impact to route handling. The goal is to extend the coverage area as the number of nodes increase. The route related capabilities that the recommended practice will provide include the following:",
"title": "IEEE P802.15.10: Layer 2 Routing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The draft recommended practice is under development; more information can be found on the IEEE 802.15.10 web page.",
"title": "IEEE P802.15.10: Layer 2 Routing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The first meeting of Task Group 13 was held during March 2017, aiming at a new standard on light fidelity (LiFi), i.e. mobile communications by using the light. The aim is to address industrial applications, i.e. ultra-reliable, low-latency connectivity with negligible jitter for next-generation IoT. Compared to 802.15.7, the group decided to rewrite the standard entirely, based on existing and new contributions, to meet those targets. The group first worked on a low-power pulsed modulation PHY (PM-PHY) using On-Off-Keying (OOK) with frequency-domain equalization (FDE) and also a high-bandwidth PHY (HB-PHY) based on orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) adopted from ITU-T G.9991. The group also decided to implement mobility by considering access points in the infrastructure and mobile users in the service area as inputs and outputs of a distributed multiple-input multiple-output (D-MIMO) link. 802.15.13 supports D-MIMO natively with a minimalistic design, suitable for specialty applications. It is implementable on low-cost FPGAs and off-the-shelf computing hardware. The Working Group letter ballot and the IEEE SA Ballot were started in November 2019 and November 2020, respectively. Publication is expected mid of 2022.",
"title": "IEEE 802.15.13: Multi-Gigabit/s Optical Wireless Communications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The IEEE P802.15 Wireless Next Generation Standing Committee (SCwng) is chartered to facilitate and stimulate presentations and discussions on new wireless related technologies that may be subject for new 802.15 standardization projects or to address the whole 802.15 work group with issues or concerns with techniques or technologies.",
"title": "Wireless Next Generation Standing Committee"
}
]
| IEEE 802.15 is a working group of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) IEEE 802 standards committee which specifies Wireless Specialty Networks (WSN) standards. The working group was formerly known as Working Group for Wireless Personal Area Networks. The number of Task Groups in IEEE 802.15 varies based on the number of active projects. The current list of active projects can be found on the IEEE 802.15 web site. | 2001-05-15T13:37:15Z | 2023-11-26T15:52:58Z | [
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"Template:IEEE standards",
"Template:Short description",
"Template:See also",
"Template:Main",
"Template:Annotated link",
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"Template:Cite book"
]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.15 |
14,736 | IEEE 802 | IEEE 802 is a family of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standards for local area networks (LANs), personal area networks (PANs), and metropolitan area networks (MANs). The IEEE 802 LAN/MAN Standards Committee (LMSC) maintains these standards. The IEEE 802 family of standards has had twenty-four members, numbered 802.1 through 802.24, with a working group of the LMSC devoted to each. However, not all of these working groups are currently active.
The IEEE 802 standards are restricted to computer networks carrying variable-size packets, unlike cell relay networks, for example, in which data is transmitted in short, uniformly sized units called cells. Isochronous signal networks, in which data is transmitted as a steady stream of octets, or groups of octets, at regular time intervals, are also outside the scope of the IEEE 802 standards.
The number 802 has no significance: it was simply the next number in the sequence that the IEEE used for standards projects.
The services and protocols specified in IEEE 802 map to the lower two layers (data link and physical) of the seven-layer Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) networking reference model. IEEE 802 divides the OSI data link layer into two sub-layers: logical link control (LLC) and medium access control (MAC), as follows:
The most widely used standards are for Ethernet, Bridging and Virtual Bridged LANs, Wireless LAN, Wireless PAN, Wireless MAN, Wireless Coexistence, Media Independent Handover Services, and Wireless RAN. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "IEEE 802 is a family of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standards for local area networks (LANs), personal area networks (PANs), and metropolitan area networks (MANs). The IEEE 802 LAN/MAN Standards Committee (LMSC) maintains these standards. The IEEE 802 family of standards has had twenty-four members, numbered 802.1 through 802.24, with a working group of the LMSC devoted to each. However, not all of these working groups are currently active.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The IEEE 802 standards are restricted to computer networks carrying variable-size packets, unlike cell relay networks, for example, in which data is transmitted in short, uniformly sized units called cells. Isochronous signal networks, in which data is transmitted as a steady stream of octets, or groups of octets, at regular time intervals, are also outside the scope of the IEEE 802 standards.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The number 802 has no significance: it was simply the next number in the sequence that the IEEE used for standards projects.",
"title": ""
},
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"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The services and protocols specified in IEEE 802 map to the lower two layers (data link and physical) of the seven-layer Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) networking reference model. IEEE 802 divides the OSI data link layer into two sub-layers: logical link control (LLC) and medium access control (MAC), as follows:",
"title": ""
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"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The most widely used standards are for Ethernet, Bridging and Virtual Bridged LANs, Wireless LAN, Wireless PAN, Wireless MAN, Wireless Coexistence, Media Independent Handover Services, and Wireless RAN.",
"title": ""
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| IEEE 802 is a family of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standards for local area networks (LANs), personal area networks (PANs), and metropolitan area networks (MANs). The IEEE 802 LAN/MAN Standards Committee (LMSC) maintains these standards. The IEEE 802 family of standards has had twenty-four members, numbered 802.1 through 802.24, with a working group of the LMSC devoted to each. However, not all of these working groups are currently active. The IEEE 802 standards are restricted to computer networks carrying variable-size packets, unlike cell relay networks, for example, in which data is transmitted in short, uniformly sized units called cells. Isochronous signal networks, in which data is transmitted as a steady stream of octets, or groups of octets, at regular time intervals, are also outside the scope of the IEEE 802 standards. The number 802 has no significance: it was simply the next number in the sequence that the IEEE used for standards projects. The services and protocols specified in IEEE 802 map to the lower two layers of the seven-layer Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) networking reference model. IEEE 802 divides the OSI data link layer into two sub-layers: logical link control (LLC) and medium access control (MAC), as follows: Data link layer
LLC sublayer
MAC sublayer
Physical layer The most widely used standards are for Ethernet, Bridging and Virtual Bridged LANs, Wireless LAN, Wireless PAN, Wireless MAN, Wireless Coexistence, Media Independent Handover Services, and Wireless RAN. | 2001-05-15T13:46:15Z | 2023-11-03T15:31:46Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802 |
14,739 | IEEE 802.11 | IEEE 802.11 is part of the IEEE 802 set of local area network (LAN) technical standards, and specifies the set of medium access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) protocols for implementing wireless local area network (WLAN) computer communication. The standard and amendments provide the basis for wireless network products using the Wi-Fi brand and are the world's most widely used wireless computer networking standards. IEEE 802.11 is used in most home and office networks to allow laptops, printers, smartphones, and other devices to communicate with each other and access the Internet without connecting wires. IEEE 802.11 is also a basis for vehicle-based communication networks with IEEE 802.11p.
The standards are created and maintained by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) LAN/MAN Standards Committee (IEEE 802). The base version of the standard was released in 1997 and has had subsequent amendments. While each amendment is officially revoked when it is incorporated in the latest version of the standard, the corporate world tends to market to the revisions because they concisely denote the capabilities of their products. As a result, in the marketplace, each revision tends to become its own standard.
IEEE 802.11 uses various frequencies including, but not limited to, 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, 6 GHz, and 60 GHz frequency bands. Although IEEE 802.11 specifications list channels that might be used, the radio frequency spectrum availability allowed varies significantly by regulatory domain.
The protocols are typically used in conjunction with IEEE 802.2, and are designed to interwork seamlessly with Ethernet, and are very often used to carry Internet Protocol traffic.
The 802.11 family consists of a series of half-duplex over-the-air modulation techniques that use the same basic protocol. The 802.11 protocol family employs carrier-sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) whereby equipment listens to a channel for other users (including non 802.11 users) before transmitting each frame (some use the term "packet", which may be ambiguous: "frame" is more technically correct).
802.11-1997 was the first wireless networking standard in the family, but 802.11b was the first widely accepted one, followed by 802.11a, 802.11g, 802.11n, and 802.11ac. Other standards in the family (c–f, h, j) are service amendments that are used to extend the current scope of the existing standard, which amendments may also include corrections to a previous specification.
802.11b and 802.11g use the 2.4-GHz ISM band, operating in the United States under Part 15 of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission Rules and Regulations. 802.11n can also use that 2.4-GHz band. Because of this choice of frequency band, 802.11b/g/n equipment may occasionally suffer interference in the 2.4-GHz band from microwave ovens, cordless telephones, and Bluetooth devices. 802.11b and 802.11g control their interference and susceptibility to interference by using direct-sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) signaling methods, respectively.
802.11a uses the 5 GHz U-NII band which, for much of the world, offers at least 23 non-overlapping, 20-MHz-wide channels. This is an advantage over the 2.4-GHz, ISM-frequency band, which offers only three non-overlapping, 20-MHz-wide channels where other adjacent channels overlap (see: list of WLAN channels). Better or worse performance with higher or lower frequencies (channels) may be realized, depending on the environment. 802.11n and 802.11ax can use either the 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz band; 802.11ac uses only the 5 GHz band.
The segment of the radio frequency spectrum used by 802.11 varies between countries. In the US, 802.11a and 802.11g devices may be operated without a license, as allowed in Part 15 of the FCC Rules and Regulations. Frequencies used by channels one through six of 802.11b and 802.11g fall within the 2.4 GHz amateur radio band. Licensed amateur radio operators may operate 802.11b/g devices under Part 97 of the FCC Rules and Regulations, allowing increased power output but not commercial content or encryption.
In 2018, the Wi-Fi Alliance began using a consumer-friendly generation numbering scheme for the publicly used 802.11 protocols. Wi-Fi generations 1–6 refer to the 802.11b, 802.11a, 802.11g, 802.11n, 802.11ac, and 802.11ax protocols, in that order.
802.11 technology has its origins in a 1985 ruling by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission that released the ISM band for unlicensed use.
In 1991 NCR Corporation/AT&T (now Nokia Labs and LSI Corporation) invented a precursor to 802.11 in Nieuwegein, the Netherlands. The inventors initially intended to use the technology for cashier systems. The first wireless products were brought to the market under the name WaveLAN with raw data rates of 1 Mbit/s and 2 Mbit/s.
Vic Hayes, who held the chair of IEEE 802.11 for 10 years, and has been called the "father of Wi-Fi", was involved in designing the initial 802.11b and 802.11a standards within the IEEE. He, along with Bell Labs Engineer Bruce Tuch, approached IEEE to create a standard.
In 1999, the Wi-Fi Alliance was formed as a trade association to hold the Wi-Fi trademark under which most products are sold.
The major commercial breakthrough came with Apple's adoption of Wi-Fi for their iBook series of laptops in 1999. It was the first mass consumer product to offer Wi-Fi network connectivity, which was then branded by Apple as AirPort. One year later IBM followed with its ThinkPad 1300 series in 2000.
The original version of the standard IEEE 802.11 was released in 1997 and clarified in 1999, but is now obsolete. It specified two net bit rates of 1 or 2 megabits per second (Mbit/s), plus forward error correction code. It specified three alternative physical layer technologies: diffuse infrared operating at 1 Mbit/s; frequency-hopping spread spectrum operating at 1 Mbit/s or 2 Mbit/s; and direct-sequence spread spectrum operating at 1 Mbit/s or 2 Mbit/s. The latter two radio technologies used microwave transmission over the Industrial Scientific Medical frequency band at 2.4 GHz. Some earlier WLAN technologies used lower frequencies, such as the U.S. 900 MHz ISM band.
Legacy 802.11 with direct-sequence spread spectrum was rapidly supplanted and popularized by 802.11b.
802.11a, published in 1999, uses the same data link layer protocol and frame format as the original standard, but an OFDM based air interface (physical layer) was added.
It operates in the 5 GHz band with a maximum net data rate of 54 Mbit/s, plus error correction code, which yields realistic net achievable throughput in the mid-20 Mbit/s. It has seen widespread worldwide implementation, particularly within the corporate workspace.
Since the 2.4 GHz band is heavily used to the point of being crowded, using the relatively unused 5 GHz band gives 802.11a a significant advantage. However, this high carrier frequency also brings a disadvantage: the effective overall range of 802.11a is less than that of 802.11b/g. In theory, 802.11a signals are absorbed more readily by walls and other solid objects in their path due to their smaller wavelength, and, as a result, cannot penetrate as far as those of 802.11b. In practice, 802.11b typically has a higher range at low speeds (802.11b will reduce speed to 5.5 Mbit/s or even 1 Mbit/s at low signal strengths). 802.11a also suffers from interference, but locally there may be fewer signals to interfere with, resulting in less interference and better throughput.
The 802.11b standard has a maximum raw data rate of 11 Mbit/s (Megabits per second) and uses the same media access method defined in the original standard. 802.11b products appeared on the market in early 2000, since 802.11b is a direct extension of the modulation technique defined in the original standard. The dramatic increase in throughput of 802.11b (compared to the original standard) along with simultaneous substantial price reductions led to the rapid acceptance of 802.11b as the definitive wireless LAN technology.
Devices using 802.11b experience interference from other products operating in the 2.4 GHz band. Devices operating in the 2.4 GHz range include microwave ovens, Bluetooth devices, baby monitors, cordless telephones, and some amateur radio equipment. As unlicensed intentional radiators in this ISM band, they must not interfere with and must tolerate interference from primary or secondary allocations (users) of this band, such as amateur radio.
In June 2003, a third modulation standard was ratified: 802.11g. This works in the 2.4 GHz band (like 802.11b), but uses the same OFDM based transmission scheme as 802.11a. It operates at a maximum physical layer bit rate of 54 Mbit/s exclusive of forward error correction codes, or about 22 Mbit/s average throughput. 802.11g hardware is fully backward compatible with 802.11b hardware, and therefore is encumbered with legacy issues that reduce throughput by ~21% when compared to 802.11a.
The then-proposed 802.11g standard was rapidly adopted in the market starting in January 2003, well before ratification, due to the desire for higher data rates as well as reductions in manufacturing costs. By summer 2003, most dual-band 802.11a/b products became dual-band/tri-mode, supporting a and b/g in a single mobile adapter card or access point. Details of making b and g work well together occupied much of the lingering technical process; in an 802.11g network, however, the activity of an 802.11b participant will reduce the data rate of the overall 802.11g network.
Like 802.11b, 802.11g devices also suffer interference from other products operating in the 2.4 GHz band, for example, wireless keyboards.
In 2003, task group TGma was authorized to "roll up" many of the amendments to the 1999 version of the 802.11 standard. REVma or 802.11ma, as it was called, created a single document that merged 8 amendments (802.11a, b, d, e, g, h, i, j) with the base standard. Upon approval on 8 March 2007, 802.11REVma was renamed to the then-current base standard IEEE 802.11-2007.
802.11n is an amendment that improves upon the previous 802.11 standards; its first draft of certification was published in 2006. The 802.11n standard was retroactively labelled as Wi-Fi 4 by the Wi-Fi Alliance. The standard added support for multiple-input multiple-output antennas (MIMO). 802.11n operates on both the 2.4 GHz and the 5 GHz bands. Support for 5 GHz bands is optional. Its net data rate ranges from 54 Mbit/s to 600 Mbit/s. The IEEE has approved the amendment, and it was published in October 2009. Prior to the final ratification, enterprises were already migrating to 802.11n networks based on the Wi-Fi Alliance's certification of products conforming to a 2007 draft of the 802.11n proposal.
In May 2007, task group TGmb was authorized to "roll up" many of the amendments to the 2007 version of the 802.11 standard. REVmb or 802.11mb, as it was called, created a single document that merged ten amendments (802.11k, r, y, n, w, p, z, v, u, s) with the 2007 base standard. In addition much cleanup was done, including a reordering of many of the clauses. Upon publication on 29 March 2012, the new standard was referred to as IEEE 802.11-2012.
IEEE 802.11ac-2013 is an amendment to IEEE 802.11, published in December 2013, that builds on 802.11n. The 802.11ac standard was retroactively labelled as Wi-Fi 5 by the Wi-Fi Alliance. Changes compared to 802.11n include wider channels (80 or 160 MHz versus 40 MHz) in the 5 GHz band, more spatial streams (up to eight versus four), higher-order modulation (up to 256-QAM vs. 64-QAM), and the addition of Multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO). The Wi-Fi Alliance separated the introduction of ac wireless products into two phases ("waves"), named "Wave 1" and "Wave 2". From mid-2013, the alliance started certifying Wave 1 802.11ac products shipped by manufacturers, based on the IEEE 802.11ac Draft 3.0 (the IEEE standard was not finalized until later that year). In 2016 Wi-Fi Alliance introduced the Wave 2 certification, to provide higher bandwidth and capacity than Wave 1 products. Wave 2 products include additional features like MU-MIMO, 160 MHz channel width support, support for more 5 GHz channels, and four spatial streams (with four antennas; compared to three in Wave 1 and 802.11n, and eight in IEEE's 802.11ax specification).
IEEE 802.11ad is an amendment that defines a new physical layer for 802.11 networks to operate in the 60 GHz millimeter wave spectrum. This frequency band has significantly different propagation characteristics than the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands where Wi-Fi networks operate. Products implementing the 802.11ad standard are being brought to market under the WiGig brand name. The certification program is now being developed by the Wi-Fi Alliance instead of the now defunct Wireless Gigabit Alliance. The peak transmission rate of 802.11ad is 7 Gbit/s.
IEEE 802.11ad is a protocol used for very high data rates (about 8 Gbit/s) and for short range communication (about 1–10 meters).
TP-Link announced the world's first 802.11ad router in January 2016.
The WiGig standard is not too well known, although it was announced in 2009 and added to the IEEE 802.11 family in December 2012.
IEEE 802.11af, also referred to as "White-Fi" and "Super Wi-Fi", is an amendment, approved in February 2014, that allows WLAN operation in TV white space spectrum in the VHF and UHF bands between 54 and 790 MHz. It uses cognitive radio technology to transmit on unused TV channels, with the standard taking measures to limit interference for primary users, such as analog TV, digital TV, and wireless microphones. Access points and stations determine their position using a satellite positioning system such as GPS, and use the Internet to query a geolocation database (GDB) provided by a regional regulatory agency to discover what frequency channels are available for use at a given time and position. The physical layer uses OFDM and is based on 802.11ac. The propagation path loss as well as the attenuation by materials such as brick and concrete is lower in the UHF and VHF bands than in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands, which increases the possible range. The frequency channels are 6 to 8 MHz wide, depending on the regulatory domain. Up to four channels may be bonded in either one or two contiguous blocks. MIMO operation is possible with up to four streams used for either space–time block code (STBC) or multi-user (MU) operation. The achievable data rate per spatial stream is 26.7 Mbit/s for 6 and 7 MHz channels, and 35.6 Mbit/s for 8 MHz channels. With four spatial streams and four bonded channels, the maximum data rate is 426.7 Mbit/s for 6 and 7 MHz channels and 568.9 Mbit/s for 8 MHz channels.
IEEE 802.11-2016 which was known as IEEE 802.11 REVmc, is a revision based on IEEE 802.11-2012, incorporating 5 amendments (11ae, 11aa, 11ad, 11ac, 11af). In addition, existing MAC and PHY functions have been enhanced and obsolete features were removed or marked for removal. Some clauses and annexes have been renumbered.
IEEE 802.11ah, published in 2017, defines a WLAN system operating at sub-1 GHz license-exempt bands. Due to the favorable propagation characteristics of the low-frequency spectra, 802.11ah can provide improved transmission range compared with the conventional 802.11 WLANs operating in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. 802.11ah can be used for various purposes including large-scale sensor networks, extended-range hotspots, and outdoor Wi-Fi for cellular WAN carrier traffic offloading, whereas the available bandwidth is relatively narrow. The protocol intends consumption to be competitive with low-power Bluetooth, at a much wider range.
IEEE 802.11ai is an amendment to the 802.11 standard that added new mechanisms for a faster initial link setup time.
IEEE 802.11aj is a derivative of 802.11ad for use in the 45 GHz unlicensed spectrum available in some regions of the world (specifically China); it also provides additional capabilities for use in the 60 GHz band.
Alternatively known as China Millimeter Wave (CMMW).
IEEE 802.11aq is an amendment to the 802.11 standard that will enable pre-association discovery of services. This extends some of the mechanisms in 802.11u that enabled device discovery to discover further the services running on a device, or provided by a network.
IEEE 802.11-2020, which was known as IEEE 802.11 REVmd, is a revision based on IEEE 802.11-2016 incorporating 5 amendments (11ai, 11ah, 11aj, 11ak, 11aq). In addition, existing MAC and PHY functions have been enhanced and obsolete features were removed or marked for removal. Some clauses and annexes have been added.
IEEE 802.11ax is the successor to 802.11ac, marketed as Wi-Fi 6 (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz) and Wi-Fi 6E (6 GHz) by the Wi-Fi Alliance. It is also known as High Efficiency Wi-Fi, for the overall improvements to Wi-Fi 6 clients in dense environments. For an individual client, the maximum improvement in data rate (PHY speed) against the predecessor (802.11ac) is only 39% (for comparison, this improvement was nearly 500% for the predecessors). Yet, even with this comparatively minor 39% figure, the goal was to provide 4 times the throughput-per-area of 802.11ac (hence High Efficiency). The motivation behind this goal was the deployment of WLAN in dense environments such as corporate offices, shopping malls and dense residential apartments. This is achieved by means of a technique called OFDMA, which is basically multiplexing in the frequency domain (as opposed to spatial multiplexing, as in 802.11ac). This is equivalent to cellular technology applied into Wi-Fi.
The IEEE 802.11ax‑2021 standard was approved on February 9, 2021.
IEEE 802.11ay is a standard that is being developed, also called EDMG: Enhanced Directional MultiGigabit PHY. It is an amendment that defines a new physical layer for 802.11 networks to operate in the 60 GHz millimeter wave spectrum. It will be an extension of the existing 11ad, aimed to extend the throughput, range, and use-cases. The main use-cases include indoor operation and short-range communications due to atmospheric oxygen absorption and inability to penetrate walls. The peak transmission rate of 802.11ay is 40 Gbit/s. The main extensions include: channel bonding (2, 3 and 4), MIMO (up to 4 streams) and higher modulation schemes. The expected range is 300-500 m.
IEEE 802.11ba Wake-up Radio (WUR) Operation is an amendment to the IEEE 802.11 standard that enables energy-efficient operation for data reception without increasing latency. The target active power consumption to receive a WUR packet is less than 1 milliwatt and supports data rates of 62.5 kbit/s and 250 kbit/s. The WUR PHY uses MC-OOK (multicarrier OOK) to achieve extremely low power consumption.
IEEE 802.11bb is a networking protocol standard in the IEEE 802.11 set of protocols that uses infrared light for communications.
IEEE 802.11be Extremely High Throughput (EHT) is the potential next amendment to the 802.11 IEEE standard, and will likely be designated as Wi-Fi 7. It will build upon 802.11ax, focusing on WLAN indoor and outdoor operation with stationary and pedestrian speeds in the 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz frequency bands.
Across all variations of 802.11, maximum achievable throughputs are given either based on measurements under ideal conditions or in the layer-2 data rates. However, this does not apply to typical deployments in which data is being transferred between two endpoints, of which at least one is typically connected to a wired infrastructure and the other endpoint is connected to an infrastructure via a wireless link.
This means that, typically, data frames pass an 802.11 (WLAN) medium and are being converted to 802.3 (Ethernet) or vice versa. Due to the difference in the frame (header) lengths of these two media, the application's packet size determines the speed of the data transfer. This means applications that use small packets (e.g., VoIP) create dataflows with high-overhead traffic (i.e., a low goodput). Other factors that contribute to the overall application data rate are the speed with which the application transmits the packets (i.e., the data rate) and, of course, the energy with which the wireless signal is received. The latter is determined by distance and by the configured output power of the communicating devices.
The same references apply to the attached graphs that show measurements of UDP throughput. Each represents an average (UDP) throughput (please note that the error bars are there but barely visible due to the small variation) of 25 measurements. Each is with a specific packet size (small or large) and with a specific data rate (10 kbit/s – 100 Mbit/s). Markers for traffic profiles of common applications are included as well. These figures assume there are no packet errors, which, if occurring, will lower the transmission rate further.
802.11b, 802.11g, and 802.11n-2.4 utilize the 2.400–2.500 GHz spectrum, one of the ISM bands. 802.11a, 802.11n, and 802.11ac use the more heavily regulated 4.915–5.825 GHz band. These are commonly referred to as the "2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands" in most sales literature. Each spectrum is sub-divided into channels with a center frequency and bandwidth, analogous to how radio and TV broadcast bands are sub-divided.
The 2.4 GHz band is divided into 14 channels spaced 5 MHz apart, beginning with channel 1, which is centered on 2.412 GHz. The latter channels have additional restrictions or are unavailable for use in some regulatory domains.
The channel numbering of the 5.725–5.875 GHz spectrum is less intuitive due to the differences in regulations between countries. These are discussed in greater detail on the list of WLAN channels.
In addition to specifying the channel center frequency, 802.11 also specifies (in Clause 17) a spectral mask defining the permitted power distribution across each channel. The mask requires the signal to be attenuated a minimum of 20 dB from its peak amplitude at ±11 MHz from the center frequency, the point at which a channel is effectively 22 MHz wide. One consequence is that stations can use only every fourth or fifth channel without overlap.
Availability of channels is regulated by country, constrained in part by how each country allocates radio spectrum to various services. At one extreme, Japan permits the use of all 14 channels for 802.11b, and 1–13 for 802.11g/n-2.4. Other countries such as Spain initially allowed only channels 10 and 11, and France allowed only 10, 11, 12, and 13; however, Europe now allow channels 1 through 13. North America and some Central and South American countries allow only 1 through 11.
Since the spectral mask defines only power output restrictions up to ±11 MHz from the center frequency to be attenuated by −50 dBr, it is often assumed that the energy of the channel extends no further than these limits. It is more correct to say that the overlapping signal on any channel should be sufficiently attenuated to interfere with a transmitter on any other channel minimally, given the separation between channels. Due to the near–far problem a transmitter can impact (desensitize) a receiver on a "non-overlapping" channel, but only if it is close to the victim receiver (within a meter) or operating above allowed power levels. Conversely, a sufficiently distant transmitter on an overlapping channel can have little to no significant effect.
Confusion often arises over the amount of channel separation required between transmitting devices. 802.11b was based on direct-sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) modulation and utilized a channel bandwidth of 22 MHz, resulting in three "non-overlapping" channels (1, 6, and 11). 802.11g was based on OFDM modulation and utilized a channel bandwidth of 20 MHz. This occasionally leads to the belief that four "non-overlapping" channels (1, 5, 9, and 13) exist under 802.11g. However, this is not the case as per 17.4.6.3 Channel Numbering of operating channels of the IEEE Std 802.11 (2012), which states, "In a multiple cell network topology, overlapping and/or adjacent cells using different channels can operate simultaneously without interference if the distance between the center frequencies is at least 25 MHz." and section 18.3.9.3 and Figure 18-13.
This does not mean that the technical overlap of the channels recommends the non-use of overlapping channels. The amount of inter-channel interference seen on a configuration using channels 1, 5, 9, and 13 (which is permitted in Europe, but not in North America) is barely different from a three-channel configuration, but with an entire extra channel.
However, overlap between channels with more narrow spacing (e.g. 1, 4, 7, 11 in North America) may cause unacceptable degradation of signal quality and throughput, particularly when users transmit near the boundaries of AP cells.
IEEE uses the phrase regdomain to refer to a legal regulatory region. Different countries define different levels of allowable transmitter power, time that a channel can be occupied, and different available channels. Domain codes are specified for the United States, Canada, ETSI (Europe), Spain, France, Japan, and China.
Most Wi-Fi certified devices default to regdomain 0, which means least common denominator settings, i.e., the device will not transmit at a power above the allowable power in any nation, nor will it use frequencies that are not permitted in any nation.
The regdomain setting is often made difficult or impossible to change so that the end-users do not conflict with local regulatory agencies such as the United States' Federal Communications Commission.
The datagrams are called frames. Current 802.11 standards specify frame types for use in the transmission of data as well as management and control of wireless links.
Frames are divided into very specific and standardized sections. Each frame consists of a MAC header, payload, and frame check sequence (FCS). Some frames may not have a payload.
The first two bytes of the MAC header form a frame control field specifying the form and function of the frame. This frame control field is subdivided into the following sub-fields:
The next two bytes are reserved for the Duration ID field, indicating how long the field's transmission will take so other devices know when the channel will be available again. This field can take one of three forms: Duration, Contention-Free Period (CFP), and Association ID (AID).
An 802.11 frame can have up to four address fields. Each field can carry a MAC address. Address 1 is the receiver, Address 2 is the transmitter, Address 3 is used for filtering purposes by the receiver. Address 4 is only present in data frames transmitted between access points in an Extended Service Set or between intermediate nodes in a mesh network.
The remaining fields of the header are:
The payload or frame body field is variable in size, from 0 to 2304 bytes plus any overhead from security encapsulation, and contains information from higher layers.
The Frame Check Sequence (FCS) is the last four bytes in the standard 802.11 frame. Often referred to as the Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC), it allows for integrity checks of retrieved frames. As frames are about to be sent, the FCS is calculated and appended. When a station receives a frame, it can calculate the FCS of the frame and compare it to the one received. If they match, it is assumed that the frame was not distorted during transmission.
Management frames are not always authenticated, and allow for the maintenance, or discontinuance, of communication. Some common 802.11 subtypes include:
The body of a management frame consists of frame-subtype-dependent fixed fields followed by a sequence of information elements (IEs).
The common structure of an IE is as follows:
Control frames facilitate the exchange of data frames between stations. Some common 802.11 control frames include:
Data frames carry packets from web pages, files, etc. within the body. The body begins with an IEEE 802.2 header, with the Destination Service Access Point (DSAP) specifying the protocol, followed by a Subnetwork Access Protocol (SNAP) header if the DSAP is hex AA, with the organizationally unique identifier (OUI) and protocol ID (PID) fields specifying the protocol. If the OUI is all zeroes, the protocol ID field is an EtherType value. Almost all 802.11 data frames use 802.2 and SNAP headers, and most use an OUI of 00:00:00 and an EtherType value.
Similar to TCP congestion control on the internet, frame loss is built into the operation of 802.11. To select the correct transmission speed or Modulation and Coding Scheme, a rate control algorithm may test different speeds. The actual packet loss rate of Access points varies widely for different link conditions. There are variations in the loss rate experienced on production Access points, between 10% and 80%, with 30% being a common average. It is important to be aware that the link layer should recover these lost frames. If the sender does not receive an Acknowledgement (ACK) frame, then it will be resent.
Within the IEEE 802.11 Working Group, the following IEEE Standards Association Standard and Amendments exist:
802.11F and 802.11T are recommended practices rather than standards and are capitalized as such.
802.11m is used for standard maintenance. 802.11ma was completed for 802.11-2007, 802.11mb for 802.11-2012, 802.11mc for 802.11-2016, and 802.11md for 802.11-2020.
Both the terms "standard" and "amendment" are used when referring to the different variants of IEEE standards.
As far as the IEEE Standards Association is concerned, there is only one current standard; it is denoted by IEEE 802.11 followed by the date published. IEEE 802.11-2020 is the only version currently in publication, superseding previous releases. The standard is updated by means of amendments. Amendments are created by task groups (TG). Both the task group and their finished document are denoted by 802.11 followed by one or two lower case letters, for example, IEEE 802.11a or IEEE 802.11ax. Updating 802.11 is the responsibility of task group m. In order to create a new version, TGm combines the previous version of the standard and all published amendments. TGm also provides clarification and interpretation to industry on published documents. New versions of the IEEE 802.11 were published in 1999, 2007, 2012, 2016, and 2020.
Various terms in 802.11 are used to specify aspects of wireless local-area networking operation and may be unfamiliar to some readers.
For example, Time Unit (usually abbreviated TU) is used to indicate a unit of time equal to 1024 microseconds. Numerous time constants are defined in terms of TU (rather than the nearly equal millisecond).
Also, the term "Portal" is used to describe an entity that is similar to an 802.1H bridge. A Portal provides access to the WLAN by non-802.11 LAN STAs.
In 2001, a group from the University of California, Berkeley presented a paper describing weaknesses in the 802.11 Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) security mechanism defined in the original standard; they were followed by Fluhrer, Mantin, and Shamir's paper titled "Weaknesses in the Key Scheduling Algorithm of RC4". Not long after, Adam Stubblefield and AT&T publicly announced the first verification of the attack. In the attack, they were able to intercept transmissions and gain unauthorized access to wireless networks.
The IEEE set up a dedicated task group to create a replacement security solution, 802.11i (previously, this work was handled as part of a broader 802.11e effort to enhance the MAC layer). The Wi-Fi Alliance announced an interim specification called Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) based on a subset of the then-current IEEE 802.11i draft. These started to appear in products in mid-2003. IEEE 802.11i (also known as WPA2) itself was ratified in June 2004, and uses the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), instead of RC4, which was used in WEP. The modern recommended encryption for the home/consumer space is WPA2 (AES Pre-Shared Key), and for the enterprise space is WPA2 along with a RADIUS authentication server (or another type of authentication server) and a strong authentication method such as EAP-TLS.
In January 2005, the IEEE set up yet another task group "w" to protect management and broadcast frames, which previously were sent unsecured. Its standard was published in 2009.
In December 2011, a security flaw was revealed that affects some wireless routers with a specific implementation of the optional Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) feature. While WPS is not a part of 802.11, the flaw allows an attacker within the range of the wireless router to recover the WPS PIN and, with it, the router's 802.11i password in a few hours.
In late 2014, Apple announced that its iOS 8 mobile operating system would scramble MAC addresses during the pre-association stage to thwart retail footfall tracking made possible by the regular transmission of uniquely identifiable probe requests. Android 8.0 "Oreo" introduced a similar feature, named "MAC randomization".
Wi-Fi users may be subjected to a Wi-Fi deauthentication attack to eavesdrop, attack passwords, or force the use of another, usually more expensive access point. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "IEEE 802.11 is part of the IEEE 802 set of local area network (LAN) technical standards, and specifies the set of medium access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) protocols for implementing wireless local area network (WLAN) computer communication. The standard and amendments provide the basis for wireless network products using the Wi-Fi brand and are the world's most widely used wireless computer networking standards. IEEE 802.11 is used in most home and office networks to allow laptops, printers, smartphones, and other devices to communicate with each other and access the Internet without connecting wires. IEEE 802.11 is also a basis for vehicle-based communication networks with IEEE 802.11p.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The standards are created and maintained by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) LAN/MAN Standards Committee (IEEE 802). The base version of the standard was released in 1997 and has had subsequent amendments. While each amendment is officially revoked when it is incorporated in the latest version of the standard, the corporate world tends to market to the revisions because they concisely denote the capabilities of their products. As a result, in the marketplace, each revision tends to become its own standard.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "IEEE 802.11 uses various frequencies including, but not limited to, 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, 6 GHz, and 60 GHz frequency bands. Although IEEE 802.11 specifications list channels that might be used, the radio frequency spectrum availability allowed varies significantly by regulatory domain.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The protocols are typically used in conjunction with IEEE 802.2, and are designed to interwork seamlessly with Ethernet, and are very often used to carry Internet Protocol traffic.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The 802.11 family consists of a series of half-duplex over-the-air modulation techniques that use the same basic protocol. The 802.11 protocol family employs carrier-sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) whereby equipment listens to a channel for other users (including non 802.11 users) before transmitting each frame (some use the term \"packet\", which may be ambiguous: \"frame\" is more technically correct).",
"title": "General description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "802.11-1997 was the first wireless networking standard in the family, but 802.11b was the first widely accepted one, followed by 802.11a, 802.11g, 802.11n, and 802.11ac. Other standards in the family (c–f, h, j) are service amendments that are used to extend the current scope of the existing standard, which amendments may also include corrections to a previous specification.",
"title": "General description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "802.11b and 802.11g use the 2.4-GHz ISM band, operating in the United States under Part 15 of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission Rules and Regulations. 802.11n can also use that 2.4-GHz band. Because of this choice of frequency band, 802.11b/g/n equipment may occasionally suffer interference in the 2.4-GHz band from microwave ovens, cordless telephones, and Bluetooth devices. 802.11b and 802.11g control their interference and susceptibility to interference by using direct-sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) signaling methods, respectively.",
"title": "General description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "802.11a uses the 5 GHz U-NII band which, for much of the world, offers at least 23 non-overlapping, 20-MHz-wide channels. This is an advantage over the 2.4-GHz, ISM-frequency band, which offers only three non-overlapping, 20-MHz-wide channels where other adjacent channels overlap (see: list of WLAN channels). Better or worse performance with higher or lower frequencies (channels) may be realized, depending on the environment. 802.11n and 802.11ax can use either the 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz band; 802.11ac uses only the 5 GHz band.",
"title": "General description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The segment of the radio frequency spectrum used by 802.11 varies between countries. In the US, 802.11a and 802.11g devices may be operated without a license, as allowed in Part 15 of the FCC Rules and Regulations. Frequencies used by channels one through six of 802.11b and 802.11g fall within the 2.4 GHz amateur radio band. Licensed amateur radio operators may operate 802.11b/g devices under Part 97 of the FCC Rules and Regulations, allowing increased power output but not commercial content or encryption.",
"title": "General description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 2018, the Wi-Fi Alliance began using a consumer-friendly generation numbering scheme for the publicly used 802.11 protocols. Wi-Fi generations 1–6 refer to the 802.11b, 802.11a, 802.11g, 802.11n, 802.11ac, and 802.11ax protocols, in that order.",
"title": "Generations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "802.11 technology has its origins in a 1985 ruling by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission that released the ISM band for unlicensed use.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In 1991 NCR Corporation/AT&T (now Nokia Labs and LSI Corporation) invented a precursor to 802.11 in Nieuwegein, the Netherlands. The inventors initially intended to use the technology for cashier systems. The first wireless products were brought to the market under the name WaveLAN with raw data rates of 1 Mbit/s and 2 Mbit/s.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Vic Hayes, who held the chair of IEEE 802.11 for 10 years, and has been called the \"father of Wi-Fi\", was involved in designing the initial 802.11b and 802.11a standards within the IEEE. He, along with Bell Labs Engineer Bruce Tuch, approached IEEE to create a standard.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In 1999, the Wi-Fi Alliance was formed as a trade association to hold the Wi-Fi trademark under which most products are sold.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The major commercial breakthrough came with Apple's adoption of Wi-Fi for their iBook series of laptops in 1999. It was the first mass consumer product to offer Wi-Fi network connectivity, which was then branded by Apple as AirPort. One year later IBM followed with its ThinkPad 1300 series in 2000.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The original version of the standard IEEE 802.11 was released in 1997 and clarified in 1999, but is now obsolete. It specified two net bit rates of 1 or 2 megabits per second (Mbit/s), plus forward error correction code. It specified three alternative physical layer technologies: diffuse infrared operating at 1 Mbit/s; frequency-hopping spread spectrum operating at 1 Mbit/s or 2 Mbit/s; and direct-sequence spread spectrum operating at 1 Mbit/s or 2 Mbit/s. The latter two radio technologies used microwave transmission over the Industrial Scientific Medical frequency band at 2.4 GHz. Some earlier WLAN technologies used lower frequencies, such as the U.S. 900 MHz ISM band.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Legacy 802.11 with direct-sequence spread spectrum was rapidly supplanted and popularized by 802.11b.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "802.11a, published in 1999, uses the same data link layer protocol and frame format as the original standard, but an OFDM based air interface (physical layer) was added.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "It operates in the 5 GHz band with a maximum net data rate of 54 Mbit/s, plus error correction code, which yields realistic net achievable throughput in the mid-20 Mbit/s. It has seen widespread worldwide implementation, particularly within the corporate workspace.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Since the 2.4 GHz band is heavily used to the point of being crowded, using the relatively unused 5 GHz band gives 802.11a a significant advantage. However, this high carrier frequency also brings a disadvantage: the effective overall range of 802.11a is less than that of 802.11b/g. In theory, 802.11a signals are absorbed more readily by walls and other solid objects in their path due to their smaller wavelength, and, as a result, cannot penetrate as far as those of 802.11b. In practice, 802.11b typically has a higher range at low speeds (802.11b will reduce speed to 5.5 Mbit/s or even 1 Mbit/s at low signal strengths). 802.11a also suffers from interference, but locally there may be fewer signals to interfere with, resulting in less interference and better throughput.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The 802.11b standard has a maximum raw data rate of 11 Mbit/s (Megabits per second) and uses the same media access method defined in the original standard. 802.11b products appeared on the market in early 2000, since 802.11b is a direct extension of the modulation technique defined in the original standard. The dramatic increase in throughput of 802.11b (compared to the original standard) along with simultaneous substantial price reductions led to the rapid acceptance of 802.11b as the definitive wireless LAN technology.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Devices using 802.11b experience interference from other products operating in the 2.4 GHz band. Devices operating in the 2.4 GHz range include microwave ovens, Bluetooth devices, baby monitors, cordless telephones, and some amateur radio equipment. As unlicensed intentional radiators in this ISM band, they must not interfere with and must tolerate interference from primary or secondary allocations (users) of this band, such as amateur radio.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In June 2003, a third modulation standard was ratified: 802.11g. This works in the 2.4 GHz band (like 802.11b), but uses the same OFDM based transmission scheme as 802.11a. It operates at a maximum physical layer bit rate of 54 Mbit/s exclusive of forward error correction codes, or about 22 Mbit/s average throughput. 802.11g hardware is fully backward compatible with 802.11b hardware, and therefore is encumbered with legacy issues that reduce throughput by ~21% when compared to 802.11a.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The then-proposed 802.11g standard was rapidly adopted in the market starting in January 2003, well before ratification, due to the desire for higher data rates as well as reductions in manufacturing costs. By summer 2003, most dual-band 802.11a/b products became dual-band/tri-mode, supporting a and b/g in a single mobile adapter card or access point. Details of making b and g work well together occupied much of the lingering technical process; in an 802.11g network, however, the activity of an 802.11b participant will reduce the data rate of the overall 802.11g network.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Like 802.11b, 802.11g devices also suffer interference from other products operating in the 2.4 GHz band, for example, wireless keyboards.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In 2003, task group TGma was authorized to \"roll up\" many of the amendments to the 1999 version of the 802.11 standard. REVma or 802.11ma, as it was called, created a single document that merged 8 amendments (802.11a, b, d, e, g, h, i, j) with the base standard. Upon approval on 8 March 2007, 802.11REVma was renamed to the then-current base standard IEEE 802.11-2007.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "802.11n is an amendment that improves upon the previous 802.11 standards; its first draft of certification was published in 2006. The 802.11n standard was retroactively labelled as Wi-Fi 4 by the Wi-Fi Alliance. The standard added support for multiple-input multiple-output antennas (MIMO). 802.11n operates on both the 2.4 GHz and the 5 GHz bands. Support for 5 GHz bands is optional. Its net data rate ranges from 54 Mbit/s to 600 Mbit/s. The IEEE has approved the amendment, and it was published in October 2009. Prior to the final ratification, enterprises were already migrating to 802.11n networks based on the Wi-Fi Alliance's certification of products conforming to a 2007 draft of the 802.11n proposal.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In May 2007, task group TGmb was authorized to \"roll up\" many of the amendments to the 2007 version of the 802.11 standard. REVmb or 802.11mb, as it was called, created a single document that merged ten amendments (802.11k, r, y, n, w, p, z, v, u, s) with the 2007 base standard. In addition much cleanup was done, including a reordering of many of the clauses. Upon publication on 29 March 2012, the new standard was referred to as IEEE 802.11-2012.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "IEEE 802.11ac-2013 is an amendment to IEEE 802.11, published in December 2013, that builds on 802.11n. The 802.11ac standard was retroactively labelled as Wi-Fi 5 by the Wi-Fi Alliance. Changes compared to 802.11n include wider channels (80 or 160 MHz versus 40 MHz) in the 5 GHz band, more spatial streams (up to eight versus four), higher-order modulation (up to 256-QAM vs. 64-QAM), and the addition of Multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO). The Wi-Fi Alliance separated the introduction of ac wireless products into two phases (\"waves\"), named \"Wave 1\" and \"Wave 2\". From mid-2013, the alliance started certifying Wave 1 802.11ac products shipped by manufacturers, based on the IEEE 802.11ac Draft 3.0 (the IEEE standard was not finalized until later that year). In 2016 Wi-Fi Alliance introduced the Wave 2 certification, to provide higher bandwidth and capacity than Wave 1 products. Wave 2 products include additional features like MU-MIMO, 160 MHz channel width support, support for more 5 GHz channels, and four spatial streams (with four antennas; compared to three in Wave 1 and 802.11n, and eight in IEEE's 802.11ax specification).",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "IEEE 802.11ad is an amendment that defines a new physical layer for 802.11 networks to operate in the 60 GHz millimeter wave spectrum. This frequency band has significantly different propagation characteristics than the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands where Wi-Fi networks operate. Products implementing the 802.11ad standard are being brought to market under the WiGig brand name. The certification program is now being developed by the Wi-Fi Alliance instead of the now defunct Wireless Gigabit Alliance. The peak transmission rate of 802.11ad is 7 Gbit/s.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "IEEE 802.11ad is a protocol used for very high data rates (about 8 Gbit/s) and for short range communication (about 1–10 meters).",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "TP-Link announced the world's first 802.11ad router in January 2016.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The WiGig standard is not too well known, although it was announced in 2009 and added to the IEEE 802.11 family in December 2012.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "IEEE 802.11af, also referred to as \"White-Fi\" and \"Super Wi-Fi\", is an amendment, approved in February 2014, that allows WLAN operation in TV white space spectrum in the VHF and UHF bands between 54 and 790 MHz. It uses cognitive radio technology to transmit on unused TV channels, with the standard taking measures to limit interference for primary users, such as analog TV, digital TV, and wireless microphones. Access points and stations determine their position using a satellite positioning system such as GPS, and use the Internet to query a geolocation database (GDB) provided by a regional regulatory agency to discover what frequency channels are available for use at a given time and position. The physical layer uses OFDM and is based on 802.11ac. The propagation path loss as well as the attenuation by materials such as brick and concrete is lower in the UHF and VHF bands than in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands, which increases the possible range. The frequency channels are 6 to 8 MHz wide, depending on the regulatory domain. Up to four channels may be bonded in either one or two contiguous blocks. MIMO operation is possible with up to four streams used for either space–time block code (STBC) or multi-user (MU) operation. The achievable data rate per spatial stream is 26.7 Mbit/s for 6 and 7 MHz channels, and 35.6 Mbit/s for 8 MHz channels. With four spatial streams and four bonded channels, the maximum data rate is 426.7 Mbit/s for 6 and 7 MHz channels and 568.9 Mbit/s for 8 MHz channels.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "IEEE 802.11-2016 which was known as IEEE 802.11 REVmc, is a revision based on IEEE 802.11-2012, incorporating 5 amendments (11ae, 11aa, 11ad, 11ac, 11af). In addition, existing MAC and PHY functions have been enhanced and obsolete features were removed or marked for removal. Some clauses and annexes have been renumbered.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "IEEE 802.11ah, published in 2017, defines a WLAN system operating at sub-1 GHz license-exempt bands. Due to the favorable propagation characteristics of the low-frequency spectra, 802.11ah can provide improved transmission range compared with the conventional 802.11 WLANs operating in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. 802.11ah can be used for various purposes including large-scale sensor networks, extended-range hotspots, and outdoor Wi-Fi for cellular WAN carrier traffic offloading, whereas the available bandwidth is relatively narrow. The protocol intends consumption to be competitive with low-power Bluetooth, at a much wider range.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "IEEE 802.11ai is an amendment to the 802.11 standard that added new mechanisms for a faster initial link setup time.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "IEEE 802.11aj is a derivative of 802.11ad for use in the 45 GHz unlicensed spectrum available in some regions of the world (specifically China); it also provides additional capabilities for use in the 60 GHz band.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Alternatively known as China Millimeter Wave (CMMW).",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "IEEE 802.11aq is an amendment to the 802.11 standard that will enable pre-association discovery of services. This extends some of the mechanisms in 802.11u that enabled device discovery to discover further the services running on a device, or provided by a network.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "IEEE 802.11-2020, which was known as IEEE 802.11 REVmd, is a revision based on IEEE 802.11-2016 incorporating 5 amendments (11ai, 11ah, 11aj, 11ak, 11aq). In addition, existing MAC and PHY functions have been enhanced and obsolete features were removed or marked for removal. Some clauses and annexes have been added.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "IEEE 802.11ax is the successor to 802.11ac, marketed as Wi-Fi 6 (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz) and Wi-Fi 6E (6 GHz) by the Wi-Fi Alliance. It is also known as High Efficiency Wi-Fi, for the overall improvements to Wi-Fi 6 clients in dense environments. For an individual client, the maximum improvement in data rate (PHY speed) against the predecessor (802.11ac) is only 39% (for comparison, this improvement was nearly 500% for the predecessors). Yet, even with this comparatively minor 39% figure, the goal was to provide 4 times the throughput-per-area of 802.11ac (hence High Efficiency). The motivation behind this goal was the deployment of WLAN in dense environments such as corporate offices, shopping malls and dense residential apartments. This is achieved by means of a technique called OFDMA, which is basically multiplexing in the frequency domain (as opposed to spatial multiplexing, as in 802.11ac). This is equivalent to cellular technology applied into Wi-Fi.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The IEEE 802.11ax‑2021 standard was approved on February 9, 2021.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "IEEE 802.11ay is a standard that is being developed, also called EDMG: Enhanced Directional MultiGigabit PHY. It is an amendment that defines a new physical layer for 802.11 networks to operate in the 60 GHz millimeter wave spectrum. It will be an extension of the existing 11ad, aimed to extend the throughput, range, and use-cases. The main use-cases include indoor operation and short-range communications due to atmospheric oxygen absorption and inability to penetrate walls. The peak transmission rate of 802.11ay is 40 Gbit/s. The main extensions include: channel bonding (2, 3 and 4), MIMO (up to 4 streams) and higher modulation schemes. The expected range is 300-500 m.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "IEEE 802.11ba Wake-up Radio (WUR) Operation is an amendment to the IEEE 802.11 standard that enables energy-efficient operation for data reception without increasing latency. The target active power consumption to receive a WUR packet is less than 1 milliwatt and supports data rates of 62.5 kbit/s and 250 kbit/s. The WUR PHY uses MC-OOK (multicarrier OOK) to achieve extremely low power consumption.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "IEEE 802.11bb is a networking protocol standard in the IEEE 802.11 set of protocols that uses infrared light for communications.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "IEEE 802.11be Extremely High Throughput (EHT) is the potential next amendment to the 802.11 IEEE standard, and will likely be designated as Wi-Fi 7. It will build upon 802.11ax, focusing on WLAN indoor and outdoor operation with stationary and pedestrian speeds in the 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz frequency bands.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Across all variations of 802.11, maximum achievable throughputs are given either based on measurements under ideal conditions or in the layer-2 data rates. However, this does not apply to typical deployments in which data is being transferred between two endpoints, of which at least one is typically connected to a wired infrastructure and the other endpoint is connected to an infrastructure via a wireless link.",
"title": "Common misunderstandings about achievable throughput"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "This means that, typically, data frames pass an 802.11 (WLAN) medium and are being converted to 802.3 (Ethernet) or vice versa. Due to the difference in the frame (header) lengths of these two media, the application's packet size determines the speed of the data transfer. This means applications that use small packets (e.g., VoIP) create dataflows with high-overhead traffic (i.e., a low goodput). Other factors that contribute to the overall application data rate are the speed with which the application transmits the packets (i.e., the data rate) and, of course, the energy with which the wireless signal is received. The latter is determined by distance and by the configured output power of the communicating devices.",
"title": "Common misunderstandings about achievable throughput"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The same references apply to the attached graphs that show measurements of UDP throughput. Each represents an average (UDP) throughput (please note that the error bars are there but barely visible due to the small variation) of 25 measurements. Each is with a specific packet size (small or large) and with a specific data rate (10 kbit/s – 100 Mbit/s). Markers for traffic profiles of common applications are included as well. These figures assume there are no packet errors, which, if occurring, will lower the transmission rate further.",
"title": "Common misunderstandings about achievable throughput"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "802.11b, 802.11g, and 802.11n-2.4 utilize the 2.400–2.500 GHz spectrum, one of the ISM bands. 802.11a, 802.11n, and 802.11ac use the more heavily regulated 4.915–5.825 GHz band. These are commonly referred to as the \"2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands\" in most sales literature. Each spectrum is sub-divided into channels with a center frequency and bandwidth, analogous to how radio and TV broadcast bands are sub-divided.",
"title": "Channels and frequencies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "The 2.4 GHz band is divided into 14 channels spaced 5 MHz apart, beginning with channel 1, which is centered on 2.412 GHz. The latter channels have additional restrictions or are unavailable for use in some regulatory domains.",
"title": "Channels and frequencies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The channel numbering of the 5.725–5.875 GHz spectrum is less intuitive due to the differences in regulations between countries. These are discussed in greater detail on the list of WLAN channels.",
"title": "Channels and frequencies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "In addition to specifying the channel center frequency, 802.11 also specifies (in Clause 17) a spectral mask defining the permitted power distribution across each channel. The mask requires the signal to be attenuated a minimum of 20 dB from its peak amplitude at ±11 MHz from the center frequency, the point at which a channel is effectively 22 MHz wide. One consequence is that stations can use only every fourth or fifth channel without overlap.",
"title": "Channels and frequencies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Availability of channels is regulated by country, constrained in part by how each country allocates radio spectrum to various services. At one extreme, Japan permits the use of all 14 channels for 802.11b, and 1–13 for 802.11g/n-2.4. Other countries such as Spain initially allowed only channels 10 and 11, and France allowed only 10, 11, 12, and 13; however, Europe now allow channels 1 through 13. North America and some Central and South American countries allow only 1 through 11.",
"title": "Channels and frequencies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Since the spectral mask defines only power output restrictions up to ±11 MHz from the center frequency to be attenuated by −50 dBr, it is often assumed that the energy of the channel extends no further than these limits. It is more correct to say that the overlapping signal on any channel should be sufficiently attenuated to interfere with a transmitter on any other channel minimally, given the separation between channels. Due to the near–far problem a transmitter can impact (desensitize) a receiver on a \"non-overlapping\" channel, but only if it is close to the victim receiver (within a meter) or operating above allowed power levels. Conversely, a sufficiently distant transmitter on an overlapping channel can have little to no significant effect.",
"title": "Channels and frequencies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Confusion often arises over the amount of channel separation required between transmitting devices. 802.11b was based on direct-sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) modulation and utilized a channel bandwidth of 22 MHz, resulting in three \"non-overlapping\" channels (1, 6, and 11). 802.11g was based on OFDM modulation and utilized a channel bandwidth of 20 MHz. This occasionally leads to the belief that four \"non-overlapping\" channels (1, 5, 9, and 13) exist under 802.11g. However, this is not the case as per 17.4.6.3 Channel Numbering of operating channels of the IEEE Std 802.11 (2012), which states, \"In a multiple cell network topology, overlapping and/or adjacent cells using different channels can operate simultaneously without interference if the distance between the center frequencies is at least 25 MHz.\" and section 18.3.9.3 and Figure 18-13.",
"title": "Channels and frequencies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "This does not mean that the technical overlap of the channels recommends the non-use of overlapping channels. The amount of inter-channel interference seen on a configuration using channels 1, 5, 9, and 13 (which is permitted in Europe, but not in North America) is barely different from a three-channel configuration, but with an entire extra channel.",
"title": "Channels and frequencies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "However, overlap between channels with more narrow spacing (e.g. 1, 4, 7, 11 in North America) may cause unacceptable degradation of signal quality and throughput, particularly when users transmit near the boundaries of AP cells.",
"title": "Channels and frequencies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "IEEE uses the phrase regdomain to refer to a legal regulatory region. Different countries define different levels of allowable transmitter power, time that a channel can be occupied, and different available channels. Domain codes are specified for the United States, Canada, ETSI (Europe), Spain, France, Japan, and China.",
"title": "Channels and frequencies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Most Wi-Fi certified devices default to regdomain 0, which means least common denominator settings, i.e., the device will not transmit at a power above the allowable power in any nation, nor will it use frequencies that are not permitted in any nation.",
"title": "Channels and frequencies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "The regdomain setting is often made difficult or impossible to change so that the end-users do not conflict with local regulatory agencies such as the United States' Federal Communications Commission.",
"title": "Channels and frequencies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "The datagrams are called frames. Current 802.11 standards specify frame types for use in the transmission of data as well as management and control of wireless links.",
"title": "Layer 2 – Datagrams"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Frames are divided into very specific and standardized sections. Each frame consists of a MAC header, payload, and frame check sequence (FCS). Some frames may not have a payload.",
"title": "Layer 2 – Datagrams"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "The first two bytes of the MAC header form a frame control field specifying the form and function of the frame. This frame control field is subdivided into the following sub-fields:",
"title": "Layer 2 – Datagrams"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "The next two bytes are reserved for the Duration ID field, indicating how long the field's transmission will take so other devices know when the channel will be available again. This field can take one of three forms: Duration, Contention-Free Period (CFP), and Association ID (AID).",
"title": "Layer 2 – Datagrams"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "An 802.11 frame can have up to four address fields. Each field can carry a MAC address. Address 1 is the receiver, Address 2 is the transmitter, Address 3 is used for filtering purposes by the receiver. Address 4 is only present in data frames transmitted between access points in an Extended Service Set or between intermediate nodes in a mesh network.",
"title": "Layer 2 – Datagrams"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "The remaining fields of the header are:",
"title": "Layer 2 – Datagrams"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "The payload or frame body field is variable in size, from 0 to 2304 bytes plus any overhead from security encapsulation, and contains information from higher layers.",
"title": "Layer 2 – Datagrams"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "The Frame Check Sequence (FCS) is the last four bytes in the standard 802.11 frame. Often referred to as the Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC), it allows for integrity checks of retrieved frames. As frames are about to be sent, the FCS is calculated and appended. When a station receives a frame, it can calculate the FCS of the frame and compare it to the one received. If they match, it is assumed that the frame was not distorted during transmission.",
"title": "Layer 2 – Datagrams"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Management frames are not always authenticated, and allow for the maintenance, or discontinuance, of communication. Some common 802.11 subtypes include:",
"title": "Layer 2 – Datagrams"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "The body of a management frame consists of frame-subtype-dependent fixed fields followed by a sequence of information elements (IEs).",
"title": "Layer 2 – Datagrams"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "The common structure of an IE is as follows:",
"title": "Layer 2 – Datagrams"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Control frames facilitate the exchange of data frames between stations. Some common 802.11 control frames include:",
"title": "Layer 2 – Datagrams"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Data frames carry packets from web pages, files, etc. within the body. The body begins with an IEEE 802.2 header, with the Destination Service Access Point (DSAP) specifying the protocol, followed by a Subnetwork Access Protocol (SNAP) header if the DSAP is hex AA, with the organizationally unique identifier (OUI) and protocol ID (PID) fields specifying the protocol. If the OUI is all zeroes, the protocol ID field is an EtherType value. Almost all 802.11 data frames use 802.2 and SNAP headers, and most use an OUI of 00:00:00 and an EtherType value.",
"title": "Layer 2 – Datagrams"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Similar to TCP congestion control on the internet, frame loss is built into the operation of 802.11. To select the correct transmission speed or Modulation and Coding Scheme, a rate control algorithm may test different speeds. The actual packet loss rate of Access points varies widely for different link conditions. There are variations in the loss rate experienced on production Access points, between 10% and 80%, with 30% being a common average. It is important to be aware that the link layer should recover these lost frames. If the sender does not receive an Acknowledgement (ACK) frame, then it will be resent.",
"title": "Layer 2 – Datagrams"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Within the IEEE 802.11 Working Group, the following IEEE Standards Association Standard and Amendments exist:",
"title": "Standards and amendments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "802.11F and 802.11T are recommended practices rather than standards and are capitalized as such.",
"title": "Standards and amendments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "802.11m is used for standard maintenance. 802.11ma was completed for 802.11-2007, 802.11mb for 802.11-2012, 802.11mc for 802.11-2016, and 802.11md for 802.11-2020.",
"title": "Standards and amendments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Both the terms \"standard\" and \"amendment\" are used when referring to the different variants of IEEE standards.",
"title": "Standards and amendments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "As far as the IEEE Standards Association is concerned, there is only one current standard; it is denoted by IEEE 802.11 followed by the date published. IEEE 802.11-2020 is the only version currently in publication, superseding previous releases. The standard is updated by means of amendments. Amendments are created by task groups (TG). Both the task group and their finished document are denoted by 802.11 followed by one or two lower case letters, for example, IEEE 802.11a or IEEE 802.11ax. Updating 802.11 is the responsibility of task group m. In order to create a new version, TGm combines the previous version of the standard and all published amendments. TGm also provides clarification and interpretation to industry on published documents. New versions of the IEEE 802.11 were published in 1999, 2007, 2012, 2016, and 2020.",
"title": "Standards and amendments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Various terms in 802.11 are used to specify aspects of wireless local-area networking operation and may be unfamiliar to some readers.",
"title": "Nomenclature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "For example, Time Unit (usually abbreviated TU) is used to indicate a unit of time equal to 1024 microseconds. Numerous time constants are defined in terms of TU (rather than the nearly equal millisecond).",
"title": "Nomenclature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Also, the term \"Portal\" is used to describe an entity that is similar to an 802.1H bridge. A Portal provides access to the WLAN by non-802.11 LAN STAs.",
"title": "Nomenclature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "In 2001, a group from the University of California, Berkeley presented a paper describing weaknesses in the 802.11 Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) security mechanism defined in the original standard; they were followed by Fluhrer, Mantin, and Shamir's paper titled \"Weaknesses in the Key Scheduling Algorithm of RC4\". Not long after, Adam Stubblefield and AT&T publicly announced the first verification of the attack. In the attack, they were able to intercept transmissions and gain unauthorized access to wireless networks.",
"title": "Security"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "The IEEE set up a dedicated task group to create a replacement security solution, 802.11i (previously, this work was handled as part of a broader 802.11e effort to enhance the MAC layer). The Wi-Fi Alliance announced an interim specification called Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) based on a subset of the then-current IEEE 802.11i draft. These started to appear in products in mid-2003. IEEE 802.11i (also known as WPA2) itself was ratified in June 2004, and uses the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), instead of RC4, which was used in WEP. The modern recommended encryption for the home/consumer space is WPA2 (AES Pre-Shared Key), and for the enterprise space is WPA2 along with a RADIUS authentication server (or another type of authentication server) and a strong authentication method such as EAP-TLS.",
"title": "Security"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "In January 2005, the IEEE set up yet another task group \"w\" to protect management and broadcast frames, which previously were sent unsecured. Its standard was published in 2009.",
"title": "Security"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "In December 2011, a security flaw was revealed that affects some wireless routers with a specific implementation of the optional Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) feature. While WPS is not a part of 802.11, the flaw allows an attacker within the range of the wireless router to recover the WPS PIN and, with it, the router's 802.11i password in a few hours.",
"title": "Security"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "In late 2014, Apple announced that its iOS 8 mobile operating system would scramble MAC addresses during the pre-association stage to thwart retail footfall tracking made possible by the regular transmission of uniquely identifiable probe requests. Android 8.0 \"Oreo\" introduced a similar feature, named \"MAC randomization\".",
"title": "Security"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Wi-Fi users may be subjected to a Wi-Fi deauthentication attack to eavesdrop, attack passwords, or force the use of another, usually more expensive access point.",
"title": "Security"
}
]
| IEEE 802.11 is part of the IEEE 802 set of local area network (LAN) technical standards, and specifies the set of medium access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) protocols for implementing wireless local area network (WLAN) computer communication. The standard and amendments provide the basis for wireless network products using the Wi-Fi brand and are the world's most widely used wireless computer networking standards. IEEE 802.11 is used in most home and office networks to allow laptops, printers, smartphones, and other devices to communicate with each other and access the Internet without connecting wires. IEEE 802.11 is also a basis for vehicle-based communication networks with IEEE 802.11p. The standards are created and maintained by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) LAN/MAN Standards Committee. The base version of the standard was released in 1997 and has had subsequent amendments. While each amendment is officially revoked when it is incorporated in the latest version of the standard, the corporate world tends to market to the revisions because they concisely denote the capabilities of their products. As a result, in the marketplace, each revision tends to become its own standard. IEEE 802.11 uses various frequencies including, but not limited to, 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, 6 GHz, and 60 GHz frequency bands. Although IEEE 802.11 specifications list channels that might be used, the radio frequency spectrum availability allowed varies significantly by regulatory domain. The protocols are typically used in conjunction with IEEE 802.2, and are designed to interwork seamlessly with Ethernet, and are very often used to carry Internet Protocol traffic. | 2001-05-15T14:12:17Z | 2023-12-13T14:21:16Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11 |
14,741 | Irn-Bru | Irn-Bru (/ˌaɪərn ˈbruː/ "iron brew", Scots: [ˌəirənˈbruː]) is a Scottish carbonated soft drink, often described as "Scotland's other national drink" (after whisky). Introduced in 1901, the drink is produced in Westfield, Cumbernauld, North Lanarkshire, by A.G. Barr of Glasgow.
As well as being sold throughout the United Kingdom, Irn-Bru is available throughout the world and can usually be bought where there is a significant community of people from Scotland. The brand also has its own tartan. It has been the top-selling soft drink in Scotland for over a century, competing directly with global brands such as Coca-Cola.
Irn-Bru is known for its bright orange colour and unique flavour. As of 1999, it contained 0.002% of ammonium ferric citrate, sugar, 32 flavouring agents including caffeine and quinine (but not in Australia), and two controversial colourings (Sunset Yellow FCF E110 and Ponceau 4R E124). On 27 January 2010, soft-drink manufacturer A.G. Barr agreed to a Food Standards Agency voluntary ban on these two colourings although no date was set for their replacement. After lobbying by First Minister of Scotland Alex Salmond, a proposed restriction of Sunset Yellow to 10 mg/litre was eased to 20 mg/litre in 2011 – the same amount present in Irn-Bru. As of August 2021, Irn-Bru still contains these colourings.
The first Iron Brew drink was produced by the Maas & Waldstein chemicals company of New York in 1889 under the name IRONBREW. The drink was popular across North America and was widely copied. A similar beverage was launched in 1898 by London essence firm Stevenson & Howell that supplied soft drinks manufacturers in the UK and colonies. Many local bottlers around the UK began selling their own version of the beverage.
Despite the official launch date for Barr's Iron Brew being given as 1901, the firms AG Barr & Co (Glasgow) and Robert Barr (Falkirk) jointly launched their own Iron Brew drink at least two years earlier, according to a document in the firm's archives which indicates that the drink was already enjoying strong sales by May 1899. The strongman image which Barr's adopted for their bottle labels and advertising had been trademarked by the firm Stevenson & Howell in 1898. Barr's ordered their labels directly from Stevenson & Howell, which also sold Barr's many of the individual flavours with which they mixed their own drinks. An advertisement for Barr's Iron Brew dated 1900 featuring the original strongman label can be found in Falkirk's Local History Archives.
Barr's trademark application for the brand name Irn-Bru dates from July 1946 when the drink was still off sale because of wartime regulations. The firm first commercialised their drink using this new name in 1948 once government SDI consolidation of the soft drinks industry had ended. The name change followed the introduction of new labelling restrictions which cracked down on spurious health claims and introduced minimum standards for drinks claiming to contain minerals such as iron. However, according to Robert Barr OBE (chairman 1947–1978), there was also a commercial rationale behind the unusual spelling. "Iron Brew" had come to be understood as a generic product category in the UK, whereas adopting the name "Irn-Bru" allowed the firm to have a legally protected brand identity that would enable the firm to benefit from the popularity of their wartime "Adventures of Ba-Bru" comic strip advertising. (The "Iron Brew" name has continued to be used for many versions of the drink sold by rival manufacturers.)
1980 saw the introduction of Low Calorie Irn-Bru: this was re-launched in 1991 as Diet Irn-Bru and again in 2011 as Irn-Bru Sugar Free. The Irn-Bru 32 energy drink variant was launched in 2006.
Irn-Bru has long been the most popular soft drink in Scotland, with Coca-Cola second, but competition between the two brands brought their sales to roughly equal levels by 2003. It is also the third best selling soft drink in the UK, after Coca-Cola and Pepsi, outselling high-profile brands such as Fanta, Dr Pepper, Sprite and 7 Up. This success in defending its home market (a feat claimed only by Irn-Bru, Inca Kola and Thums Up; Thums Up sold out to Coca-Cola in 1993, and Inka Kola owners Corporación Lindley S.A. entered into a joint venture with Coca-Cola in 1999, giving up all rights to the name outside Peru) led to ongoing speculation that Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Inc. or its UK brand franchisee Britvic would attempt to buy A.G. Barr. In November 2012 AG Barr and Britvic announced a merger proposal, but in July 2013 the merger collapsed when terms could not be agreed.
Irn-Bru's advertising slogans used to be 'Scotland's other National Drink', referring to whisky, and 'Made in Scotland from girders', a reference to the rusty colour of the drink; though the closest one can come to substantiating this claim is the 0.002% ammonium ferric citrate listed in the ingredients.
Fiery Irn-Bru, a limited edition variant, was released in autumn 2011. It was packaged with a black and orange design, and with the signature man icon with an added image of a fire. It featured the traditional Irn-Bru flavour with an aftertaste similar to ginger.
Irn-Bru was also sold in reusable 750 ml glass bottles which, like other Barr's drinks, were able to be returned to the manufacturer in exchange for a 30 pence (previously 20p) deposit paid on purchase. This scheme was widely available in shops across Scotland and led to the colloquial term for an empty: a "glass cheque". As a result of a 40% drop in returned bottles since the 1990s Barr deemed the washing and re-filling process uneconomical, and on 1 January 2016 ceased the scheme.
2016 saw the introduction of the current logo, conveying "strength" and an "industrial feel", and a new diet variant called Irn-Bru Xtra in different branding to the existing sugar free variety in a similar fashion to Coca-Cola Zero and Pepsi Max.
Barr changed the formula of Irn-Bru in January 2018 in response to a sugar tax implemented in the UK in April 2018, intended to combat obesity. By reducing the sugar content to less than 5g per 100ml, Barr has made Irn-Bru exempt from the tax. The manufacturer asserts that "most people will not be able to tell the difference in flavour between the old and new formulas", but fans of the drink have started the 'Save Real Irn-Bru' campaign to stop or reverse this change, and have been stocking up on the more sugary formula.
In May 2019, Barr announced a new energy drink variant of Irn-Bru called Irn-Bru Energy, which was released on 1 July 2019.
In October 2019, Barr announced the launch of the "Irn-Bru 1901". The drink would be available for a limited time and use the original recipe from 1901.
In March 2021, Barr announced the relaunch of "IRN-BRU 1901" as a permanent addition to the IRN-BRU lineup.
Irn-Bru was the only soft drink on sale at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland, due to a sponsorship arrangement. Member of the US House of Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tried Irn-Bru at COP26 and said she loved it, and that it tasted just like the Latino soda Kola Champagne. The response from others at the conference ranged from strong dislike to strong like. The volume of editorial and opinion publicity the drink gained on social and print media was described as "the summit's surprise", coverage worth millions. However, AG Barr's share price remained relatively flat at the time.
It is produced in Westfield, Cumbernauld, North Lanarkshire, since Barr's moved out of their Parkhead, Glasgow factory in the mid-2000s. In 2011, Irn-Bru closed their factory in Mansfield, making the Westfield plant in Cumbernauld the main location for production. Other manufacturing locations include the English city of Sheffield.
Irn-Bru and other Barr brands including Pineappleade, Cream Soda, Tizer, Red Kola, Barr Cola, and Limeade are still available in 750 ml glass bottles.
Irn-Bru and Diet Irn-Bru are available in the following sizes:
In May 2007, A.G Barr re-designed the Irn-Bru Can and Bottle Logos.
In April 2016, A.G Barr released the redesigned Irn-Bru Can and Bottle Logos.
Barr's actively promoted their Irn-Bru from the outset, with some of their earliest ads featuring world champion wrestlers and Highland Games athletes Donald Dinnie and Alex Munro who endorsed the drink by means of personal testimonials. In the 1930s, the firm began a long-running series of comic strip ads entitled "The Adventures of Ba-Bru" which ran in various local papers from April 1939 until October 1970. The last traces of this campaign, a large neon sign featuring Ba-Bru which stood in Union St above Glasgow Central railway station, was removed in 1983 and replaced with an illuminated display featuring the tagline "Your Other National Drink".
Barr has a long-established gimmick associating Irn-Bru with Scottishness, stemming from the claim of its being Scotland's most popular soft drink. A tagline, "Made in Scotland from girders", was used for several years from the 1980s, usually featuring Irn-Bru drinkers becoming unusually strong, durable or magnetic.
An advertising campaign launched in Spring 2000 aimed to "dramatise the extraordinary appeal of Irn-Bru in a likeably maverick style". David Amers, Planning Director, said: "Irn-Bru is the likeable maverick of the soft drinks market and these ads perfectly capture the brand's spirit." One involved a grandfather (played by actor Robert Wilson) who removed his false teeth to spoil his grandson's interest in his can of Irn-Bru. A further TV advertisement featured a senior citizen in a motorised wheelchair robbing a local shopping market of a supply of Irn-Bru.
In 2004 the company created a new concept "Phenomenal". In 2006 the company launched its first Christmas adverts. This campaign consisted of a parody commercial of a popular Christmas Cartoon, The Snowman, and was effective in interesting American audiences in the Irn-Bru brand. A sequel to the commercial would later be released in December 2018. Further advertising campaigns for Irn-Bru appeared in conjunction with the release of Irn-Bru 32 in 2006.
A 2009 advertisement for the product featured a group of high school pupils performing a musical number, with the refrain "It's fizzy, it's ginger, it's phenomenal!" It was a parody of High School Musical, and starred Jack Lowden.
In 2012 the company changed its slogan to "gets you through", which see a number of people drinking Irn-Bru to get through tough situations.
In response to the Coca-Cola 'Share a Coke' campaign, Barr decided to produce thousands of limited edition 750 ml bottles of Irn-Bru with the names 'Fanny', 'Senga', 'Rab' and 'Tam' on the label, mimicking that by Coca-Cola. The use of the name 'Fanny' ties in with one of Irn-Bru's controversial marketing advertisements.
One of the most controversial Irn-Bru television adverts evoked 1950s entertainment. A mother plays the piano, while the father and two children deliver a song which ends with the mother singing: "...even though I used to be a man". This advertisement was broadcast in 2000, but when it was repeated in 2003, it led to seventeen complaints about it being offensive to members of the transgender community. Issue A14 of the Ofcom Advertising Complaints bulletin reports that the children's response to their mother's claim was not offensive. According to the advertising agency Leith, the advertisement was meant to "create a sense of humour while confirming the maverick nature of the brand". However, the scene involving the mother shaving at the end of the advertisement was deemed by Ofcom to be "capable of causing offence by strongly reinforcing negative stereotypes", and so it was taken off the air.
In 2003, an Irn-Bru commercial which showed a midwife trying to entice a baby from its mother's womb during a difficult delivery sparked fifty complaints. Some saw it as upsetting to women who had suffered miscarriages.
One billboard that drew criticism featured a young woman in a bikini along with the slogan "Diet Irn-Bru. I never knew four-and-a-half inches could give so much pleasure". Another featured a picture of a cow with the slogan "When I'm a burger, I want to be washed down with Irn-Bru". This billboard resulted in over 700 complaints but was cleared by advertisement watchdogs. According to a 2003 BBC report, a billboard which featured a depressed goth and the slogan "Cheer up Goth. Have an Irn-Bru." was also criticised for inciting bullying.
McCowan's also produced Irn-Bru Bars, chewy, fizzy, bright orange confectionery bars which taste strongly of Irn-Bru, though production ended in late 2005. Irn-Bru sorbet is available in some speciality ice cream shops in Scotland.
The drink can be used as a mixer with alcoholic beverages, mainly vodka and whisky.
Barr launched an alcopop drink combining Irn-Bru and Bell's whisky, although this proved to be unpopular and was discontinued. A later attempt came in the form of an official Irn-Bru flavour in the Red Square line-up of vodka-based drinks; this too has been discontinued.
Irn-Bru is manufactured under licence in Russia by the Moscow Brewing Company. Bru and other Barr products are exported to Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, and Cyprus, as well as parts of Africa and Asia. It is available in the Republic of Ireland, increasingly being stocked in BWG and ADM Londis supplied stores, as well as in supermarkets owned by Dunnes Stores and Tesco Ireland. In Ireland generally, the drink mainly sells in County Donegal. It is also available in Malta, Belgium and in Poland. It is now sold in Iceland, as of 2011.
In Australia, Irn-Bru was manufactured and distributed under licence by Occasio Australia until 2009. It was available in 500 ml and 1.25-litre in both standard and diet. The drink enjoyed growing success in the country, with its first advertising campaign launched in Queensland in September 2007. It was initially available in major chains such as Coles and Woolworths, Caltex service stations and in many independent grocers and convenience stores. It was then delisted at Coles Supermarkets. Because of manufacturing and bottling issues, Occasio ceased local production in late 2009. It is now imported direct from the UK and distributed by British Provender, and can again be found in the international sections of major supermarket chains and some convenience stores.
Irn-Bru sold in Canada contained no caffeine until recently. In March 2010, Health Canada repealed the ban on caffeine in clear coloured soft drinks and now bottles of Irn-Bru have the label 'Now Contains caffeine' on the packaging. Irn-Bru in Canada is distributed by TFB & Associates Ltd from Markham, Ontario but is packaged by A.G. Barr in Glasgow, Scotland. Irn-Bru can be found at Sobeys, Co-Op and Walmart supermarkets.
The now-defunct McKinlay soft-drink company in Glace Bay, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, for many years offered its own non-licensed beverage called Irn-Bru and later "Cape Breton's Irn-Bru". It was a brown carbonated soft-drink with a fruity cola taste.
The standard Irn-Bru distributed in Canada also contains the "Not a source of iron" disclaimer on the label. The UK version of the drink (with caffeine) is commonly imported by speciality retailers, particularly in areas with large Scottish populations.
Irn-Bru started being sold at 7-Eleven. It has often appeared in the Danish supermarket Netto, Rema 1000 and Normal. Today only a few 7-Elevens in Denmark continue distributing Irn-Bru, while most Føtex, Bilka, and Normal stores now stock Irn-Bru.
Imported Irn-Bru cans are found throughout Finland in some K-Citymarket locations and some independent stores.
In Hong Kong, Irn-Bru can be found in selected Wellcome supermarkets, in and around areas where the expatriate population is significant such as the Sheung Wan and Central districts.
Irn-Bru has been available in some independent or specialty stores in both cans and 1.25-litre bottles since at least 2011.
A.G. Barr launched its Irn-Bru product throughout the Middle East. It is found mostly in LuLu supermarkets.
Irn-Bru is commonly available nationwide from supermarkets as cans and 1.25-litre plastic bottles. It is bottled by Oasis, the same company that bottles Coca-Cola. Imported Irn-Bru from Scotland is available from speciality stores.
Irn-Bru entered the Norwegian market in May 2008. They had to withdraw from the market again in 2009 as a result of problems with production agreements and lack of funding for marketing.
They were believed to be sponsoring the Norwegian First Division club Mjøndalen IF in 2009. This later turned out to be fraud carried out by a third-party company, and Mjøndalen IF never received any sponsorship from Irn-Bru, even though the team played the 2009 season with Irn-Bru logo on their shirts.
Irn-Bru began being sold in Russia in 1997, and by 2002, it had become their third best selling soft drink. After its original bottler went out of business, a new deal was signed for the drink to be manufactured and distributed in larger quantities by the Pepsi Bottling Group of Russia in 2002. Its popularity has been attributed to the drink's apparent similarity to discontinued Soviet-era soft drinks. As of 2011, Irn-Bru sales in Russia were still growing.
On 4 March 2022, due to the ongoing 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, AG Barr cut ties with the Russian market.
Irn-Bru has been distributed in Spain since the early 1980s servicing primarily the large British communities residing in Spain. It can be found in key tourist areas such as the Balearic Islands, the Spanish coastal region and Canary Islands with both the regular and sugar-free variant available. Outside of the United Kingdom, Spain is among the top 10 Irn-Bru markets.
Irn-Bru and Diet Irn-Bru have been formulated since 2002 by A.G. Barr to meet the regulations for food colouring of the Food & Drug Administration (FDA). Ponceau 4R, used in the UK formulation, is prohibited by the FDA. Barr uses alternative food and drink colourants manufactured by a US company approved by the FDA. The product labelling also meets US labelling standards on nutritional information and bar code. Compliant Irn-Bru is solely imported by Great Scot International in Charlotte, North Carolina, which supplies distributors and retailers throughout the USA. | [
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"text": "Irn-Bru (/ˌaɪərn ˈbruː/ \"iron brew\", Scots: [ˌəirənˈbruː]) is a Scottish carbonated soft drink, often described as \"Scotland's other national drink\" (after whisky). Introduced in 1901, the drink is produced in Westfield, Cumbernauld, North Lanarkshire, by A.G. Barr of Glasgow.",
"title": ""
},
{
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"text": "As well as being sold throughout the United Kingdom, Irn-Bru is available throughout the world and can usually be bought where there is a significant community of people from Scotland. The brand also has its own tartan. It has been the top-selling soft drink in Scotland for over a century, competing directly with global brands such as Coca-Cola.",
"title": ""
},
{
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"text": "Irn-Bru is known for its bright orange colour and unique flavour. As of 1999, it contained 0.002% of ammonium ferric citrate, sugar, 32 flavouring agents including caffeine and quinine (but not in Australia), and two controversial colourings (Sunset Yellow FCF E110 and Ponceau 4R E124). On 27 January 2010, soft-drink manufacturer A.G. Barr agreed to a Food Standards Agency voluntary ban on these two colourings although no date was set for their replacement. After lobbying by First Minister of Scotland Alex Salmond, a proposed restriction of Sunset Yellow to 10 mg/litre was eased to 20 mg/litre in 2011 – the same amount present in Irn-Bru. As of August 2021, Irn-Bru still contains these colourings.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The first Iron Brew drink was produced by the Maas & Waldstein chemicals company of New York in 1889 under the name IRONBREW. The drink was popular across North America and was widely copied. A similar beverage was launched in 1898 by London essence firm Stevenson & Howell that supplied soft drinks manufacturers in the UK and colonies. Many local bottlers around the UK began selling their own version of the beverage.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Despite the official launch date for Barr's Iron Brew being given as 1901, the firms AG Barr & Co (Glasgow) and Robert Barr (Falkirk) jointly launched their own Iron Brew drink at least two years earlier, according to a document in the firm's archives which indicates that the drink was already enjoying strong sales by May 1899. The strongman image which Barr's adopted for their bottle labels and advertising had been trademarked by the firm Stevenson & Howell in 1898. Barr's ordered their labels directly from Stevenson & Howell, which also sold Barr's many of the individual flavours with which they mixed their own drinks. An advertisement for Barr's Iron Brew dated 1900 featuring the original strongman label can be found in Falkirk's Local History Archives.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Barr's trademark application for the brand name Irn-Bru dates from July 1946 when the drink was still off sale because of wartime regulations. The firm first commercialised their drink using this new name in 1948 once government SDI consolidation of the soft drinks industry had ended. The name change followed the introduction of new labelling restrictions which cracked down on spurious health claims and introduced minimum standards for drinks claiming to contain minerals such as iron. However, according to Robert Barr OBE (chairman 1947–1978), there was also a commercial rationale behind the unusual spelling. \"Iron Brew\" had come to be understood as a generic product category in the UK, whereas adopting the name \"Irn-Bru\" allowed the firm to have a legally protected brand identity that would enable the firm to benefit from the popularity of their wartime \"Adventures of Ba-Bru\" comic strip advertising. (The \"Iron Brew\" name has continued to be used for many versions of the drink sold by rival manufacturers.)",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "1980 saw the introduction of Low Calorie Irn-Bru: this was re-launched in 1991 as Diet Irn-Bru and again in 2011 as Irn-Bru Sugar Free. The Irn-Bru 32 energy drink variant was launched in 2006.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Irn-Bru has long been the most popular soft drink in Scotland, with Coca-Cola second, but competition between the two brands brought their sales to roughly equal levels by 2003. It is also the third best selling soft drink in the UK, after Coca-Cola and Pepsi, outselling high-profile brands such as Fanta, Dr Pepper, Sprite and 7 Up. This success in defending its home market (a feat claimed only by Irn-Bru, Inca Kola and Thums Up; Thums Up sold out to Coca-Cola in 1993, and Inka Kola owners Corporación Lindley S.A. entered into a joint venture with Coca-Cola in 1999, giving up all rights to the name outside Peru) led to ongoing speculation that Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Inc. or its UK brand franchisee Britvic would attempt to buy A.G. Barr. In November 2012 AG Barr and Britvic announced a merger proposal, but in July 2013 the merger collapsed when terms could not be agreed.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Irn-Bru's advertising slogans used to be 'Scotland's other National Drink', referring to whisky, and 'Made in Scotland from girders', a reference to the rusty colour of the drink; though the closest one can come to substantiating this claim is the 0.002% ammonium ferric citrate listed in the ingredients.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Fiery Irn-Bru, a limited edition variant, was released in autumn 2011. It was packaged with a black and orange design, and with the signature man icon with an added image of a fire. It featured the traditional Irn-Bru flavour with an aftertaste similar to ginger.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Irn-Bru was also sold in reusable 750 ml glass bottles which, like other Barr's drinks, were able to be returned to the manufacturer in exchange for a 30 pence (previously 20p) deposit paid on purchase. This scheme was widely available in shops across Scotland and led to the colloquial term for an empty: a \"glass cheque\". As a result of a 40% drop in returned bottles since the 1990s Barr deemed the washing and re-filling process uneconomical, and on 1 January 2016 ceased the scheme.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "2016 saw the introduction of the current logo, conveying \"strength\" and an \"industrial feel\", and a new diet variant called Irn-Bru Xtra in different branding to the existing sugar free variety in a similar fashion to Coca-Cola Zero and Pepsi Max.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Barr changed the formula of Irn-Bru in January 2018 in response to a sugar tax implemented in the UK in April 2018, intended to combat obesity. By reducing the sugar content to less than 5g per 100ml, Barr has made Irn-Bru exempt from the tax. The manufacturer asserts that \"most people will not be able to tell the difference in flavour between the old and new formulas\", but fans of the drink have started the 'Save Real Irn-Bru' campaign to stop or reverse this change, and have been stocking up on the more sugary formula.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In May 2019, Barr announced a new energy drink variant of Irn-Bru called Irn-Bru Energy, which was released on 1 July 2019.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In October 2019, Barr announced the launch of the \"Irn-Bru 1901\". The drink would be available for a limited time and use the original recipe from 1901.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In March 2021, Barr announced the relaunch of \"IRN-BRU 1901\" as a permanent addition to the IRN-BRU lineup.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Irn-Bru was the only soft drink on sale at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland, due to a sponsorship arrangement. Member of the US House of Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tried Irn-Bru at COP26 and said she loved it, and that it tasted just like the Latino soda Kola Champagne. The response from others at the conference ranged from strong dislike to strong like. The volume of editorial and opinion publicity the drink gained on social and print media was described as \"the summit's surprise\", coverage worth millions. However, AG Barr's share price remained relatively flat at the time.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "It is produced in Westfield, Cumbernauld, North Lanarkshire, since Barr's moved out of their Parkhead, Glasgow factory in the mid-2000s. In 2011, Irn-Bru closed their factory in Mansfield, making the Westfield plant in Cumbernauld the main location for production. Other manufacturing locations include the English city of Sheffield.",
"title": "Production"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Irn-Bru and other Barr brands including Pineappleade, Cream Soda, Tizer, Red Kola, Barr Cola, and Limeade are still available in 750 ml glass bottles.",
"title": "Packaging"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Irn-Bru and Diet Irn-Bru are available in the following sizes:",
"title": "Packaging"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In May 2007, A.G Barr re-designed the Irn-Bru Can and Bottle Logos.",
"title": "Packaging"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In April 2016, A.G Barr released the redesigned Irn-Bru Can and Bottle Logos.",
"title": "Packaging"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Barr's actively promoted their Irn-Bru from the outset, with some of their earliest ads featuring world champion wrestlers and Highland Games athletes Donald Dinnie and Alex Munro who endorsed the drink by means of personal testimonials. In the 1930s, the firm began a long-running series of comic strip ads entitled \"The Adventures of Ba-Bru\" which ran in various local papers from April 1939 until October 1970. The last traces of this campaign, a large neon sign featuring Ba-Bru which stood in Union St above Glasgow Central railway station, was removed in 1983 and replaced with an illuminated display featuring the tagline \"Your Other National Drink\".",
"title": "Marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Barr has a long-established gimmick associating Irn-Bru with Scottishness, stemming from the claim of its being Scotland's most popular soft drink. A tagline, \"Made in Scotland from girders\", was used for several years from the 1980s, usually featuring Irn-Bru drinkers becoming unusually strong, durable or magnetic.",
"title": "Marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "An advertising campaign launched in Spring 2000 aimed to \"dramatise the extraordinary appeal of Irn-Bru in a likeably maverick style\". David Amers, Planning Director, said: \"Irn-Bru is the likeable maverick of the soft drinks market and these ads perfectly capture the brand's spirit.\" One involved a grandfather (played by actor Robert Wilson) who removed his false teeth to spoil his grandson's interest in his can of Irn-Bru. A further TV advertisement featured a senior citizen in a motorised wheelchair robbing a local shopping market of a supply of Irn-Bru.",
"title": "Marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In 2004 the company created a new concept \"Phenomenal\". In 2006 the company launched its first Christmas adverts. This campaign consisted of a parody commercial of a popular Christmas Cartoon, The Snowman, and was effective in interesting American audiences in the Irn-Bru brand. A sequel to the commercial would later be released in December 2018. Further advertising campaigns for Irn-Bru appeared in conjunction with the release of Irn-Bru 32 in 2006.",
"title": "Marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "A 2009 advertisement for the product featured a group of high school pupils performing a musical number, with the refrain \"It's fizzy, it's ginger, it's phenomenal!\" It was a parody of High School Musical, and starred Jack Lowden.",
"title": "Marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In 2012 the company changed its slogan to \"gets you through\", which see a number of people drinking Irn-Bru to get through tough situations.",
"title": "Marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In response to the Coca-Cola 'Share a Coke' campaign, Barr decided to produce thousands of limited edition 750 ml bottles of Irn-Bru with the names 'Fanny', 'Senga', 'Rab' and 'Tam' on the label, mimicking that by Coca-Cola. The use of the name 'Fanny' ties in with one of Irn-Bru's controversial marketing advertisements.",
"title": "Marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "One of the most controversial Irn-Bru television adverts evoked 1950s entertainment. A mother plays the piano, while the father and two children deliver a song which ends with the mother singing: \"...even though I used to be a man\". This advertisement was broadcast in 2000, but when it was repeated in 2003, it led to seventeen complaints about it being offensive to members of the transgender community. Issue A14 of the Ofcom Advertising Complaints bulletin reports that the children's response to their mother's claim was not offensive. According to the advertising agency Leith, the advertisement was meant to \"create a sense of humour while confirming the maverick nature of the brand\". However, the scene involving the mother shaving at the end of the advertisement was deemed by Ofcom to be \"capable of causing offence by strongly reinforcing negative stereotypes\", and so it was taken off the air.",
"title": "Marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In 2003, an Irn-Bru commercial which showed a midwife trying to entice a baby from its mother's womb during a difficult delivery sparked fifty complaints. Some saw it as upsetting to women who had suffered miscarriages.",
"title": "Marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "One billboard that drew criticism featured a young woman in a bikini along with the slogan \"Diet Irn-Bru. I never knew four-and-a-half inches could give so much pleasure\". Another featured a picture of a cow with the slogan \"When I'm a burger, I want to be washed down with Irn-Bru\". This billboard resulted in over 700 complaints but was cleared by advertisement watchdogs. According to a 2003 BBC report, a billboard which featured a depressed goth and the slogan \"Cheer up Goth. Have an Irn-Bru.\" was also criticised for inciting bullying.",
"title": "Marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "McCowan's also produced Irn-Bru Bars, chewy, fizzy, bright orange confectionery bars which taste strongly of Irn-Bru, though production ended in late 2005. Irn-Bru sorbet is available in some speciality ice cream shops in Scotland.",
"title": "Brand portfolio"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The drink can be used as a mixer with alcoholic beverages, mainly vodka and whisky.",
"title": "Brand portfolio"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Barr launched an alcopop drink combining Irn-Bru and Bell's whisky, although this proved to be unpopular and was discontinued. A later attempt came in the form of an official Irn-Bru flavour in the Red Square line-up of vodka-based drinks; this too has been discontinued.",
"title": "Brand portfolio"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Irn-Bru is manufactured under licence in Russia by the Moscow Brewing Company. Bru and other Barr products are exported to Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, and Cyprus, as well as parts of Africa and Asia. It is available in the Republic of Ireland, increasingly being stocked in BWG and ADM Londis supplied stores, as well as in supermarkets owned by Dunnes Stores and Tesco Ireland. In Ireland generally, the drink mainly sells in County Donegal. It is also available in Malta, Belgium and in Poland. It is now sold in Iceland, as of 2011.",
"title": "Exports and foreign markets"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In Australia, Irn-Bru was manufactured and distributed under licence by Occasio Australia until 2009. It was available in 500 ml and 1.25-litre in both standard and diet. The drink enjoyed growing success in the country, with its first advertising campaign launched in Queensland in September 2007. It was initially available in major chains such as Coles and Woolworths, Caltex service stations and in many independent grocers and convenience stores. It was then delisted at Coles Supermarkets. Because of manufacturing and bottling issues, Occasio ceased local production in late 2009. It is now imported direct from the UK and distributed by British Provender, and can again be found in the international sections of major supermarket chains and some convenience stores.",
"title": "Exports and foreign markets"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Irn-Bru sold in Canada contained no caffeine until recently. In March 2010, Health Canada repealed the ban on caffeine in clear coloured soft drinks and now bottles of Irn-Bru have the label 'Now Contains caffeine' on the packaging. Irn-Bru in Canada is distributed by TFB & Associates Ltd from Markham, Ontario but is packaged by A.G. Barr in Glasgow, Scotland. Irn-Bru can be found at Sobeys, Co-Op and Walmart supermarkets.",
"title": "Exports and foreign markets"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The now-defunct McKinlay soft-drink company in Glace Bay, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, for many years offered its own non-licensed beverage called Irn-Bru and later \"Cape Breton's Irn-Bru\". It was a brown carbonated soft-drink with a fruity cola taste.",
"title": "Exports and foreign markets"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The standard Irn-Bru distributed in Canada also contains the \"Not a source of iron\" disclaimer on the label. The UK version of the drink (with caffeine) is commonly imported by speciality retailers, particularly in areas with large Scottish populations.",
"title": "Exports and foreign markets"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Irn-Bru started being sold at 7-Eleven. It has often appeared in the Danish supermarket Netto, Rema 1000 and Normal. Today only a few 7-Elevens in Denmark continue distributing Irn-Bru, while most Føtex, Bilka, and Normal stores now stock Irn-Bru.",
"title": "Exports and foreign markets"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Imported Irn-Bru cans are found throughout Finland in some K-Citymarket locations and some independent stores.",
"title": "Exports and foreign markets"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In Hong Kong, Irn-Bru can be found in selected Wellcome supermarkets, in and around areas where the expatriate population is significant such as the Sheung Wan and Central districts.",
"title": "Exports and foreign markets"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Irn-Bru has been available in some independent or specialty stores in both cans and 1.25-litre bottles since at least 2011.",
"title": "Exports and foreign markets"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "A.G. Barr launched its Irn-Bru product throughout the Middle East. It is found mostly in LuLu supermarkets.",
"title": "Exports and foreign markets"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Irn-Bru is commonly available nationwide from supermarkets as cans and 1.25-litre plastic bottles. It is bottled by Oasis, the same company that bottles Coca-Cola. Imported Irn-Bru from Scotland is available from speciality stores.",
"title": "Exports and foreign markets"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Irn-Bru entered the Norwegian market in May 2008. They had to withdraw from the market again in 2009 as a result of problems with production agreements and lack of funding for marketing.",
"title": "Exports and foreign markets"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "They were believed to be sponsoring the Norwegian First Division club Mjøndalen IF in 2009. This later turned out to be fraud carried out by a third-party company, and Mjøndalen IF never received any sponsorship from Irn-Bru, even though the team played the 2009 season with Irn-Bru logo on their shirts.",
"title": "Exports and foreign markets"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Irn-Bru began being sold in Russia in 1997, and by 2002, it had become their third best selling soft drink. After its original bottler went out of business, a new deal was signed for the drink to be manufactured and distributed in larger quantities by the Pepsi Bottling Group of Russia in 2002. Its popularity has been attributed to the drink's apparent similarity to discontinued Soviet-era soft drinks. As of 2011, Irn-Bru sales in Russia were still growing.",
"title": "Exports and foreign markets"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "On 4 March 2022, due to the ongoing 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, AG Barr cut ties with the Russian market.",
"title": "Exports and foreign markets"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Irn-Bru has been distributed in Spain since the early 1980s servicing primarily the large British communities residing in Spain. It can be found in key tourist areas such as the Balearic Islands, the Spanish coastal region and Canary Islands with both the regular and sugar-free variant available. Outside of the United Kingdom, Spain is among the top 10 Irn-Bru markets.",
"title": "Exports and foreign markets"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Irn-Bru and Diet Irn-Bru have been formulated since 2002 by A.G. Barr to meet the regulations for food colouring of the Food & Drug Administration (FDA). Ponceau 4R, used in the UK formulation, is prohibited by the FDA. Barr uses alternative food and drink colourants manufactured by a US company approved by the FDA. The product labelling also meets US labelling standards on nutritional information and bar code. Compliant Irn-Bru is solely imported by Great Scot International in Charlotte, North Carolina, which supplies distributors and retailers throughout the USA.",
"title": "Exports and foreign markets"
}
]
| Irn-Bru is a Scottish carbonated soft drink, often described as "Scotland's other national drink". Introduced in 1901, the drink is produced in Westfield, Cumbernauld, North Lanarkshire, by A.G. Barr of Glasgow. As well as being sold throughout the United Kingdom, Irn-Bru is available throughout the world and can usually be bought where there is a significant community of people from Scotland. The brand also has its own tartan. It has been the top-selling soft drink in Scotland for over a century, competing directly with global brands such as Coca-Cola. | 2001-07-26T21:29:23Z | 2023-12-21T15:55:37Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irn-Bru |
14,742 | Internet Standard | In computer network engineering, an Internet Standard is a normative specification of a technology or methodology applicable to the Internet. Internet Standards are created and published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). They allow interoperation of hardware and software from different sources which allows internets to function. As the Internet became global, Internet Standards became the lingua franca of worldwide communications.
Engineering contributions to the IETF start as an Internet Draft, may be promoted to a Request for Comments, and may eventually become an Internet Standard.
An Internet Standard is characterized by technical maturity and usefulness. The IETF also defines a Proposed Standard as a less mature but stable and well-reviewed specification. A Draft Standard was an intermediate level, discontinued in 2011. A Draft Standard was an intermediary step that occurred after a Proposed Standard but prior to an Internet Standard.
As put in RFC 2026:
In general, an Internet Standard is a specification that is stable and well-understood, is technically competent, has multiple, independent, and interoperable implementations with substantial operational experience, enjoys significant public support, and is recognizably useful in some or all parts of the Internet.
An Internet Standard is documented by a Request for Comments (RFC) or a set of RFCs. A specification that is to become a Standard or part of a Standard begins as an Internet Draft, and is later, usually after several revisions, accepted and published by the RFC Editor as an RFC and labeled a Proposed Standard. Later, an RFC is elevated as Internet Standard, with an additional sequence number, when maturity has reached an acceptable level. Collectively, these stages are known as the Standards Track, and are defined in RFC 2026 and RFC 6410. The label Historic is applied to deprecated Standards Track documents or obsolete RFCs that were published before the Standards Track was established.
Only the IETF, represented by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), can approve Standards Track RFCs. The definitive list of Internet Standards is maintained in the Official Internet Protocol Standards. Previously, STD 1 used to maintain a snapshot of the list.
Internet standard is a set of rules that the devices have to follow when they connect in a network. Since the technology has evolved, the rules of the engagement between computers had to evolve with it. These are the protocols that are in place used today. Most of these were developed long before the Internet Age, going as far back as the 1970s, not long after the creation of personal computers.
TCP/IP
The official date for when the first internet went live is January 1, 1983. The Transfer Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) went into effect. ARPANET(Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) and the Defense Data Network were the networks to implement the Protocols. These protocols are considered to be the essential part of how the Internet works because they define the rules by which the connections between servers operate. They are still used today by implementing various ways data is sent via global networks.
IPsec
Internet Protocol Security is a collection of protocols that ensure the integrity of encryption in the connection between multiple devices. The purpose of this protocol is to protect public networks. According to IETF Datatracker the group dedicated to its creation was proposed into existence on 25 November 1992. Half a year later the group was created and not long after in the mid 1993 the first draft was published.
HTTP
HyperText Transfer Protocol is one of the most commonly used protocols today in the context of the World Wide Web. HTTP is a simple protocol to govern how documents, that are written in HyperText Mark Language(HTML), are exchanged via networks. This protocol is the backbone of the Web allowing for the whole hypertext system to exist practically. It was created by the team of developers spearheaded by Tim Berners-Lee. Berners-Lee is responsible for the proposal of its creation, which he did in 1989. August 6, 1991 is the date he published the first complete version of HTTP on a public forum. This date subsequently is considered by some to be the official birth of the World Wide Web. HTTP has been continually evolving since its creation, becoming more complicated with time and progression of networking technology. By default HTTP is not encrypted so in practice HTTPS is used, which stands for HTTP Secure.
TLS/SSL
TLS stands for Transport Layer Security which is a standard that enables two different endpoints to interconnect sturdy and privately. TLS came as a replacement for SSL. Secure Sockets Layers was first introduced before the creation of HTTPS and it was created by Netscape. As a matter of fact HTTPS was based on SSL when it first came out. It was apparent that one common way of encrypting data was needed so the IETF specified TLS 1.0 in RFC 2246 in January, 1999. It has been upgraded since. Last version of TLS is 1.3 from RFC 8446 in August 2018.
OSI Model
The Open Systems Interconnection model began its development in 1977. It was created by the International Organization for Standardization. It was officially published and adopted as a standard for use in 1979. It was then updated several times and the final version. It took a few years for the protocol to be presented in its final form. ISO 7498 was published in 1984. Lastly in 1995 the OSI model was revised again satisfy the urgent needs of uprising development in the field of computer network
UDP
The goal of User Datagram Protocol was to find a way to communicate between two computers as quickly and efficiently as possible. UDP was conceived and realized by David P. Reed in 1980. Essentially the way it works is using compression to send information. Data would be compressed into a datagram and sent point to point. This proved to be a secure way to transmit information and despite the drawback of losing quality of data UDP is still in use.
Becoming a standard is a two-step process within the Internet Standards Process: Proposed Standard and Internet Standard. These are called maturity levels and the process is called the Standards Track.
If an RFC is part of a proposal that is on the Standards Track, then at the first stage, the standard is proposed and subsequently organizations decide whether to implement this Proposed Standard. After the criteria in RFC 6410 is met (two separate implementations, widespread use, no errata etc.), the RFC can advance to Internet Standard.
The Internet Standards Process is defined in several "Best Current Practice" documents, notably BCP 9 (currently RFC 2026 and RFC 6410). There were previously three standard maturity levels: Proposed Standard, Draft Standard and Internet Standard. RFC 6410 reduced this to two maturity levels.
RFC 2026 originally characterized Proposed Standards as immature specifications, but this stance was annulled by RFC 7127.
A Proposed Standard specification is stable, has resolved known design choices, has received significant community review, and appears to enjoy enough community interest to be considered valuable. Usually, neither implementation nor operational experience is required for the designation of a specification as a Proposed Standard.
Proposed Standards are of such quality that implementations can be deployed in the Internet. However, as with all technical specifications, Proposed Standards may be revised if problems are found or better solutions are identified, when experiences with deploying implementations of such technologies at scale is gathered.
Many Proposed Standards are actually deployed on the Internet and used extensively, as stable protocols. Actual practice has been that full progression through the sequence of standards levels is typically quite rare, and most popular IETF protocols remain at Proposed Standard.
In October 2011, RFC 6410 merged the second and third maturity levels into one Draft Standard. Existing older Draft Standards retain that classification. The IESG can reclassify an old Draft Standard as Proposed Standard after two years (October 2013).
An Internet Standard is characterized by a high degree of technical maturity and by a generally held belief that the specified protocol or service provides significant benefit to the Internet community. Generally Internet Standards cover interoperability of systems on the Internet through defining protocols, message formats, schemas, and languages. An Internet Standard ensures that hardware and software produced by different vendors can work together. Having a standard makes it much easier to develop software and hardware that link different networks because software and hardware can be developed one layer at a time. Normally, the standards used in data communication are called protocols.
All Internet Standards are given a number in the STD series. The series was summarized in its first document, STD 1 (RFC 5000), until 2013, but this practice was retired in RFC 7100. The definitive list of Internet Standards is now maintained by the RFC Editor.
Documents submitted to the IETF editor and accepted as an RFC are not revised; if the document has to be changed, it is submitted again and assigned a new RFC number. When an RFC becomes an Internet Standard (STD), it is assigned an STD number but retains its RFC number. When an Internet Standard is updated, its number is unchanged but refers to a different RFC or set of RFCs. For example, in 2007 RFC 3700 was an Internet Standard (STD 1) and in May 2008 it was replaced with RFC 5000. RFC 3700 received Historic status, and RFC 5000 became STD 1.
The list of Internet standards was originally published as STD 1 but this practice has been abandoned in favor of an online list maintained by the RFC Editor.
The standardization process is divided into three steps:
There are five Internet standards organizations: the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Internet Society (ISOC), Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). All organizations are required to use and express the Internet language in order to remain competitive in the current Internet phase. Some basic aims of the Internet Standards Process are; ensure technical excellence; earlier implementation and testing; perfect, succinct as well as easily understood records.
Creating and improving the Internet Standards is an ongoing effort and Internet Engineering Task Force plays a significant role in this regard. These standards are shaped and available by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It is the leading Internet standards association that uses well-documented procedures for creating these standards. Once circulated, those standards are made easily accessible without any cost.
Till 1993, the United States federal government was supporting the IETF. Now, the Internet Society's Internet Architecture Board (IAB) supervises it. It is a bottom-up organization that has no formal necessities for affiliation and does not have an official membership procedure either. It watchfully works with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and other standard development organizations. Moreover, it heavily relies on working groups that are constituted and proposed to an Area Director. IETF relies on its working groups for expansion of IETF conditions and strategies with a goal to make the Internet work superior. The working group then operates under the direction of the Area Director and progress an agreement. After the circulation of the proposed charter to the IESG and IAB mailing lists and its approval then it is further forwarded to the public IETF. It is not essential to have the complete agreement of all working groups and adopt the proposal. IETF working groups are only required to recourse to check if the accord is strong.
Likewise, the Working Group produce documents in the arrangement of RFCs which are memorandum containing approaches, deeds, examination as well as innovations suitable to the functioning of the Internet and Internet-linked arrangements. In other words, Requests for Comments (RFCs) are primarily used to mature a standard network protocol that is correlated with network statements. Some RFCs are aimed to produce information while others are required to publish Internet standards. The ultimate form of the RFC converts to the standard and is issued with a numeral. After that, no more comments or variations are acceptable for the concluding form. This process is followed in every area to generate unanimous views about a problem related to the internet and develop internet standards as a solution to different glitches. There are eight common areas on which IETF focus and uses various working groups along with an area director. In the "general" area it works and develops the Internet standards. In "Application" area it concentrates on internet applications such as Web-related protocols. Furthermore, it also works on the development of internet infrastructure in the form of PPP extensions. IETF also establish principles and descriptions for network processes such as remote network observing. For example, IETF emphasis the enlargement of technical standards that encompass the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) along with the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) counterpart the exertion of the IETF using innovative technologies.
The IETF is the standards making organization concentrate on the generation of "standard" stipulations of expertise and their envisioned usage. The IETF concentrates on matters associated with the progress of current Internet and TCP/IP know-how. It is alienated into numerous working groups (WGs), every one of which is accountable for evolving standards and skills in a specific zone, for example routing or security. People in working groups are volunteers and work in fields such as equipment vendors, network operators and different research institutions. Firstly, it works on getting the common consideration of the necessities that the effort should discourse. Then an IETF Working Group is formed and necessities are ventilated in the influential Birds of a Feather (BoF) assemblies at IETF conferences.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the premier internet standards organization. It follows an open and well-documented processes for setting internet standards. The resources that the IETF offers include RFCs, internet-drafts, IANA functions, intellectual property rights, standards process, and publishing and accessing RFCs.
There are two ways in which an Internet Standard is formed and can be categorized as one of the following: "de jure" standards and "de facto" standards. A de facto standard becomes a standard through widespread use within the tech community. A de jure standard is formally created by official standard-developing organizations. These standards undergo the Internet Standards Process. Common de jure standards include ASCII, SCSI, and Internet protocol suite.
Specifications subject to the Internet Standards Process can be categorized into one of the following: Technical Specification (TS) and Applicability Statement (AS). A Technical Specification is a statement describing all relevant aspects of a protocol, service, procedure, convention, or format. This includes its scope and its intent for use, or "domain of applicability". However, a TSs use within the Internet is defined by an Applicability Statement. An AS specifies how, and under what circumstances, TSs may be applied to support a particular Internet capability. An AS identifies the ways in which relevant TSs are combined and specifies the parameters or sub-functions of TS protocols. An AS also describes the domains of applicability of TSs, such as Internet routers, terminal server, or datagram-based database servers. An AS also applies one of the following "requirement levels" to each of the TSs to which it refers:
TCP/ IP Model & associated Internet Standards Web standards are a type of internet standard which define aspects of the World Wide Web. They allow for the building and rendering of websites. The three key standards used by the World Wide Web are Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTML, and URL. Respectively, they specify the transfer of data between a browser and a web server, the content and layout of a web page, and what web page identifiers mean.
Network standards are a type of internet standard which defines rules for data communication in networking technologies and processes. Internet standards allow for the communication procedure of a device to or from other devices.
In reference to the TCP/IP Model, common standards and protocols in each layer are as follows:
The Internet has been viewed as an open playground, free for people to use and communities to monitor. However, large companies have shaped and molded it to best fit their needs. The future of internet standards will be no different. Currently, there are widely used but insecure protocols such as the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and Domain Name System (DNS). This reflects common practices that focus more on innovation than security. Companies have the power to improve these issues. With the Internet in the hands of the industry, users must depend on businesses to protect vulnerabilities present in these standards.
Ways to make BGP and DNS safer already exist but they are not widespread. For example, there is the existing BGP safeguard called Routing Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI). It is a database of routes that are known to be safe and have been cryptographically signed. Users and companies submit routes and check other users' routes for safety. If it were more widely adopted, more routes could be added and confirmed. However, RPKI is picking up momentum. As of December 2020, tech giant Google registered 99% of its routes with RPKI. They are making it easier for businesses to adopt BGP safeguards. DNS also has a security protocol with a low adoption rate: DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC). Essentially, at every stage of the DNS lookup process, DNSSEC adds a signature to data to show it has not been tampered with.
Some companies have taken the initiative to secure internet protocols. It is up to the rest to make it more widespread. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "In computer network engineering, an Internet Standard is a normative specification of a technology or methodology applicable to the Internet. Internet Standards are created and published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). They allow interoperation of hardware and software from different sources which allows internets to function. As the Internet became global, Internet Standards became the lingua franca of worldwide communications.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Engineering contributions to the IETF start as an Internet Draft, may be promoted to a Request for Comments, and may eventually become an Internet Standard.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "An Internet Standard is characterized by technical maturity and usefulness. The IETF also defines a Proposed Standard as a less mature but stable and well-reviewed specification. A Draft Standard was an intermediate level, discontinued in 2011. A Draft Standard was an intermediary step that occurred after a Proposed Standard but prior to an Internet Standard.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "As put in RFC 2026:",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In general, an Internet Standard is a specification that is stable and well-understood, is technically competent, has multiple, independent, and interoperable implementations with substantial operational experience, enjoys significant public support, and is recognizably useful in some or all parts of the Internet.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "An Internet Standard is documented by a Request for Comments (RFC) or a set of RFCs. A specification that is to become a Standard or part of a Standard begins as an Internet Draft, and is later, usually after several revisions, accepted and published by the RFC Editor as an RFC and labeled a Proposed Standard. Later, an RFC is elevated as Internet Standard, with an additional sequence number, when maturity has reached an acceptable level. Collectively, these stages are known as the Standards Track, and are defined in RFC 2026 and RFC 6410. The label Historic is applied to deprecated Standards Track documents or obsolete RFCs that were published before the Standards Track was established.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Only the IETF, represented by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), can approve Standards Track RFCs. The definitive list of Internet Standards is maintained in the Official Internet Protocol Standards. Previously, STD 1 used to maintain a snapshot of the list.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Internet standard is a set of rules that the devices have to follow when they connect in a network. Since the technology has evolved, the rules of the engagement between computers had to evolve with it. These are the protocols that are in place used today. Most of these were developed long before the Internet Age, going as far back as the 1970s, not long after the creation of personal computers.",
"title": "History & The Purpose of Internet Standards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "TCP/IP",
"title": "History & The Purpose of Internet Standards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The official date for when the first internet went live is January 1, 1983. The Transfer Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) went into effect. ARPANET(Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) and the Defense Data Network were the networks to implement the Protocols. These protocols are considered to be the essential part of how the Internet works because they define the rules by which the connections between servers operate. They are still used today by implementing various ways data is sent via global networks.",
"title": "History & The Purpose of Internet Standards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "IPsec",
"title": "History & The Purpose of Internet Standards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Internet Protocol Security is a collection of protocols that ensure the integrity of encryption in the connection between multiple devices. The purpose of this protocol is to protect public networks. According to IETF Datatracker the group dedicated to its creation was proposed into existence on 25 November 1992. Half a year later the group was created and not long after in the mid 1993 the first draft was published.",
"title": "History & The Purpose of Internet Standards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "HTTP",
"title": "History & The Purpose of Internet Standards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "HyperText Transfer Protocol is one of the most commonly used protocols today in the context of the World Wide Web. HTTP is a simple protocol to govern how documents, that are written in HyperText Mark Language(HTML), are exchanged via networks. This protocol is the backbone of the Web allowing for the whole hypertext system to exist practically. It was created by the team of developers spearheaded by Tim Berners-Lee. Berners-Lee is responsible for the proposal of its creation, which he did in 1989. August 6, 1991 is the date he published the first complete version of HTTP on a public forum. This date subsequently is considered by some to be the official birth of the World Wide Web. HTTP has been continually evolving since its creation, becoming more complicated with time and progression of networking technology. By default HTTP is not encrypted so in practice HTTPS is used, which stands for HTTP Secure.",
"title": "History & The Purpose of Internet Standards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "TLS/SSL",
"title": "History & The Purpose of Internet Standards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "TLS stands for Transport Layer Security which is a standard that enables two different endpoints to interconnect sturdy and privately. TLS came as a replacement for SSL. Secure Sockets Layers was first introduced before the creation of HTTPS and it was created by Netscape. As a matter of fact HTTPS was based on SSL when it first came out. It was apparent that one common way of encrypting data was needed so the IETF specified TLS 1.0 in RFC 2246 in January, 1999. It has been upgraded since. Last version of TLS is 1.3 from RFC 8446 in August 2018.",
"title": "History & The Purpose of Internet Standards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "OSI Model",
"title": "History & The Purpose of Internet Standards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The Open Systems Interconnection model began its development in 1977. It was created by the International Organization for Standardization. It was officially published and adopted as a standard for use in 1979. It was then updated several times and the final version. It took a few years for the protocol to be presented in its final form. ISO 7498 was published in 1984. Lastly in 1995 the OSI model was revised again satisfy the urgent needs of uprising development in the field of computer network",
"title": "History & The Purpose of Internet Standards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "UDP",
"title": "History & The Purpose of Internet Standards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The goal of User Datagram Protocol was to find a way to communicate between two computers as quickly and efficiently as possible. UDP was conceived and realized by David P. Reed in 1980. Essentially the way it works is using compression to send information. Data would be compressed into a datagram and sent point to point. This proved to be a secure way to transmit information and despite the drawback of losing quality of data UDP is still in use.",
"title": "History & The Purpose of Internet Standards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Becoming a standard is a two-step process within the Internet Standards Process: Proposed Standard and Internet Standard. These are called maturity levels and the process is called the Standards Track.",
"title": "Standardization process"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "If an RFC is part of a proposal that is on the Standards Track, then at the first stage, the standard is proposed and subsequently organizations decide whether to implement this Proposed Standard. After the criteria in RFC 6410 is met (two separate implementations, widespread use, no errata etc.), the RFC can advance to Internet Standard.",
"title": "Standardization process"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The Internet Standards Process is defined in several \"Best Current Practice\" documents, notably BCP 9 (currently RFC 2026 and RFC 6410). There were previously three standard maturity levels: Proposed Standard, Draft Standard and Internet Standard. RFC 6410 reduced this to two maturity levels.",
"title": "Standardization process"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "RFC 2026 originally characterized Proposed Standards as immature specifications, but this stance was annulled by RFC 7127.",
"title": "Standardization process"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "A Proposed Standard specification is stable, has resolved known design choices, has received significant community review, and appears to enjoy enough community interest to be considered valuable. Usually, neither implementation nor operational experience is required for the designation of a specification as a Proposed Standard.",
"title": "Standardization process"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Proposed Standards are of such quality that implementations can be deployed in the Internet. However, as with all technical specifications, Proposed Standards may be revised if problems are found or better solutions are identified, when experiences with deploying implementations of such technologies at scale is gathered.",
"title": "Standardization process"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Many Proposed Standards are actually deployed on the Internet and used extensively, as stable protocols. Actual practice has been that full progression through the sequence of standards levels is typically quite rare, and most popular IETF protocols remain at Proposed Standard.",
"title": "Standardization process"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In October 2011, RFC 6410 merged the second and third maturity levels into one Draft Standard. Existing older Draft Standards retain that classification. The IESG can reclassify an old Draft Standard as Proposed Standard after two years (October 2013).",
"title": "Standardization process"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "An Internet Standard is characterized by a high degree of technical maturity and by a generally held belief that the specified protocol or service provides significant benefit to the Internet community. Generally Internet Standards cover interoperability of systems on the Internet through defining protocols, message formats, schemas, and languages. An Internet Standard ensures that hardware and software produced by different vendors can work together. Having a standard makes it much easier to develop software and hardware that link different networks because software and hardware can be developed one layer at a time. Normally, the standards used in data communication are called protocols.",
"title": "Standardization process"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "All Internet Standards are given a number in the STD series. The series was summarized in its first document, STD 1 (RFC 5000), until 2013, but this practice was retired in RFC 7100. The definitive list of Internet Standards is now maintained by the RFC Editor.",
"title": "Standardization process"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Documents submitted to the IETF editor and accepted as an RFC are not revised; if the document has to be changed, it is submitted again and assigned a new RFC number. When an RFC becomes an Internet Standard (STD), it is assigned an STD number but retains its RFC number. When an Internet Standard is updated, its number is unchanged but refers to a different RFC or set of RFCs. For example, in 2007 RFC 3700 was an Internet Standard (STD 1) and in May 2008 it was replaced with RFC 5000. RFC 3700 received Historic status, and RFC 5000 became STD 1.",
"title": "Standardization process"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The list of Internet standards was originally published as STD 1 but this practice has been abandoned in favor of an online list maintained by the RFC Editor.",
"title": "Standardization process"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The standardization process is divided into three steps:",
"title": "Organizations of Internet Standards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "There are five Internet standards organizations: the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Internet Society (ISOC), Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). All organizations are required to use and express the Internet language in order to remain competitive in the current Internet phase. Some basic aims of the Internet Standards Process are; ensure technical excellence; earlier implementation and testing; perfect, succinct as well as easily understood records.",
"title": "Organizations of Internet Standards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Creating and improving the Internet Standards is an ongoing effort and Internet Engineering Task Force plays a significant role in this regard. These standards are shaped and available by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It is the leading Internet standards association that uses well-documented procedures for creating these standards. Once circulated, those standards are made easily accessible without any cost.",
"title": "Organizations of Internet Standards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Till 1993, the United States federal government was supporting the IETF. Now, the Internet Society's Internet Architecture Board (IAB) supervises it. It is a bottom-up organization that has no formal necessities for affiliation and does not have an official membership procedure either. It watchfully works with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and other standard development organizations. Moreover, it heavily relies on working groups that are constituted and proposed to an Area Director. IETF relies on its working groups for expansion of IETF conditions and strategies with a goal to make the Internet work superior. The working group then operates under the direction of the Area Director and progress an agreement. After the circulation of the proposed charter to the IESG and IAB mailing lists and its approval then it is further forwarded to the public IETF. It is not essential to have the complete agreement of all working groups and adopt the proposal. IETF working groups are only required to recourse to check if the accord is strong.",
"title": "Organizations of Internet Standards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Likewise, the Working Group produce documents in the arrangement of RFCs which are memorandum containing approaches, deeds, examination as well as innovations suitable to the functioning of the Internet and Internet-linked arrangements. In other words, Requests for Comments (RFCs) are primarily used to mature a standard network protocol that is correlated with network statements. Some RFCs are aimed to produce information while others are required to publish Internet standards. The ultimate form of the RFC converts to the standard and is issued with a numeral. After that, no more comments or variations are acceptable for the concluding form. This process is followed in every area to generate unanimous views about a problem related to the internet and develop internet standards as a solution to different glitches. There are eight common areas on which IETF focus and uses various working groups along with an area director. In the \"general\" area it works and develops the Internet standards. In \"Application\" area it concentrates on internet applications such as Web-related protocols. Furthermore, it also works on the development of internet infrastructure in the form of PPP extensions. IETF also establish principles and descriptions for network processes such as remote network observing. For example, IETF emphasis the enlargement of technical standards that encompass the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) along with the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) counterpart the exertion of the IETF using innovative technologies.",
"title": "Organizations of Internet Standards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The IETF is the standards making organization concentrate on the generation of \"standard\" stipulations of expertise and their envisioned usage. The IETF concentrates on matters associated with the progress of current Internet and TCP/IP know-how. It is alienated into numerous working groups (WGs), every one of which is accountable for evolving standards and skills in a specific zone, for example routing or security. People in working groups are volunteers and work in fields such as equipment vendors, network operators and different research institutions. Firstly, it works on getting the common consideration of the necessities that the effort should discourse. Then an IETF Working Group is formed and necessities are ventilated in the influential Birds of a Feather (BoF) assemblies at IETF conferences.",
"title": "Organizations of Internet Standards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the premier internet standards organization. It follows an open and well-documented processes for setting internet standards. The resources that the IETF offers include RFCs, internet-drafts, IANA functions, intellectual property rights, standards process, and publishing and accessing RFCs.",
"title": "Internet Engineering Task Force"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "There are two ways in which an Internet Standard is formed and can be categorized as one of the following: \"de jure\" standards and \"de facto\" standards. A de facto standard becomes a standard through widespread use within the tech community. A de jure standard is formally created by official standard-developing organizations. These standards undergo the Internet Standards Process. Common de jure standards include ASCII, SCSI, and Internet protocol suite.",
"title": "Types of Internet Standards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Specifications subject to the Internet Standards Process can be categorized into one of the following: Technical Specification (TS) and Applicability Statement (AS). A Technical Specification is a statement describing all relevant aspects of a protocol, service, procedure, convention, or format. This includes its scope and its intent for use, or \"domain of applicability\". However, a TSs use within the Internet is defined by an Applicability Statement. An AS specifies how, and under what circumstances, TSs may be applied to support a particular Internet capability. An AS identifies the ways in which relevant TSs are combined and specifies the parameters or sub-functions of TS protocols. An AS also describes the domains of applicability of TSs, such as Internet routers, terminal server, or datagram-based database servers. An AS also applies one of the following \"requirement levels\" to each of the TSs to which it refers:",
"title": "Types of Internet Standards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "TCP/ IP Model & associated Internet Standards Web standards are a type of internet standard which define aspects of the World Wide Web. They allow for the building and rendering of websites. The three key standards used by the World Wide Web are Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTML, and URL. Respectively, they specify the transfer of data between a browser and a web server, the content and layout of a web page, and what web page identifiers mean.",
"title": "Types of Internet Standards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Network standards are a type of internet standard which defines rules for data communication in networking technologies and processes. Internet standards allow for the communication procedure of a device to or from other devices.",
"title": "Types of Internet Standards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "In reference to the TCP/IP Model, common standards and protocols in each layer are as follows:",
"title": "Types of Internet Standards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The Internet has been viewed as an open playground, free for people to use and communities to monitor. However, large companies have shaped and molded it to best fit their needs. The future of internet standards will be no different. Currently, there are widely used but insecure protocols such as the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and Domain Name System (DNS). This reflects common practices that focus more on innovation than security. Companies have the power to improve these issues. With the Internet in the hands of the industry, users must depend on businesses to protect vulnerabilities present in these standards.",
"title": "The Future of Internet Standards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Ways to make BGP and DNS safer already exist but they are not widespread. For example, there is the existing BGP safeguard called Routing Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI). It is a database of routes that are known to be safe and have been cryptographically signed. Users and companies submit routes and check other users' routes for safety. If it were more widely adopted, more routes could be added and confirmed. However, RPKI is picking up momentum. As of December 2020, tech giant Google registered 99% of its routes with RPKI. They are making it easier for businesses to adopt BGP safeguards. DNS also has a security protocol with a low adoption rate: DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC). Essentially, at every stage of the DNS lookup process, DNSSEC adds a signature to data to show it has not been tampered with.",
"title": "The Future of Internet Standards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Some companies have taken the initiative to secure internet protocols. It is up to the rest to make it more widespread.",
"title": "The Future of Internet Standards"
}
]
| In computer network engineering, an Internet Standard is a normative specification of a technology or methodology applicable to the Internet. Internet Standards are created and published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). They allow interoperation of hardware and software from different sources which allows internets to function. As the Internet became global, Internet Standards became the lingua franca of worldwide communications. Engineering contributions to the IETF start as an Internet Draft, may be promoted to a Request for Comments, and may eventually become an Internet Standard. An Internet Standard is characterized by technical maturity and usefulness. The IETF also defines a Proposed Standard as a less mature but stable and well-reviewed specification. A Draft Standard was an intermediate level, discontinued in 2011. A Draft Standard was an intermediary step that occurred after a Proposed Standard but prior to an Internet Standard. As put in RFC 2026: | 2001-08-24T16:07:22Z | 2023-11-02T10:08:46Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Standard |
14,743 | ISOC | ISOC is an abbreviation which may refer to: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "ISOC is an abbreviation which may refer to:",
"title": ""
}
]
| ISOC is an abbreviation which may refer to: Information Security Operations Center, is a location where enterprise information systems are monitored, assessed, and defended.
Internet Society, ISOC, an international organization that promotes Internet use and access
Internal Security Operations Command, a unit of the Thai military devoted to national security issues
Islamic Society, various Islamic-based groups
Independent State of Croatia, a country that existed during WWII | 2022-06-09T00:13:25Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISOC |
|
14,744 | ITU-T | The International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) is one of the three Sectors (branches) of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). It is responsible for coordinating standards for telecommunications and Information Communication Technology, such as X.509 for cybersecurity, Y.3172 and Y.3173 for machine learning, and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC for video compression, between its Member States, Private Sector Members, and Academia Members.
The World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (WTSA), the sector's governing conference, convenes every four years.
ITU-T has a permanent secretariat called the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB), which is based at the ITU headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. The current director of the TSB is Seizo Onoe (of Japan), whose 4-year term commenced on 1 January 2023. Seizo Onoe succeeded Chaesub Lee of South Korea, who was director from 1 January 2015 until 31 December 2022.
The ITU-T mission is to ensure the efficient and timely production of standards covering all fields of telecommunications and Information Communication Technology (ICTs) on a worldwide basis, as well as defining tariff and accounting principles for international telecommunication services.
The international standards that are produced by the ITU-T are referred to as "Recommendations" (with the word capitalized to distinguish its meaning from the common parlance sense of the word "recommendation"), as they become mandatory only when adopted as part of a national law.
Since the ITU-T is part of the ITU, which is a United Nations specialized agency, its standards carry more formal international weight than those of most other standards development organizations that publish technical specifications of a similar form.
At the initiative of Napoleon III, the French government invited international participants to a conference in Paris in 1865 to facilitate and regulate international telegraph services. A result of the conference was the founding of the forerunner of the modern ITU.
At the 1925 Paris conference, the ITU created two consultative committees to deal with the complexities of the international telephone services, known as CCIF (as the French acronym) and with long-distance telegraphy CCIT (Comité Consultatif International des Communications Téléphoniques a grande distance).
In view of the basic similarity of many of the technical problems faced by the CCIF and CCIT, a decision was taken in 1956 to merge them into a single entity, the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (CCITT, in the French acronym). The first Plenary Assembly of the new organization was held in Geneva, Switzerland in December 1956.
In 1992, the Plenipotentiary Conference (the top policy-making conference of ITU) saw a reform of ITU, giving the Union greater flexibility to adapt to an increasingly complex, interactive and competitive environment. The CCITT was renamed the Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T), as one of three Sectors of the Union alongside the Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) and the Telecommunication Development Sector (ITU-D).
Historically, the Recommendations of the CCITT were presented at plenary assemblies for endorsement, held every four years, and the full set of Recommendations were published after each plenary assembly. However, the delays in producing texts, and translating them into other working languages, did not suit the fast pace of change in the telecommunications industry.
The rise of the personal computer industry in the early 1980s created a new common practice among both consumers and businesses of adopting "bleeding edge" communications technology even if it was not yet standardized. Thus, standards organizations had to put forth standards much faster, or find themselves ratifying de facto standards after the fact. One of the most prominent examples of this was the Open Document Architecture project, which began in 1985 when a profusion of software firms around the world were still furiously competing to shape the future of the electronic office, and was completed in 1999 long after Microsoft Office's then-secret binary file formats had become established as the global de facto standard.
The ITU-T now operates under much more streamlined processes. The time between an initial proposal of a draft document by a member company and the final approval of a full-status ITU-T Recommendation can now be as short as a few months (or less in some cases). This makes the standardization approval process in the ITU-T much more responsive to the needs of rapid technology development than in the ITU's historical past. New and updated Recommendations are published on an almost daily basis, and nearly all of the library of over 3,270 Recommendations is now free of charge online. (About 30 specifications jointly maintained by the ITU-T and ISO/IEC are not available for free to the public.)
ITU-T has moreover tried to facilitate cooperation between the various forums and standard-developing organizations (SDOs). This collaboration is necessary to avoid duplication of work and the consequent risk of conflicting standards in the market place.
In the work of standardization, ITU-T cooperates with other SDOs, e.g., the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
Most of the work of ITU-T is carried out by its Sector Members and Associates, while the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB) is the executive arm of ITU-T and coordinator for a number of workshops and seminars to progress existing work areas and explore new ones. The events cover a wide array of topics in the field of information and communication technologies (ICT) and attract high-ranking experts as speakers, and attendees from engineers to high-level management from all industry sectors.
The technical work, the development of Recommendations, of ITU-T is managed by Study Groups (SGs), such as Study Group 13 for network standards, Study Group 16 for multimedia standards, and Study Group 17 for security standards, which are created by the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (WTSA) which is held every four years. As part of the deliberations, WTSA has instructed ITU to hold the Global Standards Symposium, which unlike WTSA is open to public for participation. The people involved in these SGs are experts in telecommunications from all over the world. There are currently 11 SGs. Study groups meet face to face (or virtually under exceptional circumstances) according to a calendar issued by the TSB. SGs are augmented by Focus Groups (FGs), an instrument created by ITU-T, providing a way to quickly react to ICT standardization needs and allowing great flexibility in terms of participation and working methods. The key difference between SGs and FGs is that the latter have greater freedom to organize and finance themselves, and to involve non-members in their work, but they do not have the authority to approve Recommendations. Focus Groups can be created very quickly, are usually short-lived and can choose their own working methods, leadership, financing, and types of deliverables. Current Focus Groups include the ITU-WHO Focus Group on Artificial Intelligence for Health (FG-AI4H) as well as Machine Learning for 5G (which developed Y.3172), Quantum Information Technologies for Networks, and Artificial Intelligence for Assisted and Autonomous Driving.
The Alternative Approval Process (AAP) is a fast-track approval procedure that was developed to allow standards to be brought to market in the timeframe that industry now demands. The AAP is defined in ITU-T Recommendation A.8.
This dramatic overhaul of standards-making by streamlining approval procedures was implemented in 2001 and is estimated to have cut the time involved in this critical aspect of the standardization process by 80 to 90 percent. This means that an average standard that took around four years to approve and publish until the mid nineties, and two years until 1997, can now be approved in an average of two months, or as little as five weeks.
Besides streamlining the underlying procedures involved in the approval process, an important contributory factor to the use of AAP is electronic document handling. Once the approval process has begun the rest of the process can be completed electronically, in the vast majority of cases, with no further physical meetings.
The introduction of AAP also formalizes public/private partnership in the approval process by providing equal opportunities for both sector members and member states in the approval of technical standards.
A panel of SG experts drafts a proposal that is then forwarded at an SG meeting to the appropriate body which decides if it is sufficiently ready to be designated a draft text and thus gives its consent for further review at the next level.
After this Consent has been given, TSB announces the start of the AAP procedure by posting the draft text to the ITU-T website and calling for comments. This gives the opportunity for all members to review the text. This phase, called last call, is a four-week period in which comments can be submitted by member states and sector members.
If no comments other than editorial corrections are received, the Recommendation is considered approved since no issues were identified that might need any further work. However, if there are any comments, the SG chairman, in consultation with TSB, sets up a comment resolution process by the concerned experts. The revised text is then posted on the web for an additional review period of three weeks.
Similar to the last call phase, in additional review the Recommendation is considered as approved if no comments are received. If comments are received, it is apparent that there are some issues that still need more work, and the draft text and all comments are sent to the next Study Group meeting for further discussion and possible approval.
Those Recommendations considered as having policy or regulatory implications are approved through what is known as the Traditional Approval Process (TAP), which allows a longer period for reflection and commenting by member states. TAP Recommendations are also translated into the six working languages of ITU (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish).
ITU-T Recommendations are the names given to telecommunications and computer protocol specification documents published by ITU-T.
ITU-T assigns each Recommendation a name based on the series and Recommendation number. The name starts with the letter of the series the Recommendation belongs to. Each series encompasses a broad category of Recommendations, such as "H-Series Recommendations: Audiovisual and multimedia systems". The series letter is followed by a period and the Recommendation number, which uniquely identifies the Recommendation within the series. Often, a range of related Recommendations are further grouped within the series and given adjacent numbers, such as "H.200-H.499: Infrastructure of audiovisual services" or "H.260-H.279: Coding of moving video". Many numbers are "skipped" to give room for future Recommendations to be adjacent to related Recommendations. Recommendations can be revised or "superseded" and keep their existing Recommendation number.
In addition to the ITU-T Recommendations, which have non-mandatory status unless they are adopted in national laws, ITU-T is also the custodian of a binding international treaty, the International Telecommunication Regulations. The ITRs go back to the earliest days of the ITU when there were two separate treaties, dealing with telegraph and telephone. The ITRs were adopted, as a single treaty, at the World Administrative Telegraphy and Telephone Conference held in Melbourne, 1988 (WATTC-88).
The ITRs comprise ten articles which deal, inter alia, with the definition of international telecommunication services, cooperation between countries and national administrations, safety of life and priority of telecommunications and charging and accounting principles. The adoption of the ITRs in 1988 is often taken as the start of the wider liberalization process in international telecommunications, though a few countries, including United States and United Kingdom, had made steps to liberalize their markets before 1988.
The Constitution and Convention of ITU provides for the amendment of ITRs through a World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT). Accordingly, in 1998 there began a process of review of the ITRs; and in 2009 extensive preparations began for such a conference, WCIT-12. In addition to "regional preparatory meetings", the ITU Secretariat developed 13 "Background Briefs on key issues" that were expected to be discussed at the conference. Convened by former ITU secretary-general Hamadoun Touré, the Conference, WCIT-12, was then held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, during the period 3–14 December 2014.
The Standardization Sector of ITU also organizes AI for Good, the United Nations platform for the sustainable development of Artificial Intelligence. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) is one of the three Sectors (branches) of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). It is responsible for coordinating standards for telecommunications and Information Communication Technology, such as X.509 for cybersecurity, Y.3172 and Y.3173 for machine learning, and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC for video compression, between its Member States, Private Sector Members, and Academia Members.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (WTSA), the sector's governing conference, convenes every four years.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "ITU-T has a permanent secretariat called the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB), which is based at the ITU headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. The current director of the TSB is Seizo Onoe (of Japan), whose 4-year term commenced on 1 January 2023. Seizo Onoe succeeded Chaesub Lee of South Korea, who was director from 1 January 2015 until 31 December 2022.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The ITU-T mission is to ensure the efficient and timely production of standards covering all fields of telecommunications and Information Communication Technology (ICTs) on a worldwide basis, as well as defining tariff and accounting principles for international telecommunication services.",
"title": "Primary function"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The international standards that are produced by the ITU-T are referred to as \"Recommendations\" (with the word capitalized to distinguish its meaning from the common parlance sense of the word \"recommendation\"), as they become mandatory only when adopted as part of a national law.",
"title": "Primary function"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Since the ITU-T is part of the ITU, which is a United Nations specialized agency, its standards carry more formal international weight than those of most other standards development organizations that publish technical specifications of a similar form.",
"title": "Primary function"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "At the initiative of Napoleon III, the French government invited international participants to a conference in Paris in 1865 to facilitate and regulate international telegraph services. A result of the conference was the founding of the forerunner of the modern ITU.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "At the 1925 Paris conference, the ITU created two consultative committees to deal with the complexities of the international telephone services, known as CCIF (as the French acronym) and with long-distance telegraphy CCIT (Comité Consultatif International des Communications Téléphoniques a grande distance).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In view of the basic similarity of many of the technical problems faced by the CCIF and CCIT, a decision was taken in 1956 to merge them into a single entity, the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (CCITT, in the French acronym). The first Plenary Assembly of the new organization was held in Geneva, Switzerland in December 1956.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1992, the Plenipotentiary Conference (the top policy-making conference of ITU) saw a reform of ITU, giving the Union greater flexibility to adapt to an increasingly complex, interactive and competitive environment. The CCITT was renamed the Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T), as one of three Sectors of the Union alongside the Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) and the Telecommunication Development Sector (ITU-D).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Historically, the Recommendations of the CCITT were presented at plenary assemblies for endorsement, held every four years, and the full set of Recommendations were published after each plenary assembly. However, the delays in producing texts, and translating them into other working languages, did not suit the fast pace of change in the telecommunications industry.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The rise of the personal computer industry in the early 1980s created a new common practice among both consumers and businesses of adopting \"bleeding edge\" communications technology even if it was not yet standardized. Thus, standards organizations had to put forth standards much faster, or find themselves ratifying de facto standards after the fact. One of the most prominent examples of this was the Open Document Architecture project, which began in 1985 when a profusion of software firms around the world were still furiously competing to shape the future of the electronic office, and was completed in 1999 long after Microsoft Office's then-secret binary file formats had become established as the global de facto standard.",
"title": "\"Real time\" standardization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The ITU-T now operates under much more streamlined processes. The time between an initial proposal of a draft document by a member company and the final approval of a full-status ITU-T Recommendation can now be as short as a few months (or less in some cases). This makes the standardization approval process in the ITU-T much more responsive to the needs of rapid technology development than in the ITU's historical past. New and updated Recommendations are published on an almost daily basis, and nearly all of the library of over 3,270 Recommendations is now free of charge online. (About 30 specifications jointly maintained by the ITU-T and ISO/IEC are not available for free to the public.)",
"title": "\"Real time\" standardization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "ITU-T has moreover tried to facilitate cooperation between the various forums and standard-developing organizations (SDOs). This collaboration is necessary to avoid duplication of work and the consequent risk of conflicting standards in the market place.",
"title": "\"Real time\" standardization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In the work of standardization, ITU-T cooperates with other SDOs, e.g., the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).",
"title": "\"Real time\" standardization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Most of the work of ITU-T is carried out by its Sector Members and Associates, while the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB) is the executive arm of ITU-T and coordinator for a number of workshops and seminars to progress existing work areas and explore new ones. The events cover a wide array of topics in the field of information and communication technologies (ICT) and attract high-ranking experts as speakers, and attendees from engineers to high-level management from all industry sectors.",
"title": "\"Real time\" standardization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The technical work, the development of Recommendations, of ITU-T is managed by Study Groups (SGs), such as Study Group 13 for network standards, Study Group 16 for multimedia standards, and Study Group 17 for security standards, which are created by the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (WTSA) which is held every four years. As part of the deliberations, WTSA has instructed ITU to hold the Global Standards Symposium, which unlike WTSA is open to public for participation. The people involved in these SGs are experts in telecommunications from all over the world. There are currently 11 SGs. Study groups meet face to face (or virtually under exceptional circumstances) according to a calendar issued by the TSB. SGs are augmented by Focus Groups (FGs), an instrument created by ITU-T, providing a way to quickly react to ICT standardization needs and allowing great flexibility in terms of participation and working methods. The key difference between SGs and FGs is that the latter have greater freedom to organize and finance themselves, and to involve non-members in their work, but they do not have the authority to approve Recommendations. Focus Groups can be created very quickly, are usually short-lived and can choose their own working methods, leadership, financing, and types of deliverables. Current Focus Groups include the ITU-WHO Focus Group on Artificial Intelligence for Health (FG-AI4H) as well as Machine Learning for 5G (which developed Y.3172), Quantum Information Technologies for Networks, and Artificial Intelligence for Assisted and Autonomous Driving.",
"title": "\"Real time\" standardization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The Alternative Approval Process (AAP) is a fast-track approval procedure that was developed to allow standards to be brought to market in the timeframe that industry now demands. The AAP is defined in ITU-T Recommendation A.8.",
"title": "\"Real time\" standardization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "This dramatic overhaul of standards-making by streamlining approval procedures was implemented in 2001 and is estimated to have cut the time involved in this critical aspect of the standardization process by 80 to 90 percent. This means that an average standard that took around four years to approve and publish until the mid nineties, and two years until 1997, can now be approved in an average of two months, or as little as five weeks.",
"title": "\"Real time\" standardization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Besides streamlining the underlying procedures involved in the approval process, an important contributory factor to the use of AAP is electronic document handling. Once the approval process has begun the rest of the process can be completed electronically, in the vast majority of cases, with no further physical meetings.",
"title": "\"Real time\" standardization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The introduction of AAP also formalizes public/private partnership in the approval process by providing equal opportunities for both sector members and member states in the approval of technical standards.",
"title": "\"Real time\" standardization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "A panel of SG experts drafts a proposal that is then forwarded at an SG meeting to the appropriate body which decides if it is sufficiently ready to be designated a draft text and thus gives its consent for further review at the next level.",
"title": "\"Real time\" standardization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "After this Consent has been given, TSB announces the start of the AAP procedure by posting the draft text to the ITU-T website and calling for comments. This gives the opportunity for all members to review the text. This phase, called last call, is a four-week period in which comments can be submitted by member states and sector members.",
"title": "\"Real time\" standardization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "If no comments other than editorial corrections are received, the Recommendation is considered approved since no issues were identified that might need any further work. However, if there are any comments, the SG chairman, in consultation with TSB, sets up a comment resolution process by the concerned experts. The revised text is then posted on the web for an additional review period of three weeks.",
"title": "\"Real time\" standardization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Similar to the last call phase, in additional review the Recommendation is considered as approved if no comments are received. If comments are received, it is apparent that there are some issues that still need more work, and the draft text and all comments are sent to the next Study Group meeting for further discussion and possible approval.",
"title": "\"Real time\" standardization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Those Recommendations considered as having policy or regulatory implications are approved through what is known as the Traditional Approval Process (TAP), which allows a longer period for reflection and commenting by member states. TAP Recommendations are also translated into the six working languages of ITU (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish).",
"title": "\"Real time\" standardization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "ITU-T Recommendations are the names given to telecommunications and computer protocol specification documents published by ITU-T.",
"title": "Series and Recommendations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "ITU-T assigns each Recommendation a name based on the series and Recommendation number. The name starts with the letter of the series the Recommendation belongs to. Each series encompasses a broad category of Recommendations, such as \"H-Series Recommendations: Audiovisual and multimedia systems\". The series letter is followed by a period and the Recommendation number, which uniquely identifies the Recommendation within the series. Often, a range of related Recommendations are further grouped within the series and given adjacent numbers, such as \"H.200-H.499: Infrastructure of audiovisual services\" or \"H.260-H.279: Coding of moving video\". Many numbers are \"skipped\" to give room for future Recommendations to be adjacent to related Recommendations. Recommendations can be revised or \"superseded\" and keep their existing Recommendation number.",
"title": "Series and Recommendations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In addition to the ITU-T Recommendations, which have non-mandatory status unless they are adopted in national laws, ITU-T is also the custodian of a binding international treaty, the International Telecommunication Regulations. The ITRs go back to the earliest days of the ITU when there were two separate treaties, dealing with telegraph and telephone. The ITRs were adopted, as a single treaty, at the World Administrative Telegraphy and Telephone Conference held in Melbourne, 1988 (WATTC-88).",
"title": "International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The ITRs comprise ten articles which deal, inter alia, with the definition of international telecommunication services, cooperation between countries and national administrations, safety of life and priority of telecommunications and charging and accounting principles. The adoption of the ITRs in 1988 is often taken as the start of the wider liberalization process in international telecommunications, though a few countries, including United States and United Kingdom, had made steps to liberalize their markets before 1988.",
"title": "International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The Constitution and Convention of ITU provides for the amendment of ITRs through a World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT). Accordingly, in 1998 there began a process of review of the ITRs; and in 2009 extensive preparations began for such a conference, WCIT-12. In addition to \"regional preparatory meetings\", the ITU Secretariat developed 13 \"Background Briefs on key issues\" that were expected to be discussed at the conference. Convened by former ITU secretary-general Hamadoun Touré, the Conference, WCIT-12, was then held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, during the period 3–14 December 2014.",
"title": "International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The Standardization Sector of ITU also organizes AI for Good, the United Nations platform for the sustainable development of Artificial Intelligence.",
"title": "AI for Good"
}
]
| The International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) is one of the three Sectors (branches) of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). It is responsible for coordinating standards for telecommunications and Information Communication Technology, such as X.509 for cybersecurity, Y.3172 and Y.3173 for machine learning, and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC for video compression, between its Member States, Private Sector Members, and Academia Members. The World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (WTSA), the sector's governing conference, convenes every four years. ITU-T has a permanent secretariat called the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB), which is based at the ITU headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. The current director of the TSB is Seizo Onoe, whose 4-year term commenced on 1 January 2023. Seizo Onoe succeeded Chaesub Lee of South Korea, who was director from 1 January 2015 until 31 December 2022. | 2001-10-29T08:55:42Z | 2023-12-18T02:44:34Z | [
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14,745 | Indian | Indian or Indians may refer to something or someone of, from, or associated with the nation of India or with the indigenous people of the Americas. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Indian or Indians may refer to something or someone of, from, or associated with the nation of India or with the indigenous people of the Americas.",
"title": ""
}
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| Indian or Indians may refer to something or someone of, from, or associated with the nation of India or with the indigenous people of the Americas. | 2001-05-16T17:21:44Z | 2023-11-28T14:09:54Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian |
14,747 | Ionic | Ionic or Ionian may refer to: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Ionic or Ionian may refer to:",
"title": ""
}
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| Ionic or Ionian may refer to: | 2023-02-03T23:39:50Z | [
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|
14,749 | Indium | Indium is a chemical element; it has symbol In and atomic number 49. It is a silvery-white post-transition metal and one of the softest elements. Chemically, indium is similar to gallium and thallium, and its properties are largely intermediate between the two. It was discovered in 1863 by Ferdinand Reich and Hieronymous Theodor Richter by spectroscopic methods and named for the indigo blue line in its spectrum.
Indium is a technology-critical element used primarily in the production of flat-panel displays as indium tin oxide (ITO), a transparent and conductive coating applied to glass. Indium is also used in the semiconductor industry, in low-melting-point metal alloys such as solders and soft-metal high-vacuum seals. It is produced exclusively as a by-product during the processing of the ores of other metals, chiefly from sphalerite and other zinc sulfide ores.
Indium has no biological role and its compounds are toxic when inhaled or injected into the bloodstream, although they are poorly absorbed following ingestion.
Indium is a silvery-white, highly ductile post-transition metal with a bright luster. It is so soft (Mohs hardness 1.2) that it can be cut with a knife and leaves a visible line when rubbed on paper. It is a member of group 13 on the periodic table and its properties are mostly intermediate between its vertical neighbors gallium and thallium. Like tin, a high-pitched cry is heard when indium is bent – a crackling sound due to crystal twinning. Like gallium, indium is able to wet glass. Like both, indium has a low melting point, 156.60 °C (313.88 °F); higher than its lighter homologue, gallium, but lower than its heavier homologue, thallium, and lower than tin. The boiling point is 2072 °C (3762 °F), higher than that of thallium, but lower than gallium, conversely to the general trend of melting points, but similarly to the trends down the other post-transition metal groups because of the weakness of the metallic bonding with few electrons delocalized.
The density of indium, 7.31 g/cm, is also greater than gallium, but lower than thallium. Below the critical temperature, 3.41 K, indium becomes a superconductor. Indium crystallizes in the body-centered tetragonal crystal system in the space group I4/mmm (lattice parameters: a = 325 pm, c = 495 pm): this is a slightly distorted face-centered cubic structure, where each indium atom has four neighbours at 324 pm distance and eight neighbours slightly further (336 pm). Indium has greater solubility in liquid mercury than any other metal (more than 50 mass percent of indium at 0 °C). Indium displays a ductile viscoplastic response, found to be size-independent in tension and compression. However it does have a size effect in bending and indentation, associated to a length-scale of order 50–100 µm, significantly large when compared with other metals.
Indium has 49 electrons, with an electronic configuration of [Kr]4d5s5p. In compounds, indium most commonly donates the three outermost electrons to become indium(III), In. In some cases, the pair of 5s-electrons are not donated, resulting in indium(I), In. The stabilization of the monovalent state is attributed to the inert pair effect, in which relativistic effects stabilize the 5s-orbital, observed in heavier elements. Thallium (indium's heavier homolog) shows an even stronger effect, causing oxidation to thallium(I) to be more probable than to thallium(III), whereas gallium (indium's lighter homolog) commonly shows only the +3 oxidation state. Thus, although thallium(III) is a moderately strong oxidizing agent, indium(III) is not, and many indium(I) compounds are powerful reducing agents. While the energy required to include the s-electrons in chemical bonding is lowest for indium among the group 13 metals, bond energies decrease down the group so that by indium, the energy released in forming two additional bonds and attaining the +3 state is not always enough to outweigh the energy needed to involve the 5s-electrons. Indium(I) oxide and hydroxide are more basic and indium(III) oxide and hydroxide are more acidic.
A number of standard electrode potentials, depending on the reaction under study, are reported for indium, reflecting the decreased stability of the +3 oxidation state:
Indium metal does not react with water, but it is oxidized by stronger oxidizing agents such as halogens to give indium(III) compounds. It does not form a boride, silicide, or carbide, and the hydride InH3 has at best a transitory existence in ethereal solutions at low temperatures, being unstable enough to spontaneously polymerize without coordination. Indium is rather basic in aqueous solution, showing only slight amphoteric characteristics, and unlike its lighter homologs aluminium and gallium, it is insoluble in aqueous alkaline solutions.
Indium has 39 known isotopes, ranging in mass number from 97 to 135. Only two isotopes occur naturally as primordial nuclides: indium-113, the only stable isotope, and indium-115, which has a half-life of 4.41×10 years, four orders of magnitude greater than the age of the Universe and nearly 30,000 times greater than half life of thorium-232. The half-life of In is very long because the beta decay to Sn is spin-forbidden. Indium-115 makes up 95.7% of all indium. Indium is one of three known elements (the others being tellurium and rhenium) of which the stable isotope is less abundant in nature than the long-lived primordial radioisotopes.
The stablest artificial isotope is indium-111, with a half-life of approximately 2.8 days. All other isotopes have half-lives shorter than 5 hours. Indium also has 47 meta states, among which indium-114m1 (half-life about 49.51 days) is the most stable, more stable than the ground state of any indium isotope other than the primordial. All decay by isomeric transition. The indium isotopes lighter than In predominantly decay through electron capture or positron emission to form cadmium isotopes, while the other indium isotopes from In and greater predominantly decay through beta-minus decay to form tin isotopes.
Indium(III) oxide, In2O3, forms when indium metal is burned in air or when the hydroxide or nitrate is heated. In2O3 adopts a structure like alumina and is amphoteric, that is able to react with both acids and bases. Indium reacts with water to reproduce soluble indium(III) hydroxide, which is also amphoteric; with alkalis to produce indates(III); and with acids to produce indium(III) salts:
The analogous sesqui-chalcogenides with sulfur, selenium, and tellurium are also known. Indium forms the expected trihalides. Chlorination, bromination, and iodination of In produce colorless InCl3, InBr3, and yellow InI3. The compounds are Lewis acids, somewhat akin to the better known aluminium trihalides. Again like the related aluminium compound, InF3 is polymeric.
Direct reaction of indium with the pnictogens produces the gray or semimetallic III–V semiconductors. Many of them slowly decompose in moist air, necessitating careful storage of semiconductor compounds to prevent contact with the atmosphere. Indium nitride is readily attacked by acids and alkalis.
Indium(I) compounds are not common. The chloride, bromide, and iodide are deeply colored, unlike the parent trihalides from which they are prepared. The fluoride is known only as an unstable gaseous compound. Indium(I) oxide black powder is produced when indium(III) oxide decomposes upon heating to 700 °C.
Less frequently, indium forms compounds in oxidation state +2 and even fractional oxidation states. Usually such materials feature In–In bonding, most notably in the halides In2X4 and [In2X6], and various subchalcogenides such as In4Se3. Several other compounds are known to combine indium(I) and indium(III), such as In6(InCl6)Cl3, In5(InBr4)2(InBr6), and InInBr4.
Organoindium compounds feature In–C bonds. Most are In(III) derivatives, but cyclopentadienylindium(I) is an exception. It was the first known organoindium(I) compound, and is polymeric, consisting of zigzag chains of alternating indium atoms and cyclopentadienyl complexes. Perhaps the best-known organoindium compound is trimethylindium, In(CH3)3, used to prepare certain semiconducting materials.
In 1863, the German chemists Ferdinand Reich and Hieronymous Theodor Richter were testing ores from the mines around Freiberg, Saxony. They dissolved the minerals pyrite, arsenopyrite, galena and sphalerite in hydrochloric acid and distilled raw zinc chloride. Reich, who was color-blind, employed Richter as an assistant for detecting the colored spectral lines. Knowing that ores from that region sometimes contain thallium, they searched for the green thallium emission spectrum lines. Instead, they found a bright blue line. Because that blue line did not match any known element, they hypothesized a new element was present in the minerals. They named the element indium, from the indigo color seen in its spectrum, after the Latin indicum, meaning 'of India'.
Richter went on to isolate the metal in 1864. An ingot of 0.5 kg (1.1 lb) was presented at the World Fair 1867. Reich and Richter later fell out when the latter claimed to be the sole discoverer.
Indium is created by the long-lasting (up to thousands of years) s-process (slow neutron capture) in low-to-medium-mass stars (range in mass between 0.6 and 10 solar masses). When a silver-109 atom captures a neutron, it transmutes into silver-110, which then undergoes beta decay to become cadmium-110. Capturing further neutrons, it becomes cadmium-115, which decays to indium-115 by another beta decay. This explains why the radioactive isotope is more abundant than the stable one. The stable indium isotope, indium-113, is one of the p-nuclei, the origin of which is not fully understood; although indium-113 is known to be made directly in the s- and r-processes (rapid neutron capture), and also as the daughter of very long-lived cadmium-113, which has a half-life of about eight quadrillion years, this cannot account for all indium-113.
Indium is the 68th most abundant element in Earth's crust at approximately 50 ppb. This is similar to the crustal abundance of silver, bismuth and mercury. It very rarely forms its own minerals, or occurs in elemental form. Fewer than 10 indium minerals such as roquesite (CuInS2) are known, and none occur at sufficient concentrations for economic extraction. Instead, indium is usually a trace constituent of more common ore minerals, such as sphalerite and chalcopyrite. From these, it can be extracted as a by-product during smelting. While the enrichment of indium in these deposits is high relative to its crustal abundance, it is insufficient, at current prices, to support extraction of indium as the main product.
Different estimates exist of the amounts of indium contained within the ores of other metals. However, these amounts are not extractable without mining of the host materials (see Production and availability). Thus, the availability of indium is fundamentally determined by the rate at which these ores are extracted, and not their absolute amount. This is an aspect that is often forgotten in the current debate, e.g. by the Graedel group at Yale in their criticality assessments, explaining the paradoxically low depletion times some studies cite.
Indium is produced exclusively as a by-product during the processing of the ores of other metals. Its main source material are sulfidic zinc ores, where it is mostly hosted by sphalerite. Minor amounts are also extracted from sulfidic copper ores. During the roast-leach-electrowinning process of zinc smelting, indium accumulates in the iron-rich residues. From these, it can be extracted in different ways. It may also be recovered directly from the process solutions. Further purification is done by electrolysis. The exact process varies with the mode of operation of the smelter.
Its by-product status means that indium production is constrained by the amount of sulfidic zinc (and copper) ores extracted each year. Therefore, its availability needs to be discussed in terms of supply potential. The supply potential of a by-product is defined as that amount which is economically extractable from its host materials per year under current market conditions (i.e. technology and price). Reserves and resources are not relevant for by-products, since they cannot be extracted independently from the main-products. Recent estimates put the supply potential of indium at a minimum of 1,300 t/yr from sulfidic zinc ores and 20 t/yr from sulfidic copper ores. These figures are significantly greater than current production (655 t in 2016). Thus, major future increases in the by-product production of indium will be possible without significant increases in production costs or price. The average indium price in 2016 was US$240/kg, down from US$705/kg in 2014.
China is a leading producer of indium (290 tonnes in 2016), followed by South Korea (195 t), Japan (70 t) and Canada (65 t). The Teck Resources refinery in Trail, British Columbia, is a large single-source indium producer, with an output of 32.5 tonnes in 2005, 41.8 tonnes in 2004 and 36.1 tonnes in 2003.
The primary consumption of indium worldwide is LCD production. Demand rose rapidly from the late 1990s to 2010 with the popularity of LCD computer monitors and television sets, which now account for 50% of indium consumption. Increased manufacturing efficiency and recycling (especially in Japan) maintain a balance between demand and supply. According to the UNEP, indium's end-of-life recycling rate is less than 1%.
In 1924, indium was found to have a valued property of stabilizing non-ferrous metals, and that became the first significant use for the element. The first large-scale application for indium was coating bearings in high-performance aircraft engines during World War II, to protect against damage and corrosion; this is no longer a major use of the element. New uses were found in fusible alloys, solders, and electronics. In the 1950s, tiny beads of indium were used for the emitters and collectors of PNP alloy-junction transistors. In the middle and late 1980s, the development of indium phosphide semiconductors and indium tin oxide thin films for liquid-crystal displays (LCD) aroused much interest. By 1992, the thin-film application had become the largest end use.
Indium(III) oxide and indium tin oxide (ITO) are used as a transparent conductive coating on glass substrates in electroluminescent panels. Indium tin oxide is used as a light filter in low-pressure sodium-vapor lamps. The infrared radiation is reflected back into the lamp, which increases the temperature within the tube and improves the performance of the lamp.
Indium has many semiconductor-related applications. Some indium compounds, such as indium antimonide and indium phosphide, are semiconductors with useful properties: one precursor is usually trimethylindium (TMI), which is also used as the semiconductor dopant in II–VI compound semiconductors. InAs and InSb are used for low-temperature transistors and InP for high-temperature transistors. The compound semiconductors InGaN and InGaP are used in light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and laser diodes. Indium is used in photovoltaics as the semiconductor copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS), also called CIGS solar cells, a type of second-generation thin-film solar cell. Indium is used in PNP bipolar junction transistors with germanium: when soldered at low temperature, indium does not stress the germanium.
Indium wire is used as a vacuum seal and a thermal conductor in cryogenics and ultra-high-vacuum applications, in such manufacturing applications as gaskets that deform to fill gaps. Owing to its great plasticity and adhesion to metals, Indium sheets are sometimes used for cold-soldering in microwave circuits and waveguide joints, where direct soldering is complicated. Indium is an ingredient in the gallium–indium–tin alloy galinstan, which is liquid at room temperature and replaces mercury in some thermometers. Other alloys of indium with bismuth, cadmium, lead, and tin, which have higher but still low melting points (between 50 and 100 °C), are used in fire sprinkler systems and heat regulators.
Indium is one of many substitutes for mercury in alkaline batteries to prevent the zinc from corroding and releasing hydrogen gas. Indium is added to some dental amalgam alloys to decrease the surface tension of the mercury and allow for less mercury and easier amalgamation.
Indium's high neutron-capture cross-section for thermal neutrons makes it suitable for use in control rods for nuclear reactors, typically in an alloy of 80% silver, 15% indium, and 5% cadmium. In nuclear engineering, the (n,n') reactions of In and In are used to determine magnitudes of neutron fluxes.
In 2009, Professor Mas Subramanian and former graduate student Andrew Smith at Oregon State University discovered that indium can be combined with yttrium and manganese to form an intensely blue, non-toxic, inert, fade-resistant pigment, YInMn blue, the first new inorganic blue pigment discovered in 200 years.
Indium has no metabolic role in any organism. In a similar way to aluminium salts, indium(III) ions can be toxic to the kidney when given by injection. Indium tin oxide and indium phosphide harm the pulmonary and immune systems, predominantly through ionic indium, though hydrated indium oxide is more than forty times as toxic when injected, measured by the quantity of indium introduced. Radioactive indium-111 (in very small amounts on a chemical basis) is used in nuclear medicine tests, as a radiotracer to follow the movement of labeled proteins and white blood cells in the body. Indium compounds are mostly not absorbed upon ingestion and are only moderately absorbed on inhalation; they tend to be stored temporarily in the muscles, skin, and bones before being excreted, and the biological half-life of indium is about two weeks in humans.
People can be exposed to indium in the workplace by inhalation, ingestion, skin contact, and eye contact. Indium lung is a lung disease characterized by pulmonary alveolar proteinosis and pulmonary fibrosis, first described by Japanese researchers in 2003. As of 2010, 10 cases had been described, though more than 100 indium workers had documented respiratory abnormalities. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health has set a recommended exposure limit (REL) of 0.1 mg/m over an eight-hour workday. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Indium is a chemical element; it has symbol In and atomic number 49. It is a silvery-white post-transition metal and one of the softest elements. Chemically, indium is similar to gallium and thallium, and its properties are largely intermediate between the two. It was discovered in 1863 by Ferdinand Reich and Hieronymous Theodor Richter by spectroscopic methods and named for the indigo blue line in its spectrum.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Indium is a technology-critical element used primarily in the production of flat-panel displays as indium tin oxide (ITO), a transparent and conductive coating applied to glass. Indium is also used in the semiconductor industry, in low-melting-point metal alloys such as solders and soft-metal high-vacuum seals. It is produced exclusively as a by-product during the processing of the ores of other metals, chiefly from sphalerite and other zinc sulfide ores.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Indium has no biological role and its compounds are toxic when inhaled or injected into the bloodstream, although they are poorly absorbed following ingestion.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Indium is a silvery-white, highly ductile post-transition metal with a bright luster. It is so soft (Mohs hardness 1.2) that it can be cut with a knife and leaves a visible line when rubbed on paper. It is a member of group 13 on the periodic table and its properties are mostly intermediate between its vertical neighbors gallium and thallium. Like tin, a high-pitched cry is heard when indium is bent – a crackling sound due to crystal twinning. Like gallium, indium is able to wet glass. Like both, indium has a low melting point, 156.60 °C (313.88 °F); higher than its lighter homologue, gallium, but lower than its heavier homologue, thallium, and lower than tin. The boiling point is 2072 °C (3762 °F), higher than that of thallium, but lower than gallium, conversely to the general trend of melting points, but similarly to the trends down the other post-transition metal groups because of the weakness of the metallic bonding with few electrons delocalized.",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The density of indium, 7.31 g/cm, is also greater than gallium, but lower than thallium. Below the critical temperature, 3.41 K, indium becomes a superconductor. Indium crystallizes in the body-centered tetragonal crystal system in the space group I4/mmm (lattice parameters: a = 325 pm, c = 495 pm): this is a slightly distorted face-centered cubic structure, where each indium atom has four neighbours at 324 pm distance and eight neighbours slightly further (336 pm). Indium has greater solubility in liquid mercury than any other metal (more than 50 mass percent of indium at 0 °C). Indium displays a ductile viscoplastic response, found to be size-independent in tension and compression. However it does have a size effect in bending and indentation, associated to a length-scale of order 50–100 µm, significantly large when compared with other metals.",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Indium has 49 electrons, with an electronic configuration of [Kr]4d5s5p. In compounds, indium most commonly donates the three outermost electrons to become indium(III), In. In some cases, the pair of 5s-electrons are not donated, resulting in indium(I), In. The stabilization of the monovalent state is attributed to the inert pair effect, in which relativistic effects stabilize the 5s-orbital, observed in heavier elements. Thallium (indium's heavier homolog) shows an even stronger effect, causing oxidation to thallium(I) to be more probable than to thallium(III), whereas gallium (indium's lighter homolog) commonly shows only the +3 oxidation state. Thus, although thallium(III) is a moderately strong oxidizing agent, indium(III) is not, and many indium(I) compounds are powerful reducing agents. While the energy required to include the s-electrons in chemical bonding is lowest for indium among the group 13 metals, bond energies decrease down the group so that by indium, the energy released in forming two additional bonds and attaining the +3 state is not always enough to outweigh the energy needed to involve the 5s-electrons. Indium(I) oxide and hydroxide are more basic and indium(III) oxide and hydroxide are more acidic.",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "A number of standard electrode potentials, depending on the reaction under study, are reported for indium, reflecting the decreased stability of the +3 oxidation state:",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Indium metal does not react with water, but it is oxidized by stronger oxidizing agents such as halogens to give indium(III) compounds. It does not form a boride, silicide, or carbide, and the hydride InH3 has at best a transitory existence in ethereal solutions at low temperatures, being unstable enough to spontaneously polymerize without coordination. Indium is rather basic in aqueous solution, showing only slight amphoteric characteristics, and unlike its lighter homologs aluminium and gallium, it is insoluble in aqueous alkaline solutions.",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Indium has 39 known isotopes, ranging in mass number from 97 to 135. Only two isotopes occur naturally as primordial nuclides: indium-113, the only stable isotope, and indium-115, which has a half-life of 4.41×10 years, four orders of magnitude greater than the age of the Universe and nearly 30,000 times greater than half life of thorium-232. The half-life of In is very long because the beta decay to Sn is spin-forbidden. Indium-115 makes up 95.7% of all indium. Indium is one of three known elements (the others being tellurium and rhenium) of which the stable isotope is less abundant in nature than the long-lived primordial radioisotopes.",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The stablest artificial isotope is indium-111, with a half-life of approximately 2.8 days. All other isotopes have half-lives shorter than 5 hours. Indium also has 47 meta states, among which indium-114m1 (half-life about 49.51 days) is the most stable, more stable than the ground state of any indium isotope other than the primordial. All decay by isomeric transition. The indium isotopes lighter than In predominantly decay through electron capture or positron emission to form cadmium isotopes, while the other indium isotopes from In and greater predominantly decay through beta-minus decay to form tin isotopes.",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Indium(III) oxide, In2O3, forms when indium metal is burned in air or when the hydroxide or nitrate is heated. In2O3 adopts a structure like alumina and is amphoteric, that is able to react with both acids and bases. Indium reacts with water to reproduce soluble indium(III) hydroxide, which is also amphoteric; with alkalis to produce indates(III); and with acids to produce indium(III) salts:",
"title": "Compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The analogous sesqui-chalcogenides with sulfur, selenium, and tellurium are also known. Indium forms the expected trihalides. Chlorination, bromination, and iodination of In produce colorless InCl3, InBr3, and yellow InI3. The compounds are Lewis acids, somewhat akin to the better known aluminium trihalides. Again like the related aluminium compound, InF3 is polymeric.",
"title": "Compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Direct reaction of indium with the pnictogens produces the gray or semimetallic III–V semiconductors. Many of them slowly decompose in moist air, necessitating careful storage of semiconductor compounds to prevent contact with the atmosphere. Indium nitride is readily attacked by acids and alkalis.",
"title": "Compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Indium(I) compounds are not common. The chloride, bromide, and iodide are deeply colored, unlike the parent trihalides from which they are prepared. The fluoride is known only as an unstable gaseous compound. Indium(I) oxide black powder is produced when indium(III) oxide decomposes upon heating to 700 °C.",
"title": "Compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Less frequently, indium forms compounds in oxidation state +2 and even fractional oxidation states. Usually such materials feature In–In bonding, most notably in the halides In2X4 and [In2X6], and various subchalcogenides such as In4Se3. Several other compounds are known to combine indium(I) and indium(III), such as In6(InCl6)Cl3, In5(InBr4)2(InBr6), and InInBr4.",
"title": "Compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Organoindium compounds feature In–C bonds. Most are In(III) derivatives, but cyclopentadienylindium(I) is an exception. It was the first known organoindium(I) compound, and is polymeric, consisting of zigzag chains of alternating indium atoms and cyclopentadienyl complexes. Perhaps the best-known organoindium compound is trimethylindium, In(CH3)3, used to prepare certain semiconducting materials.",
"title": "Compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In 1863, the German chemists Ferdinand Reich and Hieronymous Theodor Richter were testing ores from the mines around Freiberg, Saxony. They dissolved the minerals pyrite, arsenopyrite, galena and sphalerite in hydrochloric acid and distilled raw zinc chloride. Reich, who was color-blind, employed Richter as an assistant for detecting the colored spectral lines. Knowing that ores from that region sometimes contain thallium, they searched for the green thallium emission spectrum lines. Instead, they found a bright blue line. Because that blue line did not match any known element, they hypothesized a new element was present in the minerals. They named the element indium, from the indigo color seen in its spectrum, after the Latin indicum, meaning 'of India'.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Richter went on to isolate the metal in 1864. An ingot of 0.5 kg (1.1 lb) was presented at the World Fair 1867. Reich and Richter later fell out when the latter claimed to be the sole discoverer.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Indium is created by the long-lasting (up to thousands of years) s-process (slow neutron capture) in low-to-medium-mass stars (range in mass between 0.6 and 10 solar masses). When a silver-109 atom captures a neutron, it transmutes into silver-110, which then undergoes beta decay to become cadmium-110. Capturing further neutrons, it becomes cadmium-115, which decays to indium-115 by another beta decay. This explains why the radioactive isotope is more abundant than the stable one. The stable indium isotope, indium-113, is one of the p-nuclei, the origin of which is not fully understood; although indium-113 is known to be made directly in the s- and r-processes (rapid neutron capture), and also as the daughter of very long-lived cadmium-113, which has a half-life of about eight quadrillion years, this cannot account for all indium-113.",
"title": "Occurrence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Indium is the 68th most abundant element in Earth's crust at approximately 50 ppb. This is similar to the crustal abundance of silver, bismuth and mercury. It very rarely forms its own minerals, or occurs in elemental form. Fewer than 10 indium minerals such as roquesite (CuInS2) are known, and none occur at sufficient concentrations for economic extraction. Instead, indium is usually a trace constituent of more common ore minerals, such as sphalerite and chalcopyrite. From these, it can be extracted as a by-product during smelting. While the enrichment of indium in these deposits is high relative to its crustal abundance, it is insufficient, at current prices, to support extraction of indium as the main product.",
"title": "Occurrence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Different estimates exist of the amounts of indium contained within the ores of other metals. However, these amounts are not extractable without mining of the host materials (see Production and availability). Thus, the availability of indium is fundamentally determined by the rate at which these ores are extracted, and not their absolute amount. This is an aspect that is often forgotten in the current debate, e.g. by the Graedel group at Yale in their criticality assessments, explaining the paradoxically low depletion times some studies cite.",
"title": "Occurrence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Indium is produced exclusively as a by-product during the processing of the ores of other metals. Its main source material are sulfidic zinc ores, where it is mostly hosted by sphalerite. Minor amounts are also extracted from sulfidic copper ores. During the roast-leach-electrowinning process of zinc smelting, indium accumulates in the iron-rich residues. From these, it can be extracted in different ways. It may also be recovered directly from the process solutions. Further purification is done by electrolysis. The exact process varies with the mode of operation of the smelter.",
"title": "Production and availability"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Its by-product status means that indium production is constrained by the amount of sulfidic zinc (and copper) ores extracted each year. Therefore, its availability needs to be discussed in terms of supply potential. The supply potential of a by-product is defined as that amount which is economically extractable from its host materials per year under current market conditions (i.e. technology and price). Reserves and resources are not relevant for by-products, since they cannot be extracted independently from the main-products. Recent estimates put the supply potential of indium at a minimum of 1,300 t/yr from sulfidic zinc ores and 20 t/yr from sulfidic copper ores. These figures are significantly greater than current production (655 t in 2016). Thus, major future increases in the by-product production of indium will be possible without significant increases in production costs or price. The average indium price in 2016 was US$240/kg, down from US$705/kg in 2014.",
"title": "Production and availability"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "China is a leading producer of indium (290 tonnes in 2016), followed by South Korea (195 t), Japan (70 t) and Canada (65 t). The Teck Resources refinery in Trail, British Columbia, is a large single-source indium producer, with an output of 32.5 tonnes in 2005, 41.8 tonnes in 2004 and 36.1 tonnes in 2003.",
"title": "Production and availability"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The primary consumption of indium worldwide is LCD production. Demand rose rapidly from the late 1990s to 2010 with the popularity of LCD computer monitors and television sets, which now account for 50% of indium consumption. Increased manufacturing efficiency and recycling (especially in Japan) maintain a balance between demand and supply. According to the UNEP, indium's end-of-life recycling rate is less than 1%.",
"title": "Production and availability"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In 1924, indium was found to have a valued property of stabilizing non-ferrous metals, and that became the first significant use for the element. The first large-scale application for indium was coating bearings in high-performance aircraft engines during World War II, to protect against damage and corrosion; this is no longer a major use of the element. New uses were found in fusible alloys, solders, and electronics. In the 1950s, tiny beads of indium were used for the emitters and collectors of PNP alloy-junction transistors. In the middle and late 1980s, the development of indium phosphide semiconductors and indium tin oxide thin films for liquid-crystal displays (LCD) aroused much interest. By 1992, the thin-film application had become the largest end use.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Indium(III) oxide and indium tin oxide (ITO) are used as a transparent conductive coating on glass substrates in electroluminescent panels. Indium tin oxide is used as a light filter in low-pressure sodium-vapor lamps. The infrared radiation is reflected back into the lamp, which increases the temperature within the tube and improves the performance of the lamp.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Indium has many semiconductor-related applications. Some indium compounds, such as indium antimonide and indium phosphide, are semiconductors with useful properties: one precursor is usually trimethylindium (TMI), which is also used as the semiconductor dopant in II–VI compound semiconductors. InAs and InSb are used for low-temperature transistors and InP for high-temperature transistors. The compound semiconductors InGaN and InGaP are used in light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and laser diodes. Indium is used in photovoltaics as the semiconductor copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS), also called CIGS solar cells, a type of second-generation thin-film solar cell. Indium is used in PNP bipolar junction transistors with germanium: when soldered at low temperature, indium does not stress the germanium.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Indium wire is used as a vacuum seal and a thermal conductor in cryogenics and ultra-high-vacuum applications, in such manufacturing applications as gaskets that deform to fill gaps. Owing to its great plasticity and adhesion to metals, Indium sheets are sometimes used for cold-soldering in microwave circuits and waveguide joints, where direct soldering is complicated. Indium is an ingredient in the gallium–indium–tin alloy galinstan, which is liquid at room temperature and replaces mercury in some thermometers. Other alloys of indium with bismuth, cadmium, lead, and tin, which have higher but still low melting points (between 50 and 100 °C), are used in fire sprinkler systems and heat regulators.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Indium is one of many substitutes for mercury in alkaline batteries to prevent the zinc from corroding and releasing hydrogen gas. Indium is added to some dental amalgam alloys to decrease the surface tension of the mercury and allow for less mercury and easier amalgamation.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Indium's high neutron-capture cross-section for thermal neutrons makes it suitable for use in control rods for nuclear reactors, typically in an alloy of 80% silver, 15% indium, and 5% cadmium. In nuclear engineering, the (n,n') reactions of In and In are used to determine magnitudes of neutron fluxes.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In 2009, Professor Mas Subramanian and former graduate student Andrew Smith at Oregon State University discovered that indium can be combined with yttrium and manganese to form an intensely blue, non-toxic, inert, fade-resistant pigment, YInMn blue, the first new inorganic blue pigment discovered in 200 years.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Indium has no metabolic role in any organism. In a similar way to aluminium salts, indium(III) ions can be toxic to the kidney when given by injection. Indium tin oxide and indium phosphide harm the pulmonary and immune systems, predominantly through ionic indium, though hydrated indium oxide is more than forty times as toxic when injected, measured by the quantity of indium introduced. Radioactive indium-111 (in very small amounts on a chemical basis) is used in nuclear medicine tests, as a radiotracer to follow the movement of labeled proteins and white blood cells in the body. Indium compounds are mostly not absorbed upon ingestion and are only moderately absorbed on inhalation; they tend to be stored temporarily in the muscles, skin, and bones before being excreted, and the biological half-life of indium is about two weeks in humans.",
"title": "Biological role and precautions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "People can be exposed to indium in the workplace by inhalation, ingestion, skin contact, and eye contact. Indium lung is a lung disease characterized by pulmonary alveolar proteinosis and pulmonary fibrosis, first described by Japanese researchers in 2003. As of 2010, 10 cases had been described, though more than 100 indium workers had documented respiratory abnormalities. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health has set a recommended exposure limit (REL) of 0.1 mg/m over an eight-hour workday.",
"title": "Biological role and precautions"
}
]
| Indium is a chemical element; it has symbol In and atomic number 49. It is a silvery-white post-transition metal and one of the softest elements. Chemically, indium is similar to gallium and thallium, and its properties are largely intermediate between the two. It was discovered in 1863 by Ferdinand Reich and Hieronymous Theodor Richter by spectroscopic methods and named for the indigo blue line in its spectrum. Indium is a technology-critical element used primarily in the production of flat-panel displays as indium tin oxide (ITO), a transparent and conductive coating applied to glass. Indium is also used in the semiconductor industry, in low-melting-point metal alloys such as solders and soft-metal high-vacuum seals. It is produced exclusively as a by-product during the processing of the ores of other metals, chiefly from sphalerite and other zinc sulfide ores. Indium has no biological role and its compounds are toxic when inhaled or injected into the bloodstream, although they are poorly absorbed following ingestion. | 2001-05-17T13:31:47Z | 2023-12-14T21:23:53Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indium |
14,750 | Iodine | Iodine is a chemical element; it has symbol I and atomic number 53. The heaviest of the stable halogens, it exists at standard conditions as a semi-lustrous, non-metallic solid that melts to form a deep violet liquid at 114 °C (237 °F), and boils to a violet gas at 184 °C (363 °F). The element was discovered by the French chemist Bernard Courtois in 1811 and was named two years later by Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, after the Ancient Greek Ιώδης 'violet-coloured'.
Iodine occurs in many oxidation states, including iodide (I), iodate (IO3), and the various periodate anions. It is the least abundant of the stable halogens, being the sixty-first most abundant element. As the heaviest essential mineral nutrient, iodine is required for the synthesis of thyroid hormones. Iodine deficiency affects about two billion people and is the leading preventable cause of intellectual disabilities.
The dominant producers of iodine today are Chile and Japan. Due to its high atomic number and ease of attachment to organic compounds, it has also found favour as a non-toxic radiocontrast material. Because of the specificity of its uptake by the human body, radioactive isotopes of iodine can also be used to treat thyroid cancer. Iodine is also used as a catalyst in the industrial production of acetic acid and some polymers.
It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.
In 1811, iodine was discovered by French chemist Bernard Courtois, who was born to a manufacturer of saltpetre (an essential component of gunpowder). At the time of the Napoleonic Wars, saltpetre was in great demand in France. Saltpetre produced from French nitre beds required sodium carbonate, which could be isolated from seaweed collected on the coasts of Normandy and Brittany. To isolate the sodium carbonate, seaweed was burned and the ash washed with water. The remaining waste was destroyed by adding sulfuric acid. Courtois once added excessive sulfuric acid and a cloud of purple vapour rose. He noted that the vapour crystallised on cold surfaces, making dark crystals. Courtois suspected that this material was a new element but lacked funding to pursue it further.
Courtois gave samples to his friends, Charles Bernard Desormes (1777–1838) and Nicolas Clément (1779–1841), to continue research. He also gave some of the substance to chemist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac (1778–1850), and to physicist André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836). On 29 November 1813, Desormes and Clément made Courtois' discovery public. They described the substance to a meeting of the Imperial Institute of France. On 6 December, Gay-Lussac announced that the new substance was either an element or a compound of oxygen. Gay-Lussac suggested the name "iode", from the Ancient Greek ἰοειδής (ioeidēs, "violet"), because of the colour of iodine vapor. Ampère had given some of his sample to English chemist Humphry Davy (1778–1829), who experimented on the substance and noted its similarity to chlorine. Davy sent a letter dated 10 December to the Royal Society of London stating that he had identified a new element. Arguments erupted between Davy and Gay-Lussac over who identified iodine first, but both scientists acknowledged Courtois as the first to isolate the element.
In 1873 the French medical researcher Casimir Joseph Davaine (1812–1882) discovered the antiseptic action of iodine. Antonio Grossich (1849–1926), an Istrian-born surgeon, was among the first to use sterilisation of the operative field. In 1908, he introduced tincture of iodine as a way to rapidly sterilise the human skin in the surgical field.
In early periodic tables, iodine was often given the symbol J, for Jod, its name in German.
Iodine is the fourth halogen, being a member of group 17 in the periodic table, below fluorine, chlorine, and bromine; it is the heaviest stable member of its group. (The fifth and sixth halogens, the radioactive astatine and tennessine, are not well-studied due to their expense and inaccessibility in large quantities, but appear to show various unusual properties for the group due to relativistic effects.) Iodine has an electron configuration of [Kr]4d5s5p, with the seven electrons in the fifth and outermost shell being its valence electrons. Like the other halogens, it is one electron short of a full octet and is hence an oxidising agent, reacting with many elements in order to complete its outer shell, although in keeping with periodic trends, it is the weakest oxidising agent among the stable halogens: it has the lowest electronegativity among them, just 2.66 on the Pauling scale (compare fluorine, chlorine, and bromine at 3.98, 3.16, and 2.96 respectively; astatine continues the trend with an electronegativity of 2.2). Elemental iodine hence forms diatomic molecules with chemical formula I2, where two iodine atoms share a pair of electrons in order to each achieve a stable octet for themselves; at high temperatures, these diatomic molecules reversibly dissociate a pair of iodine atoms. Similarly, the iodide anion, I, is the strongest reducing agent among the stable halogens, being the most easily oxidised back to diatomic I2. (Astatine goes further, being indeed unstable as At and readily oxidised to At or At.)
The halogens darken in colour as the group is descended: fluorine is a very pale yellow, chlorine is greenish-yellow, bromine is reddish-brown, and iodine is violet.
Elemental iodine is slightly soluble in water, with one gram dissolving in 3450 mL at 20 °C and 1280 mL at 50 °C; potassium iodide may be added to increase solubility via formation of triiodide ions, among other polyiodides. Nonpolar solvents such as hexane and carbon tetrachloride provide a higher solubility. Polar solutions, such as aqueous solutions, are brown, reflecting the role of these solvents as Lewis bases; on the other hand, nonpolar solutions are violet, the color of iodine vapour. Charge-transfer complexes form when iodine is dissolved in polar solvents, hence changing the colour. Iodine is violet when dissolved in carbon tetrachloride and saturated hydrocarbons but deep brown in alcohols and amines, solvents that form charge-transfer adducts.
The melting and boiling points of iodine are the highest among the halogens, conforming to the increasing trend down the group, since iodine has the largest electron cloud among them that is the most easily polarised, resulting in its molecules having the strongest van der Waals interactions among the halogens. Similarly, iodine is the least volatile of the halogens, though the solid still can be observed to give off purple vapor. Due to this property iodine is commonly used to demonstrate sublimation directly from solid to gas, which gives rise to a misconception that it does not melt in atmospheric pressure. Because it has the largest atomic radius among the halogens, iodine has the lowest first ionisation energy, lowest electron affinity, lowest electronegativity and lowest reactivity of the halogens.
The interhalogen bond in diiodine is the weakest of all the halogens. As such, 1% of a sample of gaseous iodine at atmospheric pressure is dissociated into iodine atoms at 575 °C. Temperatures greater than 750 °C are required for fluorine, chlorine, and bromine to dissociate to a similar extent. Most bonds to iodine are weaker than the analogous bonds to the lighter halogens. Gaseous iodine is composed of I2 molecules with an I–I bond length of 266.6 pm. The I–I bond is one of the longest single bonds known. It is even longer (271.5 pm) in solid orthorhombic crystalline iodine, which has the same crystal structure as chlorine and bromine. (The record is held by iodine's neighbour xenon: the Xe–Xe bond length is 308.71 pm.) As such, within the iodine molecule, significant electronic interactions occur with the two next-nearest neighbours of each atom, and these interactions give rise, in bulk iodine, to a shiny appearance and semiconducting properties. Iodine is a two-dimensional semiconductor with a band gap of 1.3 eV (125 kJ/mol): it is a semiconductor in the plane of its crystalline layers and an insulator in the perpendicular direction.
Of the thirty-seven known isotopes of iodine, only one occurs in nature, iodine-127. The others are radioactive and have half-lives too short to be primordial. As such, iodine is both monoisotopic and mononuclidic and its atomic weight is known to great precision, as it is a constant of nature.
The longest-lived of the radioactive isotopes of iodine is iodine-129, which has a half-life of 15.7 million years, decaying via beta decay to stable xenon-129. Some iodine-129 was formed along with iodine-127 before the formation of the Solar System, but it has by now completely decayed away, making it an extinct radionuclide that is nevertheless still useful in dating the history of the early Solar System or very old groundwaters, due to its mobility in the environment. Its former presence may be determined from an excess of its daughter xenon-129. Traces of iodine-129 still exist today, as it is also a cosmogenic nuclide, formed from cosmic ray spallation of atmospheric xenon: these traces make up 10 to 10 of all terrestrial iodine. It also occurs from open-air nuclear testing, and is not hazardous because of its very long half-life, the longest of all fission products. At the peak of thermonuclear testing in the 1960s and 1970s, iodine-129 still made up only about 10 of all terrestrial iodine. Excited states of iodine-127 and iodine-129 are often used in Mössbauer spectroscopy.
The other iodine radioisotopes have much shorter half-lives, no longer than days. Some of them have medical applications involving the thyroid gland, where the iodine that enters the body is stored and concentrated. Iodine-123 has a half-life of thirteen hours and decays by electron capture to tellurium-123, emitting gamma radiation; it is used in nuclear medicine imaging, including single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) and X-ray computed tomography (X-Ray CT) scans. Iodine-125 has a half-life of fifty-nine days, decaying by electron capture to tellurium-125 and emitting low-energy gamma radiation; the second-longest-lived iodine radioisotope, it has uses in biological assays, nuclear medicine imaging and in radiation therapy as brachytherapy to treat a number of conditions, including prostate cancer, uveal melanomas, and brain tumours. Finally, iodine-131, with a half-life of eight days, beta decays to an excited state of stable xenon-131 that then converts to the ground state by emitting gamma radiation. It is a common fission product and thus is present in high levels in radioactive fallout. It may then be absorbed through contaminated food, and will also accumulate in the thyroid. As it decays, it may cause damage to the thyroid. The primary risk from exposure to high levels of iodine-131 is the chance occurrence of radiogenic thyroid cancer in later life. Other risks include the possibility of non-cancerous growths and thyroiditis.
The usual means of protection against the negative effects of iodine-131 is by saturating the thyroid gland with stable iodine-127 in the form of potassium iodide tablets, taken daily for optimal prophylaxis. However, iodine-131 may also be used for medicinal purposes in radiation therapy for this very reason, when tissue destruction is desired after iodine uptake by the tissue. Iodine-131 is also used as a radioactive tracer.
Iodine is quite reactive, but it is much less reactive than the other halogens. For example, while chlorine gas will halogenate carbon monoxide, nitric oxide, and sulfur dioxide (to phosgene, nitrosyl chloride, and sulfuryl chloride respectively), iodine will not do so. Furthermore, iodination of metals tends to result in lower oxidation states than chlorination or bromination; for example, rhenium metal reacts with chlorine to form rhenium hexachloride, but with bromine it forms only rhenium pentabromide and iodine can achieve only rhenium tetraiodide. By the same token, however, since iodine has the lowest ionisation energy among the halogens and is the most easily oxidised of them, it has a more significant cationic chemistry and its higher oxidation states are rather more stable than those of bromine and chlorine, for example in iodine heptafluoride.
The iodine molecule, I2, dissolves in CCl4 and aliphatic hydrocarbons to give bright violet solutions. In these solvents the absorption band maximum occurs in the 520 – 540 nm region and is assigned to a π to σ transition. When I2 reacts with Lewis bases in these solvents a blue shift in I2 peak is seen and the new peak (230 – 330 nm) arises that is due to the formation of adducts, which are referred to as charge-transfer complexes.
The simplest compound of iodine is hydrogen iodide, HI. It is a colourless gas that reacts with oxygen to give water and iodine. Although it is useful in iodination reactions in the laboratory, it does not have large-scale industrial uses, unlike the other hydrogen halides. Commercially, it is usually made by reacting iodine with hydrogen sulfide or hydrazine:
At room temperature, it is a colourless gas, like all of the hydrogen halides except hydrogen fluoride, since hydrogen cannot form strong hydrogen bonds to the large and only mildly electronegative iodine atom. It melts at −51.0 °C and boils at −35.1 °C. It is an endothermic compound that can exothermically dissociate at room temperature, although the process is very slow unless a catalyst is present: the reaction between hydrogen and iodine at room temperature to give hydrogen iodide does not proceed to completion. The H–I bond dissociation energy is likewise the smallest of the hydrogen halides, at 295 kJ/mol.
Aqueous hydrogen iodide is known as hydroiodic acid, which is a strong acid. Hydrogen iodide is exceptionally soluble in water: one litre of water will dissolve 425 litres of hydrogen iodide, and the saturated solution has only four water molecules per molecule of hydrogen iodide. Commercial so-called "concentrated" hydroiodic acid usually contains 48–57% HI by mass; the solution forms an azeotrope with boiling point 126.7 °C at 56.7 g HI per 100 g solution. Hence hydroiodic acid cannot be concentrated past this point by evaporation of water. Unlike gaseous hydrogen iodide, hydroiodic acid has major industrial use in the manufacture of acetic acid by the Cativa process.
Unlike hydrogen fluoride, anhydrous liquid hydrogen iodide is difficult to work with as a solvent, because its boiling point is low, it has a small liquid range, its permittivity is low and it does not dissociate appreciably into H2I and HI2 ions – the latter, in any case, are much less stable than the bifluoride ions (HF2) due to the very weak hydrogen bonding between hydrogen and iodine, though its salts with very large and weakly polarising cations such as Cs and NR4 (R = Me, Et, Bu) may still be isolated. Anhydrous hydrogen iodide is a poor solvent, able to dissolve only small molecular compounds such as nitrosyl chloride and phenol, or salts with very low lattice energies such as tetraalkylammonium halides.
With the exception of the noble gases, nearly all elements on the periodic table up to einsteinium (EsI3 is known) are known to form binary compounds with iodine. Until 1990, nitrogen triiodide was only known as an ammonia adduct. Ammonia-free NI3 was found to be isolable at –196 °C but spontaneously decomposes at 0 °C. For thermodynamic reasons related to electronegativity of the elements, neutral sulfur and selenium iodides that are stable at room temperature are also nonexistent, although S2I2 and SI2 are stable up to 183 and 9 K, respectively. As of 2022, no neutral binary selenium iodide has been unambiguously identified (at any temperature). Sulfur- and selenium-iodine polyatomic cations (e.g., [S2I4][AsF6]2 and [Se2I4][Sb2F11]2) have been prepared and characterized crystallographically.
Given the large size of the iodide anion and iodine's weak oxidising power, high oxidation states are difficult to achieve in binary iodides, the maximum known being in the pentaiodides of niobium, tantalum, and protactinium. Iodides can be made by reaction of an element or its oxide, hydroxide, or carbonate with hydroiodic acid, and then dehydrated by mildly high temperatures combined with either low pressure or anhydrous hydrogen iodide gas. These methods work best when the iodide product is stable to hydrolysis. Other syntheses include high-temperature oxidative iodination of the element with iodine or hydrogen iodide, high-temperature iodination of a metal oxide or other halide by iodine, a volatile metal halide, carbon tetraiodide, or an organic iodide. For example, molybdenum(IV) oxide reacts with aluminium(III) iodide at 230 °C to give molybdenum(II) iodide. An example involving halogen exchange is given below, involving the reaction of tantalum(V) chloride with excess aluminium(III) iodide at 400 °C to give tantalum(V) iodide:
Lower iodides may be produced either through thermal decomposition or disproportionation, or by reducing the higher iodide with hydrogen or a metal, for example:
Most metal iodides with the metal in low oxidation states (+1 to +3) are ionic. Nonmetals tend to form covalent molecular iodides, as do metals in high oxidation states from +3 and above. Both ionic and covalent iodides are known for metals in oxidation state +3 (e.g. scandium iodide is mostly ionic, but aluminium iodide is not). Ionic iodides MIn tend to have the lowest melting and boiling points among the halides MXn of the same element, because the electrostatic forces of attraction between the cations and anions are weakest for the large iodide anion. In contrast, covalent iodides tend to instead have the highest melting and boiling points among the halides of the same element, since iodine is the most polarisable of the halogens and, having the most electrons among them, can contribute the most to van der Waals forces. Naturally, exceptions abound in intermediate iodides where one trend gives way to the other. Similarly, solubilities in water of predominantly ionic iodides (e.g. potassium and calcium) are the greatest among ionic halides of that element, while those of covalent iodides (e.g. silver) are the lowest of that element. In particular, silver iodide is very insoluble in water and its formation is often used as a qualitative test for iodine.
The halogens form many binary, diamagnetic interhalogen compounds with stoichiometries XY, XY3, XY5, and XY7 (where X is heavier than Y), and iodine is no exception. Iodine forms all three possible diatomic interhalogens, a trifluoride and trichloride, as well as a pentafluoride and, exceptionally among the halogens, a heptafluoride. Numerous cationic and anionic derivatives are also characterised, such as the wine-red or bright orange compounds of ICl2 and the dark brown or purplish black compounds of I2Cl. Apart from these, some pseudohalides are also known, such as cyanogen iodide (ICN), iodine thiocyanate (ISCN), and iodine azide (IN3).
Iodine monofluoride (IF) is unstable at room temperature and disproportionates very readily and irreversibly to iodine and iodine pentafluoride, and thus cannot be obtained pure. It can be synthesised from the reaction of iodine with fluorine gas in trichlorofluoromethane at −45 °C, with iodine trifluoride in trichlorofluoromethane at −78 °C, or with silver(I) fluoride at 0 °C. Iodine monochloride (ICl) and iodine monobromide (IBr), on the other hand, are moderately stable. The former, a volatile red-brown compound, was discovered independently by Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and Humphry Davy in 1813–1814 not long after the discoveries of chlorine and iodine, and it mimics the intermediate halogen bromine so well that Justus von Liebig was misled into mistaking bromine (which he had found) for iodine monochloride. Iodine monochloride and iodine monobromide may be prepared simply by reacting iodine with chlorine or bromine at room temperature and purified by fractional crystallisation. Both are quite reactive and attack even platinum and gold, though not boron, carbon, cadmium, lead, zirconium, niobium, molybdenum, and tungsten. Their reaction with organic compounds depends on conditions. Iodine chloride vapour tends to chlorinate phenol and salicylic acid, since when iodine chloride undergoes homolytic fission, chlorine and iodine are produced and the former is more reactive. However, iodine chloride in carbon tetrachloride solution results in iodination being the main reaction, since now heterolytic fission of the I–Cl bond occurs and I attacks phenol as an electrophile. However, iodine monobromide tends to brominate phenol even in carbon tetrachloride solution because it tends to dissociate into its elements in solution, and bromine is more reactive than iodine. When liquid, iodine monochloride and iodine monobromide dissociate into I2X and IX2 ions (X = Cl, Br); thus they are significant conductors of electricity and can be used as ionising solvents.
Iodine trifluoride (IF3) is an unstable yellow solid that decomposes above −28 °C. It is thus little-known. It is difficult to produce because fluorine gas would tend to oxidise iodine all the way to the pentafluoride; reaction at low temperature with xenon difluoride is necessary. Iodine trichloride, which exists in the solid state as the planar dimer I2Cl6, is a bright yellow solid, synthesised by reacting iodine with liquid chlorine at −80 °C; caution is necessary during purification because it easily dissociates to iodine monochloride and chlorine and hence can act as a strong chlorinating agent. Liquid iodine trichloride conducts electricity, possibly indicating dissociation to ICl2 and ICl4 ions.
Iodine pentafluoride (IF5), a colourless, volatile liquid, is the most thermodynamically stable iodine fluoride, and can be made by reacting iodine with fluorine gas at room temperature. It is a fluorinating agent, but is mild enough to store in glass apparatus. Again, slight electrical conductivity is present in the liquid state because of dissociation to IF4 and IF6. The pentagonal bipyramidal iodine heptafluoride (IF7) is an extremely powerful fluorinating agent, behind only chlorine trifluoride, chlorine pentafluoride, and bromine pentafluoride among the interhalogens: it reacts with almost all the elements even at low temperatures, fluorinates Pyrex glass to form iodine(VII) oxyfluoride (IOF5), and sets carbon monoxide on fire.
Iodine oxides are the most stable of all the halogen oxides, because of the strong I–O bonds resulting from the large electronegativity difference between iodine and oxygen, and they have been known for the longest time. The stable, white, hygroscopic iodine pentoxide (I2O5) has been known since its formation in 1813 by Gay-Lussac and Davy. It is most easily made by the dehydration of iodic acid (HIO3), of which it is the anhydride. It will quickly oxidise carbon monoxide completely to carbon dioxide at room temperature, and is thus a useful reagent in determining carbon monoxide concentration. It also oxidises nitrogen oxide, ethylene, and hydrogen sulfide. It reacts with sulfur trioxide and peroxydisulfuryl difluoride (S2O6F2) to form salts of the iodyl cation, [IO2], and is reduced by concentrated sulfuric acid to iodosyl salts involving [IO]. It may be fluorinated by fluorine, bromine trifluoride, sulfur tetrafluoride, or chloryl fluoride, resulting iodine pentafluoride, which also reacts with iodine pentoxide, giving iodine(V) oxyfluoride, IOF3. A few other less stable oxides are known, notably I4O9 and I2O4; their structures have not been determined, but reasonable guesses are I(IO3)3 and [IO][IO3] respectively.
More important are the four oxoacids: hypoiodous acid (HIO), iodous acid (HIO2), iodic acid (HIO3), and periodic acid (HIO4 or H5IO6). When iodine dissolves in aqueous solution, the following reactions occur:
Hypoiodous acid is unstable to disproportionation. The hypoiodite ions thus formed disproportionate immediately to give iodide and iodate:
Iodous acid and iodite are even less stable and exist only as a fleeting intermediate in the oxidation of iodide to iodate, if at all. Iodates are by far the most important of these compounds, which can be made by oxidising alkali metal iodides with oxygen at 600 °C and high pressure, or by oxidising iodine with chlorates. Unlike chlorates, which disproportionate very slowly to form chloride and perchlorate, iodates are stable to disproportionation in both acidic and alkaline solutions. From these, salts of most metals can be obtained. Iodic acid is most easily made by oxidation of an aqueous iodine suspension by electrolysis or fuming nitric acid. Iodate has the weakest oxidising power of the halates, but reacts the quickest.
Many periodates are known, including not only the expected tetrahedral IO4, but also square-pyramidal IO5, octahedral orthoperiodate IO6, [IO3(OH)3], [I2O8(OH2)], and I2O9. They are usually made by oxidising alkaline sodium iodate electrochemically (with lead(IV) oxide as the anode) or by chlorine gas:
They are thermodymically and kinetically powerful oxidising agents, quickly oxidising Mn to MnO4, and cleaving glycols, α-diketones, α-ketols, α-aminoalcohols, and α-diamines. Orthoperiodate especially stabilises high oxidation states among metals because of its very high negative charge of −5. Orthoperiodic acid, H5IO6, is stable, and dehydrates at 100 °C in a vacuum to metaperiodic acid, HIO4. Attempting to go further does not result in the nonexistent iodine heptoxide (I2O7), but rather iodine pentoxide and oxygen. Periodic acid may be protonated by sulfuric acid to give the I(OH)6 cation, isoelectronic to Te(OH)6 and Sb(OH)6, and giving salts with bisulfate and sulfate.
When iodine dissolves in strong acids, such as fuming sulfuric acid, a bright blue paramagnetic solution including I2 cations is formed. A solid salt of the diiodine cation may be obtained by oxidising iodine with antimony pentafluoride:
The salt I2Sb2F11 is dark blue, and the blue tantalum analogue I2Ta2F11 is also known. Whereas the I–I bond length in I2 is 267 pm, that in I2 is only 256 pm as the missing electron in the latter has been removed from an antibonding orbital, making the bond stronger and hence shorter. In fluorosulfuric acid solution, deep-blue I2 reversibly dimerises below −60 °C, forming red rectangular diamagnetic I4. Other polyiodine cations are not as well-characterised, including bent dark-brown or black I3 and centrosymmetric C2h green or black I5, known in the AsF6 and AlCl4 salts among others.
The only important polyiodide anion in aqueous solution is linear triiodide, I3. Its formation explains why the solubility of iodine in water may be increased by the addition of potassium iodide solution:
Many other polyiodides may be found when solutions containing iodine and iodide crystallise, such as I5, I9, I4, and I8, whose salts with large, weakly polarising cations such as Cs may be isolated.
Organoiodine compounds have been fundamental in the development of organic synthesis, such as in the Hofmann elimination of amines, the Williamson ether synthesis, the Wurtz coupling reaction, and in Grignard reagents.
The carbon–iodine bond is a common functional group that forms part of core organic chemistry; formally, these compounds may be thought of as organic derivatives of the iodide anion. The simplest organoiodine compounds, alkyl iodides, may be synthesised by the reaction of alcohols with phosphorus triiodide; these may then be used in nucleophilic substitution reactions, or for preparing Grignard reagents. The C–I bond is the weakest of all the carbon–halogen bonds due to the minuscule difference in electronegativity between carbon (2.55) and iodine (2.66). As such, iodide is the best leaving group among the halogens, to such an extent that many organoiodine compounds turn yellow when stored over time due to decomposition into elemental iodine; as such, they are commonly used in organic synthesis, because of the easy formation and cleavage of the C–I bond. They are also significantly denser than the other organohalogen compounds thanks to the high atomic weight of iodine. A few organic oxidising agents like the iodanes contain iodine in a higher oxidation state than −1, such as 2-iodoxybenzoic acid, a common reagent for the oxidation of alcohols to aldehydes, and iodobenzene dichloride (PhICl2), used for the selective chlorination of alkenes and alkynes. One of the more well-known uses of organoiodine compounds is the so-called iodoform test, where iodoform (CHI3) is produced by the exhaustive iodination of a methyl ketone (or another compound capable of being oxidised to a methyl ketone), as follows:
Some drawbacks of using organoiodine compounds as compared to organochlorine or organobromine compounds is the greater expense and toxicity of the iodine derivatives, since iodine is expensive and organoiodine compounds are stronger alkylating agents. For example, iodoacetamide and iodoacetic acid denature proteins by irreversibly alkylating cysteine residues and preventing the reformation of disulfide linkages.
Halogen exchange to produce iodoalkanes by the Finkelstein reaction is slightly complicated by the fact that iodide is a better leaving group than chloride or bromide. The difference is nevertheless small enough that the reaction can be driven to completion by exploiting the differential solubility of halide salts, or by using a large excess of the halide salt. In the classic Finkelstein reaction, an alkyl chloride or an alkyl bromide is converted to an alkyl iodide by treatment with a solution of sodium iodide in acetone. Sodium iodide is soluble in acetone and sodium chloride and sodium bromide are not. The reaction is driven toward products by mass action due to the precipitation of the insoluble salt.
Iodine is the least abundant of the stable halogens, comprising only 0.46 parts per million of Earth's crustal rocks (compare: fluorine 544 ppm, chlorine 126 ppm, bromine 2.5 ppm). Among the 83 elements which occur in significant quantities (elements 1–42, 44–60, 62–83, 90 and 92), it ranks 61st in abundance. Iodide minerals are rare, and most deposits that are concentrated enough for economical extraction are iodate minerals instead. Examples include lautarite, Ca(IO3)2, and dietzeite, 7Ca(IO3)2·8CaCrO4. These are the minerals that occur as trace impurities in the caliche, found in Chile, whose main product is sodium nitrate. In total, they can contain at least 0.02% and at most 1% iodine by mass. Sodium iodate is extracted from the caliche and reduced to iodide by sodium bisulfite. This solution is then reacted with freshly extracted iodate, resulting in comproportionation to iodine, which may be filtered off.
The caliche was the main source of iodine in the 19th century and continues to be important today, replacing kelp (which is no longer an economically viable source), but in the late 20th century brines emerged as a comparable source. The Japanese Minami Kanto gas field east of Tokyo and the American Anadarko Basin gas field in northwest Oklahoma are the two largest such sources. The brine is hotter than 60 °C from the depth of the source. The brine is first purified and acidified using sulfuric acid, then the iodide present is oxidised to iodine with chlorine. An iodine solution is produced, but is dilute and must be concentrated. Air is blown into the solution to evaporate the iodine, which is passed into an absorbing tower, where sulfur dioxide reduces the iodine. The hydrogen iodide (HI) is reacted with chlorine to precipitate the iodine. After filtering and purification the iodine is packed.
These sources ensure that Chile and Japan are the largest producers of iodine today. Alternatively, the brine may be treated with silver nitrate to precipitate out iodine as silver iodide, which is then decomposed by reaction with iron to form metallic silver and a solution of iron(II) iodide. The iodine may then be liberated by displacement with chlorine.
About half of all produced iodine goes into various organoiodine compounds, another 15% remains as the pure element, another 15% is used to form potassium iodide, and another 15% for other inorganic iodine compounds. Among the major uses of iodine compounds are catalysts, animal feed supplements, stabilisers, dyes, colourants and pigments, pharmaceutical, sanitation (from tincture of iodine), and photography; minor uses include smog inhibition, cloud seeding, and various uses in analytical chemistry.
The iodide and iodate anions are often used for quantitative volumetric analysis, for example in iodometry. Iodine and starch form a blue complex, and this reaction is often used to test for either starch or iodine and as an indicator in iodometry. The iodine test for starch is still used to detect counterfeit banknotes printed on starch-containing paper.
The iodine value is the mass of iodine in grams that is consumed by 100 grams of a chemical substance typically fats or oils. Iodine numbers are often used to determine the amount of unsaturation in fatty acids. This unsaturation is in the form of double bonds, which react with iodine compounds.
Potassium tetraiodomercurate(II), K2HgI4, is also known as Nessler's reagent. It is often used as a sensitive spot test for ammonia. Similarly, Mayer's reagent (potassium tetraiodomercurate(II) solution) is used as a precipitating reagent to test for alkaloids. Aqueous alkaline iodine solution is used in the iodoform test for methyl ketones.
The spectrum of the iodine molecule, I2, consists of (not exclusively) tens of thousands of sharp spectral lines in the wavelength range 500–700 nm. It is therefore a commonly used wavelength reference (secondary standard). By measuring with a spectroscopic Doppler-free technique while focusing on one of these lines, the hyperfine structure of the iodine molecule reveals itself. A line is now resolved such that either 15 components (from even rotational quantum numbers, Jeven), or 21 components (from odd rotational quantum numbers, Jodd) are measurable.
Caesium iodide and thallium-doped sodium iodide are used in crystal scintillators for the detection of gamma rays. The efficiency is high and energy dispersive spectroscopy is possible, but the resolution is rather poor.
Propulsion systems employing iodine as the propellant can be built more compactly, with less mass (and cost), and operate more efficiently than the gridded ion thrusters that were utilized to propel previous spacecraft, such as Japan's Hayabusa probes, ESA's GOCE satellite, or NASA's DART mission, all of which used xenon as the reaction mass. Iodine's atomic weight is only 3.3% less than that of xenon, while its first two ionisation energies average 12% less; together, these make iodine ions a promising substitute.
Use of iodine should allow more widespread application of ion-thrust technology, particularly with smaller-scale space vehicles. According to the European Space Agency, "This small but potentially disruptive innovation could help to clear the skies of space junk, by enabling tiny satellites to self-destruct cheaply and easily at the end of their missions, by steering themselves into the atmosphere where they would burn up."
In early 2021, the French group ThrustMe performed an in-orbit demonstration of an electric-powered ion thruster for spacecraft, where iodine was used in lieu of xenon as the source of plasma, in order to generate thrust by accelerating ions with an electrostatic field.
Elemental iodine is used as an antiseptic either as the element, or as the water-soluble triiodide anion I3 generated in situ by adding iodide to poorly water-soluble elemental iodine (the reverse chemical reaction makes some free elemental iodine available for antisepsis). Elemental iodine may also be used to treat iodine deficiency.
In the alternative, iodine may be produced from iodophors, which contain iodine complexed with a solubilizing agent (the iodide ion may be thought of loosely as the iodophor in triiodide water solutions). Examples of such preparations include:
The antimicrobial action of iodine is quick and works at low concentrations, and thus it is used in operating theatres. Its specific mode of action is unknown. It penetrates into microorganisms and attacks particular amino acids (such as cysteine and methionine), nucleotides, and fatty acids, ultimately resulting in cell death. It also has an antiviral action, but nonlipid viruses and parvoviruses are less sensitive than lipid enveloped viruses. Iodine probably attacks surface proteins of enveloped viruses, and it may also destabilise membrane fatty acids by reacting with unsaturated carbon bonds.
Before the advent of organic chelating agents, salts of iodide were given orally in the treatment of lead or mercury poisoning, such as heavily popularized by Louis Melsens and many nineteenth and early twentieth century doctors.
In medicine, a saturated solution of potassium iodide is used to treat acute thyrotoxicosis. It is also used to block uptake of iodine-131 in the thyroid gland (see isotopes section above), when this isotope is used as part of radiopharmaceuticals (such as iobenguane) that are not targeted to the thyroid or thyroid-type tissues.
Iodine-131 (usually as iodide) is a component of nuclear fallout, and is particularly dangerous owing to the thyroid gland's propensity to concentrate ingested iodine and retain it for periods longer than this isotope's radiological half-life of eight days. For this reason, people at risk of exposure to environmental radioactive iodine (iodine-131) in fallout may be instructed to take non-radioactive potassium iodide tablets. The typical adult dose is one 130 mg tablet per 24 hours, supplying 100 mg (100,000 micrograms) of ionic iodine. (The typical daily dose of iodine for normal health is of order 100 micrograms; see "Dietary Intake" below.) Ingestion of this large dose of non-radioactive iodine minimises the uptake of radioactive iodine by the thyroid gland.
As an element with high electron density and atomic number, iodine absorbs X-rays weaker than 33.3 keV due to the photoelectric effect of the innermost electrons. Organoiodine compounds are used with intravenous injection as X-ray radiocontrast agents. This application is often in conjunction with advanced X-ray techniques such as angiography and CT scanning. At present, all water-soluble radiocontrast agents rely on iodine-containing compounds.
The production of ethylenediamine dihydroiodide, provided as a nutritional supplement for livestock, consumes a large portion of available iodine. Another significant use is a catalyst for the production of acetic acid by the Monsanto and Cativa processes. In these technologies, which support the world's demand for acetic acid, hydroiodic acid converts the methanol feedstock into methyl iodide, which undergoes carbonylation. Hydrolysis of the resulting acetyl iodide regenerates hydroiodic acid and gives acetic acid.
Inorganic iodides find specialised uses. Titanium, zirconium, hafnium, and thorium are purified by the van Arkel–de Boer process, which involves the reversible formation of the tetraiodides of these elements. Silver iodide is a major ingredient to traditional photographic film. Thousands of kilograms of silver iodide are used annually for cloud seeding to induce rain.
The organoiodine compound erythrosine is an important food coloring agent. Perfluoroalkyl iodides are precursors to important surfactants, such as perfluorooctanesulfonic acid.
The iodine clock reaction (in which iodine also serves as a test for starch, forming a dark blue complex), is a popular educational demonstration experiment and example of a seemingly oscillating reaction (it is only the concentration of an intermediate product that oscillates).
Although iodine has widespread roles in many species, agents containing it can exert a differential effect upon different species in an agricultural system. The growth of all strains of Fusarium verticillioides is significantly inhibited by an iodine-containing fungistatic (AJ1629-34EC) at concentrations that do not harm the crop. This might be a less toxic anti-fungal agricultural treatment due to its relatively natural chemistry.
I is used as the radiolabel in investigating which ligands go to which plant pattern recognition receptors (PRRs).
Iodine is an essential element for life and, at atomic number Z = 53, is the heaviest element commonly needed by living organisms. (Lanthanum and the other lanthanides, as well as tungsten with Z = 74 and uranium with Z = 92, are used by a few microorganisms.) It is required for the synthesis of the growth-regulating thyroid hormones thyroxine and triiodothyronine (T4 and T3 respectively, named after their number of iodine atoms). A deficiency of iodine leads to decreased production of T3 and T4 and a concomitant enlargement of the thyroid tissue in an attempt to obtain more iodine, causing the disease known as simple goitre. The major form of thyroid hormone in the blood is thyroxine (T4), which has a longer half-life than T3. In humans, the ratio of T4 to T3 released into the blood is between 14:1 and 20:1. T4 is converted to the active T3 (three to four times more potent than T4) within cells by deiodinases (5'-iodinase). These are further processed by decarboxylation and deiodination to produce iodothyronamine (T1a) and thyronamine (T0a'). All three isoforms of the deiodinases are selenium-containing enzymes; thus dietary selenium is essential for T3 production.
Iodine accounts for 65% of the molecular weight of T4 and 59% of T3. Fifteen to 20 mg of iodine is concentrated in thyroid tissue and hormones, but 70% of all iodine in the body is found in other tissues, including mammary glands, eyes, gastric mucosa, fetal thymus, cerebro-spinal fluid and choroid plexus, arterial walls, the cervix, and salivary glands. During pregnancy, the placenta is able to store and accumulate iodine. In the cells of those tissues, iodide enters directly by sodium-iodide symporter (NIS). The action of iodine in mammary tissue is related to fetal and neonatal development, but in the other tissues, it is (at least) partially unknown.
The daily levels of intake recommended by the United States National Academy of Medicine are between 110 and 130 µg for infants up to 12 months, 90 µg for children up to eight years, 130 µg for children up to 13 years, 150 µg for adults, 220 µg for pregnant women and 290 µg for lactation. The Tolerable Upper Intake Level (UL) for adults is 1,100 μg/day. This upper limit was assessed by analyzing the effect of supplementation on thyroid-stimulating hormone.
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) refers to the collective set of information as Dietary Reference Values, with Population Reference Intake (PRI) instead of RDA, and Average Requirement instead of EAR; AI and UL are defined the same as in the United States. For women and men ages 18 and older, the PRI for iodine is set at 150 μg/day; the PRI during pregnancy or lactation is 200 μg/day. For children aged 1–17 years, the PRI increases with age from 90 to 130 μg/day. These PRIs are comparable to the U.S. RDAs with the exception of that for lactation.
The thyroid gland needs no more than 70 μg/day to synthesise the requisite daily amounts of T4 and T3. The higher recommended daily allowance levels of iodine seem necessary for optimal function of a number of body systems, including lactation, gastric mucosa, salivary glands, brain cells, choroid plexus, thymus, and arterial walls.
Natural sources of dietary iodine include seafood, such as fish, seaweeds (such as kelp) and shellfish, dairy products and eggs so long as the animals received enough iodine, and plants grown on iodine-rich soil. Iodised salt is fortified with iodine in the form of sodium iodide or potassium iodate.
As of 2000, the median intake of iodine from food in the United States was 240 to 300 μg/day for men and 190 to 210 μg/day for women. The general US population has adequate iodine nutrition, with women of childbearing age and pregnant women having a possible mild risk of deficiency. In Japan, consumption was considered much higher, ranging between 5,280 μg/day to 13,800 μg/day from dietary seaweed or kombu kelp, often in the form of kombu umami extracts for soup stock and potato chips. However, new studies suggest that Japan's consumption is closer to 1,000–3,000 μg/day. The adult UL in Japan was last revised to 3,000 µg/day in 2015.
After iodine fortification programs such as iodisation of salt have been implemented, some cases of iodine-induced hyperthyroidism have been observed (so-called Jod-Basedow phenomenon). The condition seems to occur mainly in people over forty, and the risk appears higher when iodine deficiency is severe and the initial rise in iodine intake is high.
In areas where there is little iodine in the diet, typically remote inland areas and semi-arid equatorial climates where no marine foods are eaten, iodine deficiency gives rise to hypothyroidism, symptoms of which are extreme fatigue, goitre, mental slowing, depression, weight gain, and low basal body temperatures. Iodine deficiency is the leading cause of preventable intellectual disability, a result that occurs primarily when babies or small children are rendered hypothyroidic by a lack of the element. The addition of iodine to table salt has largely eliminated this problem in wealthier nations, but iodine deficiency remains a serious public health problem in the developing world today. Iodine deficiency is also a problem in certain areas of Europe. Information processing, fine motor skills, and visual problem solving are improved by iodine repletion in moderately iodine-deficient children.
Elemental iodine (I2) is toxic if taken orally undiluted. The lethal dose for an adult human is 30 mg/kg, which is about 2.1–2.4 grams for a human weighing 70 to 80 kg (even if experiments on rats demonstrated that these animals could survive after eating a 14000 mg/kg dose). Excess iodine can be more cytotoxic in the presence of selenium deficiency. Iodine supplementation in selenium-deficient populations is, in theory, problematic, partly for this reason. The toxicity derives from its oxidizing properties, through which it denaturates proteins (including enzymes).
Elemental iodine is also a skin irritant. Direct contact with skin can cause damage, and solid iodine crystals should be handled with care. Solutions with high elemental iodine concentration, such as tincture of iodine and Lugol's solution, are capable of causing tissue damage if used in prolonged cleaning or antisepsis; similarly, liquid Povidone-iodine (Betadine) trapped against the skin resulted in chemical burns in some reported cases.
People can be exposed to iodine in the workplace by inhalation, ingestion, skin contact, and eye contact. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has set the legal limit (Permissible exposure limit) for iodine exposure in the workplace at 0.1 ppm (1 mg/m) during an 8-hour workday. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has set a Recommended exposure limit (REL) of 0.1 ppm (1 mg/m) during an 8-hour workday. At levels of 2 ppm, iodine is immediately dangerous to life and health.
Some people develop a hypersensitivity to products and foods containing iodine. Applications of tincture of iodine or Betadine can cause rashes, sometimes severe. Parenteral use of iodine-based contrast agents (see above) can cause reactions ranging from a mild rash to fatal anaphylaxis. Such reactions have led to the misconception (widely held, even among physicians) that some people are allergic to iodine itself; even allergies to iodine-rich seafood have been so construed. In fact, there has never been a confirmed report of a true iodine allergy, and an allergy to elemental iodine or simple iodide salts is theoretically impossible. Hypersensitivity reactions to products and foods containing iodine are apparently related to their other molecular components; thus, a person who has demonstrated an allergy to one food or product containing iodine may not have an allergic reaction to another. Patients with various food allergies (shellfish, egg, milk, etc.) do not have an increased risk for a contrast medium hypersensitivity. As with all medications, the patient's allergy history should be questioned and consulted before any containing iodine are administered.
Phosphorus can reduce elemental iodine to hydroiodic acid, which is a reagent effective for reducing ephedrine or pseudoephedrine to methamphetamine. For this reason, iodine was designated by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration as a List I precursor chemical under 21 CFR 1310.02. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Iodine is a chemical element; it has symbol I and atomic number 53. The heaviest of the stable halogens, it exists at standard conditions as a semi-lustrous, non-metallic solid that melts to form a deep violet liquid at 114 °C (237 °F), and boils to a violet gas at 184 °C (363 °F). The element was discovered by the French chemist Bernard Courtois in 1811 and was named two years later by Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, after the Ancient Greek Ιώδης 'violet-coloured'.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Iodine occurs in many oxidation states, including iodide (I), iodate (IO3), and the various periodate anions. It is the least abundant of the stable halogens, being the sixty-first most abundant element. As the heaviest essential mineral nutrient, iodine is required for the synthesis of thyroid hormones. Iodine deficiency affects about two billion people and is the leading preventable cause of intellectual disabilities.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The dominant producers of iodine today are Chile and Japan. Due to its high atomic number and ease of attachment to organic compounds, it has also found favour as a non-toxic radiocontrast material. Because of the specificity of its uptake by the human body, radioactive isotopes of iodine can also be used to treat thyroid cancer. Iodine is also used as a catalyst in the industrial production of acetic acid and some polymers.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In 1811, iodine was discovered by French chemist Bernard Courtois, who was born to a manufacturer of saltpetre (an essential component of gunpowder). At the time of the Napoleonic Wars, saltpetre was in great demand in France. Saltpetre produced from French nitre beds required sodium carbonate, which could be isolated from seaweed collected on the coasts of Normandy and Brittany. To isolate the sodium carbonate, seaweed was burned and the ash washed with water. The remaining waste was destroyed by adding sulfuric acid. Courtois once added excessive sulfuric acid and a cloud of purple vapour rose. He noted that the vapour crystallised on cold surfaces, making dark crystals. Courtois suspected that this material was a new element but lacked funding to pursue it further.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Courtois gave samples to his friends, Charles Bernard Desormes (1777–1838) and Nicolas Clément (1779–1841), to continue research. He also gave some of the substance to chemist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac (1778–1850), and to physicist André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836). On 29 November 1813, Desormes and Clément made Courtois' discovery public. They described the substance to a meeting of the Imperial Institute of France. On 6 December, Gay-Lussac announced that the new substance was either an element or a compound of oxygen. Gay-Lussac suggested the name \"iode\", from the Ancient Greek ἰοειδής (ioeidēs, \"violet\"), because of the colour of iodine vapor. Ampère had given some of his sample to English chemist Humphry Davy (1778–1829), who experimented on the substance and noted its similarity to chlorine. Davy sent a letter dated 10 December to the Royal Society of London stating that he had identified a new element. Arguments erupted between Davy and Gay-Lussac over who identified iodine first, but both scientists acknowledged Courtois as the first to isolate the element.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 1873 the French medical researcher Casimir Joseph Davaine (1812–1882) discovered the antiseptic action of iodine. Antonio Grossich (1849–1926), an Istrian-born surgeon, was among the first to use sterilisation of the operative field. In 1908, he introduced tincture of iodine as a way to rapidly sterilise the human skin in the surgical field.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In early periodic tables, iodine was often given the symbol J, for Jod, its name in German.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Iodine is the fourth halogen, being a member of group 17 in the periodic table, below fluorine, chlorine, and bromine; it is the heaviest stable member of its group. (The fifth and sixth halogens, the radioactive astatine and tennessine, are not well-studied due to their expense and inaccessibility in large quantities, but appear to show various unusual properties for the group due to relativistic effects.) Iodine has an electron configuration of [Kr]4d5s5p, with the seven electrons in the fifth and outermost shell being its valence electrons. Like the other halogens, it is one electron short of a full octet and is hence an oxidising agent, reacting with many elements in order to complete its outer shell, although in keeping with periodic trends, it is the weakest oxidising agent among the stable halogens: it has the lowest electronegativity among them, just 2.66 on the Pauling scale (compare fluorine, chlorine, and bromine at 3.98, 3.16, and 2.96 respectively; astatine continues the trend with an electronegativity of 2.2). Elemental iodine hence forms diatomic molecules with chemical formula I2, where two iodine atoms share a pair of electrons in order to each achieve a stable octet for themselves; at high temperatures, these diatomic molecules reversibly dissociate a pair of iodine atoms. Similarly, the iodide anion, I, is the strongest reducing agent among the stable halogens, being the most easily oxidised back to diatomic I2. (Astatine goes further, being indeed unstable as At and readily oxidised to At or At.)",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The halogens darken in colour as the group is descended: fluorine is a very pale yellow, chlorine is greenish-yellow, bromine is reddish-brown, and iodine is violet.",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Elemental iodine is slightly soluble in water, with one gram dissolving in 3450 mL at 20 °C and 1280 mL at 50 °C; potassium iodide may be added to increase solubility via formation of triiodide ions, among other polyiodides. Nonpolar solvents such as hexane and carbon tetrachloride provide a higher solubility. Polar solutions, such as aqueous solutions, are brown, reflecting the role of these solvents as Lewis bases; on the other hand, nonpolar solutions are violet, the color of iodine vapour. Charge-transfer complexes form when iodine is dissolved in polar solvents, hence changing the colour. Iodine is violet when dissolved in carbon tetrachloride and saturated hydrocarbons but deep brown in alcohols and amines, solvents that form charge-transfer adducts.",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The melting and boiling points of iodine are the highest among the halogens, conforming to the increasing trend down the group, since iodine has the largest electron cloud among them that is the most easily polarised, resulting in its molecules having the strongest van der Waals interactions among the halogens. Similarly, iodine is the least volatile of the halogens, though the solid still can be observed to give off purple vapor. Due to this property iodine is commonly used to demonstrate sublimation directly from solid to gas, which gives rise to a misconception that it does not melt in atmospheric pressure. Because it has the largest atomic radius among the halogens, iodine has the lowest first ionisation energy, lowest electron affinity, lowest electronegativity and lowest reactivity of the halogens.",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The interhalogen bond in diiodine is the weakest of all the halogens. As such, 1% of a sample of gaseous iodine at atmospheric pressure is dissociated into iodine atoms at 575 °C. Temperatures greater than 750 °C are required for fluorine, chlorine, and bromine to dissociate to a similar extent. Most bonds to iodine are weaker than the analogous bonds to the lighter halogens. Gaseous iodine is composed of I2 molecules with an I–I bond length of 266.6 pm. The I–I bond is one of the longest single bonds known. It is even longer (271.5 pm) in solid orthorhombic crystalline iodine, which has the same crystal structure as chlorine and bromine. (The record is held by iodine's neighbour xenon: the Xe–Xe bond length is 308.71 pm.) As such, within the iodine molecule, significant electronic interactions occur with the two next-nearest neighbours of each atom, and these interactions give rise, in bulk iodine, to a shiny appearance and semiconducting properties. Iodine is a two-dimensional semiconductor with a band gap of 1.3 eV (125 kJ/mol): it is a semiconductor in the plane of its crystalline layers and an insulator in the perpendicular direction.",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Of the thirty-seven known isotopes of iodine, only one occurs in nature, iodine-127. The others are radioactive and have half-lives too short to be primordial. As such, iodine is both monoisotopic and mononuclidic and its atomic weight is known to great precision, as it is a constant of nature.",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The longest-lived of the radioactive isotopes of iodine is iodine-129, which has a half-life of 15.7 million years, decaying via beta decay to stable xenon-129. Some iodine-129 was formed along with iodine-127 before the formation of the Solar System, but it has by now completely decayed away, making it an extinct radionuclide that is nevertheless still useful in dating the history of the early Solar System or very old groundwaters, due to its mobility in the environment. Its former presence may be determined from an excess of its daughter xenon-129. Traces of iodine-129 still exist today, as it is also a cosmogenic nuclide, formed from cosmic ray spallation of atmospheric xenon: these traces make up 10 to 10 of all terrestrial iodine. It also occurs from open-air nuclear testing, and is not hazardous because of its very long half-life, the longest of all fission products. At the peak of thermonuclear testing in the 1960s and 1970s, iodine-129 still made up only about 10 of all terrestrial iodine. Excited states of iodine-127 and iodine-129 are often used in Mössbauer spectroscopy.",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The other iodine radioisotopes have much shorter half-lives, no longer than days. Some of them have medical applications involving the thyroid gland, where the iodine that enters the body is stored and concentrated. Iodine-123 has a half-life of thirteen hours and decays by electron capture to tellurium-123, emitting gamma radiation; it is used in nuclear medicine imaging, including single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) and X-ray computed tomography (X-Ray CT) scans. Iodine-125 has a half-life of fifty-nine days, decaying by electron capture to tellurium-125 and emitting low-energy gamma radiation; the second-longest-lived iodine radioisotope, it has uses in biological assays, nuclear medicine imaging and in radiation therapy as brachytherapy to treat a number of conditions, including prostate cancer, uveal melanomas, and brain tumours. Finally, iodine-131, with a half-life of eight days, beta decays to an excited state of stable xenon-131 that then converts to the ground state by emitting gamma radiation. It is a common fission product and thus is present in high levels in radioactive fallout. It may then be absorbed through contaminated food, and will also accumulate in the thyroid. As it decays, it may cause damage to the thyroid. The primary risk from exposure to high levels of iodine-131 is the chance occurrence of radiogenic thyroid cancer in later life. Other risks include the possibility of non-cancerous growths and thyroiditis.",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The usual means of protection against the negative effects of iodine-131 is by saturating the thyroid gland with stable iodine-127 in the form of potassium iodide tablets, taken daily for optimal prophylaxis. However, iodine-131 may also be used for medicinal purposes in radiation therapy for this very reason, when tissue destruction is desired after iodine uptake by the tissue. Iodine-131 is also used as a radioactive tracer.",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Iodine is quite reactive, but it is much less reactive than the other halogens. For example, while chlorine gas will halogenate carbon monoxide, nitric oxide, and sulfur dioxide (to phosgene, nitrosyl chloride, and sulfuryl chloride respectively), iodine will not do so. Furthermore, iodination of metals tends to result in lower oxidation states than chlorination or bromination; for example, rhenium metal reacts with chlorine to form rhenium hexachloride, but with bromine it forms only rhenium pentabromide and iodine can achieve only rhenium tetraiodide. By the same token, however, since iodine has the lowest ionisation energy among the halogens and is the most easily oxidised of them, it has a more significant cationic chemistry and its higher oxidation states are rather more stable than those of bromine and chlorine, for example in iodine heptafluoride.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The iodine molecule, I2, dissolves in CCl4 and aliphatic hydrocarbons to give bright violet solutions. In these solvents the absorption band maximum occurs in the 520 – 540 nm region and is assigned to a π to σ transition. When I2 reacts with Lewis bases in these solvents a blue shift in I2 peak is seen and the new peak (230 – 330 nm) arises that is due to the formation of adducts, which are referred to as charge-transfer complexes.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The simplest compound of iodine is hydrogen iodide, HI. It is a colourless gas that reacts with oxygen to give water and iodine. Although it is useful in iodination reactions in the laboratory, it does not have large-scale industrial uses, unlike the other hydrogen halides. Commercially, it is usually made by reacting iodine with hydrogen sulfide or hydrazine:",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "At room temperature, it is a colourless gas, like all of the hydrogen halides except hydrogen fluoride, since hydrogen cannot form strong hydrogen bonds to the large and only mildly electronegative iodine atom. It melts at −51.0 °C and boils at −35.1 °C. It is an endothermic compound that can exothermically dissociate at room temperature, although the process is very slow unless a catalyst is present: the reaction between hydrogen and iodine at room temperature to give hydrogen iodide does not proceed to completion. The H–I bond dissociation energy is likewise the smallest of the hydrogen halides, at 295 kJ/mol.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Aqueous hydrogen iodide is known as hydroiodic acid, which is a strong acid. Hydrogen iodide is exceptionally soluble in water: one litre of water will dissolve 425 litres of hydrogen iodide, and the saturated solution has only four water molecules per molecule of hydrogen iodide. Commercial so-called \"concentrated\" hydroiodic acid usually contains 48–57% HI by mass; the solution forms an azeotrope with boiling point 126.7 °C at 56.7 g HI per 100 g solution. Hence hydroiodic acid cannot be concentrated past this point by evaporation of water. Unlike gaseous hydrogen iodide, hydroiodic acid has major industrial use in the manufacture of acetic acid by the Cativa process.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Unlike hydrogen fluoride, anhydrous liquid hydrogen iodide is difficult to work with as a solvent, because its boiling point is low, it has a small liquid range, its permittivity is low and it does not dissociate appreciably into H2I and HI2 ions – the latter, in any case, are much less stable than the bifluoride ions (HF2) due to the very weak hydrogen bonding between hydrogen and iodine, though its salts with very large and weakly polarising cations such as Cs and NR4 (R = Me, Et, Bu) may still be isolated. Anhydrous hydrogen iodide is a poor solvent, able to dissolve only small molecular compounds such as nitrosyl chloride and phenol, or salts with very low lattice energies such as tetraalkylammonium halides.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "With the exception of the noble gases, nearly all elements on the periodic table up to einsteinium (EsI3 is known) are known to form binary compounds with iodine. Until 1990, nitrogen triiodide was only known as an ammonia adduct. Ammonia-free NI3 was found to be isolable at –196 °C but spontaneously decomposes at 0 °C. For thermodynamic reasons related to electronegativity of the elements, neutral sulfur and selenium iodides that are stable at room temperature are also nonexistent, although S2I2 and SI2 are stable up to 183 and 9 K, respectively. As of 2022, no neutral binary selenium iodide has been unambiguously identified (at any temperature). Sulfur- and selenium-iodine polyatomic cations (e.g., [S2I4][AsF6]2 and [Se2I4][Sb2F11]2) have been prepared and characterized crystallographically.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Given the large size of the iodide anion and iodine's weak oxidising power, high oxidation states are difficult to achieve in binary iodides, the maximum known being in the pentaiodides of niobium, tantalum, and protactinium. Iodides can be made by reaction of an element or its oxide, hydroxide, or carbonate with hydroiodic acid, and then dehydrated by mildly high temperatures combined with either low pressure or anhydrous hydrogen iodide gas. These methods work best when the iodide product is stable to hydrolysis. Other syntheses include high-temperature oxidative iodination of the element with iodine or hydrogen iodide, high-temperature iodination of a metal oxide or other halide by iodine, a volatile metal halide, carbon tetraiodide, or an organic iodide. For example, molybdenum(IV) oxide reacts with aluminium(III) iodide at 230 °C to give molybdenum(II) iodide. An example involving halogen exchange is given below, involving the reaction of tantalum(V) chloride with excess aluminium(III) iodide at 400 °C to give tantalum(V) iodide:",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Lower iodides may be produced either through thermal decomposition or disproportionation, or by reducing the higher iodide with hydrogen or a metal, for example:",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Most metal iodides with the metal in low oxidation states (+1 to +3) are ionic. Nonmetals tend to form covalent molecular iodides, as do metals in high oxidation states from +3 and above. Both ionic and covalent iodides are known for metals in oxidation state +3 (e.g. scandium iodide is mostly ionic, but aluminium iodide is not). Ionic iodides MIn tend to have the lowest melting and boiling points among the halides MXn of the same element, because the electrostatic forces of attraction between the cations and anions are weakest for the large iodide anion. In contrast, covalent iodides tend to instead have the highest melting and boiling points among the halides of the same element, since iodine is the most polarisable of the halogens and, having the most electrons among them, can contribute the most to van der Waals forces. Naturally, exceptions abound in intermediate iodides where one trend gives way to the other. Similarly, solubilities in water of predominantly ionic iodides (e.g. potassium and calcium) are the greatest among ionic halides of that element, while those of covalent iodides (e.g. silver) are the lowest of that element. In particular, silver iodide is very insoluble in water and its formation is often used as a qualitative test for iodine.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The halogens form many binary, diamagnetic interhalogen compounds with stoichiometries XY, XY3, XY5, and XY7 (where X is heavier than Y), and iodine is no exception. Iodine forms all three possible diatomic interhalogens, a trifluoride and trichloride, as well as a pentafluoride and, exceptionally among the halogens, a heptafluoride. Numerous cationic and anionic derivatives are also characterised, such as the wine-red or bright orange compounds of ICl2 and the dark brown or purplish black compounds of I2Cl. Apart from these, some pseudohalides are also known, such as cyanogen iodide (ICN), iodine thiocyanate (ISCN), and iodine azide (IN3).",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Iodine monofluoride (IF) is unstable at room temperature and disproportionates very readily and irreversibly to iodine and iodine pentafluoride, and thus cannot be obtained pure. It can be synthesised from the reaction of iodine with fluorine gas in trichlorofluoromethane at −45 °C, with iodine trifluoride in trichlorofluoromethane at −78 °C, or with silver(I) fluoride at 0 °C. Iodine monochloride (ICl) and iodine monobromide (IBr), on the other hand, are moderately stable. The former, a volatile red-brown compound, was discovered independently by Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and Humphry Davy in 1813–1814 not long after the discoveries of chlorine and iodine, and it mimics the intermediate halogen bromine so well that Justus von Liebig was misled into mistaking bromine (which he had found) for iodine monochloride. Iodine monochloride and iodine monobromide may be prepared simply by reacting iodine with chlorine or bromine at room temperature and purified by fractional crystallisation. Both are quite reactive and attack even platinum and gold, though not boron, carbon, cadmium, lead, zirconium, niobium, molybdenum, and tungsten. Their reaction with organic compounds depends on conditions. Iodine chloride vapour tends to chlorinate phenol and salicylic acid, since when iodine chloride undergoes homolytic fission, chlorine and iodine are produced and the former is more reactive. However, iodine chloride in carbon tetrachloride solution results in iodination being the main reaction, since now heterolytic fission of the I–Cl bond occurs and I attacks phenol as an electrophile. However, iodine monobromide tends to brominate phenol even in carbon tetrachloride solution because it tends to dissociate into its elements in solution, and bromine is more reactive than iodine. When liquid, iodine monochloride and iodine monobromide dissociate into I2X and IX2 ions (X = Cl, Br); thus they are significant conductors of electricity and can be used as ionising solvents.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Iodine trifluoride (IF3) is an unstable yellow solid that decomposes above −28 °C. It is thus little-known. It is difficult to produce because fluorine gas would tend to oxidise iodine all the way to the pentafluoride; reaction at low temperature with xenon difluoride is necessary. Iodine trichloride, which exists in the solid state as the planar dimer I2Cl6, is a bright yellow solid, synthesised by reacting iodine with liquid chlorine at −80 °C; caution is necessary during purification because it easily dissociates to iodine monochloride and chlorine and hence can act as a strong chlorinating agent. Liquid iodine trichloride conducts electricity, possibly indicating dissociation to ICl2 and ICl4 ions.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Iodine pentafluoride (IF5), a colourless, volatile liquid, is the most thermodynamically stable iodine fluoride, and can be made by reacting iodine with fluorine gas at room temperature. It is a fluorinating agent, but is mild enough to store in glass apparatus. Again, slight electrical conductivity is present in the liquid state because of dissociation to IF4 and IF6. The pentagonal bipyramidal iodine heptafluoride (IF7) is an extremely powerful fluorinating agent, behind only chlorine trifluoride, chlorine pentafluoride, and bromine pentafluoride among the interhalogens: it reacts with almost all the elements even at low temperatures, fluorinates Pyrex glass to form iodine(VII) oxyfluoride (IOF5), and sets carbon monoxide on fire.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Iodine oxides are the most stable of all the halogen oxides, because of the strong I–O bonds resulting from the large electronegativity difference between iodine and oxygen, and they have been known for the longest time. The stable, white, hygroscopic iodine pentoxide (I2O5) has been known since its formation in 1813 by Gay-Lussac and Davy. It is most easily made by the dehydration of iodic acid (HIO3), of which it is the anhydride. It will quickly oxidise carbon monoxide completely to carbon dioxide at room temperature, and is thus a useful reagent in determining carbon monoxide concentration. It also oxidises nitrogen oxide, ethylene, and hydrogen sulfide. It reacts with sulfur trioxide and peroxydisulfuryl difluoride (S2O6F2) to form salts of the iodyl cation, [IO2], and is reduced by concentrated sulfuric acid to iodosyl salts involving [IO]. It may be fluorinated by fluorine, bromine trifluoride, sulfur tetrafluoride, or chloryl fluoride, resulting iodine pentafluoride, which also reacts with iodine pentoxide, giving iodine(V) oxyfluoride, IOF3. A few other less stable oxides are known, notably I4O9 and I2O4; their structures have not been determined, but reasonable guesses are I(IO3)3 and [IO][IO3] respectively.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "More important are the four oxoacids: hypoiodous acid (HIO), iodous acid (HIO2), iodic acid (HIO3), and periodic acid (HIO4 or H5IO6). When iodine dissolves in aqueous solution, the following reactions occur:",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Hypoiodous acid is unstable to disproportionation. The hypoiodite ions thus formed disproportionate immediately to give iodide and iodate:",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Iodous acid and iodite are even less stable and exist only as a fleeting intermediate in the oxidation of iodide to iodate, if at all. Iodates are by far the most important of these compounds, which can be made by oxidising alkali metal iodides with oxygen at 600 °C and high pressure, or by oxidising iodine with chlorates. Unlike chlorates, which disproportionate very slowly to form chloride and perchlorate, iodates are stable to disproportionation in both acidic and alkaline solutions. From these, salts of most metals can be obtained. Iodic acid is most easily made by oxidation of an aqueous iodine suspension by electrolysis or fuming nitric acid. Iodate has the weakest oxidising power of the halates, but reacts the quickest.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Many periodates are known, including not only the expected tetrahedral IO4, but also square-pyramidal IO5, octahedral orthoperiodate IO6, [IO3(OH)3], [I2O8(OH2)], and I2O9. They are usually made by oxidising alkaline sodium iodate electrochemically (with lead(IV) oxide as the anode) or by chlorine gas:",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "They are thermodymically and kinetically powerful oxidising agents, quickly oxidising Mn to MnO4, and cleaving glycols, α-diketones, α-ketols, α-aminoalcohols, and α-diamines. Orthoperiodate especially stabilises high oxidation states among metals because of its very high negative charge of −5. Orthoperiodic acid, H5IO6, is stable, and dehydrates at 100 °C in a vacuum to metaperiodic acid, HIO4. Attempting to go further does not result in the nonexistent iodine heptoxide (I2O7), but rather iodine pentoxide and oxygen. Periodic acid may be protonated by sulfuric acid to give the I(OH)6 cation, isoelectronic to Te(OH)6 and Sb(OH)6, and giving salts with bisulfate and sulfate.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "When iodine dissolves in strong acids, such as fuming sulfuric acid, a bright blue paramagnetic solution including I2 cations is formed. A solid salt of the diiodine cation may be obtained by oxidising iodine with antimony pentafluoride:",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The salt I2Sb2F11 is dark blue, and the blue tantalum analogue I2Ta2F11 is also known. Whereas the I–I bond length in I2 is 267 pm, that in I2 is only 256 pm as the missing electron in the latter has been removed from an antibonding orbital, making the bond stronger and hence shorter. In fluorosulfuric acid solution, deep-blue I2 reversibly dimerises below −60 °C, forming red rectangular diamagnetic I4. Other polyiodine cations are not as well-characterised, including bent dark-brown or black I3 and centrosymmetric C2h green or black I5, known in the AsF6 and AlCl4 salts among others.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The only important polyiodide anion in aqueous solution is linear triiodide, I3. Its formation explains why the solubility of iodine in water may be increased by the addition of potassium iodide solution:",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Many other polyiodides may be found when solutions containing iodine and iodide crystallise, such as I5, I9, I4, and I8, whose salts with large, weakly polarising cations such as Cs may be isolated.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Organoiodine compounds have been fundamental in the development of organic synthesis, such as in the Hofmann elimination of amines, the Williamson ether synthesis, the Wurtz coupling reaction, and in Grignard reagents.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The carbon–iodine bond is a common functional group that forms part of core organic chemistry; formally, these compounds may be thought of as organic derivatives of the iodide anion. The simplest organoiodine compounds, alkyl iodides, may be synthesised by the reaction of alcohols with phosphorus triiodide; these may then be used in nucleophilic substitution reactions, or for preparing Grignard reagents. The C–I bond is the weakest of all the carbon–halogen bonds due to the minuscule difference in electronegativity between carbon (2.55) and iodine (2.66). As such, iodide is the best leaving group among the halogens, to such an extent that many organoiodine compounds turn yellow when stored over time due to decomposition into elemental iodine; as such, they are commonly used in organic synthesis, because of the easy formation and cleavage of the C–I bond. They are also significantly denser than the other organohalogen compounds thanks to the high atomic weight of iodine. A few organic oxidising agents like the iodanes contain iodine in a higher oxidation state than −1, such as 2-iodoxybenzoic acid, a common reagent for the oxidation of alcohols to aldehydes, and iodobenzene dichloride (PhICl2), used for the selective chlorination of alkenes and alkynes. One of the more well-known uses of organoiodine compounds is the so-called iodoform test, where iodoform (CHI3) is produced by the exhaustive iodination of a methyl ketone (or another compound capable of being oxidised to a methyl ketone), as follows:",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Some drawbacks of using organoiodine compounds as compared to organochlorine or organobromine compounds is the greater expense and toxicity of the iodine derivatives, since iodine is expensive and organoiodine compounds are stronger alkylating agents. For example, iodoacetamide and iodoacetic acid denature proteins by irreversibly alkylating cysteine residues and preventing the reformation of disulfide linkages.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Halogen exchange to produce iodoalkanes by the Finkelstein reaction is slightly complicated by the fact that iodide is a better leaving group than chloride or bromide. The difference is nevertheless small enough that the reaction can be driven to completion by exploiting the differential solubility of halide salts, or by using a large excess of the halide salt. In the classic Finkelstein reaction, an alkyl chloride or an alkyl bromide is converted to an alkyl iodide by treatment with a solution of sodium iodide in acetone. Sodium iodide is soluble in acetone and sodium chloride and sodium bromide are not. The reaction is driven toward products by mass action due to the precipitation of the insoluble salt.",
"title": "Chemistry and compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Iodine is the least abundant of the stable halogens, comprising only 0.46 parts per million of Earth's crustal rocks (compare: fluorine 544 ppm, chlorine 126 ppm, bromine 2.5 ppm). Among the 83 elements which occur in significant quantities (elements 1–42, 44–60, 62–83, 90 and 92), it ranks 61st in abundance. Iodide minerals are rare, and most deposits that are concentrated enough for economical extraction are iodate minerals instead. Examples include lautarite, Ca(IO3)2, and dietzeite, 7Ca(IO3)2·8CaCrO4. These are the minerals that occur as trace impurities in the caliche, found in Chile, whose main product is sodium nitrate. In total, they can contain at least 0.02% and at most 1% iodine by mass. Sodium iodate is extracted from the caliche and reduced to iodide by sodium bisulfite. This solution is then reacted with freshly extracted iodate, resulting in comproportionation to iodine, which may be filtered off.",
"title": "Occurrence and production"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The caliche was the main source of iodine in the 19th century and continues to be important today, replacing kelp (which is no longer an economically viable source), but in the late 20th century brines emerged as a comparable source. The Japanese Minami Kanto gas field east of Tokyo and the American Anadarko Basin gas field in northwest Oklahoma are the two largest such sources. The brine is hotter than 60 °C from the depth of the source. The brine is first purified and acidified using sulfuric acid, then the iodide present is oxidised to iodine with chlorine. An iodine solution is produced, but is dilute and must be concentrated. Air is blown into the solution to evaporate the iodine, which is passed into an absorbing tower, where sulfur dioxide reduces the iodine. The hydrogen iodide (HI) is reacted with chlorine to precipitate the iodine. After filtering and purification the iodine is packed.",
"title": "Occurrence and production"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "These sources ensure that Chile and Japan are the largest producers of iodine today. Alternatively, the brine may be treated with silver nitrate to precipitate out iodine as silver iodide, which is then decomposed by reaction with iron to form metallic silver and a solution of iron(II) iodide. The iodine may then be liberated by displacement with chlorine.",
"title": "Occurrence and production"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "About half of all produced iodine goes into various organoiodine compounds, another 15% remains as the pure element, another 15% is used to form potassium iodide, and another 15% for other inorganic iodine compounds. Among the major uses of iodine compounds are catalysts, animal feed supplements, stabilisers, dyes, colourants and pigments, pharmaceutical, sanitation (from tincture of iodine), and photography; minor uses include smog inhibition, cloud seeding, and various uses in analytical chemistry.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The iodide and iodate anions are often used for quantitative volumetric analysis, for example in iodometry. Iodine and starch form a blue complex, and this reaction is often used to test for either starch or iodine and as an indicator in iodometry. The iodine test for starch is still used to detect counterfeit banknotes printed on starch-containing paper.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The iodine value is the mass of iodine in grams that is consumed by 100 grams of a chemical substance typically fats or oils. Iodine numbers are often used to determine the amount of unsaturation in fatty acids. This unsaturation is in the form of double bonds, which react with iodine compounds.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Potassium tetraiodomercurate(II), K2HgI4, is also known as Nessler's reagent. It is often used as a sensitive spot test for ammonia. Similarly, Mayer's reagent (potassium tetraiodomercurate(II) solution) is used as a precipitating reagent to test for alkaloids. Aqueous alkaline iodine solution is used in the iodoform test for methyl ketones.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The spectrum of the iodine molecule, I2, consists of (not exclusively) tens of thousands of sharp spectral lines in the wavelength range 500–700 nm. It is therefore a commonly used wavelength reference (secondary standard). By measuring with a spectroscopic Doppler-free technique while focusing on one of these lines, the hyperfine structure of the iodine molecule reveals itself. A line is now resolved such that either 15 components (from even rotational quantum numbers, Jeven), or 21 components (from odd rotational quantum numbers, Jodd) are measurable.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Caesium iodide and thallium-doped sodium iodide are used in crystal scintillators for the detection of gamma rays. The efficiency is high and energy dispersive spectroscopy is possible, but the resolution is rather poor.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Propulsion systems employing iodine as the propellant can be built more compactly, with less mass (and cost), and operate more efficiently than the gridded ion thrusters that were utilized to propel previous spacecraft, such as Japan's Hayabusa probes, ESA's GOCE satellite, or NASA's DART mission, all of which used xenon as the reaction mass. Iodine's atomic weight is only 3.3% less than that of xenon, while its first two ionisation energies average 12% less; together, these make iodine ions a promising substitute.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Use of iodine should allow more widespread application of ion-thrust technology, particularly with smaller-scale space vehicles. According to the European Space Agency, \"This small but potentially disruptive innovation could help to clear the skies of space junk, by enabling tiny satellites to self-destruct cheaply and easily at the end of their missions, by steering themselves into the atmosphere where they would burn up.\"",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "In early 2021, the French group ThrustMe performed an in-orbit demonstration of an electric-powered ion thruster for spacecraft, where iodine was used in lieu of xenon as the source of plasma, in order to generate thrust by accelerating ions with an electrostatic field.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Elemental iodine is used as an antiseptic either as the element, or as the water-soluble triiodide anion I3 generated in situ by adding iodide to poorly water-soluble elemental iodine (the reverse chemical reaction makes some free elemental iodine available for antisepsis). Elemental iodine may also be used to treat iodine deficiency.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "In the alternative, iodine may be produced from iodophors, which contain iodine complexed with a solubilizing agent (the iodide ion may be thought of loosely as the iodophor in triiodide water solutions). Examples of such preparations include:",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The antimicrobial action of iodine is quick and works at low concentrations, and thus it is used in operating theatres. Its specific mode of action is unknown. It penetrates into microorganisms and attacks particular amino acids (such as cysteine and methionine), nucleotides, and fatty acids, ultimately resulting in cell death. It also has an antiviral action, but nonlipid viruses and parvoviruses are less sensitive than lipid enveloped viruses. Iodine probably attacks surface proteins of enveloped viruses, and it may also destabilise membrane fatty acids by reacting with unsaturated carbon bonds.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Before the advent of organic chelating agents, salts of iodide were given orally in the treatment of lead or mercury poisoning, such as heavily popularized by Louis Melsens and many nineteenth and early twentieth century doctors.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "In medicine, a saturated solution of potassium iodide is used to treat acute thyrotoxicosis. It is also used to block uptake of iodine-131 in the thyroid gland (see isotopes section above), when this isotope is used as part of radiopharmaceuticals (such as iobenguane) that are not targeted to the thyroid or thyroid-type tissues.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Iodine-131 (usually as iodide) is a component of nuclear fallout, and is particularly dangerous owing to the thyroid gland's propensity to concentrate ingested iodine and retain it for periods longer than this isotope's radiological half-life of eight days. For this reason, people at risk of exposure to environmental radioactive iodine (iodine-131) in fallout may be instructed to take non-radioactive potassium iodide tablets. The typical adult dose is one 130 mg tablet per 24 hours, supplying 100 mg (100,000 micrograms) of ionic iodine. (The typical daily dose of iodine for normal health is of order 100 micrograms; see \"Dietary Intake\" below.) Ingestion of this large dose of non-radioactive iodine minimises the uptake of radioactive iodine by the thyroid gland.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "As an element with high electron density and atomic number, iodine absorbs X-rays weaker than 33.3 keV due to the photoelectric effect of the innermost electrons. Organoiodine compounds are used with intravenous injection as X-ray radiocontrast agents. This application is often in conjunction with advanced X-ray techniques such as angiography and CT scanning. At present, all water-soluble radiocontrast agents rely on iodine-containing compounds.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "The production of ethylenediamine dihydroiodide, provided as a nutritional supplement for livestock, consumes a large portion of available iodine. Another significant use is a catalyst for the production of acetic acid by the Monsanto and Cativa processes. In these technologies, which support the world's demand for acetic acid, hydroiodic acid converts the methanol feedstock into methyl iodide, which undergoes carbonylation. Hydrolysis of the resulting acetyl iodide regenerates hydroiodic acid and gives acetic acid.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Inorganic iodides find specialised uses. Titanium, zirconium, hafnium, and thorium are purified by the van Arkel–de Boer process, which involves the reversible formation of the tetraiodides of these elements. Silver iodide is a major ingredient to traditional photographic film. Thousands of kilograms of silver iodide are used annually for cloud seeding to induce rain.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The organoiodine compound erythrosine is an important food coloring agent. Perfluoroalkyl iodides are precursors to important surfactants, such as perfluorooctanesulfonic acid.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "The iodine clock reaction (in which iodine also serves as a test for starch, forming a dark blue complex), is a popular educational demonstration experiment and example of a seemingly oscillating reaction (it is only the concentration of an intermediate product that oscillates).",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Although iodine has widespread roles in many species, agents containing it can exert a differential effect upon different species in an agricultural system. The growth of all strains of Fusarium verticillioides is significantly inhibited by an iodine-containing fungistatic (AJ1629-34EC) at concentrations that do not harm the crop. This might be a less toxic anti-fungal agricultural treatment due to its relatively natural chemistry.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "I is used as the radiolabel in investigating which ligands go to which plant pattern recognition receptors (PRRs).",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Iodine is an essential element for life and, at atomic number Z = 53, is the heaviest element commonly needed by living organisms. (Lanthanum and the other lanthanides, as well as tungsten with Z = 74 and uranium with Z = 92, are used by a few microorganisms.) It is required for the synthesis of the growth-regulating thyroid hormones thyroxine and triiodothyronine (T4 and T3 respectively, named after their number of iodine atoms). A deficiency of iodine leads to decreased production of T3 and T4 and a concomitant enlargement of the thyroid tissue in an attempt to obtain more iodine, causing the disease known as simple goitre. The major form of thyroid hormone in the blood is thyroxine (T4), which has a longer half-life than T3. In humans, the ratio of T4 to T3 released into the blood is between 14:1 and 20:1. T4 is converted to the active T3 (three to four times more potent than T4) within cells by deiodinases (5'-iodinase). These are further processed by decarboxylation and deiodination to produce iodothyronamine (T1a) and thyronamine (T0a'). All three isoforms of the deiodinases are selenium-containing enzymes; thus dietary selenium is essential for T3 production.",
"title": "Biological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Iodine accounts for 65% of the molecular weight of T4 and 59% of T3. Fifteen to 20 mg of iodine is concentrated in thyroid tissue and hormones, but 70% of all iodine in the body is found in other tissues, including mammary glands, eyes, gastric mucosa, fetal thymus, cerebro-spinal fluid and choroid plexus, arterial walls, the cervix, and salivary glands. During pregnancy, the placenta is able to store and accumulate iodine. In the cells of those tissues, iodide enters directly by sodium-iodide symporter (NIS). The action of iodine in mammary tissue is related to fetal and neonatal development, but in the other tissues, it is (at least) partially unknown.",
"title": "Biological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "The daily levels of intake recommended by the United States National Academy of Medicine are between 110 and 130 µg for infants up to 12 months, 90 µg for children up to eight years, 130 µg for children up to 13 years, 150 µg for adults, 220 µg for pregnant women and 290 µg for lactation. The Tolerable Upper Intake Level (UL) for adults is 1,100 μg/day. This upper limit was assessed by analyzing the effect of supplementation on thyroid-stimulating hormone.",
"title": "Biological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) refers to the collective set of information as Dietary Reference Values, with Population Reference Intake (PRI) instead of RDA, and Average Requirement instead of EAR; AI and UL are defined the same as in the United States. For women and men ages 18 and older, the PRI for iodine is set at 150 μg/day; the PRI during pregnancy or lactation is 200 μg/day. For children aged 1–17 years, the PRI increases with age from 90 to 130 μg/day. These PRIs are comparable to the U.S. RDAs with the exception of that for lactation.",
"title": "Biological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "The thyroid gland needs no more than 70 μg/day to synthesise the requisite daily amounts of T4 and T3. The higher recommended daily allowance levels of iodine seem necessary for optimal function of a number of body systems, including lactation, gastric mucosa, salivary glands, brain cells, choroid plexus, thymus, and arterial walls.",
"title": "Biological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Natural sources of dietary iodine include seafood, such as fish, seaweeds (such as kelp) and shellfish, dairy products and eggs so long as the animals received enough iodine, and plants grown on iodine-rich soil. Iodised salt is fortified with iodine in the form of sodium iodide or potassium iodate.",
"title": "Biological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "As of 2000, the median intake of iodine from food in the United States was 240 to 300 μg/day for men and 190 to 210 μg/day for women. The general US population has adequate iodine nutrition, with women of childbearing age and pregnant women having a possible mild risk of deficiency. In Japan, consumption was considered much higher, ranging between 5,280 μg/day to 13,800 μg/day from dietary seaweed or kombu kelp, often in the form of kombu umami extracts for soup stock and potato chips. However, new studies suggest that Japan's consumption is closer to 1,000–3,000 μg/day. The adult UL in Japan was last revised to 3,000 µg/day in 2015.",
"title": "Biological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "After iodine fortification programs such as iodisation of salt have been implemented, some cases of iodine-induced hyperthyroidism have been observed (so-called Jod-Basedow phenomenon). The condition seems to occur mainly in people over forty, and the risk appears higher when iodine deficiency is severe and the initial rise in iodine intake is high.",
"title": "Biological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "In areas where there is little iodine in the diet, typically remote inland areas and semi-arid equatorial climates where no marine foods are eaten, iodine deficiency gives rise to hypothyroidism, symptoms of which are extreme fatigue, goitre, mental slowing, depression, weight gain, and low basal body temperatures. Iodine deficiency is the leading cause of preventable intellectual disability, a result that occurs primarily when babies or small children are rendered hypothyroidic by a lack of the element. The addition of iodine to table salt has largely eliminated this problem in wealthier nations, but iodine deficiency remains a serious public health problem in the developing world today. Iodine deficiency is also a problem in certain areas of Europe. Information processing, fine motor skills, and visual problem solving are improved by iodine repletion in moderately iodine-deficient children.",
"title": "Biological role"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Elemental iodine (I2) is toxic if taken orally undiluted. The lethal dose for an adult human is 30 mg/kg, which is about 2.1–2.4 grams for a human weighing 70 to 80 kg (even if experiments on rats demonstrated that these animals could survive after eating a 14000 mg/kg dose). Excess iodine can be more cytotoxic in the presence of selenium deficiency. Iodine supplementation in selenium-deficient populations is, in theory, problematic, partly for this reason. The toxicity derives from its oxidizing properties, through which it denaturates proteins (including enzymes).",
"title": "Precautions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Elemental iodine is also a skin irritant. Direct contact with skin can cause damage, and solid iodine crystals should be handled with care. Solutions with high elemental iodine concentration, such as tincture of iodine and Lugol's solution, are capable of causing tissue damage if used in prolonged cleaning or antisepsis; similarly, liquid Povidone-iodine (Betadine) trapped against the skin resulted in chemical burns in some reported cases.",
"title": "Precautions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "People can be exposed to iodine in the workplace by inhalation, ingestion, skin contact, and eye contact. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has set the legal limit (Permissible exposure limit) for iodine exposure in the workplace at 0.1 ppm (1 mg/m) during an 8-hour workday. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has set a Recommended exposure limit (REL) of 0.1 ppm (1 mg/m) during an 8-hour workday. At levels of 2 ppm, iodine is immediately dangerous to life and health.",
"title": "Precautions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Some people develop a hypersensitivity to products and foods containing iodine. Applications of tincture of iodine or Betadine can cause rashes, sometimes severe. Parenteral use of iodine-based contrast agents (see above) can cause reactions ranging from a mild rash to fatal anaphylaxis. Such reactions have led to the misconception (widely held, even among physicians) that some people are allergic to iodine itself; even allergies to iodine-rich seafood have been so construed. In fact, there has never been a confirmed report of a true iodine allergy, and an allergy to elemental iodine or simple iodide salts is theoretically impossible. Hypersensitivity reactions to products and foods containing iodine are apparently related to their other molecular components; thus, a person who has demonstrated an allergy to one food or product containing iodine may not have an allergic reaction to another. Patients with various food allergies (shellfish, egg, milk, etc.) do not have an increased risk for a contrast medium hypersensitivity. As with all medications, the patient's allergy history should be questioned and consulted before any containing iodine are administered.",
"title": "Precautions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Phosphorus can reduce elemental iodine to hydroiodic acid, which is a reagent effective for reducing ephedrine or pseudoephedrine to methamphetamine. For this reason, iodine was designated by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration as a List I precursor chemical under 21 CFR 1310.02.",
"title": "Precautions"
}
]
| Iodine is a chemical element; it has symbol I and atomic number 53. The heaviest of the stable halogens, it exists at standard conditions as a semi-lustrous, non-metallic solid that melts to form a deep violet liquid at 114 °C (237 °F), and boils to a violet gas at 184 °C (363 °F). The element was discovered by the French chemist Bernard Courtois in 1811 and was named two years later by Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, after the Ancient Greek Ιώδης 'violet-coloured'. Iodine occurs in many oxidation states, including iodide (I−), iodate (IO−3), and the various periodate anions. It is the least abundant of the stable halogens, being the sixty-first most abundant element. As the heaviest essential mineral nutrient, iodine is required for the synthesis of thyroid hormones. Iodine deficiency affects about two billion people and is the leading preventable cause of intellectual disabilities. The dominant producers of iodine today are Chile and Japan. Due to its high atomic number and ease of attachment to organic compounds, it has also found favour as a non-toxic radiocontrast material. Because of the specificity of its uptake by the human body, radioactive isotopes of iodine can also be used to treat thyroid cancer. Iodine is also used as a catalyst in the industrial production of acetic acid and some polymers. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines. | 2001-05-17T13:34:56Z | 2023-12-17T16:06:41Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine |
14,751 | IKEA | Inter IKEA Systems B.V., doing business as IKEA (/aɪˈkiːə/ eye-KEE-ə, Swedish: [ɪˈkêːa]), is a Swedish multinational conglomerate that designs and sells ready-to-assemble furniture, kitchen appliances, decoration, home accessories, and various other goods and home services. Started in 1943 by Ingvar Kamprad and currently legally headquartered in the Netherlands, IKEA has been the world's largest furniture retailer since 2008. The brand used by the group is derived from an acronym that consists of the founder's initials, and those of Elmtaryd, the family farm where he was born, and the nearby village Agunnaryd (his hometown in Småland, southern Sweden).
The group is primarily known for its modernist furniture designs, its simple approach to interior design, and its immersive shopping concept, based around a showroom of decorated room settings, in which customers can interact with the available articles onsite. In addition, the firm is known for its attention to cost control and continuous product development, notably, the ready-to-assemble model of furniture sales, and other elements which have allowed IKEA to establish lower prices than its competitors.
As of March 2021, there are 422 IKEA stores operating in 50 countries and in fiscal year 2018, €38.8 billion (US$44.6 billion) worth of IKEA goods were sold. For multiple reasons, including lowering taxes payable, IKEA uses a complicated corporate structure. Within this structure, all IKEA stores are operated under franchise from Inter IKEA Systems B.V. which handles branding, design, manufacturing, and supply. Another part of the IKEA group, Ingka Group, operates the majority of IKEA stores as a franchisee and pays royalties to Inter IKEA Systems B.V. Some IKEA stores are also operated by independent franchises. The IKEA website contains about 12,000 products and there were over 2.1 billion visitors to IKEA's websites in the year from September 2015 to August 2016.
The group is responsible for approximately 1% of world commercial-product wood consumption, making it the largest individual user of wood in the world. IKEA claims to use 99.5% recycled or FSC-certified wood. However, IKEA has been shown to be involved in unsustainable and most likely illegal logging of old-growth and protected forests in multiple Eastern European countries in recent years.
In 1943, then-17-year-old Ingvar Kamprad founded IKEA as a mail-order sales business, and began to sell furniture five years later. The first store was opened in Älmhult, Småland, in 1958, under the name Möbel-IKÉA (Möbel means "furniture" in Swedish). The first stores outside Sweden were opened in Norway (1963) and Denmark (1969). The stores spread to other parts of Europe in the 1970s, with the first store outside Scandinavia opening in Switzerland (1973), followed by West Germany (1974), Japan (1974), Australia, Hong Kong (1975), Canada (1976), Singapore and the Netherlands (1978). IKEA further expanded in the 1980s, opening stores in countries such as France and Spain (1981), Belgium (1984), the United States (1985), the United Kingdom (1987), and Italy (1989). Germany, with 55 stores, is IKEA's biggest market, followed by the United States, with 52 stores.
IKEA entered Latin America in February 2010, opening in the Dominican Republic. As for the region's largest markets, on 8 April 2021, a store was opened in Mexico City. In August 2018, IKEA opened its first store in India, in Hyderabad. There are now stores in Bengaluru and Mumbai.
In November 2021, IKEA opened its largest store in the world, measuring 65,000 square metres (700,000 sq ft), in the Philippines at the Mall of Asia Complex in Pasay City. In March 2022, IKEA announced the closing of all 17 stores in Russia, resulting from the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. However, Ingka also owns 14 shopping centres across Russia operating under its MEGA brand. These will remain open. In September 2023, the MEGA chain of 14 supermarkets was bought by the Russian Gazprombank. Due to the ongoing war and unimproved situation in Russia, IKEA said on 15 June that it would sell factories, close offices and reduce its work force. Later it became known that IKEA does not plan to sell its business, but expects to return to Russia within two years. About 700 people will continue to work for the company during this period. By October 2022, IKEA laid off about 10,000 Russian employees.
IKEA was hit hard by COVID-19 due to lockdowns in various countries, like in the UK and Canada. Because demand had fallen, its annual catalogue ceased publication after 70 years in print. The prices of their products have risen significantly in 2022 due to rising costs and inflation. In April 2022, IKEA has shut down one of its stores in Guiyang when sales took a significant hit from the pandemic. Due to strict COVID-19 lockdowns in China, IKEA is considering closing another store in Shanghai by July 2022. IKEA is also facing stock shortages and shipping problems that may continue until the end of 2022.
On 10 August 2022, IKEA opened its first store in Chile, the first store in South America. Another store opened in Colombia in September 2023 in Bogotá, soon to be followed by a store in Peru.
IKEA stores are typically blue buildings with yellow accents (also Sweden's national colours). They are often designed in a one-way layout, leading customers counter-clockwise along what IKEA calls "the long natural way" designed to encourage the customer to see the store in its entirety (as opposed to a traditional retail store, which allows a customer to go directly to the section where the desired goods and services are displayed). There are often shortcuts to other parts of the showroom.
The sequence first involves going through the furniture showrooms making note of selected items. The showroom usually consists of simulated room settings where customers can see the actual furniture in use, e.g.: a living-room with a sofa, a TV set, a bookcase and a dining table, accessorized with plants, cushions, rugs, lamps, plates, glasses and cutlery. Showroom sections are usually displayed in the order of the rooms of a house: living rooms, dining rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, kids' rooms. The customer then collects a shopping cart and proceeds to an open-shelf "Market Hall" warehouse for smaller items. Lastly, the self-service furniture warehouse stores the showroom products in flat pack form for the customer to collect the ones previously noted. Sometimes, they are directed to collect products from an external warehouse on the same site or at a site nearby after purchase. Finally, customers pay for their products at a cash register. Not all furniture is stocked at the store level, such as particular sofa colours needing to be shipped from a warehouse to the customer's home or the store.
Most stores follow the layout of having the showroom upstairs with the marketplace and self-service warehouse downstairs. Some stores are single level, while others have separate warehouses to allow more stock to be kept on-site. Single-level stores are found predominantly in areas where the cost of land would be less than the cost of building a 2-level store. Some stores have dual-level warehouses with machine-controlled silos to allow large quantities of stock to be accessed throughout the selling day.
Most IKEA stores offer an "as-is" or "bargain corner" (recently rebranded as “circular hub”) area at the end of the warehouse, just before the cash registers. Returned, damaged, and formerly showcased products are displayed here and sold with a significant discount.
The vast majority of IKEA stores are located outside of city centres, primarily because of land cost and traffic access. Several smaller store formats have been unsuccessfully tested in the past (the "midi" concept in the early 1990s, which was tested in Ottawa and Heerlen with 9,300 m (100,000 sq ft), or a "boutique" shop in Manhattan).
A new format for a full-size, city centre store was introduced with the opening of the Manchester store, situated in Ashton-under-Lyne in 2006. Another store, in Coventry, opened in December 2007. The store had seven floors and a different flow from other IKEA stores; however, it closed down in 2020 due to the site being deemed unsuitable for future business. IKEA's Southampton store that opened in February 2009 is also in the city centre and built in an urban style similar to the Coventry store. IKEA built these stores in response to UK government restrictions on large retail establishment outside city centres.
Japan was another market where IKEA performed badly initially, exited the market completely and then re-entered the Japanese market with an alternative store design and layout with which it finally found success. IKEA entered the Japanese market in 1974 through a franchise arrangement with a local partner, only to withdraw in failure in 1986. Japan was one of the first markets outside its original core European market. Despite Japan being the second largest economy in the world at the time, IKEA did not adequately adapt its store layout strategy to the Japanese consumer. Japanese consumers did not have a culture of DIY furniture assembly, and many in the early days had no way to haul the flat-packs home to their small apartments. Nor did the store layouts familiar to European customers initially make much sense to Japanese consumers, so prior to re-entering the Japanese market in 2006, IKEA management did extensive local market research in more effective store layouts. One area of local adaptation was the room displays common to every IKEA store worldwide. Rather than just replicate a typical European room layout, the IKEA Japan management was careful to set up room displays more closely resembling Japanese apartment rooms, such as one for "a typical Japanese teenage boy who likes baseball and computer games".
IKEA also adapted its store location and services to the 'inner-city' format for the expansion in China, unlike other countries where IKEA stores for economic and planning restriction reasons tends to be more commonly just outside city centres due to planning restrictions. In China, planning restrictions are less of an issue than in other country markets due to the lack of cars for much of its customer base. Accordingly, in store design alternatives, IKEA has had to offer store locations and formats closer to public transportation since few customers had access to cars with which to buy and take-home DIY flat pack furniture. The store design alternative thinking and strategy in China has been to locate stores to facilitate access for non-car owning customers. In fact, in some locations in China, IKEA stores can be found not in the usual suburban or near airport locations like in other countries, but rather places such as downtown shopping centre with a 'mini-IKEA' store to attract shoppers. For example, one store design alternative trend that IKEA has implemented has been 'pop-up' stores along social media platforms in their advertising strategy for the first-time as a company to reach new customers demographics while still reinforcing its global brand locally in China.
In Hong Kong, where shop space is limited and costly, IKEA has opened four stores, all of which are located in multi-storey commercial buildings. They are smaller than other IKEA stores but large by Hong Kong standards. In addition to tailoring store sizes for specific countries, IKEA also alters the sizes of their products in order to accommodate cultural differences.
In 2015, IKEA announced that it would be attempting a smaller store design at several locations in Canada. This modified store will feature only a display gallery and a small warehouse. One location planned for Kitchener is in the place formerly occupied by a Sears Home store. The warehouses will not keep furniture stocked, and so customers will not be able to drop in to purchase and leave with furniture the same day. Instead, they will purchase the furniture in advance online or in-store and order the furniture delivered to one of the new stores, for a greatly reduced rate. IKEA claims that this new model will allow them to expand quickly into new markets rather than spending years opening a full-size store.
In 2020, IKEA opened at Al Wahda Mall in Abu Dhabi, UAE, which at 2,137 m (23,002 sq ft) was one of the smallest IKEA stores in the world. It also opened at 360 Mall in Kuwait and in Harajuku, Tokyo at the same year. The size of 360 Mall store was slightly larger than Al Wahda's despite bringing similar concept, at 3,000 m (32,000 sq ft), located at extension of the mall. As for IKEA Harajuku, the 2,500 m (26,910 sq ft), 7-storey store houses the chain's first and only konbini concept.
In 2021, IKEA opened another of its smallest stores at the JEM Mall in Jurong East, Singapore. Replacing liquidated department store Robinsons, IKEA Jurong is only 6,500 m (70,000 sq ft) across three levels and the first in Southeast Asia that did not provide the "Market Hall" warehouse in its store. Also on the same year, IKEA opened its first small-store format in Bali, Indonesia. Replacing liquidated Giant hypermarket, IKEA Bali is dubbed as Customer Meeting Point, and eventually the smallest store so far, at 1,200 m (13,000 sq ft) of space.
In 2022, another small-size store was opened inside Kings Mall (now known as Livat Hammersmith), Hammersmith, in February, at 4,600 m (50,000 sq ft), followed by a 9,400 m (101,000 sq ft) store inside Mall Taman Anggrek, Jakarta, which was opened on 7 April 2022.
Rather than being sold pre-assembled, much of IKEA's furniture is designed to be assembled by the customer. The company claims that this helps reduce costs and use of packaging by not shipping air; the volume of a bookcase, for example, is considerably less if it is shipped unassembled rather than assembled. This is also more practical for European customers using public transport, because flat packs can be more easily carried.
IKEA contends that it has been a pioneering force in sustainable approaches to mass consumer culture. Kamprad calls this "democratic design", meaning that the company applies an integrated approach to manufacturing and design (see also environmental design). In response to the explosion of human population and material expectations in the 20th and 21st centuries, the company implements economies of scale, capturing material streams and creating manufacturing processes that hold costs and resource use down, such as the extensive use of medium-density fibreboard ("MDF"), also called "particle board".
Notable items of IKEA furniture include the Poäng armchair, the Billy bookcase and the Klippan sofa, all of which have sold by the tens of millions since the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The IKEA and LEGO brands teamed up to create a range of simple storage solutions for children and adults.
In June 2021, IKEA Canada unveiled a series of 10 "Love Seats" inspired by different Pride flags, created by four LGBTQ designers.
IKEA products are identified by one-word (occasionally two-word) names. Most of the names are Scandinavian in origin. Although there are some exceptions, most product names are based on a special naming system developed by IKEA. Company founder Kamprad was dyslexic and found that naming the furniture with proper names and words, rather than a product code, made the names easier to remember.
Some of IKEA's Swedish product names have amusing or unfortunate connotations in other languages, sometimes resulting in the names being withdrawn in certain countries. Notable examples for English include the "Jerker" computer desk (discontinued as of 2013), "Fukta" plant spray, "Fartfull" workbench, and "Lyckhem" (meaning bliss).
Due to several products being named after real locations, this has resulted in some locations sharing names with objects considered generally unpleasant, such as a toilet brush being named after the lake of Bolmen and a rubbish bin named after the village of Toften. In November 2021, Visit Sweden launched a jocular campaign named "Discover the Originals", which invites tourists to visit the locations which have received such unfortunate associations with such items.
During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, to facilitate social distancing between customers and accommodate the increased volume of customers who were booking IKEA design consultation services, IKEA stores in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain improved their design consulting process by piloting Ombori's paperless queue management system for the brand.
In March 2021, IKEA launched IKEA Studio in partnership with Apple Inc., an app enabling customers to design full-scale rooms with IKEA furniture using augmented reality on an iPhone.
In 2016, IKEA started a move into the smart home business. The IKEA TRÅDFRI smart lighting kit was one of the first ranges signalling this change. IKEA's media team has confirmed that smart home project will be a big move. They have also started a partnership with Philips Hue. The wireless charging furniture, integrating wireless Qi charging into everyday furniture, is another strategy for the smart home business.
A collaboration to build Sonos smart speaker technology into furniture sold by IKEA was announced in December 2017. The first products resulting from the collaboration launched in August 2019.
Under the product name SYMFONISK, IKEA and Sonos have made two distinct wireless speakers that integrate with existing Sonos households or can be used to start with the Sonos-ecosystem, one that's also a lamp and another that's a more traditional looking bookshelf speaker. Both products as well as accessories for the purpose of mounting the bookshelf speakers have gone on sale worldwide on 1 August.
From the start, IKEA SYMFONISK can only be controlled from the Sonos app, but IKEA added support for the speakers in their own Home Smart app to be paired with scenes that control both the lights, air purifiers, smart plugs and smart blinds together with the speakers.
IKEA has also expanded its product base to include flat-pack houses and apartments, in an effort to cut prices involved in a first-time buyer's home. The IKEA product, named BoKlok was launched in Sweden in 1996 in a joint venture with Skanska. Now working in the Nordic countries and in the UK, sites confirmed in England include London, Ashton-under-Lyne, Leeds, Gateshead, Warrington, Bristol and Liverpool.
At the end of September 2013, the company announced that solar panel packages, so-called "residential kits", for houses will be sold at 17 UK stores by mid-2014. The decision followed a successful pilot project at the Lakeside IKEA store, whereby one photovoltaic system was sold almost every day. The solar CIGS panels are manufactured by Solibro, a German-based subsidiary of the Chinese company Hanergy. By the end of 2014, IKEA began to sell Solibro's solar residential kits in the Netherlands and in Switzerland. In November 2015, IKEA ended its contract with Hanergy and in April 2016 started working with Solarcentury to sell solar panels in the United Kingdom. The deal would allow customers to be able to order panels online and at three stores before being expanded to all United Kingdom stores by the end of summer.
In April 2019, the company announced that it would begin test marketing a new concept, renting furniture to customers. One of the motivating factors was that inexpensive IKEA products were viewed as "disposable" and often ended up being scrapped after a few years of use. This was at a time when especially younger buyers said they wanted to minimize their impact on the environment. The company understood this view. In an interview, Jesper Brodin, the chief executive of Ingka Group (the largest franchisee of IKEA stores), commented that "climate change and unsustainable consumption are among the biggest challenges we face in society". The other strategic objectives of the plan were to be more affordable and more convenient. The company said it would test the rental concept in all 30 markets by 2020, expecting it to increase the number of times a piece of furniture would be used before recycling.
The first IKEA store opened in 1958 with a small cafe that transitioned into a full-blown restaurant in 1960 that, until 2011, sold branded Swedish prepared specialist foods, such as meatballs, packages of gravy, lingonberry jam, various biscuits and crackers, and salmon and fish roe spread. The new label has a variety of items including chocolates, meatballs, jams, pancakes, salmon and various drinks.
Although the cafes primarily serve Swedish food, the menu varies based on the culture, food and location of each store. With restaurants in 38 countries, the menu often incorporates local dishes, including shawarma in Saudi Arabia, poutine in Canada, macarons in France, and gelato in Italy. In Indonesia, the Swedish meatballs recipe is changed to accommodate the country's halal requirements. Stores in Israel sell kosher food under rabbinical supervision. The kosher restaurants are separated into dairy and meat areas.
In many locations, the IKEA restaurants open daily before the rest of the store and serve breakfast. All food products are based on Swedish recipes and traditions. Food accounts for 5% of IKEA's sales.
IKEA sells plant-based meatballs made from potatoes, apples, pea protein, and oats in all of its stores. According to United States journalist Avery Yale Kamila, IKEA began testing its plant-based meatballs in 2014, then launched the plant-based meatballs in 2015 and began testing vegan hot dogs in 2018. In 2019, journalist James Hansen reported in Eater London that IKEA would only sell vegetarian food at Christmas time.
Every store has a children's play area, named Småland (Swedish for small lands; it is also the Swedish province of Småland where founder Kamprad was born). Parents drop off their children at a gate to the playground, and pick them up after they arrive at another entrance. In some stores, parents are given free pagers by the on-site staff, which the staff can use to summon parents whose children need them earlier than expected; in others, staff summon parents through announcements over the in-store public address system or by calling them on their mobile phones. The largest Småland play area is located at the IKEA store in Navi Mumbai, India. Some of these were closed down due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Until 28 September 2023, IKEA owned & operated the MEGA Family Shopping Centre chain in Russia. Its operations have since been sold to Gazprombank.
On 8 August 2008, IKEA UK launched a virtual mobile phone network called IKEA Family Mobile, which ran on T-Mobile. At launch it was the cheapest pay-as-you-go network in the UK. In June 2015 the network announced that its services would cease to operate from 31 August 2015.
As of 2012, IKEA has a joint venture with TCL to provide Uppleva integrated HDTV and entertainment system products.
In mid-August 2012, the company announced that it would establish a chain of 100 economy hotels in Europe but, unlike its few existing hotels in Scandinavia, they would not carry the IKEA name, nor would they use IKEA furniture and furnishings – they would be operated by an unnamed international group of hoteliers. As of 30 April 2018, however, the company owned only a single hotel, the IKEA Hotell in Älmhult, Sweden.
It was previously planning to open another one, in New Haven, Connecticut, United States, after converting the historic Pirelli Building. The company received approval for the concept from the city's planning commission in mid-November 2018; the building was to include 165 rooms and the property would offer 129 dedicated parking spaces. Research in April 2019 provided no indication that the hotel had been completed as of that time. The building was then sold to Connecticut architect and developer Becker + Becker for $1.2 million. Opening in 2022 under Hotel Marcel, it is managed by Charlestowne Hotels and became part of Hilton's Tapestry Collection.
From 2016 to 2018, IKEA sold a commuter belt-driven bicycle, the Sladda.
In September 2017, IKEA announced they would be acquiring the UD company TaskRabbit. The deal, completed later that year, has TaskRabbit operating as an independent company.
In March 2020, IKEA announced that it had partnered with Pizza Hut Hong Kong on a joint venture. IKEA launched a new side table called SÄVA. The table, designed to resemble a pizza saver, would be boxed in packaging resembling a pizza box, and the building instructions included a suggestion to order a Swedish meatball pizza from Pizza Hut, which would contain the same meatballs served in IKEA restaurants.
In April 2020, IKEA acquired AI imaging startup Geomagical Labs.
In July 2020, IKEA opened a concept store in the Harajuku district of Tokyo, Japan, where it launched its first ever apparel line.
Ingka Centres, IKEA's malls division, announced in December 2021 that it would open two malls, anchored by IKEA stores, in Gurugram and Noida in India at a cost of around ₹9,000 crore (US$1.1 billion). Both malls are expected to open by 2025.
In 2016, IKEA Canada partnered with the Setsuné Indigenous Fashion Incubator, co-founded by Sage Paul, to design and produce the collection ÅTERSTÄLLA, which means to restore, heal, or redecorate, and it was made entirely from salvaged Ikea textiles, reflecting the traditional Indigenous value to "use everything."
IKEA is owned and operated by a complicated array of not-for-profit and for-profit corporations. The corporate structure is divided into two main parts: operations and franchising.
INGKA Holding B.V., based in the Netherlands, owns the Ingka Group, which takes care of the centres, retails, customer fulfillment, and all the other services related to IKEA products. The IKEA brand is owned and managed by Inter IKEA Systems B.V., based in the Netherlands, owned by Inter IKEA Holding B.V. Inter IKEA Holding is also in charge of design, manufacturing and supply of IKEA products.
Inter IKEA Systems is owned by Inter IKEA Holding BV, a company registered in the Netherlands, formerly registered in Luxembourg (under the name Inter IKEA Holding SA). Inter IKEA Holding, in turn, is owned by the Interogo Foundation, based in Liechtenstein. In 2016, the INGKA Holding sold its design, manufacturing and logistics subsidiaries to Inter IKEA Holding.
In June 2013, Ingvar Kamprad resigned from the board of Inter IKEA Holding SA and his youngest son Mathias Kamprad replaced Per Ludvigsson as the chairman of the holding company. Following his decision to step down, the 87-year-old founder explained, "I see this as a good time for me to leave the board of Inter IKEA Group. By that we are also taking another step in the generation shift that has been ongoing for some years." After the 2016 company restructure, Inter IKEA Holding SA no longer exists, having reincorporated in the Netherlands. Mathias Kamprad became a board member of the Inter IKEA Group and the Interogo Foundation. Mathias and his two older brothers, who also have leadership roles at IKEA, work on the corporation's overall vision and long-term strategy.
Along with helping IKEA make a non-taxable profit, IKEA's complicated corporate structure allowed Kamprad to maintain tight control over the operations of INGKA Holding, and thus the operation of most IKEA stores. The INGKA Foundation's five-person executive committee was chaired by Kamprad. It appoints a board of INGKA Holding, approves any changes to INGKA Holding's bylaws, and has the right to preempt new share issues. If a member of the executive committee quits or dies, the other four members appoint their replacement.
In Kamprad's absence, the foundation's bylaws include specific provisions requiring it to continue operating the INGKA Holding group and specifying that shares can be sold only to another foundation with the same objectives as the INGKA Foundation.
The net profit of IKEA Group (which does not include Inter IKEA systems) in fiscal year 2009 (after paying franchise fees to Inter IKEA systems) was €2.538 billion on sales of €21.846 billion. Because INGKA Holding is owned by the non-profit INGKA Foundation, none of this profit is taxed. The foundation's nonprofit status also means that the Kamprad family cannot reap these profits directly, but the Kamprads do collect a portion of IKEA sales profits through the franchising relationship between INGKA Holding and Inter IKEA Systems.
As a franchisee, the Ingka Group pays 3% of royalties to Inter IKEA Systems. Inter IKEA Systems collected €631 million of franchise fees in 2004 but reported pre-tax profits of only €225 million in 2004. One of the major pre-tax expenses that Inter IKEA systems reported was €590 million of "other operating charges". IKEA has refused to explain these charges, but Inter IKEA Systems appears to make large payments to I.I. Holding, another Luxembourg-registered group that, according to The Economist, "is almost certain to be controlled by the Kamprad family". I.I. Holding made a profit of €328 million in 2004.
In 2004, the Inter IKEA group of companies and I.I. Holding reported combined profits of €553m and paid €19m in taxes, or approximately 3.5 percent.
Public Eye, a non-profit organisation in Switzerland that promotes corporate responsibility, has formally criticised IKEA for its tax avoidance strategies. In 2007, the organisation nominated IKEA for one of its Public Eye "awards", which highlight corporate irresponsibility.
In February 2016, the Greens / EFA group in the European Parliament issued a report entitled IKEA: Flat Pack Tax Avoidance on the tax planning strategies of IKEA and their possible use to avoid tax in several European countries. The report was sent to Pierre Moscovici, the European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs, Taxation and Customs, and Margrethe Vestager, the European Commissioner for Competition, expressing the hope that it would be of use to them in their respective roles "to advance the fight for tax justice in Europe".
Although IKEA originated in Sweden, their household products and furniture products are manufactured in many different countries, in order to achieve cost efficiency. For most of its products, the final assembly is performed by the end-user (consumer).
Swedwood, an IKEA subsidiary, produces all of the company's wood-based products, with the largest Swedwood factory located in Southern Poland. According to the subsidiary, over 16,000 employees across 50 sites in 10 countries manufacture the 100 million pieces of furniture that IKEA sells annually. IKEA furniture uses the hardwood alternative particle board. Hultsfred, a factory in southern Sweden, is the company's sole supplier.
Distribution centre efficiency and flexibility have been one of IKEA's ongoing priorities and thus it has implemented automated, robotic warehouse systems and warehouse management systems (WMS). Such systems facilitate a merger of the traditional retail and mail order sales channels into an omni-channel fulfillment model. In 2020, Ikea was noted by Supply Chain magazine as having one of the most automated warehouse systems in the world.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, IKEA has been facing major supply chain issues since 2021, which could extend into 2022. Jon Abrahamsson, the chief executive of Inter IKEA has stated that the main issue is shipping products from China, as a "quarter" of IKEA products are made there. A variety of reasons led to supply shortages, including consumption shocks. In addition, factories were unable to produce raw materials and workers even after they began receiving orders.
During the 1980s, IKEA kept its costs down by using production facilities in East Germany. A portion of the workforce at those factories consisted of political prisoners. This fact, revealed in a report by Ernst & Young commissioned by the company, resulted from the intermingling of criminals and political dissidents in the state-owned production facilities IKEA contracted with, a practice which was generally known in West Germany. IKEA was one of a number of companies, including West German firms, which benefited from this practice. The investigation resulted from attempts by former political prisoners to obtain compensation. In November 2012, IKEA admitted being aware at the time of the possibility of use of forced labour and failing to exercise sufficient control to identify and avoid it. A summary of the Ernst & Young report was released on 16 November 2012.
In 2018, Ikea was accused of union busting when employees sought to organize, using such tactics as captive audience meetings.
IKEA was named one of the 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers in 2004 and 2005 by Working Mothers magazine. It ranked 80 in Fortune's 200 Best Companies to Work For in 2006 and in October 2008, IKEA Canada LP was named one of "Canada's Top 100 Employers" by Mediacorp Canada Inc.
After initial environmental issues like the highly publicized formaldehyde scandals in the early 1980s and 1992, IKEA took a proactive stance on environmental issues and tried to prevent future incidents through a variety of measures. In 1990, IKEA invited Karl-Henrik Robèrt, founder of the Natural Step, to address its board of directors. Robert's system conditions for sustainability provided a strategic approach to improving the company's environmental performance. In 1990, IKEA adopted the Natural Step framework as the basis for its environmental plan. This led to the development of an Environmental Action Plan, which was adopted in 1992. The plan focused on structural change, allowing IKEA to "maximize the impact of resources invested and reduce the energy necessary to address isolated issues." The environmental measures taken include the following:
In 2000, IKEA introduced its code of conduct for suppliers that covers social, safety, and environmental questions. Today IKEA has around 60 auditors who perform hundreds of supplier audits every year. The main purpose of these audits is to make sure that the IKEA suppliers follow the law in each country where they are based. Most IKEA suppliers fulfil the law today with exceptions for some special issues, one being excessive working hours in Asia, in countries such as China and India.
As of March 2018, IKEA has signed on with 25 other companies to participate in the British Retail Consortium's Better Retail Better World initiative, which challenges companies to meet objectives outlined by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
To make IKEA a more sustainable company, a product life cycle was created. For the idea stage, products should be flat-packed so that more items can be shipped at once; products should also be easier to dismantle and recycle. Raw materials are used, and since wood and cotton are two of IKEA's most important manufacturing products, the company works with environmentally friendly forests and cotton, whereby the excessive use of chemicals and water is avoided.
IKEA stores recycle waste and many run on renewable energy. All employees are trained in environmental and social responsibility, while public transit is one of the priorities when the location of stores is considered. Also, the coffee and chocolate served at IKEA stores is UTZ Certified.
The last stage of the life cycle is the end of life. Most IKEA stores recycle light bulbs and drained batteries, and the company is also exploring the recycling of sofas and other home furnishing products.
In August 2008, IKEA announced that it had created IKEA GreenTech, a €50 million venture capital fund. Located in Lund (a university town in Sweden), it will invest in 8–10 companies in the coming five years with focus on solar panels, alternative light sources, product materials, energy efficiency and water saving and purification. The aim is to commercialise green technologies for sale in IKEA stores within 3–4 years.
On 17 February 2011, IKEA announced its plans to develop a wind farm in Dalarna County, Sweden, furthering its goal of using only renewable energy to fuel its operations. As of June 2012, 17 United States IKEA stores are powered by solar panels, with 22 additional installations in progress, and IKEA owns the 165 MW Cameron Wind farm in Cameron County on the South Texas coast and a 42 MW coastal wind farm in Finland.
In September 2019, IKEA announced that they would be investing $2.8 billion in renewable energy infrastructure. The company is targeting making their entire supply chain climate positive by 2030.
IKEA is the world's largest buyer and retailer of wood. In 2015, IKEA claimed to use 1% of the world's supply of timber.
According to IKEA's 2021 Sustainability Report, 99.5% of all wood that the company uses is either recycled or meets the standards of the Forest Stewardship Council. IKEA states that "[a]ll wood used for IKEA products must meet our critical requirements that ensure it's not (e.g.) sourced from illegally harvested forests [...]". However, despite these claims, IKEA has been involved in unsustainable and most likely illegal logging of wood in multiple Eastern European countries in recent years; see Criticism of IKEA.
IKEA owns about 136,000 acres of forest in the US and about 450,000 acres in Europe.
On 14 January 2021, IKEA announced that Ingka Investments had acquired approximately 10,840 acres (4,386 hectares) near the Altamaha River Basin in the U.S. state of Georgia from The Conservation Fund. The acquisition comes with the agreement "to protect the land from fragmentation, restore the longleaf pine forest, and safe-guard the habitat of the gopher tortoise."
IKEA is reported to be the largest private landowner in Romania since 2015.
In 2011, the company examined its wood consumption and noticed that almost half of its global pine and spruce consumption was for the fabrication of pallets. The company consequently started a transition to the use of paper pallets and the "Optiledge system". The OptiLedge product is totally recyclable, made from 100% virgin high-impact copolymer polypropylene (PP) plastic. The system is a "unit load alternative to the use of a pallet. The system consists of the OptiLedge (usually used in pairs), aligned and strapped to the bottom carton to form a base layer upon which to stack more products. Corner boards are used when strapping to minimize the potential for package compression." The conversion began in Germany and Japan, before its introduction into the rest of Europe and North America. The system has been marketed to other companies, and IKEA has formed the OptiLedge company to manage and sell the product.
Since March 2013, IKEA has stopped providing plastic bags to customers, but offers reusable bags for sale. The IKEA restaurants also only offer reusable plates, knives, forks, spoons, etc. Toilets in some IKEA WC-rooms have been outfitted with dual-function flushers. IKEA has recycling bins for compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), energy-saving bulbs, and batteries.
In 2001, IKEA was one of the first companies to operate its own cross-border goods trains through several countries in Europe.
IKEA has expanded its sustainability plan in the UK to include electric car charge points for customers at all locations by the end of 2013. The effort will include Nissan and Ecotricity and promise to deliver an 80% charge in 30 minutes.
From 2016, IKEA has only sold energy-efficient LED lightbulbs, lamps and light fixtures. LED lightbulbs use as little as 15% of the power of a regular incandescent light bulb.
The INGKA Foundation is officially dedicated to promoting "innovations in architecture and interior design". The net worth of the foundation exceeded the net worth of the much better known Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (now the largest private foundation in the world) for a period. However, most of the Group's profit is spent on investment.
IKEA is involved in several international charitable causes, particularly in partnership with UNICEF, including:
IKEA also supports American Forests to restore forests and reduce pollution.
On 3 March 2022, IKEA announced €20 million donation to UNHCR for relief support of Ukrainians who suffer from the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
IKEA donated €10 million to Doctors Without Borders for its work in Syria in response to the 2023 Turkey–Syria earthquake.
In September 2005, IKEA Social Initiative was formed to manage the company's social involvement on a global level. IKEA Social Initiative is headed by Marianne Barner.
The main partners of IKEA Social Initiative are UNICEF and Save the Children.
On 23 February 2009, at the ECOSOC event in New York, UNICEF announced that IKEA Social Initiative has become the agency's largest corporate partner, with total commitments of more than US$180 million (£281,079,000).
Examples of involvements:
In 2009, Sweden's largest television station, SVT, revealed that IKEA's money—the three per cent collection from each store—does not actually go to a charitable foundation in the Netherlands, as IKEA has said. Inter IKEA is owned by a foundation in Liechtenstein, called Interogo, which has amassed $12 billion (£18 billion), and is controlled by the Kamprad family.
IKEA used to publish an annual catalogue, first published in Swedish in 1951. It is considered to be the main marketing tool of the company, consuming 70% of its annual marketing budget. The catalogue is distributed both in stores and by mail, with most of it being produced by IKEA Communications AB in IKEA's hometown of Älmhult, Sweden. At its peak in 2016, 200 million copies of the catalogue were distributed in 32 languages to more than 50 markets. In December 2020, IKEA announced that they would cease publication of both the print and digital versions of the catalogue, with the 2021 edition (released in 2020) being the final edition.
In common with some other retailers, IKEA launched a loyalty card called "IKEA Family". The card is free of charge and can be used to obtain discounts on certain products found in-store. It is available worldwide. In conjunction with the card, IKEA also publishes and sells a printed quarterly magazine titled IKEA Family Live which supplements the card and catalogue. The magazine is already printed in thirteen languages and an English edition for the United Kingdom was launched in February 2007. It is expected to have a subscription of over 500,000.
On 12 September 2017, IKEA announced the augmented reality app, IKEA Place, following by Apple's release of its ARkit technology and iOS 11. IKEA Place helps consumers to visualize true to scale IKEA products into real environment.
In 1994, IKEA ran a commercial in the United States, titled Dining Room, widely thought to be the first to feature a homosexual couple; it aired for several weeks before being withdrawn after calls for a boycott and a bomb threat directed at IKEA stores. Other IKEA commercials appeal to the wider LGBTQ community, one featuring a transgender woman.
In 2002, the inaugural television component of the "Unböring" campaign, titled Lamp, went on to win several awards, including a Grand Clio, Golds at the London International Awards and the ANDY Awards, and the Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, the most prestigious awards ceremony in the advertising community.
A debate ensued between Fraser Patterson, Chief Executive of Onis, and Andrew McGuinness, partner at Beattie McGuinness Bungay (BMB), the advertising and PR agency that was awarded the £12 million IKEA account. The essence of the debate was that BMB claimed to be unaware of Onis's campaign as Onis was not an advertising agency. Onis's argument was that its advertising could be seen in prominent landmarks throughout London, having been already accredited, showing concern about the impact IKEA's campaign would have on the originality of its own. BMB and IKEA subsequently agreed to provide Onis with a feature page on the IKEA campaign site linking through to Onis's website for a period of one year.
In 2008, IKEA paired up with the makers of video game The Sims 2 to make a stuff pack called IKEA Home Stuff, featuring many IKEA products. It was released on 24 June 2008 in North America and 26 June 2008 in Europe. It is the second stuff pack with a major brand, the first being The Sims 2 H&M Fashion Stuff.
IKEA took over the title sponsorship of Philadelphia's annual Thanksgiving Day parade in 2008, replacing Boscov's, which filed for bankruptcy in August 2008.
In November 2008, a subway train decorated in IKEA style was introduced in Novosibirsk, Russia. Four cars were turned into a mobile showroom of the Swedish design. The redesigned train, which features colourful seats and fancy curtains, carried passengers until 6 June 2009.
In March 2010, IKEA developed an event in four important Métro stations in Paris, in which furniture collections are displayed in high-traffic spots, giving potential customers a chance to check out the brand's products. The Métro walls were also filled with prints that showcase IKEA interiors.
In September 2017, IKEA launched the "IKEA Human Catalogue" campaign, in which memory champion Yanjaa Wintersoul memorized all 328 pages of the catalogue in minute detail in just a week before its launch. To prove the legitimacy and accuracy of the campaign, live demonstrations were held at press conferences in IKEA stores across Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand as well as a Facebook Live event held at the Facebook Singapore headquarters and talk show demonstrations in the US with Steve Harvey among others. The advertising campaign was hugely successful winning numerous industry awards including the Webby award 2018 for best social media campaign, an Ogilvy award and is currently a contender for the Cannes Lions 2018.
In 2020, IKEA conducted a "Buy Back Friday" campaign with a message to present a new life to old furniture instead of offering customers to buy new items for Black Friday.
In June 2021, IKEA said it had suspended adverts on GB News because of concerns the channel's content would go against their aim to be inclusive. In a statement IKEA said: "We have safeguards in place to prevent our advertising from appearing on platforms that are not in line with our humanistic values. We are in the process of investigating how this may have occurred to ensure it won't happen again in future, and have suspended paid display advertising in the meantime."
IKEA has been criticized about unsustainable sourcing of wood from protected forests, certain unsafe product lines, negative effects on communities, as well as other issues.
In the 1980s under the rule of the genocidal Romanian Communist Dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania's secret police the 'Securitate' received six-figure payments from Ikea. According to declassified files at the National College for Studying the Securitate Archives, Ikea agreed to overcharge for products made in Romania and some of the overpayment funds were deposited into an account controlled by the Securitate.
IKEA has avoided millions of euros in taxes performing some intrincated mechanisms and it was noted by the EU back in 2017. The main countries where they operated their business using tax loopholes were the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium.
In 2018, the company's plush toy shark "Blåhaj" was widely used in an internet meme, with social media users posting humorous photos of it in their homes.
The song "IKEA" was released by Jonathan Coulton on the album Smoking Monkey in 2003.
IKEA stores have been featured in many works of fiction. Some examples include: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Inter IKEA Systems B.V., doing business as IKEA (/aɪˈkiːə/ eye-KEE-ə, Swedish: [ɪˈkêːa]), is a Swedish multinational conglomerate that designs and sells ready-to-assemble furniture, kitchen appliances, decoration, home accessories, and various other goods and home services. Started in 1943 by Ingvar Kamprad and currently legally headquartered in the Netherlands, IKEA has been the world's largest furniture retailer since 2008. The brand used by the group is derived from an acronym that consists of the founder's initials, and those of Elmtaryd, the family farm where he was born, and the nearby village Agunnaryd (his hometown in Småland, southern Sweden).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The group is primarily known for its modernist furniture designs, its simple approach to interior design, and its immersive shopping concept, based around a showroom of decorated room settings, in which customers can interact with the available articles onsite. In addition, the firm is known for its attention to cost control and continuous product development, notably, the ready-to-assemble model of furniture sales, and other elements which have allowed IKEA to establish lower prices than its competitors.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "As of March 2021, there are 422 IKEA stores operating in 50 countries and in fiscal year 2018, €38.8 billion (US$44.6 billion) worth of IKEA goods were sold. For multiple reasons, including lowering taxes payable, IKEA uses a complicated corporate structure. Within this structure, all IKEA stores are operated under franchise from Inter IKEA Systems B.V. which handles branding, design, manufacturing, and supply. Another part of the IKEA group, Ingka Group, operates the majority of IKEA stores as a franchisee and pays royalties to Inter IKEA Systems B.V. Some IKEA stores are also operated by independent franchises. The IKEA website contains about 12,000 products and there were over 2.1 billion visitors to IKEA's websites in the year from September 2015 to August 2016.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The group is responsible for approximately 1% of world commercial-product wood consumption, making it the largest individual user of wood in the world. IKEA claims to use 99.5% recycled or FSC-certified wood. However, IKEA has been shown to be involved in unsustainable and most likely illegal logging of old-growth and protected forests in multiple Eastern European countries in recent years.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In 1943, then-17-year-old Ingvar Kamprad founded IKEA as a mail-order sales business, and began to sell furniture five years later. The first store was opened in Älmhult, Småland, in 1958, under the name Möbel-IKÉA (Möbel means \"furniture\" in Swedish). The first stores outside Sweden were opened in Norway (1963) and Denmark (1969). The stores spread to other parts of Europe in the 1970s, with the first store outside Scandinavia opening in Switzerland (1973), followed by West Germany (1974), Japan (1974), Australia, Hong Kong (1975), Canada (1976), Singapore and the Netherlands (1978). IKEA further expanded in the 1980s, opening stores in countries such as France and Spain (1981), Belgium (1984), the United States (1985), the United Kingdom (1987), and Italy (1989). Germany, with 55 stores, is IKEA's biggest market, followed by the United States, with 52 stores.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "IKEA entered Latin America in February 2010, opening in the Dominican Republic. As for the region's largest markets, on 8 April 2021, a store was opened in Mexico City. In August 2018, IKEA opened its first store in India, in Hyderabad. There are now stores in Bengaluru and Mumbai.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In November 2021, IKEA opened its largest store in the world, measuring 65,000 square metres (700,000 sq ft), in the Philippines at the Mall of Asia Complex in Pasay City. In March 2022, IKEA announced the closing of all 17 stores in Russia, resulting from the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. However, Ingka also owns 14 shopping centres across Russia operating under its MEGA brand. These will remain open. In September 2023, the MEGA chain of 14 supermarkets was bought by the Russian Gazprombank. Due to the ongoing war and unimproved situation in Russia, IKEA said on 15 June that it would sell factories, close offices and reduce its work force. Later it became known that IKEA does not plan to sell its business, but expects to return to Russia within two years. About 700 people will continue to work for the company during this period. By October 2022, IKEA laid off about 10,000 Russian employees.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "IKEA was hit hard by COVID-19 due to lockdowns in various countries, like in the UK and Canada. Because demand had fallen, its annual catalogue ceased publication after 70 years in print. The prices of their products have risen significantly in 2022 due to rising costs and inflation. In April 2022, IKEA has shut down one of its stores in Guiyang when sales took a significant hit from the pandemic. Due to strict COVID-19 lockdowns in China, IKEA is considering closing another store in Shanghai by July 2022. IKEA is also facing stock shortages and shipping problems that may continue until the end of 2022.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "On 10 August 2022, IKEA opened its first store in Chile, the first store in South America. Another store opened in Colombia in September 2023 in Bogotá, soon to be followed by a store in Peru.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "IKEA stores are typically blue buildings with yellow accents (also Sweden's national colours). They are often designed in a one-way layout, leading customers counter-clockwise along what IKEA calls \"the long natural way\" designed to encourage the customer to see the store in its entirety (as opposed to a traditional retail store, which allows a customer to go directly to the section where the desired goods and services are displayed). There are often shortcuts to other parts of the showroom.",
"title": "Store layout"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The sequence first involves going through the furniture showrooms making note of selected items. The showroom usually consists of simulated room settings where customers can see the actual furniture in use, e.g.: a living-room with a sofa, a TV set, a bookcase and a dining table, accessorized with plants, cushions, rugs, lamps, plates, glasses and cutlery. Showroom sections are usually displayed in the order of the rooms of a house: living rooms, dining rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, kids' rooms. The customer then collects a shopping cart and proceeds to an open-shelf \"Market Hall\" warehouse for smaller items. Lastly, the self-service furniture warehouse stores the showroom products in flat pack form for the customer to collect the ones previously noted. Sometimes, they are directed to collect products from an external warehouse on the same site or at a site nearby after purchase. Finally, customers pay for their products at a cash register. Not all furniture is stocked at the store level, such as particular sofa colours needing to be shipped from a warehouse to the customer's home or the store.",
"title": "Store layout"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Most stores follow the layout of having the showroom upstairs with the marketplace and self-service warehouse downstairs. Some stores are single level, while others have separate warehouses to allow more stock to be kept on-site. Single-level stores are found predominantly in areas where the cost of land would be less than the cost of building a 2-level store. Some stores have dual-level warehouses with machine-controlled silos to allow large quantities of stock to be accessed throughout the selling day.",
"title": "Store layout"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Most IKEA stores offer an \"as-is\" or \"bargain corner\" (recently rebranded as “circular hub”) area at the end of the warehouse, just before the cash registers. Returned, damaged, and formerly showcased products are displayed here and sold with a significant discount.",
"title": "Store layout"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The vast majority of IKEA stores are located outside of city centres, primarily because of land cost and traffic access. Several smaller store formats have been unsuccessfully tested in the past (the \"midi\" concept in the early 1990s, which was tested in Ottawa and Heerlen with 9,300 m (100,000 sq ft), or a \"boutique\" shop in Manhattan).",
"title": "Store layout"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "A new format for a full-size, city centre store was introduced with the opening of the Manchester store, situated in Ashton-under-Lyne in 2006. Another store, in Coventry, opened in December 2007. The store had seven floors and a different flow from other IKEA stores; however, it closed down in 2020 due to the site being deemed unsuitable for future business. IKEA's Southampton store that opened in February 2009 is also in the city centre and built in an urban style similar to the Coventry store. IKEA built these stores in response to UK government restrictions on large retail establishment outside city centres.",
"title": "Store layout"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Japan was another market where IKEA performed badly initially, exited the market completely and then re-entered the Japanese market with an alternative store design and layout with which it finally found success. IKEA entered the Japanese market in 1974 through a franchise arrangement with a local partner, only to withdraw in failure in 1986. Japan was one of the first markets outside its original core European market. Despite Japan being the second largest economy in the world at the time, IKEA did not adequately adapt its store layout strategy to the Japanese consumer. Japanese consumers did not have a culture of DIY furniture assembly, and many in the early days had no way to haul the flat-packs home to their small apartments. Nor did the store layouts familiar to European customers initially make much sense to Japanese consumers, so prior to re-entering the Japanese market in 2006, IKEA management did extensive local market research in more effective store layouts. One area of local adaptation was the room displays common to every IKEA store worldwide. Rather than just replicate a typical European room layout, the IKEA Japan management was careful to set up room displays more closely resembling Japanese apartment rooms, such as one for \"a typical Japanese teenage boy who likes baseball and computer games\".",
"title": "Store layout"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "IKEA also adapted its store location and services to the 'inner-city' format for the expansion in China, unlike other countries where IKEA stores for economic and planning restriction reasons tends to be more commonly just outside city centres due to planning restrictions. In China, planning restrictions are less of an issue than in other country markets due to the lack of cars for much of its customer base. Accordingly, in store design alternatives, IKEA has had to offer store locations and formats closer to public transportation since few customers had access to cars with which to buy and take-home DIY flat pack furniture. The store design alternative thinking and strategy in China has been to locate stores to facilitate access for non-car owning customers. In fact, in some locations in China, IKEA stores can be found not in the usual suburban or near airport locations like in other countries, but rather places such as downtown shopping centre with a 'mini-IKEA' store to attract shoppers. For example, one store design alternative trend that IKEA has implemented has been 'pop-up' stores along social media platforms in their advertising strategy for the first-time as a company to reach new customers demographics while still reinforcing its global brand locally in China.",
"title": "Store layout"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In Hong Kong, where shop space is limited and costly, IKEA has opened four stores, all of which are located in multi-storey commercial buildings. They are smaller than other IKEA stores but large by Hong Kong standards. In addition to tailoring store sizes for specific countries, IKEA also alters the sizes of their products in order to accommodate cultural differences.",
"title": "Store layout"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In 2015, IKEA announced that it would be attempting a smaller store design at several locations in Canada. This modified store will feature only a display gallery and a small warehouse. One location planned for Kitchener is in the place formerly occupied by a Sears Home store. The warehouses will not keep furniture stocked, and so customers will not be able to drop in to purchase and leave with furniture the same day. Instead, they will purchase the furniture in advance online or in-store and order the furniture delivered to one of the new stores, for a greatly reduced rate. IKEA claims that this new model will allow them to expand quickly into new markets rather than spending years opening a full-size store.",
"title": "Store layout"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In 2020, IKEA opened at Al Wahda Mall in Abu Dhabi, UAE, which at 2,137 m (23,002 sq ft) was one of the smallest IKEA stores in the world. It also opened at 360 Mall in Kuwait and in Harajuku, Tokyo at the same year. The size of 360 Mall store was slightly larger than Al Wahda's despite bringing similar concept, at 3,000 m (32,000 sq ft), located at extension of the mall. As for IKEA Harajuku, the 2,500 m (26,910 sq ft), 7-storey store houses the chain's first and only konbini concept.",
"title": "Store layout"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In 2021, IKEA opened another of its smallest stores at the JEM Mall in Jurong East, Singapore. Replacing liquidated department store Robinsons, IKEA Jurong is only 6,500 m (70,000 sq ft) across three levels and the first in Southeast Asia that did not provide the \"Market Hall\" warehouse in its store. Also on the same year, IKEA opened its first small-store format in Bali, Indonesia. Replacing liquidated Giant hypermarket, IKEA Bali is dubbed as Customer Meeting Point, and eventually the smallest store so far, at 1,200 m (13,000 sq ft) of space.",
"title": "Store layout"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In 2022, another small-size store was opened inside Kings Mall (now known as Livat Hammersmith), Hammersmith, in February, at 4,600 m (50,000 sq ft), followed by a 9,400 m (101,000 sq ft) store inside Mall Taman Anggrek, Jakarta, which was opened on 7 April 2022.",
"title": "Store layout"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Rather than being sold pre-assembled, much of IKEA's furniture is designed to be assembled by the customer. The company claims that this helps reduce costs and use of packaging by not shipping air; the volume of a bookcase, for example, is considerably less if it is shipped unassembled rather than assembled. This is also more practical for European customers using public transport, because flat packs can be more easily carried.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "IKEA contends that it has been a pioneering force in sustainable approaches to mass consumer culture. Kamprad calls this \"democratic design\", meaning that the company applies an integrated approach to manufacturing and design (see also environmental design). In response to the explosion of human population and material expectations in the 20th and 21st centuries, the company implements economies of scale, capturing material streams and creating manufacturing processes that hold costs and resource use down, such as the extensive use of medium-density fibreboard (\"MDF\"), also called \"particle board\".",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Notable items of IKEA furniture include the Poäng armchair, the Billy bookcase and the Klippan sofa, all of which have sold by the tens of millions since the late 1970s and early 1980s.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The IKEA and LEGO brands teamed up to create a range of simple storage solutions for children and adults.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In June 2021, IKEA Canada unveiled a series of 10 \"Love Seats\" inspired by different Pride flags, created by four LGBTQ designers.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "IKEA products are identified by one-word (occasionally two-word) names. Most of the names are Scandinavian in origin. Although there are some exceptions, most product names are based on a special naming system developed by IKEA. Company founder Kamprad was dyslexic and found that naming the furniture with proper names and words, rather than a product code, made the names easier to remember.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Some of IKEA's Swedish product names have amusing or unfortunate connotations in other languages, sometimes resulting in the names being withdrawn in certain countries. Notable examples for English include the \"Jerker\" computer desk (discontinued as of 2013), \"Fukta\" plant spray, \"Fartfull\" workbench, and \"Lyckhem\" (meaning bliss).",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Due to several products being named after real locations, this has resulted in some locations sharing names with objects considered generally unpleasant, such as a toilet brush being named after the lake of Bolmen and a rubbish bin named after the village of Toften. In November 2021, Visit Sweden launched a jocular campaign named \"Discover the Originals\", which invites tourists to visit the locations which have received such unfortunate associations with such items.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, to facilitate social distancing between customers and accommodate the increased volume of customers who were booking IKEA design consultation services, IKEA stores in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain improved their design consulting process by piloting Ombori's paperless queue management system for the brand.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In March 2021, IKEA launched IKEA Studio in partnership with Apple Inc., an app enabling customers to design full-scale rooms with IKEA furniture using augmented reality on an iPhone.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In 2016, IKEA started a move into the smart home business. The IKEA TRÅDFRI smart lighting kit was one of the first ranges signalling this change. IKEA's media team has confirmed that smart home project will be a big move. They have also started a partnership with Philips Hue. The wireless charging furniture, integrating wireless Qi charging into everyday furniture, is another strategy for the smart home business.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "A collaboration to build Sonos smart speaker technology into furniture sold by IKEA was announced in December 2017. The first products resulting from the collaboration launched in August 2019.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Under the product name SYMFONISK, IKEA and Sonos have made two distinct wireless speakers that integrate with existing Sonos households or can be used to start with the Sonos-ecosystem, one that's also a lamp and another that's a more traditional looking bookshelf speaker. Both products as well as accessories for the purpose of mounting the bookshelf speakers have gone on sale worldwide on 1 August.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "From the start, IKEA SYMFONISK can only be controlled from the Sonos app, but IKEA added support for the speakers in their own Home Smart app to be paired with scenes that control both the lights, air purifiers, smart plugs and smart blinds together with the speakers.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "IKEA has also expanded its product base to include flat-pack houses and apartments, in an effort to cut prices involved in a first-time buyer's home. The IKEA product, named BoKlok was launched in Sweden in 1996 in a joint venture with Skanska. Now working in the Nordic countries and in the UK, sites confirmed in England include London, Ashton-under-Lyne, Leeds, Gateshead, Warrington, Bristol and Liverpool.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "At the end of September 2013, the company announced that solar panel packages, so-called \"residential kits\", for houses will be sold at 17 UK stores by mid-2014. The decision followed a successful pilot project at the Lakeside IKEA store, whereby one photovoltaic system was sold almost every day. The solar CIGS panels are manufactured by Solibro, a German-based subsidiary of the Chinese company Hanergy. By the end of 2014, IKEA began to sell Solibro's solar residential kits in the Netherlands and in Switzerland. In November 2015, IKEA ended its contract with Hanergy and in April 2016 started working with Solarcentury to sell solar panels in the United Kingdom. The deal would allow customers to be able to order panels online and at three stores before being expanded to all United Kingdom stores by the end of summer.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In April 2019, the company announced that it would begin test marketing a new concept, renting furniture to customers. One of the motivating factors was that inexpensive IKEA products were viewed as \"disposable\" and often ended up being scrapped after a few years of use. This was at a time when especially younger buyers said they wanted to minimize their impact on the environment. The company understood this view. In an interview, Jesper Brodin, the chief executive of Ingka Group (the largest franchisee of IKEA stores), commented that \"climate change and unsustainable consumption are among the biggest challenges we face in society\". The other strategic objectives of the plan were to be more affordable and more convenient. The company said it would test the rental concept in all 30 markets by 2020, expecting it to increase the number of times a piece of furniture would be used before recycling.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The first IKEA store opened in 1958 with a small cafe that transitioned into a full-blown restaurant in 1960 that, until 2011, sold branded Swedish prepared specialist foods, such as meatballs, packages of gravy, lingonberry jam, various biscuits and crackers, and salmon and fish roe spread. The new label has a variety of items including chocolates, meatballs, jams, pancakes, salmon and various drinks.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Although the cafes primarily serve Swedish food, the menu varies based on the culture, food and location of each store. With restaurants in 38 countries, the menu often incorporates local dishes, including shawarma in Saudi Arabia, poutine in Canada, macarons in France, and gelato in Italy. In Indonesia, the Swedish meatballs recipe is changed to accommodate the country's halal requirements. Stores in Israel sell kosher food under rabbinical supervision. The kosher restaurants are separated into dairy and meat areas.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In many locations, the IKEA restaurants open daily before the rest of the store and serve breakfast. All food products are based on Swedish recipes and traditions. Food accounts for 5% of IKEA's sales.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "IKEA sells plant-based meatballs made from potatoes, apples, pea protein, and oats in all of its stores. According to United States journalist Avery Yale Kamila, IKEA began testing its plant-based meatballs in 2014, then launched the plant-based meatballs in 2015 and began testing vegan hot dogs in 2018. In 2019, journalist James Hansen reported in Eater London that IKEA would only sell vegetarian food at Christmas time.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Every store has a children's play area, named Småland (Swedish for small lands; it is also the Swedish province of Småland where founder Kamprad was born). Parents drop off their children at a gate to the playground, and pick them up after they arrive at another entrance. In some stores, parents are given free pagers by the on-site staff, which the staff can use to summon parents whose children need them earlier than expected; in others, staff summon parents through announcements over the in-store public address system or by calling them on their mobile phones. The largest Småland play area is located at the IKEA store in Navi Mumbai, India. Some of these were closed down due to the COVID-19 pandemic.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Until 28 September 2023, IKEA owned & operated the MEGA Family Shopping Centre chain in Russia. Its operations have since been sold to Gazprombank.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "On 8 August 2008, IKEA UK launched a virtual mobile phone network called IKEA Family Mobile, which ran on T-Mobile. At launch it was the cheapest pay-as-you-go network in the UK. In June 2015 the network announced that its services would cease to operate from 31 August 2015.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "As of 2012, IKEA has a joint venture with TCL to provide Uppleva integrated HDTV and entertainment system products.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In mid-August 2012, the company announced that it would establish a chain of 100 economy hotels in Europe but, unlike its few existing hotels in Scandinavia, they would not carry the IKEA name, nor would they use IKEA furniture and furnishings – they would be operated by an unnamed international group of hoteliers. As of 30 April 2018, however, the company owned only a single hotel, the IKEA Hotell in Älmhult, Sweden.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "It was previously planning to open another one, in New Haven, Connecticut, United States, after converting the historic Pirelli Building. The company received approval for the concept from the city's planning commission in mid-November 2018; the building was to include 165 rooms and the property would offer 129 dedicated parking spaces. Research in April 2019 provided no indication that the hotel had been completed as of that time. The building was then sold to Connecticut architect and developer Becker + Becker for $1.2 million. Opening in 2022 under Hotel Marcel, it is managed by Charlestowne Hotels and became part of Hilton's Tapestry Collection.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "From 2016 to 2018, IKEA sold a commuter belt-driven bicycle, the Sladda.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "In September 2017, IKEA announced they would be acquiring the UD company TaskRabbit. The deal, completed later that year, has TaskRabbit operating as an independent company.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "In March 2020, IKEA announced that it had partnered with Pizza Hut Hong Kong on a joint venture. IKEA launched a new side table called SÄVA. The table, designed to resemble a pizza saver, would be boxed in packaging resembling a pizza box, and the building instructions included a suggestion to order a Swedish meatball pizza from Pizza Hut, which would contain the same meatballs served in IKEA restaurants.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "In April 2020, IKEA acquired AI imaging startup Geomagical Labs.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "In July 2020, IKEA opened a concept store in the Harajuku district of Tokyo, Japan, where it launched its first ever apparel line.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Ingka Centres, IKEA's malls division, announced in December 2021 that it would open two malls, anchored by IKEA stores, in Gurugram and Noida in India at a cost of around ₹9,000 crore (US$1.1 billion). Both malls are expected to open by 2025.",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "In 2016, IKEA Canada partnered with the Setsuné Indigenous Fashion Incubator, co-founded by Sage Paul, to design and produce the collection ÅTERSTÄLLA, which means to restore, heal, or redecorate, and it was made entirely from salvaged Ikea textiles, reflecting the traditional Indigenous value to \"use everything.\"",
"title": "Products and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "IKEA is owned and operated by a complicated array of not-for-profit and for-profit corporations. The corporate structure is divided into two main parts: operations and franchising.",
"title": "Corporate structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "INGKA Holding B.V., based in the Netherlands, owns the Ingka Group, which takes care of the centres, retails, customer fulfillment, and all the other services related to IKEA products. The IKEA brand is owned and managed by Inter IKEA Systems B.V., based in the Netherlands, owned by Inter IKEA Holding B.V. Inter IKEA Holding is also in charge of design, manufacturing and supply of IKEA products.",
"title": "Corporate structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Inter IKEA Systems is owned by Inter IKEA Holding BV, a company registered in the Netherlands, formerly registered in Luxembourg (under the name Inter IKEA Holding SA). Inter IKEA Holding, in turn, is owned by the Interogo Foundation, based in Liechtenstein. In 2016, the INGKA Holding sold its design, manufacturing and logistics subsidiaries to Inter IKEA Holding.",
"title": "Corporate structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "In June 2013, Ingvar Kamprad resigned from the board of Inter IKEA Holding SA and his youngest son Mathias Kamprad replaced Per Ludvigsson as the chairman of the holding company. Following his decision to step down, the 87-year-old founder explained, \"I see this as a good time for me to leave the board of Inter IKEA Group. By that we are also taking another step in the generation shift that has been ongoing for some years.\" After the 2016 company restructure, Inter IKEA Holding SA no longer exists, having reincorporated in the Netherlands. Mathias Kamprad became a board member of the Inter IKEA Group and the Interogo Foundation. Mathias and his two older brothers, who also have leadership roles at IKEA, work on the corporation's overall vision and long-term strategy.",
"title": "Corporate structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Along with helping IKEA make a non-taxable profit, IKEA's complicated corporate structure allowed Kamprad to maintain tight control over the operations of INGKA Holding, and thus the operation of most IKEA stores. The INGKA Foundation's five-person executive committee was chaired by Kamprad. It appoints a board of INGKA Holding, approves any changes to INGKA Holding's bylaws, and has the right to preempt new share issues. If a member of the executive committee quits or dies, the other four members appoint their replacement.",
"title": "Corporate structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "In Kamprad's absence, the foundation's bylaws include specific provisions requiring it to continue operating the INGKA Holding group and specifying that shares can be sold only to another foundation with the same objectives as the INGKA Foundation.",
"title": "Corporate structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "The net profit of IKEA Group (which does not include Inter IKEA systems) in fiscal year 2009 (after paying franchise fees to Inter IKEA systems) was €2.538 billion on sales of €21.846 billion. Because INGKA Holding is owned by the non-profit INGKA Foundation, none of this profit is taxed. The foundation's nonprofit status also means that the Kamprad family cannot reap these profits directly, but the Kamprads do collect a portion of IKEA sales profits through the franchising relationship between INGKA Holding and Inter IKEA Systems.",
"title": "Corporate structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "As a franchisee, the Ingka Group pays 3% of royalties to Inter IKEA Systems. Inter IKEA Systems collected €631 million of franchise fees in 2004 but reported pre-tax profits of only €225 million in 2004. One of the major pre-tax expenses that Inter IKEA systems reported was €590 million of \"other operating charges\". IKEA has refused to explain these charges, but Inter IKEA Systems appears to make large payments to I.I. Holding, another Luxembourg-registered group that, according to The Economist, \"is almost certain to be controlled by the Kamprad family\". I.I. Holding made a profit of €328 million in 2004.",
"title": "Corporate structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "In 2004, the Inter IKEA group of companies and I.I. Holding reported combined profits of €553m and paid €19m in taxes, or approximately 3.5 percent.",
"title": "Corporate structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Public Eye, a non-profit organisation in Switzerland that promotes corporate responsibility, has formally criticised IKEA for its tax avoidance strategies. In 2007, the organisation nominated IKEA for one of its Public Eye \"awards\", which highlight corporate irresponsibility.",
"title": "Corporate structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "In February 2016, the Greens / EFA group in the European Parliament issued a report entitled IKEA: Flat Pack Tax Avoidance on the tax planning strategies of IKEA and their possible use to avoid tax in several European countries. The report was sent to Pierre Moscovici, the European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs, Taxation and Customs, and Margrethe Vestager, the European Commissioner for Competition, expressing the hope that it would be of use to them in their respective roles \"to advance the fight for tax justice in Europe\".",
"title": "Corporate structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Although IKEA originated in Sweden, their household products and furniture products are manufactured in many different countries, in order to achieve cost efficiency. For most of its products, the final assembly is performed by the end-user (consumer).",
"title": "Manufacturing, logistics, and labour"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Swedwood, an IKEA subsidiary, produces all of the company's wood-based products, with the largest Swedwood factory located in Southern Poland. According to the subsidiary, over 16,000 employees across 50 sites in 10 countries manufacture the 100 million pieces of furniture that IKEA sells annually. IKEA furniture uses the hardwood alternative particle board. Hultsfred, a factory in southern Sweden, is the company's sole supplier.",
"title": "Manufacturing, logistics, and labour"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Distribution centre efficiency and flexibility have been one of IKEA's ongoing priorities and thus it has implemented automated, robotic warehouse systems and warehouse management systems (WMS). Such systems facilitate a merger of the traditional retail and mail order sales channels into an omni-channel fulfillment model. In 2020, Ikea was noted by Supply Chain magazine as having one of the most automated warehouse systems in the world.",
"title": "Manufacturing, logistics, and labour"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, IKEA has been facing major supply chain issues since 2021, which could extend into 2022. Jon Abrahamsson, the chief executive of Inter IKEA has stated that the main issue is shipping products from China, as a \"quarter\" of IKEA products are made there. A variety of reasons led to supply shortages, including consumption shocks. In addition, factories were unable to produce raw materials and workers even after they began receiving orders.",
"title": "Manufacturing, logistics, and labour"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "During the 1980s, IKEA kept its costs down by using production facilities in East Germany. A portion of the workforce at those factories consisted of political prisoners. This fact, revealed in a report by Ernst & Young commissioned by the company, resulted from the intermingling of criminals and political dissidents in the state-owned production facilities IKEA contracted with, a practice which was generally known in West Germany. IKEA was one of a number of companies, including West German firms, which benefited from this practice. The investigation resulted from attempts by former political prisoners to obtain compensation. In November 2012, IKEA admitted being aware at the time of the possibility of use of forced labour and failing to exercise sufficient control to identify and avoid it. A summary of the Ernst & Young report was released on 16 November 2012.",
"title": "Manufacturing, logistics, and labour"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "In 2018, Ikea was accused of union busting when employees sought to organize, using such tactics as captive audience meetings.",
"title": "Manufacturing, logistics, and labour"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "IKEA was named one of the 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers in 2004 and 2005 by Working Mothers magazine. It ranked 80 in Fortune's 200 Best Companies to Work For in 2006 and in October 2008, IKEA Canada LP was named one of \"Canada's Top 100 Employers\" by Mediacorp Canada Inc.",
"title": "Manufacturing, logistics, and labour"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "After initial environmental issues like the highly publicized formaldehyde scandals in the early 1980s and 1992, IKEA took a proactive stance on environmental issues and tried to prevent future incidents through a variety of measures. In 1990, IKEA invited Karl-Henrik Robèrt, founder of the Natural Step, to address its board of directors. Robert's system conditions for sustainability provided a strategic approach to improving the company's environmental performance. In 1990, IKEA adopted the Natural Step framework as the basis for its environmental plan. This led to the development of an Environmental Action Plan, which was adopted in 1992. The plan focused on structural change, allowing IKEA to \"maximize the impact of resources invested and reduce the energy necessary to address isolated issues.\" The environmental measures taken include the following:",
"title": "Environmental initiatives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "In 2000, IKEA introduced its code of conduct for suppliers that covers social, safety, and environmental questions. Today IKEA has around 60 auditors who perform hundreds of supplier audits every year. The main purpose of these audits is to make sure that the IKEA suppliers follow the law in each country where they are based. Most IKEA suppliers fulfil the law today with exceptions for some special issues, one being excessive working hours in Asia, in countries such as China and India.",
"title": "Environmental initiatives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "As of March 2018, IKEA has signed on with 25 other companies to participate in the British Retail Consortium's Better Retail Better World initiative, which challenges companies to meet objectives outlined by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.",
"title": "Environmental initiatives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "To make IKEA a more sustainable company, a product life cycle was created. For the idea stage, products should be flat-packed so that more items can be shipped at once; products should also be easier to dismantle and recycle. Raw materials are used, and since wood and cotton are two of IKEA's most important manufacturing products, the company works with environmentally friendly forests and cotton, whereby the excessive use of chemicals and water is avoided.",
"title": "Environmental initiatives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "IKEA stores recycle waste and many run on renewable energy. All employees are trained in environmental and social responsibility, while public transit is one of the priorities when the location of stores is considered. Also, the coffee and chocolate served at IKEA stores is UTZ Certified.",
"title": "Environmental initiatives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "The last stage of the life cycle is the end of life. Most IKEA stores recycle light bulbs and drained batteries, and the company is also exploring the recycling of sofas and other home furnishing products.",
"title": "Environmental initiatives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "In August 2008, IKEA announced that it had created IKEA GreenTech, a €50 million venture capital fund. Located in Lund (a university town in Sweden), it will invest in 8–10 companies in the coming five years with focus on solar panels, alternative light sources, product materials, energy efficiency and water saving and purification. The aim is to commercialise green technologies for sale in IKEA stores within 3–4 years.",
"title": "Environmental initiatives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "On 17 February 2011, IKEA announced its plans to develop a wind farm in Dalarna County, Sweden, furthering its goal of using only renewable energy to fuel its operations. As of June 2012, 17 United States IKEA stores are powered by solar panels, with 22 additional installations in progress, and IKEA owns the 165 MW Cameron Wind farm in Cameron County on the South Texas coast and a 42 MW coastal wind farm in Finland.",
"title": "Environmental initiatives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "In September 2019, IKEA announced that they would be investing $2.8 billion in renewable energy infrastructure. The company is targeting making their entire supply chain climate positive by 2030.",
"title": "Environmental initiatives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "IKEA is the world's largest buyer and retailer of wood. In 2015, IKEA claimed to use 1% of the world's supply of timber.",
"title": "Environmental initiatives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "According to IKEA's 2021 Sustainability Report, 99.5% of all wood that the company uses is either recycled or meets the standards of the Forest Stewardship Council. IKEA states that \"[a]ll wood used for IKEA products must meet our critical requirements that ensure it's not (e.g.) sourced from illegally harvested forests [...]\". However, despite these claims, IKEA has been involved in unsustainable and most likely illegal logging of wood in multiple Eastern European countries in recent years; see Criticism of IKEA.",
"title": "Environmental initiatives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "IKEA owns about 136,000 acres of forest in the US and about 450,000 acres in Europe.",
"title": "Environmental initiatives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "On 14 January 2021, IKEA announced that Ingka Investments had acquired approximately 10,840 acres (4,386 hectares) near the Altamaha River Basin in the U.S. state of Georgia from The Conservation Fund. The acquisition comes with the agreement \"to protect the land from fragmentation, restore the longleaf pine forest, and safe-guard the habitat of the gopher tortoise.\"",
"title": "Environmental initiatives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "IKEA is reported to be the largest private landowner in Romania since 2015.",
"title": "Environmental initiatives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "In 2011, the company examined its wood consumption and noticed that almost half of its global pine and spruce consumption was for the fabrication of pallets. The company consequently started a transition to the use of paper pallets and the \"Optiledge system\". The OptiLedge product is totally recyclable, made from 100% virgin high-impact copolymer polypropylene (PP) plastic. The system is a \"unit load alternative to the use of a pallet. The system consists of the OptiLedge (usually used in pairs), aligned and strapped to the bottom carton to form a base layer upon which to stack more products. Corner boards are used when strapping to minimize the potential for package compression.\" The conversion began in Germany and Japan, before its introduction into the rest of Europe and North America. The system has been marketed to other companies, and IKEA has formed the OptiLedge company to manage and sell the product.",
"title": "Environmental initiatives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Since March 2013, IKEA has stopped providing plastic bags to customers, but offers reusable bags for sale. The IKEA restaurants also only offer reusable plates, knives, forks, spoons, etc. Toilets in some IKEA WC-rooms have been outfitted with dual-function flushers. IKEA has recycling bins for compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), energy-saving bulbs, and batteries.",
"title": "Environmental initiatives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "In 2001, IKEA was one of the first companies to operate its own cross-border goods trains through several countries in Europe.",
"title": "Environmental initiatives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "IKEA has expanded its sustainability plan in the UK to include electric car charge points for customers at all locations by the end of 2013. The effort will include Nissan and Ecotricity and promise to deliver an 80% charge in 30 minutes.",
"title": "Environmental initiatives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "From 2016, IKEA has only sold energy-efficient LED lightbulbs, lamps and light fixtures. LED lightbulbs use as little as 15% of the power of a regular incandescent light bulb.",
"title": "Environmental initiatives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "The INGKA Foundation is officially dedicated to promoting \"innovations in architecture and interior design\". The net worth of the foundation exceeded the net worth of the much better known Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (now the largest private foundation in the world) for a period. However, most of the Group's profit is spent on investment.",
"title": "Donations made by IKEA"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "IKEA is involved in several international charitable causes, particularly in partnership with UNICEF, including:",
"title": "Donations made by IKEA"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "IKEA also supports American Forests to restore forests and reduce pollution.",
"title": "Donations made by IKEA"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "On 3 March 2022, IKEA announced €20 million donation to UNHCR for relief support of Ukrainians who suffer from the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.",
"title": "Donations made by IKEA"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "IKEA donated €10 million to Doctors Without Borders for its work in Syria in response to the 2023 Turkey–Syria earthquake.",
"title": "Donations made by IKEA"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "In September 2005, IKEA Social Initiative was formed to manage the company's social involvement on a global level. IKEA Social Initiative is headed by Marianne Barner.",
"title": "Donations made by IKEA"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "The main partners of IKEA Social Initiative are UNICEF and Save the Children.",
"title": "Donations made by IKEA"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "On 23 February 2009, at the ECOSOC event in New York, UNICEF announced that IKEA Social Initiative has become the agency's largest corporate partner, with total commitments of more than US$180 million (£281,079,000).",
"title": "Donations made by IKEA"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "Examples of involvements:",
"title": "Donations made by IKEA"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "In 2009, Sweden's largest television station, SVT, revealed that IKEA's money—the three per cent collection from each store—does not actually go to a charitable foundation in the Netherlands, as IKEA has said. Inter IKEA is owned by a foundation in Liechtenstein, called Interogo, which has amassed $12 billion (£18 billion), and is controlled by the Kamprad family.",
"title": "Donations made by IKEA"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "IKEA used to publish an annual catalogue, first published in Swedish in 1951. It is considered to be the main marketing tool of the company, consuming 70% of its annual marketing budget. The catalogue is distributed both in stores and by mail, with most of it being produced by IKEA Communications AB in IKEA's hometown of Älmhult, Sweden. At its peak in 2016, 200 million copies of the catalogue were distributed in 32 languages to more than 50 markets. In December 2020, IKEA announced that they would cease publication of both the print and digital versions of the catalogue, with the 2021 edition (released in 2020) being the final edition.",
"title": "Marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "In common with some other retailers, IKEA launched a loyalty card called \"IKEA Family\". The card is free of charge and can be used to obtain discounts on certain products found in-store. It is available worldwide. In conjunction with the card, IKEA also publishes and sells a printed quarterly magazine titled IKEA Family Live which supplements the card and catalogue. The magazine is already printed in thirteen languages and an English edition for the United Kingdom was launched in February 2007. It is expected to have a subscription of over 500,000.",
"title": "Marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "On 12 September 2017, IKEA announced the augmented reality app, IKEA Place, following by Apple's release of its ARkit technology and iOS 11. IKEA Place helps consumers to visualize true to scale IKEA products into real environment.",
"title": "Marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "In 1994, IKEA ran a commercial in the United States, titled Dining Room, widely thought to be the first to feature a homosexual couple; it aired for several weeks before being withdrawn after calls for a boycott and a bomb threat directed at IKEA stores. Other IKEA commercials appeal to the wider LGBTQ community, one featuring a transgender woman.",
"title": "Marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "In 2002, the inaugural television component of the \"Unböring\" campaign, titled Lamp, went on to win several awards, including a Grand Clio, Golds at the London International Awards and the ANDY Awards, and the Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, the most prestigious awards ceremony in the advertising community.",
"title": "Marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "A debate ensued between Fraser Patterson, Chief Executive of Onis, and Andrew McGuinness, partner at Beattie McGuinness Bungay (BMB), the advertising and PR agency that was awarded the £12 million IKEA account. The essence of the debate was that BMB claimed to be unaware of Onis's campaign as Onis was not an advertising agency. Onis's argument was that its advertising could be seen in prominent landmarks throughout London, having been already accredited, showing concern about the impact IKEA's campaign would have on the originality of its own. BMB and IKEA subsequently agreed to provide Onis with a feature page on the IKEA campaign site linking through to Onis's website for a period of one year.",
"title": "Marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "In 2008, IKEA paired up with the makers of video game The Sims 2 to make a stuff pack called IKEA Home Stuff, featuring many IKEA products. It was released on 24 June 2008 in North America and 26 June 2008 in Europe. It is the second stuff pack with a major brand, the first being The Sims 2 H&M Fashion Stuff.",
"title": "Marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "IKEA took over the title sponsorship of Philadelphia's annual Thanksgiving Day parade in 2008, replacing Boscov's, which filed for bankruptcy in August 2008.",
"title": "Marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "In November 2008, a subway train decorated in IKEA style was introduced in Novosibirsk, Russia. Four cars were turned into a mobile showroom of the Swedish design. The redesigned train, which features colourful seats and fancy curtains, carried passengers until 6 June 2009.",
"title": "Marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "In March 2010, IKEA developed an event in four important Métro stations in Paris, in which furniture collections are displayed in high-traffic spots, giving potential customers a chance to check out the brand's products. The Métro walls were also filled with prints that showcase IKEA interiors.",
"title": "Marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "In September 2017, IKEA launched the \"IKEA Human Catalogue\" campaign, in which memory champion Yanjaa Wintersoul memorized all 328 pages of the catalogue in minute detail in just a week before its launch. To prove the legitimacy and accuracy of the campaign, live demonstrations were held at press conferences in IKEA stores across Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand as well as a Facebook Live event held at the Facebook Singapore headquarters and talk show demonstrations in the US with Steve Harvey among others. The advertising campaign was hugely successful winning numerous industry awards including the Webby award 2018 for best social media campaign, an Ogilvy award and is currently a contender for the Cannes Lions 2018.",
"title": "Marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "In 2020, IKEA conducted a \"Buy Back Friday\" campaign with a message to present a new life to old furniture instead of offering customers to buy new items for Black Friday.",
"title": "Marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "In June 2021, IKEA said it had suspended adverts on GB News because of concerns the channel's content would go against their aim to be inclusive. In a statement IKEA said: \"We have safeguards in place to prevent our advertising from appearing on platforms that are not in line with our humanistic values. We are in the process of investigating how this may have occurred to ensure it won't happen again in future, and have suspended paid display advertising in the meantime.\"",
"title": "Marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "IKEA has been criticized about unsustainable sourcing of wood from protected forests, certain unsafe product lines, negative effects on communities, as well as other issues.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "In the 1980s under the rule of the genocidal Romanian Communist Dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania's secret police the 'Securitate' received six-figure payments from Ikea. According to declassified files at the National College for Studying the Securitate Archives, Ikea agreed to overcharge for products made in Romania and some of the overpayment funds were deposited into an account controlled by the Securitate.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "IKEA has avoided millions of euros in taxes performing some intrincated mechanisms and it was noted by the EU back in 2017. The main countries where they operated their business using tax loopholes were the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "In 2018, the company's plush toy shark \"Blåhaj\" was widely used in an internet meme, with social media users posting humorous photos of it in their homes.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "The song \"IKEA\" was released by Jonathan Coulton on the album Smoking Monkey in 2003.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "IKEA stores have been featured in many works of fiction. Some examples include:",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "",
"title": "External links"
}
]
| Inter IKEA Systems B.V., doing business as IKEA, is a Swedish multinational conglomerate that designs and sells ready-to-assemble furniture, kitchen appliances, decoration, home accessories, and various other goods and home services. Started in 1943 by Ingvar Kamprad and currently legally headquartered in the Netherlands, IKEA has been the world's largest furniture retailer since 2008. The brand used by the group is derived from an acronym that consists of the founder's initials, and those of Elmtaryd, the family farm where he was born, and the nearby village Agunnaryd. The group is primarily known for its modernist furniture designs, its simple approach to interior design, and its immersive shopping concept, based around a showroom of decorated room settings, in which customers can interact with the available articles onsite. In addition, the firm is known for its attention to cost control and continuous product development, notably, the ready-to-assemble model of furniture sales, and other elements which have allowed IKEA to establish lower prices than its competitors. As of March 2021, there are 422 IKEA stores operating in 50 countries and in fiscal year 2018, €38.8 billion (US$44.6 billion) worth of IKEA goods were sold. For multiple reasons, including lowering taxes payable, IKEA uses a complicated corporate structure. Within this structure, all IKEA stores are operated under franchise from Inter IKEA Systems B.V. which handles branding, design, manufacturing, and supply. Another part of the IKEA group, Ingka Group, operates the majority of IKEA stores as a franchisee and pays royalties to Inter IKEA Systems B.V. Some IKEA stores are also operated by independent franchises. The IKEA website contains about 12,000 products and there were over 2.1 billion visitors to IKEA's websites in the year from September 2015 to August 2016. The group is responsible for approximately 1% of world commercial-product wood consumption, making it the largest individual user of wood in the world. IKEA claims to use 99.5% recycled or FSC-certified wood. However, IKEA has been shown to be involved in unsustainable and most likely illegal logging of old-growth and protected forests in multiple Eastern European countries in recent years. | 2001-11-05T21:50:55Z | 2023-12-30T23:30:44Z | [
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14,752 | Iridium | Iridium is a chemical element; it has symbol Ir and atomic number 77. A very hard, brittle, silvery-white transition metal of the platinum group, it is considered the second-densest naturally occurring metal (after osmium) with a density of 22.56 g/cm (0.815 lb/cu in) as defined by experimental X-ray crystallography. It is one of the most corrosion-resistant metals, even at temperatures as high as 2,000 °C (3,630 °F). However, corrosion-resistance is not quantifiable in absolute terms: although only certain molten salts and halogens are corrosive to solid iridium, finely divided iridium dust is much more reactive and can be flammable, whereas gold dust is not flammable but can be attacked by substances that iridium resists, such as aqua regia.
Iridium was discovered in 1803 among insoluble impurities in natural platinum. Smithson Tennant, the primary discoverer, named it after the Greek goddess Iris, personification of the rainbow, because of the striking and diverse colors of its salts. Iridium is one of the rarest elements in Earth's crust, with estimated annual production and consumption of only 7.3 tonnes (16 thousand pounds) in 2018. Ir and Ir are the only two naturally occurring isotopes of iridium, as well as the only stable isotopes; the latter is the more abundant.
The dominant uses of iridium are the metal itself and its alloys, as in high-performance spark plugs, crucibles for recrystallization of semiconductors at high temperatures, and electrodes for the production of chlorine in the chloralkali process. Important compounds of iridium are chlorides and iodides in industrial catalysis. Iridium is a component of some OLEDs.
Iridium is found in meteorites in much higher abundance than in the Earth's crust. For this reason, the unusually high abundance of iridium in the clay layer at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary gave rise to the Alvarez hypothesis that the impact of a massive extraterrestrial object caused the extinction of dinosaurs and many other species 66 million years ago, now known to be produced by the impact that formed the Chicxulub crater. Similarly, an iridium anomaly in core samples from the Pacific Ocean suggested the Eltanin impact of about 2.5 million years ago.
It is thought that the total amount of iridium in the planet Earth is much higher than that observed in crustal rocks, but as with other platinum-group metals, the high density and tendency of iridium to bond with iron caused most iridium to descend below the crust when the planet was young and still molten.
A member of the platinum group metals, iridium is white, resembling platinum, but with a slight yellowish cast. Because of its hardness, brittleness, and very high melting point, solid iridium is difficult to machine, form, or work; thus powder metallurgy is commonly employed instead. It is the only metal to maintain good mechanical properties in air at temperatures above 1,600 °C (2,910 °F). It has the 10th highest boiling point among all elements and becomes a superconductor at temperatures below 0.14 K (−273.010 °C; −459.418 °F).
Iridium's modulus of elasticity is the second-highest among the metals, being surpassed only by osmium. This, together with a high shear modulus and a very low figure for Poisson's ratio (the relationship of longitudinal to lateral strain), indicate the high degree of stiffness and resistance to deformation that have rendered its fabrication into useful components a matter of great difficulty. Despite these limitations and iridium's high cost, a number of applications have developed where mechanical strength is an essential factor in some of the extremely severe conditions encountered in modern technology.
The measured density of iridium is only slightly lower (by about 0.12%) than that of osmium, the densest metal known. Some ambiguity occurred regarding which of the two elements was denser, due to the small size of the difference in density and difficulties in measuring it accurately, but, with increased accuracy in factors used for calculating density, X-ray crystallographic data yielded densities of 22.56 g/cm (0.815 lb/cu in) for iridium and 22.59 g/cm (0.816 lb/cu in) for osmium.
Iridium is extremely brittle, to the point of being hard to weld because the heat-affected zone cracks, but it can be made more ductile by addition of small quantities of titanium and zirconium (0.2% of each apparently works well).
The Vickers hardness of pure platinum is 56 HV, whereas platinum with 50% of iridium can reach over 500 HV.
Iridium is the most corrosion-resistant metal known: it is not attacked by acids, including aqua regia. In the presence of oxygen, it reacts with cyanide salts. Traditional oxidants also react, including the halogens and oxygen at higher temperatures. Iridium also reacts directly with sulfur at atmospheric pressure to yield iridium disulfide.
Iridium has two naturally occurring stable isotopes, Ir and Ir, with natural abundances of 37.3% and 62.7%, respectively. At least 37 radioisotopes have also been synthesized, ranging in mass number from 164 to 202. Ir, which falls between the two stable isotopes, is the most stable radioisotope, with a half-life of 73.827 days, and finds application in brachytherapy and in industrial radiography, particularly for nondestructive testing of welds in steel in the oil and gas industries; iridium-192 sources have been involved in a number of radiological accidents. Three other isotopes have half-lives of at least a day—Ir, Ir, and Ir. Isotopes with masses below 191 decay by some combination of β decay, α decay, and (rare) proton emission, with the exception of Ir, which decays by electron capture. Synthetic isotopes heavier than 191 decay by β decay, although Ir also has a minor electron capture decay path. All known isotopes of iridium were discovered between 1934 and 2008, with the most recent discoveries being Ir.
At least 32 metastable isomers have been characterized, ranging in mass number from 164 to 197. The most stable of these is Ir, which decays by isomeric transition with a half-life of 241 years, making it more stable than any of iridium's synthetic isotopes in their ground states. The least stable isomer is Ir with a half-life of only 2 μs. The isotope Ir was the first one of any element to be shown to present a Mössbauer effect. This renders it useful for Mössbauer spectroscopy for research in physics, chemistry, biochemistry, metallurgy, and mineralogy.
Iridium forms compounds in oxidation states between −3 and +9, but the most common oxidation states are +1, +2, +3, and +4. Well-characterized compounds containing iridium in the +6 oxidation state include IrF6 and the oxides Sr2MgIrO6 and Sr2CaIrO6. iridium(VIII) oxide (IrO4) was generated under matrix isolation conditions at 6 K in argon. The highest oxidation state (+9), which is also the highest recorded for any element, is found in gaseous [IrO4].
Iridium does not form binary hydrides. Only one binary oxide is well-characterized: iridium dioxide, IrO2. It is a blue black solid that adopts the fluorite structure. A sesquioxide, Ir2O3, has been described as a blue-black powder, which is oxidized to IrO2 by HNO3. The corresponding disulfides, diselenides, sesquisulfides, and sesquiselenides are known, as well as IrS3.
Binary trihalides, IrX3, are known for all of the halogens. For oxidation states +4 and above, only the tetrafluoride, pentafluoride and hexafluoride are known. Iridium hexafluoride, IrF6, is a volatile yellow solid, composed of octahedral molecules. It decomposes in water and is reduced to IrF4. Iridium pentafluoride is also a strong oxidant, but it is a tetramer, Ir4F20, formed by four corner-sharing octahedra.
Iridium has extensive coordination chemistry.
Iridium in its complexes is always low-spin. Ir(III) and Ir(IV) generally form octahedral complexes. Polyhydride complexes are known for the +5 and +3 oxidation states. One example is IrH5(PPr3)2. The ternary hydride Mg6Ir2H11 is believed to contain both the IrH5 and the 18-electron IrH4 anion.
Iridium also forms oxyanions with oxidation states +4 and +5. K2IrO3 and KIrO3 can be prepared from the reaction of potassium oxide or potassium superoxide with iridium at high temperatures. Such solids are not soluble in conventional solvents.
Just like many elements, iridium forms important chloride complexes. Hexachloroiridic (IV) acid, H2IrCl6, and its ammonium salt are the most common iridium compounds from an industrial and preparative perspectives. They are intermediates in the purification of iridium and used as precursors for most other iridium compounds, as well as in the preparation of anode coatings. The IrCl6 ion has an intense dark brown color, and can be readily reduced to the lighter-colored IrCl6 and vice versa. Iridium trichloride, IrCl3, which can be obtained in anhydrous form from direct oxidation of iridium powder by chlorine at 650 °C, or in hydrated form by dissolving Ir2O3 in hydrochloric acid, is often used as a starting material for the synthesis of other Ir(III) compounds. Another compound used as a starting material is ammonium hexachloroiridate(III), (NH4)3IrCl6.
In the presence of air, iridium metal dissolves in molten alkali-metal cyanides to produce the Ir(CN)6 (hexacyanoiridate) ion and upon oxidation produces the most stable oxide.
Organoiridium compounds contain iridium–carbon bonds. Early studies identified the very stable tetrairidium dodecacarbonyl, Ir4(CO)12. In this compound, each of the iridium atoms is bonded to the other three, forming a tetrahedral cluster. The discovery of Vaska's complex (IrCl(CO)[P(C6H5)3]2) opened the door for oxidative addition reactions, a process fundamental to useful reactions. For example, Crabtree's catalyst, a homogeneous catalyst for hydrogenation reactions.
Iridium complexes played a pivotal role in the development of Carbon–hydrogen bond activation (C–H activation), which promises to allow functionalization of hydrocarbons, which are traditionally regarded as unreactive.
The discovery of iridium is intertwined with that of platinum and the other metals of the platinum group. The first European reference to platinum appears in 1557 in the writings of the Italian humanist Julius Caesar Scaliger as a description of an unknown noble metal found between Darién and Mexico, "which no fire nor any Spanish artifice has yet been able to liquefy". From their first encounters with platinum, the Spanish generally saw the metal as a kind of impurity in gold, and it was treated as such. It was often simply thrown away, and there was an official decree forbidding the adulteration of gold with platinum impurities.
In 1735, Antonio de Ulloa and Jorge Juan y Santacilia saw Native Americans mining platinum while the Spaniards were travelling through Colombia and Peru for eight years. Ulloa and Juan found mines with the whitish metal nuggets and took them home to Spain. Antonio de Ulloa returned to Spain and established the first mineralogy lab in Spain and was the first to systematically study platinum, which was in 1748. His historical account of the expedition included a description of platinum as being neither separable nor calcinable. Ulloa also anticipated the discovery of platinum mines. After publishing the report in 1748, Ulloa did not continue to investigate the new metal. In 1758, he was sent to superintend mercury mining operations in Huancavelica.
In 1741, Charles Wood, a British metallurgist, found various samples of Colombian platinum in Jamaica, which he sent to William Brownrigg for further investigation.
In 1750, after studying the platinum sent to him by Wood, Brownrigg presented a detailed account of the metal to the Royal Society, stating that he had seen no mention of it in any previous accounts of known minerals. Brownrigg also made note of platinum's extremely high melting point and refractory metal-like behaviour toward borax. Other chemists across Europe soon began studying platinum, including Andreas Sigismund Marggraf, Torbern Bergman, Jöns Jakob Berzelius, William Lewis, and Pierre Macquer. In 1752, Henrik Scheffer published a detailed scientific description of the metal, which he referred to as "white gold", including an account of how he succeeded in fusing platinum ore with the aid of arsenic. Scheffer described platinum as being less pliable than gold, but with similar resistance to corrosion.
Chemists who studied platinum dissolved it in aqua regia (a mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acids) to create soluble salts. They always observed a small amount of a dark, insoluble residue. Joseph Louis Proust thought that the residue was graphite. The French chemists Victor Collet-Descotils, Antoine François, comte de Fourcroy, and Louis Nicolas Vauquelin also observed the black residue in 1803, but did not obtain enough for further experiments.
In 1803, British scientist Smithson Tennant (1761–1815) analyzed the insoluble residue and concluded that it must contain a new metal. Vauquelin treated the powder alternately with alkali and acids and obtained a volatile new oxide, which he believed to be of this new metal—which he named ptene, from the Greek word πτηνός ptēnós, "winged". Tennant, who had the advantage of a much greater amount of residue, continued his research and identified the two previously undiscovered elements in the black residue, iridium and osmium. He obtained dark red crystals (probably of Na2[IrCl6]·nH2O) by a sequence of reactions with sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid. He named iridium after Iris (Ἶρις), the Greek winged goddess of the rainbow and the messenger of the Olympian gods, because many of the salts he obtained were strongly colored. Discovery of the new elements was documented in a letter to the Royal Society on June 21, 1804.
British scientist John George Children was the first to melt a sample of iridium in 1813 with the aid of "the greatest galvanic battery that has ever been constructed" (at that time). The first to obtain high-purity iridium was Robert Hare in 1842. He found it had a density of around 21.8 g/cm (0.79 lb/cu in) and noted the metal is nearly immalleable and very hard. The first melting in appreciable quantity was done by Henri Sainte-Claire Deville and Jules Henri Debray in 1860. They required burning more than 300 litres (79 US gal) of pure O2 and H2 gas for each 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) of iridium.
These extreme difficulties in melting the metal limited the possibilities for handling iridium. John Isaac Hawkins was looking to obtain a fine and hard point for fountain pen nibs, and in 1834 managed to create an iridium-pointed gold pen. In 1880, John Holland and William Lofland Dudley were able to melt iridium by adding phosphorus and patented the process in the United States; British company Johnson Matthey later stated they had been using a similar process since 1837 and had already presented fused iridium at a number of World Fairs. The first use of an alloy of iridium with ruthenium in thermocouples was made by Otto Feussner in 1933. These allowed for the measurement of high temperatures in air up to 2,000 °C (3,630 °F).
In Munich, Germany in 1957 Rudolf Mössbauer, in what has been called one of the "landmark experiments in twentieth-century physics", discovered the resonant and recoil-free emission and absorption of gamma rays by atoms in a solid metal sample containing only Ir. This phenomenon, known as the Mössbauer effect resulted in the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1961, at the age 32, just three years after he published his discovery.
Along with all elements having atomic weights higher than that of iron, iridium is only naturally formed by the r-process (rapid neutron capture) in supernovae and neutron star mergers.
Iridium is one of the nine least abundant stable elements in Earth's crust, having an average mass fraction of 0.001 ppm in crustal rock; platinum is 10 times more abundant, gold is 40 times more abundant, and silver and mercury are 80 times more abundant. Tellurium is about as abundant as iridium. In contrast to its low abundance in crustal rock, iridium is relatively common in meteorites, with concentrations of 0.5 ppm or more. The overall concentration of iridium on Earth is thought to be much higher than what is observed in crustal rocks, but because of the density and siderophilic ("iron-loving") character of iridium, it descended below the crust and into Earth's core when the planet was still molten.
Iridium is found in nature as an uncombined element or in natural alloys, especially the iridium–osmium alloys osmiridium (osmium-rich) and iridosmium (iridium-rich). In nickel and copper deposits, the platinum group metals occur as sulfides, tellurides, antimonides, and arsenides. In all of these compounds, platinum can be exchanged with a small amount of iridium or osmium. As with all of the platinum group metals, iridium can be found naturally in alloys with raw nickel or raw copper. A number of iridium-dominant minerals, with iridium as the species-forming element, are known. They are exceedingly rare and often represent the iridium analogues of the above-given ones. The examples are irarsite and cuproiridsite, to mention some. Within Earth's crust, iridium is found at highest concentrations in three types of geologic structure: igneous deposits (crustal intrusions from below), impact craters, and deposits reworked from one of the former structures. The largest known primary reserves are in the Bushveld igneous complex in South Africa, (near the largest known impact structure, the Vredefort impact structure) though the large copper–nickel deposits near Norilsk in Russia, and the Sudbury Basin (also an impact crater) in Canada are also significant sources of iridium. Smaller reserves are found in the United States. Iridium is also found in secondary deposits, combined with platinum and other platinum group metals in alluvial deposits. The alluvial deposits used by pre-Columbian people in the Chocó Department of Colombia are still a source for platinum-group metals. As of 2003, world reserves have not been estimated.
Iridium is found within marine organisms, sediments, and the water column. The abundance of iridium in seawater and organisms is relatively low, as it does not readily form chloride complexes. The abundance in organisms is about 20 parts per trillion, or about five orders of magnitude less than in sedimentary rocks at the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–T) boundary. The concentration of iridium in seawater and marine sediment is sensitive to marine oxygenation, seawater temperature, and various geological and biological processes.
Iridium in sediments can come from cosmic dust, volcanoes, precipitation from seawater, microbial processes, or hydrothermal vents, and its abundance can be strongly indicative of the source. It tends to associate with other ferrous metals in manganese nodules. Iridium is one of the characteristic elements of extraterrestrial rocks, and, along with osmium, can be used as a tracer element for meteoritic material in sediment. For example core samples from the Pacific Ocean with elevated iridium levels suggested the Eltanin impact of about 2.5 million years ago.
Some of the mass extinctions, such as the Cretaceous extinction, can be identified by anomalously high concentrations of iridium in sediment, and these can be linked to major asteroid impacts.
The Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary of 66 million years ago, marking the temporal border between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods of geological time, was identified by a thin stratum of iridium-rich clay. A team led by Luis Alvarez proposed in 1980 an extraterrestrial origin for this iridium, attributing it to an asteroid or comet impact. Their theory, known as the Alvarez hypothesis, is now widely accepted to explain the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. A large buried impact crater structure with an estimated age of about 66 million years was later identified under what is now the Yucatán Peninsula (the Chicxulub crater). Dewey M. McLean and others argue that the iridium may have been of volcanic origin instead, because Earth's core is rich in iridium, and active volcanoes such as Piton de la Fournaise, in the island of Réunion, are still releasing iridium.
Worldwide production of iridium was about 7,300 kilograms (16,100 lb) in 2018. The price is high and varying (see table). Illustrative factors that affect the price include oversupply of Ir crucibles and changes in LED technology.
Platinum metals occur together as dilute ores. Iridium is one of the rarer platinum metals: for every 190 tonnes of platinum obtained from ores, only 7.5 tonnes of iridium is isolated. To separate the metals, they must first be brought into solution. Two methods for rendering Ir-containing ores soluble are (i) fusion of the solid with sodium peroxide followed by extraction of the resulting glass in aqua regia and (ii) extraction of the solid with a mixture of chlorine with hydrochloric acid. From soluble extracts, iridium is separated by precipitating solid ammonium hexachloroiridate ((NH4)2IrCl6) or by extracting IrCl6 with organic amines. The first method is similar to the procedure Tennant and Wollaston used for their original separation. The second method can be planned as continuous liquid–liquid extraction and is therefore more suitable for industrial scale production. In either case, the product, an iridium chloride salt, is reduced with hydrogen, yielding the metal as a powder or sponge, which is amenable to powder metallurgy techniques. Iridium is also obtained commercially as a by-product from nickel and copper mining and processing. During electrorefining of copper and nickel, noble metals such as silver, gold and the platinum group metals as well as selenium and tellurium settle to the bottom of the cell as anode mud, which forms the starting point for their extraction.
Due to iridium's resistance to corrosion it has industrial applications. The main areas of use are electrodes for producing chlorine and other corrosive products, OLEDs, crucibles, catalysts (e.g. acetic acid), and ignition tips for spark plugs.
Resistance to heat and corrosion are the bases for several uses of iridium and its alloys.
Owing to its high melting point, hardness, and corrosion resistance, iridium is used to make crucibles. Such crucibles are used in the Czochralski process to produce oxide single-crystals (such as sapphires) for use in computer memory devices and in solid state lasers. The crystals, such as gadolinium gallium garnet and yttrium gallium garnet, are grown by melting pre-sintered charges of mixed oxides under oxidizing conditions at temperatures up to 2,100 °C (3,810 °F).
Certain long-life aircraft engine parts are made of an iridium alloy, and an iridium–titanium alloy is used for deep-water pipes because of its corrosion resistance. Iridium is used for multi-pored spinnerets, through which a plastic polymer melt is extruded to form fibers, such as rayon. Osmium–iridium is used for compass bearings and for balances.
Because of their resistance to arc erosion, iridium alloys are used by some manufacturers for electrical contacts for spark plugs, and iridium-based spark plugs are particularly used in aviation.
Iridium compounds are used as catalysts in the Cativa process for carbonylation of methanol to produce acetic acid.
Iridium complexes are often active for asymmetric hydrogenation both by traditional hydrogenation. and transfer hydrogenation. This property is the basis of the industrial route to the chiral herbicide (S)-metolachlor. As practiced by Syngenta on the scale of 10,000 tons/year, the complex [[ [Ir(COD)Cl]2 in the presence of Josiphos ligands.
The radioisotope iridium-192 is one of the two most important sources of energy for use in industrial γ-radiography for non-destructive testing of metals. Additionally, Ir is used as a source of gamma radiation for the treatment of cancer using brachytherapy, a form of radiotherapy where a sealed radioactive source is placed inside or next to the area requiring treatment. Specific treatments include high-dose-rate prostate brachytherapy, biliary duct brachytherapy, and intracavitary cervix brachytherapy. Iridium-192 is normally produced by neutron activation of isotope iridium-191 in natural-abundance iridium metal.
Iridium complexes are key components of white OLEDs. Similar complexes are used in photocatalysis.
An alloy of 90% platinum and 10% iridium was used in 1889 to construct the International Prototype Meter and kilogram mass, kept by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures near Paris. The meter bar was replaced as the definition of the fundamental unit of length in 1960 by a line in the atomic spectrum of krypton, but the kilogram prototype remained the international standard of mass until 20 May 2019, when the kilogram was redefined in terms of the Planck constant.
Iridium–osmium alloys were used in fountain pen nib tips. The first major use of iridium was in 1834 in nibs mounted on gold. Since 1944, the famous Parker 51 fountain pen was fitted with a nib tipped by a ruthenium and iridium alloy (with 3.8% iridium). The tip material in modern fountain pens is still conventionally called "iridium", although there is seldom any iridium in it; other metals such as ruthenium, osmium, and tungsten have taken its place.
An iridium–platinum alloy was used for the touch holes or vent pieces of cannon. According to a report of the Paris Exhibition of 1867, one of the pieces being exhibited by Johnson and Matthey "has been used in a Whitworth gun for more than 3000 rounds, and scarcely shows signs of wear yet. Those who know the constant trouble and expense which are occasioned by the wearing of the vent-pieces of cannon when in active service, will appreciate this important adaptation".
The pigment iridium black, which consists of very finely divided iridium, is used for painting porcelain an intense black; it was said that "all other porcelain black colors appear grey by the side of it".
Iridium in bulk metallic form is not biologically important or hazardous to health due to its lack of reactivity with tissues; there are only about 20 parts per trillion of iridium in human tissue. Like most metals, finely divided iridium powder can be hazardous to handle, as it is an irritant and may ignite in air. By 2015 very little is known about the toxicity of iridium compounds, primarily because it is used so rarely that few people come in contact with it and those who do only with very small amounts. However, soluble salts, such as the iridium halides, could be hazardous due to elements other than iridium or due to iridium itself. At the same time, most iridium compounds are insoluble, which makes absorption into the body difficult.
A radioisotope of iridium, Ir, is dangerous, like other radioactive isotopes. The only reported injuries related to iridium concern accidental exposure to radiation from Ir used in brachytherapy. High-energy gamma radiation from Ir can increase the risk of cancer. External exposure can cause burns, radiation poisoning, and death. Ingestion of Ir can burn the linings of the stomach and the intestines. Ir, Ir, and Ir tend to deposit in the liver, and can pose health hazards from both gamma and beta radiation. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Iridium is a chemical element; it has symbol Ir and atomic number 77. A very hard, brittle, silvery-white transition metal of the platinum group, it is considered the second-densest naturally occurring metal (after osmium) with a density of 22.56 g/cm (0.815 lb/cu in) as defined by experimental X-ray crystallography. It is one of the most corrosion-resistant metals, even at temperatures as high as 2,000 °C (3,630 °F). However, corrosion-resistance is not quantifiable in absolute terms: although only certain molten salts and halogens are corrosive to solid iridium, finely divided iridium dust is much more reactive and can be flammable, whereas gold dust is not flammable but can be attacked by substances that iridium resists, such as aqua regia.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Iridium was discovered in 1803 among insoluble impurities in natural platinum. Smithson Tennant, the primary discoverer, named it after the Greek goddess Iris, personification of the rainbow, because of the striking and diverse colors of its salts. Iridium is one of the rarest elements in Earth's crust, with estimated annual production and consumption of only 7.3 tonnes (16 thousand pounds) in 2018. Ir and Ir are the only two naturally occurring isotopes of iridium, as well as the only stable isotopes; the latter is the more abundant.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The dominant uses of iridium are the metal itself and its alloys, as in high-performance spark plugs, crucibles for recrystallization of semiconductors at high temperatures, and electrodes for the production of chlorine in the chloralkali process. Important compounds of iridium are chlorides and iodides in industrial catalysis. Iridium is a component of some OLEDs.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Iridium is found in meteorites in much higher abundance than in the Earth's crust. For this reason, the unusually high abundance of iridium in the clay layer at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary gave rise to the Alvarez hypothesis that the impact of a massive extraterrestrial object caused the extinction of dinosaurs and many other species 66 million years ago, now known to be produced by the impact that formed the Chicxulub crater. Similarly, an iridium anomaly in core samples from the Pacific Ocean suggested the Eltanin impact of about 2.5 million years ago.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "It is thought that the total amount of iridium in the planet Earth is much higher than that observed in crustal rocks, but as with other platinum-group metals, the high density and tendency of iridium to bond with iron caused most iridium to descend below the crust when the planet was young and still molten.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "A member of the platinum group metals, iridium is white, resembling platinum, but with a slight yellowish cast. Because of its hardness, brittleness, and very high melting point, solid iridium is difficult to machine, form, or work; thus powder metallurgy is commonly employed instead. It is the only metal to maintain good mechanical properties in air at temperatures above 1,600 °C (2,910 °F). It has the 10th highest boiling point among all elements and becomes a superconductor at temperatures below 0.14 K (−273.010 °C; −459.418 °F).",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Iridium's modulus of elasticity is the second-highest among the metals, being surpassed only by osmium. This, together with a high shear modulus and a very low figure for Poisson's ratio (the relationship of longitudinal to lateral strain), indicate the high degree of stiffness and resistance to deformation that have rendered its fabrication into useful components a matter of great difficulty. Despite these limitations and iridium's high cost, a number of applications have developed where mechanical strength is an essential factor in some of the extremely severe conditions encountered in modern technology.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The measured density of iridium is only slightly lower (by about 0.12%) than that of osmium, the densest metal known. Some ambiguity occurred regarding which of the two elements was denser, due to the small size of the difference in density and difficulties in measuring it accurately, but, with increased accuracy in factors used for calculating density, X-ray crystallographic data yielded densities of 22.56 g/cm (0.815 lb/cu in) for iridium and 22.59 g/cm (0.816 lb/cu in) for osmium.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Iridium is extremely brittle, to the point of being hard to weld because the heat-affected zone cracks, but it can be made more ductile by addition of small quantities of titanium and zirconium (0.2% of each apparently works well).",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The Vickers hardness of pure platinum is 56 HV, whereas platinum with 50% of iridium can reach over 500 HV.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Iridium is the most corrosion-resistant metal known: it is not attacked by acids, including aqua regia. In the presence of oxygen, it reacts with cyanide salts. Traditional oxidants also react, including the halogens and oxygen at higher temperatures. Iridium also reacts directly with sulfur at atmospheric pressure to yield iridium disulfide.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Iridium has two naturally occurring stable isotopes, Ir and Ir, with natural abundances of 37.3% and 62.7%, respectively. At least 37 radioisotopes have also been synthesized, ranging in mass number from 164 to 202. Ir, which falls between the two stable isotopes, is the most stable radioisotope, with a half-life of 73.827 days, and finds application in brachytherapy and in industrial radiography, particularly for nondestructive testing of welds in steel in the oil and gas industries; iridium-192 sources have been involved in a number of radiological accidents. Three other isotopes have half-lives of at least a day—Ir, Ir, and Ir. Isotopes with masses below 191 decay by some combination of β decay, α decay, and (rare) proton emission, with the exception of Ir, which decays by electron capture. Synthetic isotopes heavier than 191 decay by β decay, although Ir also has a minor electron capture decay path. All known isotopes of iridium were discovered between 1934 and 2008, with the most recent discoveries being Ir.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "At least 32 metastable isomers have been characterized, ranging in mass number from 164 to 197. The most stable of these is Ir, which decays by isomeric transition with a half-life of 241 years, making it more stable than any of iridium's synthetic isotopes in their ground states. The least stable isomer is Ir with a half-life of only 2 μs. The isotope Ir was the first one of any element to be shown to present a Mössbauer effect. This renders it useful for Mössbauer spectroscopy for research in physics, chemistry, biochemistry, metallurgy, and mineralogy.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Iridium forms compounds in oxidation states between −3 and +9, but the most common oxidation states are +1, +2, +3, and +4. Well-characterized compounds containing iridium in the +6 oxidation state include IrF6 and the oxides Sr2MgIrO6 and Sr2CaIrO6. iridium(VIII) oxide (IrO4) was generated under matrix isolation conditions at 6 K in argon. The highest oxidation state (+9), which is also the highest recorded for any element, is found in gaseous [IrO4].",
"title": "Chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Iridium does not form binary hydrides. Only one binary oxide is well-characterized: iridium dioxide, IrO2. It is a blue black solid that adopts the fluorite structure. A sesquioxide, Ir2O3, has been described as a blue-black powder, which is oxidized to IrO2 by HNO3. The corresponding disulfides, diselenides, sesquisulfides, and sesquiselenides are known, as well as IrS3.",
"title": "Chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Binary trihalides, IrX3, are known for all of the halogens. For oxidation states +4 and above, only the tetrafluoride, pentafluoride and hexafluoride are known. Iridium hexafluoride, IrF6, is a volatile yellow solid, composed of octahedral molecules. It decomposes in water and is reduced to IrF4. Iridium pentafluoride is also a strong oxidant, but it is a tetramer, Ir4F20, formed by four corner-sharing octahedra.",
"title": "Chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Iridium has extensive coordination chemistry.",
"title": "Chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Iridium in its complexes is always low-spin. Ir(III) and Ir(IV) generally form octahedral complexes. Polyhydride complexes are known for the +5 and +3 oxidation states. One example is IrH5(PPr3)2. The ternary hydride Mg6Ir2H11 is believed to contain both the IrH5 and the 18-electron IrH4 anion.",
"title": "Chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Iridium also forms oxyanions with oxidation states +4 and +5. K2IrO3 and KIrO3 can be prepared from the reaction of potassium oxide or potassium superoxide with iridium at high temperatures. Such solids are not soluble in conventional solvents.",
"title": "Chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Just like many elements, iridium forms important chloride complexes. Hexachloroiridic (IV) acid, H2IrCl6, and its ammonium salt are the most common iridium compounds from an industrial and preparative perspectives. They are intermediates in the purification of iridium and used as precursors for most other iridium compounds, as well as in the preparation of anode coatings. The IrCl6 ion has an intense dark brown color, and can be readily reduced to the lighter-colored IrCl6 and vice versa. Iridium trichloride, IrCl3, which can be obtained in anhydrous form from direct oxidation of iridium powder by chlorine at 650 °C, or in hydrated form by dissolving Ir2O3 in hydrochloric acid, is often used as a starting material for the synthesis of other Ir(III) compounds. Another compound used as a starting material is ammonium hexachloroiridate(III), (NH4)3IrCl6.",
"title": "Chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In the presence of air, iridium metal dissolves in molten alkali-metal cyanides to produce the Ir(CN)6 (hexacyanoiridate) ion and upon oxidation produces the most stable oxide.",
"title": "Chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Organoiridium compounds contain iridium–carbon bonds. Early studies identified the very stable tetrairidium dodecacarbonyl, Ir4(CO)12. In this compound, each of the iridium atoms is bonded to the other three, forming a tetrahedral cluster. The discovery of Vaska's complex (IrCl(CO)[P(C6H5)3]2) opened the door for oxidative addition reactions, a process fundamental to useful reactions. For example, Crabtree's catalyst, a homogeneous catalyst for hydrogenation reactions.",
"title": "Chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Iridium complexes played a pivotal role in the development of Carbon–hydrogen bond activation (C–H activation), which promises to allow functionalization of hydrocarbons, which are traditionally regarded as unreactive.",
"title": "Chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The discovery of iridium is intertwined with that of platinum and the other metals of the platinum group. The first European reference to platinum appears in 1557 in the writings of the Italian humanist Julius Caesar Scaliger as a description of an unknown noble metal found between Darién and Mexico, \"which no fire nor any Spanish artifice has yet been able to liquefy\". From their first encounters with platinum, the Spanish generally saw the metal as a kind of impurity in gold, and it was treated as such. It was often simply thrown away, and there was an official decree forbidding the adulteration of gold with platinum impurities.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In 1735, Antonio de Ulloa and Jorge Juan y Santacilia saw Native Americans mining platinum while the Spaniards were travelling through Colombia and Peru for eight years. Ulloa and Juan found mines with the whitish metal nuggets and took them home to Spain. Antonio de Ulloa returned to Spain and established the first mineralogy lab in Spain and was the first to systematically study platinum, which was in 1748. His historical account of the expedition included a description of platinum as being neither separable nor calcinable. Ulloa also anticipated the discovery of platinum mines. After publishing the report in 1748, Ulloa did not continue to investigate the new metal. In 1758, he was sent to superintend mercury mining operations in Huancavelica.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In 1741, Charles Wood, a British metallurgist, found various samples of Colombian platinum in Jamaica, which he sent to William Brownrigg for further investigation.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In 1750, after studying the platinum sent to him by Wood, Brownrigg presented a detailed account of the metal to the Royal Society, stating that he had seen no mention of it in any previous accounts of known minerals. Brownrigg also made note of platinum's extremely high melting point and refractory metal-like behaviour toward borax. Other chemists across Europe soon began studying platinum, including Andreas Sigismund Marggraf, Torbern Bergman, Jöns Jakob Berzelius, William Lewis, and Pierre Macquer. In 1752, Henrik Scheffer published a detailed scientific description of the metal, which he referred to as \"white gold\", including an account of how he succeeded in fusing platinum ore with the aid of arsenic. Scheffer described platinum as being less pliable than gold, but with similar resistance to corrosion.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Chemists who studied platinum dissolved it in aqua regia (a mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acids) to create soluble salts. They always observed a small amount of a dark, insoluble residue. Joseph Louis Proust thought that the residue was graphite. The French chemists Victor Collet-Descotils, Antoine François, comte de Fourcroy, and Louis Nicolas Vauquelin also observed the black residue in 1803, but did not obtain enough for further experiments.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In 1803, British scientist Smithson Tennant (1761–1815) analyzed the insoluble residue and concluded that it must contain a new metal. Vauquelin treated the powder alternately with alkali and acids and obtained a volatile new oxide, which he believed to be of this new metal—which he named ptene, from the Greek word πτηνός ptēnós, \"winged\". Tennant, who had the advantage of a much greater amount of residue, continued his research and identified the two previously undiscovered elements in the black residue, iridium and osmium. He obtained dark red crystals (probably of Na2[IrCl6]·nH2O) by a sequence of reactions with sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid. He named iridium after Iris (Ἶρις), the Greek winged goddess of the rainbow and the messenger of the Olympian gods, because many of the salts he obtained were strongly colored. Discovery of the new elements was documented in a letter to the Royal Society on June 21, 1804.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "British scientist John George Children was the first to melt a sample of iridium in 1813 with the aid of \"the greatest galvanic battery that has ever been constructed\" (at that time). The first to obtain high-purity iridium was Robert Hare in 1842. He found it had a density of around 21.8 g/cm (0.79 lb/cu in) and noted the metal is nearly immalleable and very hard. The first melting in appreciable quantity was done by Henri Sainte-Claire Deville and Jules Henri Debray in 1860. They required burning more than 300 litres (79 US gal) of pure O2 and H2 gas for each 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) of iridium.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "These extreme difficulties in melting the metal limited the possibilities for handling iridium. John Isaac Hawkins was looking to obtain a fine and hard point for fountain pen nibs, and in 1834 managed to create an iridium-pointed gold pen. In 1880, John Holland and William Lofland Dudley were able to melt iridium by adding phosphorus and patented the process in the United States; British company Johnson Matthey later stated they had been using a similar process since 1837 and had already presented fused iridium at a number of World Fairs. The first use of an alloy of iridium with ruthenium in thermocouples was made by Otto Feussner in 1933. These allowed for the measurement of high temperatures in air up to 2,000 °C (3,630 °F).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In Munich, Germany in 1957 Rudolf Mössbauer, in what has been called one of the \"landmark experiments in twentieth-century physics\", discovered the resonant and recoil-free emission and absorption of gamma rays by atoms in a solid metal sample containing only Ir. This phenomenon, known as the Mössbauer effect resulted in the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1961, at the age 32, just three years after he published his discovery.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Along with all elements having atomic weights higher than that of iron, iridium is only naturally formed by the r-process (rapid neutron capture) in supernovae and neutron star mergers.",
"title": "Occurrence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Iridium is one of the nine least abundant stable elements in Earth's crust, having an average mass fraction of 0.001 ppm in crustal rock; platinum is 10 times more abundant, gold is 40 times more abundant, and silver and mercury are 80 times more abundant. Tellurium is about as abundant as iridium. In contrast to its low abundance in crustal rock, iridium is relatively common in meteorites, with concentrations of 0.5 ppm or more. The overall concentration of iridium on Earth is thought to be much higher than what is observed in crustal rocks, but because of the density and siderophilic (\"iron-loving\") character of iridium, it descended below the crust and into Earth's core when the planet was still molten.",
"title": "Occurrence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Iridium is found in nature as an uncombined element or in natural alloys, especially the iridium–osmium alloys osmiridium (osmium-rich) and iridosmium (iridium-rich). In nickel and copper deposits, the platinum group metals occur as sulfides, tellurides, antimonides, and arsenides. In all of these compounds, platinum can be exchanged with a small amount of iridium or osmium. As with all of the platinum group metals, iridium can be found naturally in alloys with raw nickel or raw copper. A number of iridium-dominant minerals, with iridium as the species-forming element, are known. They are exceedingly rare and often represent the iridium analogues of the above-given ones. The examples are irarsite and cuproiridsite, to mention some. Within Earth's crust, iridium is found at highest concentrations in three types of geologic structure: igneous deposits (crustal intrusions from below), impact craters, and deposits reworked from one of the former structures. The largest known primary reserves are in the Bushveld igneous complex in South Africa, (near the largest known impact structure, the Vredefort impact structure) though the large copper–nickel deposits near Norilsk in Russia, and the Sudbury Basin (also an impact crater) in Canada are also significant sources of iridium. Smaller reserves are found in the United States. Iridium is also found in secondary deposits, combined with platinum and other platinum group metals in alluvial deposits. The alluvial deposits used by pre-Columbian people in the Chocó Department of Colombia are still a source for platinum-group metals. As of 2003, world reserves have not been estimated.",
"title": "Occurrence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Iridium is found within marine organisms, sediments, and the water column. The abundance of iridium in seawater and organisms is relatively low, as it does not readily form chloride complexes. The abundance in organisms is about 20 parts per trillion, or about five orders of magnitude less than in sedimentary rocks at the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–T) boundary. The concentration of iridium in seawater and marine sediment is sensitive to marine oxygenation, seawater temperature, and various geological and biological processes.",
"title": "Occurrence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Iridium in sediments can come from cosmic dust, volcanoes, precipitation from seawater, microbial processes, or hydrothermal vents, and its abundance can be strongly indicative of the source. It tends to associate with other ferrous metals in manganese nodules. Iridium is one of the characteristic elements of extraterrestrial rocks, and, along with osmium, can be used as a tracer element for meteoritic material in sediment. For example core samples from the Pacific Ocean with elevated iridium levels suggested the Eltanin impact of about 2.5 million years ago.",
"title": "Occurrence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Some of the mass extinctions, such as the Cretaceous extinction, can be identified by anomalously high concentrations of iridium in sediment, and these can be linked to major asteroid impacts.",
"title": "Occurrence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary of 66 million years ago, marking the temporal border between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods of geological time, was identified by a thin stratum of iridium-rich clay. A team led by Luis Alvarez proposed in 1980 an extraterrestrial origin for this iridium, attributing it to an asteroid or comet impact. Their theory, known as the Alvarez hypothesis, is now widely accepted to explain the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. A large buried impact crater structure with an estimated age of about 66 million years was later identified under what is now the Yucatán Peninsula (the Chicxulub crater). Dewey M. McLean and others argue that the iridium may have been of volcanic origin instead, because Earth's core is rich in iridium, and active volcanoes such as Piton de la Fournaise, in the island of Réunion, are still releasing iridium.",
"title": "Occurrence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Worldwide production of iridium was about 7,300 kilograms (16,100 lb) in 2018. The price is high and varying (see table). Illustrative factors that affect the price include oversupply of Ir crucibles and changes in LED technology.",
"title": "Production"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Platinum metals occur together as dilute ores. Iridium is one of the rarer platinum metals: for every 190 tonnes of platinum obtained from ores, only 7.5 tonnes of iridium is isolated. To separate the metals, they must first be brought into solution. Two methods for rendering Ir-containing ores soluble are (i) fusion of the solid with sodium peroxide followed by extraction of the resulting glass in aqua regia and (ii) extraction of the solid with a mixture of chlorine with hydrochloric acid. From soluble extracts, iridium is separated by precipitating solid ammonium hexachloroiridate ((NH4)2IrCl6) or by extracting IrCl6 with organic amines. The first method is similar to the procedure Tennant and Wollaston used for their original separation. The second method can be planned as continuous liquid–liquid extraction and is therefore more suitable for industrial scale production. In either case, the product, an iridium chloride salt, is reduced with hydrogen, yielding the metal as a powder or sponge, which is amenable to powder metallurgy techniques. Iridium is also obtained commercially as a by-product from nickel and copper mining and processing. During electrorefining of copper and nickel, noble metals such as silver, gold and the platinum group metals as well as selenium and tellurium settle to the bottom of the cell as anode mud, which forms the starting point for their extraction.",
"title": "Production"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Due to iridium's resistance to corrosion it has industrial applications. The main areas of use are electrodes for producing chlorine and other corrosive products, OLEDs, crucibles, catalysts (e.g. acetic acid), and ignition tips for spark plugs.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Resistance to heat and corrosion are the bases for several uses of iridium and its alloys.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Owing to its high melting point, hardness, and corrosion resistance, iridium is used to make crucibles. Such crucibles are used in the Czochralski process to produce oxide single-crystals (such as sapphires) for use in computer memory devices and in solid state lasers. The crystals, such as gadolinium gallium garnet and yttrium gallium garnet, are grown by melting pre-sintered charges of mixed oxides under oxidizing conditions at temperatures up to 2,100 °C (3,810 °F).",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Certain long-life aircraft engine parts are made of an iridium alloy, and an iridium–titanium alloy is used for deep-water pipes because of its corrosion resistance. Iridium is used for multi-pored spinnerets, through which a plastic polymer melt is extruded to form fibers, such as rayon. Osmium–iridium is used for compass bearings and for balances.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Because of their resistance to arc erosion, iridium alloys are used by some manufacturers for electrical contacts for spark plugs, and iridium-based spark plugs are particularly used in aviation.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Iridium compounds are used as catalysts in the Cativa process for carbonylation of methanol to produce acetic acid.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Iridium complexes are often active for asymmetric hydrogenation both by traditional hydrogenation. and transfer hydrogenation. This property is the basis of the industrial route to the chiral herbicide (S)-metolachlor. As practiced by Syngenta on the scale of 10,000 tons/year, the complex [[ [Ir(COD)Cl]2 in the presence of Josiphos ligands.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The radioisotope iridium-192 is one of the two most important sources of energy for use in industrial γ-radiography for non-destructive testing of metals. Additionally, Ir is used as a source of gamma radiation for the treatment of cancer using brachytherapy, a form of radiotherapy where a sealed radioactive source is placed inside or next to the area requiring treatment. Specific treatments include high-dose-rate prostate brachytherapy, biliary duct brachytherapy, and intracavitary cervix brachytherapy. Iridium-192 is normally produced by neutron activation of isotope iridium-191 in natural-abundance iridium metal.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Iridium complexes are key components of white OLEDs. Similar complexes are used in photocatalysis.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "An alloy of 90% platinum and 10% iridium was used in 1889 to construct the International Prototype Meter and kilogram mass, kept by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures near Paris. The meter bar was replaced as the definition of the fundamental unit of length in 1960 by a line in the atomic spectrum of krypton, but the kilogram prototype remained the international standard of mass until 20 May 2019, when the kilogram was redefined in terms of the Planck constant.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Iridium–osmium alloys were used in fountain pen nib tips. The first major use of iridium was in 1834 in nibs mounted on gold. Since 1944, the famous Parker 51 fountain pen was fitted with a nib tipped by a ruthenium and iridium alloy (with 3.8% iridium). The tip material in modern fountain pens is still conventionally called \"iridium\", although there is seldom any iridium in it; other metals such as ruthenium, osmium, and tungsten have taken its place.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "An iridium–platinum alloy was used for the touch holes or vent pieces of cannon. According to a report of the Paris Exhibition of 1867, one of the pieces being exhibited by Johnson and Matthey \"has been used in a Whitworth gun for more than 3000 rounds, and scarcely shows signs of wear yet. Those who know the constant trouble and expense which are occasioned by the wearing of the vent-pieces of cannon when in active service, will appreciate this important adaptation\".",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The pigment iridium black, which consists of very finely divided iridium, is used for painting porcelain an intense black; it was said that \"all other porcelain black colors appear grey by the side of it\".",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Iridium in bulk metallic form is not biologically important or hazardous to health due to its lack of reactivity with tissues; there are only about 20 parts per trillion of iridium in human tissue. Like most metals, finely divided iridium powder can be hazardous to handle, as it is an irritant and may ignite in air. By 2015 very little is known about the toxicity of iridium compounds, primarily because it is used so rarely that few people come in contact with it and those who do only with very small amounts. However, soluble salts, such as the iridium halides, could be hazardous due to elements other than iridium or due to iridium itself. At the same time, most iridium compounds are insoluble, which makes absorption into the body difficult.",
"title": "Precautions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "A radioisotope of iridium, Ir, is dangerous, like other radioactive isotopes. The only reported injuries related to iridium concern accidental exposure to radiation from Ir used in brachytherapy. High-energy gamma radiation from Ir can increase the risk of cancer. External exposure can cause burns, radiation poisoning, and death. Ingestion of Ir can burn the linings of the stomach and the intestines. Ir, Ir, and Ir tend to deposit in the liver, and can pose health hazards from both gamma and beta radiation.",
"title": "Precautions"
}
]
| Iridium is a chemical element; it has symbol Ir and atomic number 77. A very hard, brittle, silvery-white transition metal of the platinum group, it is considered the second-densest naturally occurring metal with a density of 22.56 g/cm3 (0.815 lb/cu in) as defined by experimental X-ray crystallography. It is one of the most corrosion-resistant metals, even at temperatures as high as 2,000 °C (3,630 °F). However, corrosion-resistance is not quantifiable in absolute terms: although only certain molten salts and halogens are corrosive to solid iridium, finely divided iridium dust is much more reactive and can be flammable, whereas gold dust is not flammable but can be attacked by substances that iridium resists, such as aqua regia. Iridium was discovered in 1803 among insoluble impurities in natural platinum. Smithson Tennant, the primary discoverer, named it after the Greek goddess Iris, personification of the rainbow, because of the striking and diverse colors of its salts. Iridium is one of the rarest elements in Earth's crust, with estimated annual production and consumption of only 7.3 tonnes in 2018. 191Ir and 193Ir are the only two naturally occurring isotopes of iridium, as well as the only stable isotopes; the latter is the more abundant. The dominant uses of iridium are the metal itself and its alloys, as in high-performance spark plugs, crucibles for recrystallization of semiconductors at high temperatures, and electrodes for the production of chlorine in the chloralkali process. Important compounds of iridium are chlorides and iodides in industrial catalysis. Iridium is a component of some OLEDs. Iridium is found in meteorites in much higher abundance than in the Earth's crust. For this reason, the unusually high abundance of iridium in the clay layer at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary gave rise to the Alvarez hypothesis that the impact of a massive extraterrestrial object caused the extinction of dinosaurs and many other species 66 million years ago, now known to be produced by the impact that formed the Chicxulub crater. Similarly, an iridium anomaly in core samples from the Pacific Ocean suggested the Eltanin impact of about 2.5 million years ago. It is thought that the total amount of iridium in the planet Earth is much higher than that observed in crustal rocks, but as with other platinum-group metals, the high density and tendency of iridium to bond with iron caused most iridium to descend below the crust when the planet was young and still molten. | 2001-07-28T02:05:14Z | 2023-12-26T22:50:17Z | [
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14,753 | IOC (disambiguation) | IOC most commonly refers to the International Olympic Committee.
IOC may also refer to: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "IOC most commonly refers to the International Olympic Committee.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "IOC may also refer to:",
"title": ""
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| IOC most commonly refers to the International Olympic Committee. IOC may also refer to: | 2022-12-12T23:52:40Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOC_(disambiguation) |
|
14,761 | International Phonetic Alphabet | The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation of speech sounds in written form. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech–language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators.
The IPA is designed to represent those qualities of speech that are part of lexical (and, to a limited extent, prosodic) sounds in oral language: phones, intonation and the separation of syllables. To represent additional qualities of speech—such as tooth gnashing, lisping, and sounds made with a cleft palate—an extended set of symbols may be used.
Segments are transcribed by one or more IPA symbols of two basic types: letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English digraph ⟨ch⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a single letter: [c], or with multiple letters plus diacritics: [t̠̺͡ʃʰ], depending on how precise one wishes to be. Slashes are used to signal phonemic transcription; therefore, /tʃ/ is more abstract than either [t̠̺͡ʃʰ] or [c] and might refer to either, depending on the context and language.
Occasionally, letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 segmental letters, an indefinitely large number of suprasegmental letters, 44 diacritics (not counting composites), and four extra-lexical prosodic marks in the IPA. Most of these are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA.
In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, formed what would be known from 1897 onwards as the International Phonetic Association (in French, l'Association phonétique internationale). Their original alphabet was based on a spelling reform for English known as the Romic alphabet, but to make it usable for other languages the values of the symbols were allowed to vary from language to language. For example, the sound [ʃ] (the sh in shoe) was originally represented with the letter ⟨c⟩ in English, but with the digraph ⟨ch⟩ in French. In 1888, the alphabet was revised to be uniform across languages, thus providing the base for all future revisions. The idea of making the IPA was first suggested by Otto Jespersen in a letter to Passy. It was developed by Alexander John Ellis, Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, and Passy.
Since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. After revisions and expansions from the 1890s to the 1940s, the IPA remained primarily unchanged until the Kiel Convention in 1989. A minor revision took place in 1993 with the addition of four letters for mid central vowels and the removal of letters for voiceless implosives. The alphabet was last revised in May 2005 with the addition of a letter for a labiodental flap. Apart from the addition and removal of symbols, changes to the IPA have consisted largely of renaming symbols and categories and in modifying typefaces.
Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology (extIPA) were created in 1990 and were officially adopted by the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association in 1994.
The general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound (speech segment). This means that:
The alphabet is designed for transcribing sounds (phones), not phonemes, though it is used for phonemic transcription as well. A few letters that did not indicate specific sounds have been retired (⟨ˇ⟩, once used for the "compound" tone of Swedish and Norwegian, and ⟨ƞ⟩, once used for the moraic nasal of Japanese), though one remains: ⟨ɧ⟩, used for the sj-sound of Swedish. When the IPA is used for phonemic transcription, the letter–sound correspondence can be rather loose. For example, ⟨c⟩ and ⟨ɟ⟩ are used in the IPA Handbook for /t͡ʃ/ and /d͡ʒ/.
Among the symbols of the IPA, 107 letters represent consonants and vowels, 31 diacritics are used to modify these, and 17 additional signs indicate suprasegmental qualities such as length, tone, stress, and intonation. These are organized into a chart; the chart displayed here is the official chart as posted at the website of the IPA.
The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet. For this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither: for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ⟨ʔ⟩, originally had the form of a dotless question mark, and derives from an apostrophe. A few letters, such as that of the voiced pharyngeal fricative, ⟨ʕ⟩, were inspired by other writing systems (in this case, the Arabic letter ⟨ﻉ⟩, ʿayn, via the reversed apostrophe).
Some letter forms derive from existing letters:
The International Phonetic Alphabet is based on the Latin script, and uses as few non-Latin letters as possible. The Association created the IPA so that the sound values of most letters would correspond to "international usage" (approximately Classical Latin). Hence, the consonant letters ⟨b⟩, ⟨d⟩, ⟨f⟩, (hard) ⟨ɡ⟩, (non-silent) ⟨h⟩, (unaspirated) ⟨k⟩, ⟨l⟩, ⟨m⟩, ⟨n⟩, (unaspirated) ⟨p⟩, (voiceless) ⟨s⟩, (unaspirated) ⟨t⟩, ⟨v⟩, ⟨w⟩, and ⟨z⟩ have more or less the values found in English; and the vowel letters ⟨a⟩, ⟨e⟩, ⟨i⟩, ⟨o⟩, ⟨u⟩ correspond to the (long) sound values of Latin: [i] is like the vowel in machine, [u] is as in rule, etc. Other Latin letters, particularly ⟨j⟩, ⟨r⟩ and ⟨y⟩, differ from English, but have their IPA values in Latin or other European languages.
This basic Latin inventory was extended by adding small-capital and cursive forms, diacritics and rotation. The sound values of these letters are related to those of the original letters, and their derivation may be iconic. For example, letters with a rightward-facing hook at the bottom represent retroflex equivalents of the source letters, and small capital letters usually represent uvular equivalents of their source letters.
There are also several letters from the Greek alphabet, though their sound values may differ from Greek. The most extreme difference is ⟨ʋ⟩, which is a vowel in Greek but a consonant in the IPA. For most Greek letters, subtly different glyph shapes have been devised for the IPA, specifically ⟨ɑ⟩, ⟨ꞵ⟩, ⟨ɣ⟩, ⟨ɛ⟩, ⟨ɸ⟩, ⟨ꭓ⟩ and ⟨ʋ⟩, which are encoded in Unicode separately from their parent Greek letters. One, however – ⟨θ⟩ – has only its Greek form, while for ⟨ꞵ ~ β⟩ and ⟨ꭓ ~ χ⟩, both Greek and Latin forms are in common use. The tone letters are not derived from an alphabet, but from a pitch trace on a musical scale.
Beyond the letters themselves, there are a variety of secondary symbols which aid in transcription. Diacritic marks can be combined with IPA letters to add phonetic detail such as tone and secondary articulations. There are also special symbols for prosodic features such as stress and intonation.
There are two principal types of brackets used to set off (delimit) IPA transcriptions:
Other conventions are less commonly seen:
All three of the above are provided by the IPA Handbook. The following are not, but may be seen in IPA transcription or in associated material (especially angle brackets):
Some examples of contrasting brackets in the literature:
In some English accents, the phoneme /l/, which is usually spelled as ⟨l⟩ or ⟨ll⟩, is articulated as two distinct allophones: the clear [l] occurs before vowels and the consonant /j/, whereas the dark [ɫ]/[lˠ] occurs before consonants, except /j/, and at the end of words.
the alternations /f/ – /v/ in plural formation in one class of nouns, as in knife /naɪf/ – knives /naɪvz/, which can be represented morphophonemically as {naɪV} – {naɪV+z}. The morphophoneme {V} stands for the phoneme set {/f/, /v/}.
[ˈf\faɪnəlz ˈhɛld ɪn (.) ⸨knock on door⸩ bɑɹsə{𝑝ˈloʊnə and ˈmədɹɪd 𝑝}] — f-finals held in Barcelona and Madrid.
IPA letters have cursive forms designed for use in manuscripts and when taking field notes, but the Handbook recommended against their use, as cursive IPA is "harder for most people to decipher." A braille representation of the IPA for blind or visually impaired professionals and students has also been developed.
The International Phonetic Alphabet is occasionally modified by the Association. After each modification, the Association provides an updated simplified presentation of the alphabet in the form of a chart. (See History of the IPA.) Not all aspects of the alphabet can be accommodated in a chart of the size published by the IPA. The alveolo-palatal and epiglottal consonants, for example, are not included in the consonant chart for reasons of space rather than of theory (two additional columns would be required, one between the retroflex and palatal columns and the other between the pharyngeal and glottal columns), and the lateral flap would require an additional row for that single consonant, so they are listed instead under the catchall block of "other symbols". The indefinitely large number of tone letters would make a full accounting impractical even on a larger page, and only a few examples are shown, and even the tone diacritics are not complete; the reversed tone letters are not illustrated at all.
The procedure for modifying the alphabet or the chart is to propose the change in the Journal of the IPA. (See, for example, December 2008 on an open central unrounded vowel and August 2011 on central approximants.) Reactions to the proposal may be published in the same or subsequent issues of the Journal (as in August 2009 on the open central vowel). A formal proposal is then put to the Council of the IPA – which is elected by the membership – for further discussion and a formal vote.
Many users of the alphabet, including the leadership of the Association itself, deviate from its standardized usage. The Journal of the IPA finds it acceptable to mix IPA and extIPA symbols in consonant charts in their articles. (For instance, including the extIPA letter ⟨⟩, rather than ⟨ʎ̝̊⟩, in an illustration of the IPA.)
Of more than 160 IPA symbols, relatively few will be used to transcribe speech in any one language, with various levels of precision. A precise phonetic transcription, in which sounds are specified in detail, is known as a narrow transcription. A coarser transcription with less detail is called a broad transcription. Both are relative terms, and both are generally enclosed in square brackets. Broad phonetic transcriptions may restrict themselves to easily heard details, or only to details that are relevant to the discussion at hand, and may differ little if at all from phonemic transcriptions, but they make no theoretical claim that all the distinctions transcribed are necessarily meaningful in the language.
For example, the English word little may be transcribed broadly as [ˈlɪtəl], approximately describing many pronunciations. A narrower transcription may focus on individual or dialectical details: [ˈɫɪɾɫ] in General American, [ˈlɪʔo] in Cockney, or [ˈɫɪːɫ] in Southern US English.
Phonemic transcriptions, which express the conceptual counterparts of spoken sounds, are usually enclosed in slashes (/ /) and tend to use simpler letters with few diacritics. The choice of IPA letters may reflect theoretical claims of how speakers conceptualize sounds as phonemes or they may be merely a convenience for typesetting. Phonemic approximations between slashes do not have absolute sound values. For instance, in English, either the vowel of pick or the vowel of peak may be transcribed as /i/, so that pick, peak would be transcribed as /ˈpik, ˈpiːk/ or as /ˈpɪk, ˈpik/; and neither is identical to the vowel of the French pique which would also be transcribed /pik/. By contrast, a narrow phonetic transcription of pick, peak, pique could be: [pʰɪk], [pʰiːk], [pikʲ].
IPA is popular for transcription by linguists. Some American linguists, however, use a mix of IPA with Americanist phonetic notation or Sinological phonetic notation or otherwise use nonstandard symbols for various reasons. Authors who employ such nonstandard use are encouraged to include a chart or other explanation of their choices, which is good practice in general, as linguists differ in their understanding of the exact meaning of IPA symbols and common conventions change over time.
Many British dictionaries, including the Oxford English Dictionary and some learner's dictionaries such as the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary and the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, now use the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent the pronunciation of words. However, most American (and some British) volumes use one of a variety of pronunciation respelling systems, intended to be more comfortable for readers of English and to be more acceptable across dialects, without the implication of a preferred pronunciation that the IPA might convey. For example, the respelling systems in many American dictionaries (such as Merriam-Webster) use ⟨y⟩ for IPA [ j] and ⟨sh⟩ for IPA [ ʃ ], reflecting the usual spelling of those sounds in English. (In IPA, [y] represents the sound of the French ⟨u⟩, as in tu, and [sh] represents the sequence of consonants in grasshopper.)
The IPA is also not universal among dictionaries in languages other than English. Monolingual dictionaries of languages with phonemic orthographies generally do not bother with indicating the pronunciation of most words, and tend to use respelling systems for words with unexpected pronunciations. Dictionaries produced in Israel use the IPA rarely and sometimes use the Hebrew alphabet for transcription of foreign words. Bilingual dictionaries that translate from foreign languages into Russian usually employ the IPA, but monolingual Russian dictionaries occasionally use pronunciation respelling for foreign words. The IPA is more common in bilingual dictionaries, but there are exceptions here too. Mass-market bilingual Czech dictionaries, for instance, tend to use the IPA only for sounds not found in Czech.
IPA letters have been incorporated into the alphabets of various languages, notably via the Africa Alphabet in many sub-Saharan languages such as Hausa, Fula, Akan, Gbe languages, Manding languages, Lingala, etc. Capital case variants have been created for use in these languages. For example, Kabiyè of northern Togo has Ɖ ɖ, Ŋ ŋ, Ɣ ɣ, Ɔ ɔ, Ɛ ɛ, Ʋ ʋ. These, and others, are supported by Unicode, but appear in Latin ranges other than the IPA extensions.
In the IPA itself, however, only lower-case letters are used. The 1949 edition of the IPA handbook indicated that an asterisk ⟨*⟩ might be prefixed to indicate that a word was a proper name, but this convention was not included in the 1999 Handbook, which notes the contrary use of the asterisk as a placeholder for a sound or feature that does not have a symbol.
The IPA has widespread use among classical singers during preparation as they are frequently required to sing in a variety of foreign languages. They are also taught by vocal coaches to perfect diction and improve tone quality and tuning. Opera librettos are authoritatively transcribed in IPA, such as Nico Castel's volumes and Timothy Cheek's book Singing in Czech. Opera singers' ability to read IPA was used by the site Visual Thesaurus, which employed several opera singers "to make recordings for the 150,000 words and phrases in VT's lexical database ... for their vocal stamina, attention to the details of enunciation, and most of all, knowledge of IPA".
The International Phonetic Association organizes the letters of the IPA into three categories: pulmonic consonants, non-pulmonic consonants, and vowels.
Pulmonic consonant letters are arranged singly or in pairs of voiceless (tenuis) and voiced sounds, with these then grouped in columns from front (labial) sounds on the left to back (glottal) sounds on the right. In official publications by the IPA, two columns are omitted to save space, with the letters listed among 'other symbols' even though theoretically they belong in the main chart. They are arranged in rows from full closure (occlusives: stops and nasals) at top, to brief closure (vibrants: trills and taps), to partial closure (fricatives), and finally minimal closure (approximants) at bottom, again with a row left out to save space. In the table below, a slightly different arrangement is made: All pulmonic consonants are included in the pulmonic-consonant table, and the vibrants and laterals are separated out so that the rows reflect the common lenition pathway of stop → fricative → approximant, as well as the fact that several letters pull double duty as both fricative and approximant; affricates may then be created by joining stops and fricatives from adjacent cells. Shaded cells represent articulations that are judged to be impossible.
Vowel letters are also grouped in pairs—of unrounded and rounded vowel sounds—with these pairs also arranged from front on the left to back on the right, and from maximal closure at top to minimal closure at bottom. No vowel letters are omitted from the chart, though in the past some of the mid central vowels were listed among the 'other symbols'.
A pulmonic consonant is a consonant made by obstructing the glottis (the space between the vocal folds) or oral cavity (the mouth) and either simultaneously or subsequently letting out air from the lungs. Pulmonic consonants make up the majority of consonants in the IPA, as well as in human language. All consonants in English fall into this category.
The pulmonic consonant table, which includes most consonants, is arranged in rows that designate manner of articulation, meaning how the consonant is produced, and columns that designate place of articulation, meaning where in the vocal tract the consonant is produced. The main chart includes only consonants with a single place of articulation.
Notes
Non-pulmonic consonants are sounds whose airflow is not dependent on the lungs. These include clicks (found in the Khoisan languages and some neighboring Bantu languages of Africa), implosives (found in languages such as Sindhi, Hausa, Swahili and Vietnamese), and ejectives (found in many Amerindian and Caucasian languages).
Notes
Affricates and co-articulated stops are represented by two letters joined by a tie bar, either above or below the letters with no difference in meaning. Affricates are optionally represented by ligatures (e.g. ⟨ʧ, ʤ ⟩), though this is no longer official IPA usage because a great number of ligatures would be required to represent all affricates this way. Alternatively, a superscript notation for a consonant release is sometimes used to transcribe affricates, for example ⟨tˢ⟩ for [t͜s], paralleling [kˣ] ~ [k͜x]. The letters for the palatal plosives ⟨c⟩ and ⟨ɟ⟩ are often used as a convenience for [t͜ʃ] and [d͜ʒ] or similar affricates, even in official IPA publications, so they must be interpreted with care.
Co-articulated consonants are sounds that involve two simultaneous places of articulation (are pronounced using two parts of the vocal tract). In English, the [w] in "went" is a coarticulated consonant, being pronounced by rounding the lips and raising the back of the tongue. Similar sounds are [ʍ] and [ɥ]. In some languages, plosives can be double-articulated, for example in the name of Laurent Gbagbo.
Notes
The IPA defines a vowel as a sound which occurs at a syllable center. Below is a chart depicting the vowels of the IPA. The IPA maps the vowels according to the position of the tongue.
The vertical axis of the chart is mapped by vowel height. Vowels pronounced with the tongue lowered are at the bottom, and vowels pronounced with the tongue raised are at the top. For example, [ɑ] (the first vowel in father) is at the bottom because the tongue is lowered in this position. [i] (the vowel in "meet") is at the top because the sound is said with the tongue raised to the roof of the mouth.
In a similar fashion, the horizontal axis of the chart is determined by vowel backness. Vowels with the tongue moved towards the front of the mouth (such as [ɛ], the vowel in "met") are to the left in the chart, while those in which it is moved to the back (such as [ʌ], the vowel in "but") are placed to the right in the chart.
In places where vowels are paired, the right represents a rounded vowel (in which the lips are rounded) while the left is its unrounded counterpart.
Diphthongs are typically specified with a non-syllabic diacritic, as in ⟨ui̯⟩ or ⟨u̯i⟩, or with a superscript for the on- or off-glide, as in ⟨uⁱ⟩ or ⟨ᵘi⟩. Sometimes a tie bar is used: ⟨u͜i⟩, especially when it is difficult to tell if the diphthong is characterized by an on-glide or an off-glide or when it is variable.
Notes
Diacritics are used for phonetic detail. They are added to IPA letters to indicate a modification or specification of that letter's normal pronunciation.
By being made superscript, any IPA letter may function as a diacritic, conferring elements of its articulation to the base letter. Those superscript letters listed below are specifically provided for by the IPA Handbook; other uses can be illustrated with ⟨tˢ⟩ ([t] with fricative release), ⟨ᵗs⟩ ([s] with affricate onset), ⟨ⁿd⟩ (prenasalized [d]), ⟨bʱ⟩ ([b] with breathy voice), ⟨mˀ⟩ (glottalized [m]), ⟨sᶴ⟩ ([s] with a flavor of [ʃ], i.e. a voiceless alveolar retracted sibilant), ⟨oᶷ⟩ ([o] with diphthongization), ⟨ɯᵝ⟩ (compressed [ɯ]). Superscript diacritics placed after a letter are ambiguous between simultaneous modification of the sound and phonetic detail at the end of the sound. For example, labialized ⟨kʷ⟩ may mean either simultaneous [k] and [w] or else [k] with a labialized release. Superscript diacritics placed before a letter, on the other hand, normally indicate a modification of the onset of the sound (⟨mˀ⟩ glottalized [m], ⟨ˀm⟩ [m] with a glottal onset). (See § Superscript IPA.)
Notes:
Subdiacritics (diacritics normally placed below a letter) may be moved above a letter to avoid conflict with a descender, as in voiceless ⟨ŋ̊⟩. The raising and lowering diacritics have optional spacing forms ⟨˔⟩, ⟨˕⟩ that avoid descenders.
The state of the glottis can be finely transcribed with diacritics. A series of alveolar plosives ranging from open-glottis to closed-glottis phonation is:
Additional diacritics are provided by the Extensions to the IPA for speech pathology.
These symbols describe the features of a language above the level of individual consonants and vowels, that is, at the level of syllable, word or phrase. These include prosody, pitch, length, stress, intensity, tone and gemination of the sounds of a language, as well as the rhythm and intonation of speech. Various ligatures of pitch/tone letters and diacritics are provided for by the Kiel Convention and used in the IPA Handbook despite not being found in the summary of the IPA alphabet found on the one-page chart.
Under capital letters below we will see how a carrier letter may be used to indicate suprasegmental features such as labialization or nasalization. Some authors omit the carrier letter, for e.g. suffixed [kʰuˣt̪s̟]ʷ or prefixed [ʷkʰuˣt̪s̟], or place a spacing variant of a diacritic such as ⟨˔⟩ or ⟨˜⟩ at the beginning or end of a word to indicate that it applies to the entire word.
Notes:
The old staveless tone letters, which are effectively obsolete, include high ⟨ˉe⟩, mid ⟨˗e⟩, low ⟨ˍe⟩, rising ⟨ˊe⟩ and falling ⟨ˋe⟩.
Officially, the stress marks ⟨ˈ ˌ⟩ appear before the stressed syllable, and thus mark the syllable boundary as well as stress (though the syllable boundary may still be explicitly marked with a period). Occasionally the stress mark is placed immediately before the nucleus of the syllable, after any consonantal onset. In such transcriptions, the stress mark does not mark a syllable boundary. The primary stress mark may be doubled ⟨ˈˈ⟩ for extra stress (such as prosodic stress). The secondary stress mark is sometimes seen doubled ⟨ˌˌ⟩ for extra-weak stress, but this convention has not been adopted by the IPA. Some dictionaries place both stress marks before a syllable, ⟨¦⟩, to indicate that pronunciations with either primary or secondary stress are heard, though this is not IPA usage.
There are three boundary markers: ⟨.⟩ for a syllable break, ⟨|⟩ for a minor prosodic break and ⟨‖⟩ for a major prosodic break. The tags 'minor' and 'major' are intentionally ambiguous. Depending on need, 'minor' may vary from a foot break to a break in list-intonation to a continuing–prosodic unit boundary (equivalent to a comma), and while 'major' is often any intonation break, it may be restricted to a final–prosodic unit boundary (equivalent to a period). The 'major' symbol may also be doubled, ⟨‖‖⟩, for a stronger break.
Although not part of the IPA, the following additional boundary markers are often used in conjunction with the IPA: ⟨μ⟩ for a mora or mora boundary, ⟨σ⟩ for a syllable or syllable boundary, ⟨+⟩ for a morpheme boundary, ⟨#⟩ for a word boundary (may be doubled, ⟨##⟩, for e.g. a breath-group boundary), ⟨$⟩ for a phrase or intermediate boundary and ⟨%⟩ for a prosodic boundary. For example, C# is a word-final consonant, %V a post-pausa vowel, and σC a syllable-initial consonant.
⟨ꜛ ꜜ⟩ are defined in the Handbook as "upstep" and "downstep", concepts from tonal languages. However, the upstep symbol can also be used for pitch reset, and the IPA Handbook uses it for prosody in the illustration for Portuguese, a non-tonal language.
Phonetic pitch and phonemic tone may be indicated by either diacritics placed over the nucleus of the syllable (e.g., high-pitch ⟨é⟩) or by Chao tone letters placed either before or after the word or syllable. There are three graphic variants of the tone letters: with or without a stave, and facing left or facing right from the stave. The stave was introduced with the 1989 Kiel Convention, as was the option of placing a staved letter after the word or syllable, while retaining the older conventions. There are therefore six ways to transcribe pitch/tone in the IPA: i.e., ⟨é⟩, ⟨˦e⟩, ⟨e˦⟩, ⟨꜓e⟩, ⟨e꜓⟩ and ⟨ˉe⟩ for a high pitch/tone. Of the tone letters, only left-facing staved letters and a few representative combinations are shown in the summary on the Chart, and in practice it is currently more common for tone letters to occur after the syllable/word than before, as in the Chao tradition. Placement before the word is a carry-over from the pre-Kiel IPA convention, as is still the case for the stress and upstep/downstep marks. The IPA endorses the Chao tradition of using the left-facing tone letters, ⟨˥ ˦ ˧ ˨ ˩⟩, for underlying tone, and the right-facing letters, ⟨꜒ ꜓ ꜔ ꜕ ꜖⟩, for surface tone, as occurs in tone sandhi, and for the intonation of non-tonal languages. In the Portuguese illustration in the 1999 Handbook, tone letters are placed before a word or syllable to indicate prosodic pitch (equivalent to [↗︎] global rise and [↘︎] global fall, but allowing more precision), and in the Cantonese illustration they are placed after a word/syllable to indicate lexical tone. Theoretically therefore prosodic pitch and lexical tone could be simultaneously transcribed in a single text, though this is not a formalized distinction.
Rising and falling pitch, as in contour tones, are indicated by combining the pitch diacritics and letters in the table, such as grave plus acute for rising [ě] and acute plus grave for falling [ê]. Only six combinations of two diacritics are supported, and only across three levels (high, mid, low), despite the diacritics supporting five levels of pitch in isolation. The four other explicitly approved rising and falling diacritic combinations are high/mid rising [e᷄], low rising [e᷅], high falling [e᷇], and low/mid falling [e᷆].
The Chao tone letters, on the other hand, may be combined in any pattern, and are therefore used for more complex contours and finer distinctions than the diacritics allow, such as mid-rising [e˨˦], extra-high falling [e˥˦], etc. There are 20 such possibilities. However, in Chao's original proposal, which was adopted by the IPA in 1989, he stipulated that the half-high and half-low letters ⟨˦ ˨⟩ may be combined with each other, but not with the other three tone letters, so as not to create spuriously precise distinctions. With this restriction, there are 8 possibilities.
The old staveless tone letters tend to be more restricted than the staved letters, though not as restricted as the diacritics. Officially, they support as many distinctions as the staved letters, but typically only three pitch levels are distinguished. Unicode supports default or high-pitch ⟨ˉ ˊ ˋ ˆ ˇ ˜ ˙⟩ and low-pitch ⟨ˍ ˏ ˎ ꞈ ˬ ˷⟩. Only a few mid-pitch tones are supported (such as ⟨˗ ˴⟩), and then only accidentally.
Although tone diacritics and tone letters are presented as equivalent on the chart, "this was done only to simplify the layout of the chart. The two sets of symbols are not comparable in this way." Using diacritics, a high tone is ⟨é⟩ and a low tone is ⟨è⟩; in tone letters, these are ⟨e˥⟩ and ⟨e˩⟩. One can double the diacritics for extra-high ⟨e̋⟩ and extra-low ⟨ȅ⟩; there is no parallel to this using tone letters. Instead, tone letters have mid-high ⟨e˦⟩ and mid-low ⟨e˨⟩; again, there is no equivalent among the diacritics. Thus in a three-register tone system, ⟨é ē è⟩ are equivalent to ⟨e˥ e˧ e˩⟩, while in a four-register system, ⟨e̋ é è ȅ⟩ may be equivalent to ⟨e˥ e˦ e˨ e˩⟩.
The correspondence breaks down even further once they start combining. For more complex tones, one may combine three or four tone diacritics in any permutation, though in practice only generic peaking (rising-falling) e᷈ and dipping (falling-rising) e᷉ combinations are used. Chao tone letters are required for finer detail (e˧˥˧, e˩˨˩, e˦˩˧, e˨˩˦, etc.). Although only 10 peaking and dipping tones were proposed in Chao's original, limited set of tone letters, phoneticians often make finer distinctions, and indeed an example is found on the IPA Chart. The system allows the transcription of 112 peaking and dipping pitch contours, including tones that are level for part of their length.
More complex contours are possible. Chao gave an example of [꜔꜒꜖꜔] (mid-high-low-mid) from English prosody.
Chao tone letters generally appear after each syllable, for a language with syllable tone (⟨a˧vɔ˥˩⟩), or after the phonological word, for a language with word tone (⟨avɔ˧˥˩⟩). The IPA gives the option of placing the tone letters before the word or syllable (⟨˧a˥˩vɔ⟩, ⟨˧˥˩avɔ⟩), but this is rare for lexical tone. (And indeed reversed tone letters may be used to clarify that they apply to the following rather than to the preceding syllable: ⟨꜔a꜒꜖vɔ⟩, ⟨꜔꜒꜖avɔ⟩.) The staveless letters are not directly supported by Unicode, but some fonts allow the stave in Chao tone letters to be suppressed.
IPA diacritics may be doubled to indicate an extra degree (greater intensity) of the feature indicated. This is a productive process, but apart from extra-high and extra-low tones being marked by doubled high- and low-tone diacritics, ⟨ə̋, ə̏⟩, the major prosodic break ⟨‖⟩ being marked as a doubled minor break ⟨|⟩, and a couple other instances, this usage is not enumerated by the IPA.
For example, the stress mark may be doubled to indicate an extra degree of stress, such as prosodic stress in English. An example in French, with a single stress mark for normal prosodic stress at the end of each prosodic unit (marked as a minor prosodic break), and a double stress mark for contrastive/emphatic stress: [ˈˈɑ̃ːˈtre | məˈsjø ‖ ˈˈvwala maˈdam ‖] Entrez monsieur, voilà madame. Similarly, a doubled secondary stress mark ⟨ˌˌ⟩ is commonly used for tertiary (extra-light) stress. In a similar vein, the effectively obsolete staveless tone letters were once doubled for an emphatic rising intonation ⟨˶⟩ and an emphatic falling intonation ⟨˵⟩.
Length is commonly extended by repeating the length mark, as in English shhh! [ʃːːː], or for "overlong" segments, such as in Estonian:
(Normally additional degrees of length are handled by the extra-short or half-long diacritic, i.e. ⟨e eˑ eː⟩ or ⟨ĕ e eː⟩, but the first two words in each of the Estonian examples are analyzed as typically short and long, /e eː/ and /n nː/, requiring a different remedy for the additional words.)
Delimiters are similar: double slashes indicate extra phonemic (morpho-phonemic), double square brackets especially precise transcription, and double parentheses especially unintelligible.
Occasionally other diacritics are doubled:
The extIPA provides combining parentheses for weak intensity, which when combined with a doubled diacritic indicate an intermediate degree. For instance, increasing degrees of nasalization of the vowel [e] might be written ⟨e ẽ᪻ ẽ ẽ̃᪻ ẽ̃⟩.
A number of IPA letters are not consistently used for their official values. A distinction between voiced fricatives and approximants is only partially implemented by the IPA, for example. Even with the relatively recent addition of the palatal fricative ⟨ʝ⟩ and the velar approximant ⟨ɰ⟩ to the alphabet, other letters, though defined as fricatives, are often ambiguous between fricative and approximant. For forward places, ⟨β⟩ and ⟨ð⟩ can generally be assumed to be fricatives unless they carry a lowering diacritic. Rearward, however, ⟨ʁ⟩ and ⟨ʕ⟩ are perhaps more commonly intended to be approximants even without a lowering diacritic. ⟨h⟩ and ⟨ɦ⟩ are similarly either fricatives or approximants, depending on the language, or even glottal "transitions", without that often being specified in the transcription.
Another common ambiguity is among the letters for palatal consonants. ⟨c⟩ and ⟨ɟ⟩ are not uncommonly used as a typographic convenience for affricates, typically [t͜ʃ] and [d͜ʒ], while ⟨ɲ⟩ and ⟨ʎ⟩ are commonly used for palatalized alveolar [n̠ʲ] and [l̠ʲ]. To some extent this may be an effect of analysis, but it is common to match up single IPA letters to the phonemes of a language, without overly worrying about phonetic precision.
It has been argued that the lower-pharyngeal (epiglottal) fricatives ⟨ʜ⟩ and ⟨ʢ⟩ are better characterized as trills, rather than as fricatives that have incidental trilling. This has the advantage of merging the upper-pharyngeal fricatives [ħ, ʕ] together with the epiglottal plosive [ʡ] and trills [ʜ ʢ] into a single pharyngeal column in the consonant chart. However, in Shilha Berber the epiglottal fricatives are not trilled. Although they might be transcribed ⟨ħ̠ ʢ̠⟩ to indicate this, the far more common transcription is ⟨ʜ ʢ⟩, which is therefore ambiguous between languages.
Among vowels, ⟨a⟩ is officially a front vowel, but is more commonly treated as a central vowel. The difference, to the extent it is even possible, is not phonemic in any language.
For all phonetic notation, it is good practice for an author to specify exactly what they mean by the symbols that they use.
Superscript IPA letters are used to indicate secondary aspects of articulation. These may be aspects of simultaneous articulation that are considered to be in some sense less dominant than the basic sound, or may be transitional articulations that are interpreted as secondary elements. Examples include secondary articulation; onsets, releases and other transitions; shades of sound; light epenthetic sounds and incompletely articulated sounds. The IPA and ICPLA endorse Unicode encoding of superscript variants of all contemporary segmental letters, including the "implicit" IPA retroflex letters ⟨ꞎ ᶑ ⟩.
Superscript letters can be meaningfully modified by combining diacritics, just as baseline letters can. For example, a superscript dental nasal is ⟨ⁿ̪d̪⟩, a superscript voiceless velar nasal is ⟨ᵑ̊ǂ⟩, and labial-velar prenasalization is ⟨ᵑ͡ᵐɡ͡b⟩. Although the diacritic may seem a bit oversized compared to the superscript letter it modifies, e.g. ⟨ᵓ̃⟩, this can be an aid to legibility, just as it is with the composite superscript c-cedilla ⟨ᶜ̧⟩ and rhotic vowels ⟨ᵊ˞ ᶟ˞⟩. Superscript length marks can be used to indicate the length of aspiration of a consonant, e.g. [pʰ tʰ kʰ]. Another option is to double the diacritic: ⟨kʰʰ⟩.
A number of IPA letters and diacritics have been retired or replaced over the years. This number includes duplicate symbols, symbols that were replaced due to user preference, and unitary symbols that were rendered with diacritics or digraphs to reduce the inventory of the IPA. The rejected symbols are now considered obsolete, though some are still seen in the literature.
The IPA once had several pairs of duplicate symbols from alternative proposals, but eventually settled on one or the other. An example is the vowel letter ⟨ɷ⟩, rejected in favor of ⟨ʊ⟩. Affricates were once transcribed with ligatures, such as ⟨ʧ ʤ ⟩ (and others, some of which not found in Unicode). These have been officially retired but are still used. Letters for specific combinations of primary and secondary articulation have also been mostly retired, with the idea that such features should be indicated with tie bars or diacritics: ⟨ƍ⟩ for [zʷ] is one. In addition, the rare voiceless implosives, ⟨ƥ ƭ ƈ ƙ ʠ ⟩, were dropped soon after their introduction and are now usually written ⟨ɓ̥ ɗ̥ ʄ̊ ɠ̊ ʛ̥ ⟩. The original set of click letters, ⟨ʇ, ʗ, ʖ, ʞ⟩, was retired but is still sometimes seen, as the current pipe letters ⟨ǀ, ǃ, ǁ, ǂ⟩ can cause problems with legibility, especially when used with brackets ([ ] or / /), the letter ⟨l⟩, or the prosodic marks ⟨|, ‖⟩. (For this reason, some publications which use the current IPA pipe letters disallow IPA brackets.)
Individual non-IPA letters may find their way into publications that otherwise use the standard IPA. This is especially common with:
In addition, it is common to see ad hoc typewriter substitutions, generally capital letters, for when IPA support is not available, e.g. A for ⟨ɑ⟩, B for ⟨β⟩ or ⟨ɓ⟩, D for ⟨ð⟩, ⟨ɗ ⟩ or ⟨ɖ ⟩, E for ⟨ɛ⟩, F or P for ⟨ɸ⟩, G ⟨ɣ⟩, I ⟨ɪ⟩, L ⟨ɬ⟩, N ⟨ŋ⟩, O ⟨ɔ⟩, S ⟨ ʃ ⟩, T ⟨θ⟩ or ⟨ʈ ⟩, U ⟨ʊ⟩, V ⟨ʋ⟩, X ⟨χ⟩, Z ⟨ʒ⟩, as well as @ for ⟨ə⟩ and 7 or ? for ⟨ʔ⟩. (See also SAMPA and X-SAMPA substitute notation.)
The Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for Disordered Speech, commonly abbreviated "extIPA" and sometimes called "Extended IPA", are symbols whose original purpose was to accurately transcribe disordered speech. At the Kiel Convention in 1989, a group of linguists drew up the initial extensions, which were based on the previous work of the PRDS (Phonetic Representation of Disordered Speech) Group in the early 1980s. The extensions were first published in 1990, then modified, and published again in 1994 in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association, when they were officially adopted by the ICPLA. While the original purpose was to transcribe disordered speech, linguists have used the extensions to designate a number of sounds within standard communication, such as hushing, gnashing teeth, and smacking lips, as well as regular lexical sounds such as lateral fricatives that do not have standard IPA symbols.
In addition to the Extensions to the IPA for disordered speech, there are the conventions of the Voice Quality Symbols, which include a number of symbols for additional airstream mechanisms and secondary articulations in what they call "voice quality".
Capital letters and various characters on the number row of the keyboard are commonly used to extend the alphabet in various ways.
There are various punctuation-like conventions for linguistic transcription that are commonly used together with IPA. Some of the more common are:
Full capital letters are not used as IPA symbols, except as typewriter substitutes (e.g. N for ⟨ŋ⟩, S for ⟨ ʃ ⟩, O for ⟨ɔ⟩ – see SAMPA). They are, however, often used in conjunction with the IPA in two cases:
Wildcards are commonly used in phonology to summarize syllable or word shapes, or to show the evolution of classes of sounds. For example, the possible syllable shapes of Mandarin can be abstracted as ranging from /V/ (an atonic vowel) to /CGVNᵀ/ (a consonant-glide-vowel-nasal syllable with tone), and word-final devoicing may be schematized as C → C̥/_#. In speech pathology, capital letters represent indeterminate sounds, and may be superscripted to indicate they are weakly articulated: e.g. [ᴰ] is a weak indeterminate alveolar, [ᴷ] a weak indeterminate velar.
There is a degree of variation between authors as to the capital letters used, but ⟨C⟩ for {consonant}, ⟨V⟩ for {vowel} and ⟨N⟩ for {nasal} are ubiquitous in English-language material. Other common conventions are ⟨T⟩ for {tone/accent} (tonicity), ⟨P⟩ for {plosive}, ⟨F⟩ for {fricative}, ⟨S⟩ for {sibilant}, ⟨G⟩ for {glide/semivowel}, ⟨L⟩ for {lateral} or {liquid}, ⟨R⟩ for {rhotic} or {resonant/sonorant}, ⟨₵⟩ for {obstruent}, ⟨Ʞ⟩ for {click}, ⟨A, E, O, Ɨ, U⟩ for {open, front, back, close, rounded vowel} and ⟨B, D, Ɉ, K, Q, Φ, H⟩ for {labial, alveolar, post-alveolar/palatal, velar, uvular, pharyngeal, glottal consonant}, respectively, and ⟨X⟩ for {any sound}. The letters can be modified with IPA diacritics, for example ⟨Cʼ⟩ for {ejective}, ⟨Ƈ ⟩ for {implosive}, ⟨N͡C⟩ or ⟨ᴺC⟩ for {prenasalized consonant}, ⟨Ṽ⟩ for {nasal vowel}, ⟨CʰV́⟩ for {aspirated CV syllable with high tone}, ⟨S̬⟩ for {voiced sibilant}, ⟨N̥⟩ for {voiceless nasal}, ⟨P͡F⟩ or ⟨P⟩ for {affricate}, ⟨Cʲ⟩ for {palatalized consonant} and ⟨D̪⟩ for {dental consonant}. ⟨H⟩, ⟨M⟩, ⟨L⟩ are also commonly used for high, mid and low tone, with ⟨LH⟩ for rising tone and ⟨HL⟩ for falling tone, rather than transcribing them overly precisely with IPA tone letters or with ambiguous digits.
Typical examples of archiphonemic use of capital letters are ⟨I⟩ for the Turkish harmonic vowel set {i y ɯ u}; ⟨D⟩ for the conflated flapped middle consonant of American English writer and rider; ⟨N⟩ for the homorganic syllable-coda nasal of languages such as Spanish and Japanese (essentially equivalent to the wild-card usage of the letter); and ⟨R⟩ in cases where a phonemic distinction between trill /r/ and flap /ɾ/ is conflated, as in Spanish enrejar /eNreˈxaR/ (the n is homorganic and the first r is a trill, but the second r is variable). Similar usage is found for phonemic analysis, where a language does not distinguish sounds that have separate letters in the IPA. For instance, Castillian Spanish has been analyzed as having phonemes /Θ/ and /S/, which surface as [θ] and [s] in voiceless environments and as [ð] and [z] in voiced environments (e.g. hazte /ˈaΘte/, → [ˈaθte], vs hazme /ˈaΘme/, → [ˈaðme]; or las manos /laS ˈmanoS/, → [lazˈmanos]).
⟨V⟩, ⟨F⟩ and ⟨C⟩ have completely different meanings as Voice Quality Symbols, where they stand for "voice" (VoQS jargon for secondary articulation), "falsetto" and "creak". These three letters may take diacritics to indicate what kind of voice quality an utterance has, and may be used as carrier letters to extract a suprasegmental feature that occurs on all susceptible segments in a stretch of IPA. For instance, the transcription of Scottish Gaelic [kʷʰuˣʷt̪ʷs̟ʷ] 'cat' and [kʷʰʉˣʷt͜ʃʷ] 'cats' (Islay dialect) can be made more economical by extracting the suprasegmental labialization of the words: Vʷ[kʰuˣt̪s̟] and Vʷ[kʰʉˣt͜ʃ]. The conventional wildcards ⟨X⟩ or ⟨C⟩ might be used instead of VoQS ⟨V⟩ so that the reader does not misinterpret ⟨Vʷ⟩ as meaning that only vowels are labialized (i.e. Xʷ[kʰuˣt̪s̟] for all segments labialized, Cʷ[kʰuˣt̪s̟] for all consonants labialized), or the carrier letter may be omitted altogether (e.g. ʷ[kʰuˣt̪s̟], [ʷkʰuˣt̪s̟] or [kʰuˣt̪s̟]ʷ). (See § Suprasegmentals for other transcription conventions.)
This summary is to some extent valid internationally, but linguistic material written in other languages may have different associations with capital letters used as wildcards. For example, in German ⟨K⟩ and ⟨V⟩ are used for Konsonant (consonant) and Vokal (vowel); in French, tone may be transcribed with ⟨H⟩ and ⟨B⟩ for haut (high) and bas (low).
The blank cells on the summary IPA chart can be filled without much difficulty if the need arises.
The missing retroflex letters, namely ⟨ᶑ ꞎ ⟩, are "implicit" in the alphabet, and the IPA supported their adoption into Unicode. Attested in the literature are the retroflex implosive ⟨ᶑ ⟩, the voiceless retroflex lateral fricative ⟨ꞎ ⟩, the retroflex lateral flap ⟨ ⟩ and the retroflex click ⟨ ⟩; the first is also mentioned in the IPA Handbook, and the lateral fricatives are provided for by the extIPA.
The epiglottal trill is arguably covered by the generally trilled epiglottal "fricatives" ⟨ʜ ʢ⟩. Ad hoc letters for near-close central vowels, ⟨ᵻ ᵿ⟩, are used in some descriptions of English, though those are specifically reduced vowels (forming a set with the IPA reduced vowels ⟨ə ɐ⟩), and the simple points in vowel space are easily transcribed with diacritics: ⟨ɪ̈ ʊ̈⟩ or ⟨ɨ̞ ʉ̞⟩. Diacritics are able to fill in most of the remainder of the charts. If a sound cannot be transcribed, an asterisk ⟨*⟩ may be used, either as a letter or as a diacritic (as in ⟨k*⟩ sometimes seen for the Korean "fortis" velar).
Representations of consonant sounds outside of the core set are created by adding diacritics to letters with similar sound values. The Spanish bilabial and dental approximants are commonly written as lowered fricatives, [β̞] and [ð̞] respectively. Similarly, voiced lateral fricatives can be written as raised lateral approximants, [ɭ˔ ʎ̝ ʟ̝], though the extIPA also provides ⟨⟩ for the first of these. A few languages such as Banda have a bilabial flap as the preferred allophone of what is elsewhere a labiodental flap. It has been suggested that this be written with the labiodental flap letter and the advanced diacritic, [ⱱ̟]. Similarly, a labiodental trill would be written [ʙ̪] (bilabial trill and the dental sign), and the labiodental plosives are now universally ⟨p̪ b̪⟩ rather than the ad hoc letters ⟨ȹ ȸ⟩ once found in Bantuist literature. Other taps can be written as extra-short plosives or laterals, e.g. [ ɟ̆ ɢ̆ ʟ̆], though in some cases the diacritic would need to be written below the letter. A retroflex trill can be written as a retracted [r̠], just as non-subapical retroflex fricatives sometimes are. The remaining pulmonic consonants – the uvular laterals ([ʟ̠ ̠ ʟ̠˔]) and the palatal trill – while not strictly impossible, are very difficult to pronounce and are unlikely to occur even as allophones in the world's languages.
The vowels are similarly manageable by using diacritics for raising, lowering, fronting, backing, centering, and mid-centering. For example, the unrounded equivalent of [ʊ] can be transcribed as mid-centered [ɯ̽], and the rounded equivalent of [æ] as raised [ɶ̝] or lowered [œ̞] (though for those who conceive of vowel space as a triangle, simple [ɶ] already is the rounded equivalent of [æ]). True mid vowels are lowered [e̞ ø̞ ɘ̞ ɵ̞ ɤ̞ o̞] or raised [ɛ̝ œ̝ ɜ̝ ɞ̝ ʌ̝ ɔ̝], while centered [ɪ̈ ʊ̈] and [ä] (or, less commonly, [ɑ̈]) are near-close and open central vowels, respectively.
The only known vowels that cannot be represented in this scheme are vowels with unexpected roundedness, which would require a dedicated diacritic, such as protruded ⟨ʏʷ⟩ and compressed ⟨uᵝ⟩ (or protruded ⟨ɪʷ⟩ and compressed ⟨ɯᶹ⟩), though this transcription suggests that they are diphthongs (as indeed they are in Swedish). The extIPA 'spread' diacritic ⟨◌͍⟩ is sometimes seen, for compressed ⟨u͍⟩, ⟨o͍⟩, ⟨ɔ͍⟩, ⟨ɒ͍⟩, though the intended meaning needs to be explained or they will be interpreted as being spread the way [i] is. Ladefoged & Maddieson used the old IPA omega diacritic for labialization, ⟨◌̫⟩, for protrusion (w-like labialization without velarization), e.g. protruded ⟨y⟩, ⟨ʏ̫⟩, ⟨ø̫⟩, ⟨œ̫⟩; while Kelly & Local use a combining w diacritic ⟨◌ᪿ⟩ for protrusion (e.g. ⟨yᷱ øᪿ⟩) and a combining turned w diacritic ⟨◌ᫀ⟩ for compression (e.g. ⟨uᫀ oᫀ⟩). ⟨◌̫⟩ is the cursive form of ⟨◌ᪿ⟩, and these solutions recall an old IPA convention of rounding an unrounded vowel letter like i with a subscript ⟨◌̫⟩/omega, and unrounding a rounded letter like u with a turned omega.
An IPA symbol is often distinguished from the sound it is intended to represent, since there is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between letter and sound in broad transcription, making articulatory descriptions such as "mid front rounded vowel" or "voiced velar stop" unreliable. While the Handbook of the International Phonetic Association states that no official names exist for its symbols, it admits the presence of one or two common names for each. The symbols also have nonce names in the Unicode standard. In many cases, the names in Unicode and the IPA Handbook differ. For example, the Handbook calls ⟨ɛ⟩ "epsilon", while Unicode calls it "small letter open e".
The traditional names of the Latin and Greek letters are usually used for unmodified letters. Letters which are not directly derived from these alphabets, such as ⟨ʕ⟩, may have a variety of names, sometimes based on the appearance of the symbol or on the sound that it represents. In Unicode, some of the letters of Greek origin have Latin forms for use in IPA; the others use the characters from the Greek block.
For diacritics, there are two methods of naming. For traditional diacritics, the IPA notes the name in a well known language; for example, ⟨é⟩ is "e-acute", based on the name of the diacritic in English and French. Non-traditional diacritics are often named after objects they resemble, so ⟨d̪⟩ is called "d-bridge".
Geoffrey Pullum and William Ladusaw list a variety of names in use for both current and retired IPA symbols in their Phonetic Symbol Guide. Many of them found their way into Unicode.
Unicode supports nearly all of the IPA alphabet. Apart from basic Latin and Greek and general punctuation, the primary blocks are IPA Extensions, Spacing Modifier Letters and Combining Diacritical Marks, with lesser support from Phonetic Extensions, Phonetic Extensions Supplement, Combining Diacritical Marks Supplement, and scattered characters elsewhere. The extended IPA is supported primarily by those blocks and Latin Extended-G.
After the Kiel Convention in 1989, most IPA symbols were assigned an identifying number to prevent confusion between similar characters during the printing of manuscripts. The codes were never much used and have been superseded by Unicode.
Many typefaces have support for IPA characters, but good diacritic rendering remains rare. Web browsers generally do not need any configuration to display IPA characters, provided that a typeface capable of doing so is available to the operating system.
Typefaces that provide full IPA and nearly full extIPA support, including properly rendering the diacritics, include Gentium Plus, Charis SIL, Doulos SIL, and Andika. In addition to the level of support found in commercial and system fonts, these fonts support the full range of old-style (pre-Kiel) staveless tone letters, through a character variant option that suppresses the stave of the Chao tone letters. They also have an option to maintain the ⟨a⟩ ~ ⟨ɑ⟩ vowel distinction when set in italic. The only notable gaps are with the extIPA: the combining parentheses, which enclose diacritics, need to be set individually, as the paired parentheses are not supported; nor is the enclosing circle used to mark unidentified sounds supported, as the proper Unicode handling of that symbol has not been worked out.
The Microsoft Arial and Times New Roman fonts include IPA characters, but they are neither complete (especially Arial) nor render diacritics properly. The basic Latin Noto fonts are better, only failing with the more obscure characters. The Apple system fonts Geneva, Lucida Grande and Hiragino (certain weights) have basic IPA support. The Calibri font, which is the default font of Microsoft Office, has nearly complete IPA support with good diacritic rendering, though not as good as what is available with free fonts (see image at right).
Minion 3 has IPA support.
Brill has good IPA support. It is a commercial font but is freely available for non-commercial use.
Several systems have been developed that map the IPA symbols to ASCII characters. Notable systems include SAMPA and X-SAMPA. The usage of mapping systems in on-line text has to some extent been adopted in the context input methods, allowing convenient keying of IPA characters that would be otherwise unavailable on standard keyboard layouts.
IETF language tags have registered fonipa as a variant subtag identifying text as written in IPA. Thus, an IPA transcription of English could be tagged as en-fonipa. For the use of IPA without attribution to a concrete language, und-fonipa is available.
Online IPA keyboard utilities are available, though none of them cover the complete range of IPA symbols and diacritics. Examples are the IPA 2018 i-charts hosted by the IPA, IPA character picker 27 at GitHub, Type IPA phonetic symbols at TypeIt.org, and an IPA Chart keyboard also at GitHub. In April 2019, Google's Gboard for Android added an IPA keyboard to its platform. For iOS there are multiple free keyboard layouts available, such as the IPA Phonetic Keyboard. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation of speech sounds in written form. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech–language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The IPA is designed to represent those qualities of speech that are part of lexical (and, to a limited extent, prosodic) sounds in oral language: phones, intonation and the separation of syllables. To represent additional qualities of speech—such as tooth gnashing, lisping, and sounds made with a cleft palate—an extended set of symbols may be used.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Segments are transcribed by one or more IPA symbols of two basic types: letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English digraph ⟨ch⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a single letter: [c], or with multiple letters plus diacritics: [t̠̺͡ʃʰ], depending on how precise one wishes to be. Slashes are used to signal phonemic transcription; therefore, /tʃ/ is more abstract than either [t̠̺͡ʃʰ] or [c] and might refer to either, depending on the context and language.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Occasionally, letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 segmental letters, an indefinitely large number of suprasegmental letters, 44 diacritics (not counting composites), and four extra-lexical prosodic marks in the IPA. Most of these are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, formed what would be known from 1897 onwards as the International Phonetic Association (in French, l'Association phonétique internationale). Their original alphabet was based on a spelling reform for English known as the Romic alphabet, but to make it usable for other languages the values of the symbols were allowed to vary from language to language. For example, the sound [ʃ] (the sh in shoe) was originally represented with the letter ⟨c⟩ in English, but with the digraph ⟨ch⟩ in French. In 1888, the alphabet was revised to be uniform across languages, thus providing the base for all future revisions. The idea of making the IPA was first suggested by Otto Jespersen in a letter to Passy. It was developed by Alexander John Ellis, Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, and Passy.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. After revisions and expansions from the 1890s to the 1940s, the IPA remained primarily unchanged until the Kiel Convention in 1989. A minor revision took place in 1993 with the addition of four letters for mid central vowels and the removal of letters for voiceless implosives. The alphabet was last revised in May 2005 with the addition of a letter for a labiodental flap. Apart from the addition and removal of symbols, changes to the IPA have consisted largely of renaming symbols and categories and in modifying typefaces.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology (extIPA) were created in 1990 and were officially adopted by the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association in 1994.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound (speech segment). This means that:",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The alphabet is designed for transcribing sounds (phones), not phonemes, though it is used for phonemic transcription as well. A few letters that did not indicate specific sounds have been retired (⟨ˇ⟩, once used for the \"compound\" tone of Swedish and Norwegian, and ⟨ƞ⟩, once used for the moraic nasal of Japanese), though one remains: ⟨ɧ⟩, used for the sj-sound of Swedish. When the IPA is used for phonemic transcription, the letter–sound correspondence can be rather loose. For example, ⟨c⟩ and ⟨ɟ⟩ are used in the IPA Handbook for /t͡ʃ/ and /d͡ʒ/.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Among the symbols of the IPA, 107 letters represent consonants and vowels, 31 diacritics are used to modify these, and 17 additional signs indicate suprasegmental qualities such as length, tone, stress, and intonation. These are organized into a chart; the chart displayed here is the official chart as posted at the website of the IPA.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet. For this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither: for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ⟨ʔ⟩, originally had the form of a dotless question mark, and derives from an apostrophe. A few letters, such as that of the voiced pharyngeal fricative, ⟨ʕ⟩, were inspired by other writing systems (in this case, the Arabic letter ⟨ﻉ⟩, ʿayn, via the reversed apostrophe).",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Some letter forms derive from existing letters:",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The International Phonetic Alphabet is based on the Latin script, and uses as few non-Latin letters as possible. The Association created the IPA so that the sound values of most letters would correspond to \"international usage\" (approximately Classical Latin). Hence, the consonant letters ⟨b⟩, ⟨d⟩, ⟨f⟩, (hard) ⟨ɡ⟩, (non-silent) ⟨h⟩, (unaspirated) ⟨k⟩, ⟨l⟩, ⟨m⟩, ⟨n⟩, (unaspirated) ⟨p⟩, (voiceless) ⟨s⟩, (unaspirated) ⟨t⟩, ⟨v⟩, ⟨w⟩, and ⟨z⟩ have more or less the values found in English; and the vowel letters ⟨a⟩, ⟨e⟩, ⟨i⟩, ⟨o⟩, ⟨u⟩ correspond to the (long) sound values of Latin: [i] is like the vowel in machine, [u] is as in rule, etc. Other Latin letters, particularly ⟨j⟩, ⟨r⟩ and ⟨y⟩, differ from English, but have their IPA values in Latin or other European languages.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "This basic Latin inventory was extended by adding small-capital and cursive forms, diacritics and rotation. The sound values of these letters are related to those of the original letters, and their derivation may be iconic. For example, letters with a rightward-facing hook at the bottom represent retroflex equivalents of the source letters, and small capital letters usually represent uvular equivalents of their source letters.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "There are also several letters from the Greek alphabet, though their sound values may differ from Greek. The most extreme difference is ⟨ʋ⟩, which is a vowel in Greek but a consonant in the IPA. For most Greek letters, subtly different glyph shapes have been devised for the IPA, specifically ⟨ɑ⟩, ⟨ꞵ⟩, ⟨ɣ⟩, ⟨ɛ⟩, ⟨ɸ⟩, ⟨ꭓ⟩ and ⟨ʋ⟩, which are encoded in Unicode separately from their parent Greek letters. One, however – ⟨θ⟩ – has only its Greek form, while for ⟨ꞵ ~ β⟩ and ⟨ꭓ ~ χ⟩, both Greek and Latin forms are in common use. The tone letters are not derived from an alphabet, but from a pitch trace on a musical scale.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Beyond the letters themselves, there are a variety of secondary symbols which aid in transcription. Diacritic marks can be combined with IPA letters to add phonetic detail such as tone and secondary articulations. There are also special symbols for prosodic features such as stress and intonation.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "There are two principal types of brackets used to set off (delimit) IPA transcriptions:",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Other conventions are less commonly seen:",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "All three of the above are provided by the IPA Handbook. The following are not, but may be seen in IPA transcription or in associated material (especially angle brackets):",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Some examples of contrasting brackets in the literature:",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In some English accents, the phoneme /l/, which is usually spelled as ⟨l⟩ or ⟨ll⟩, is articulated as two distinct allophones: the clear [l] occurs before vowels and the consonant /j/, whereas the dark [ɫ]/[lˠ] occurs before consonants, except /j/, and at the end of words.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "the alternations /f/ – /v/ in plural formation in one class of nouns, as in knife /naɪf/ – knives /naɪvz/, which can be represented morphophonemically as {naɪV} – {naɪV+z}. The morphophoneme {V} stands for the phoneme set {/f/, /v/}.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "[ˈf\\faɪnəlz ˈhɛld ɪn (.) ⸨knock on door⸩ bɑɹsə{𝑝ˈloʊnə and ˈmədɹɪd 𝑝}] — f-finals held in Barcelona and Madrid.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "IPA letters have cursive forms designed for use in manuscripts and when taking field notes, but the Handbook recommended against their use, as cursive IPA is \"harder for most people to decipher.\" A braille representation of the IPA for blind or visually impaired professionals and students has also been developed.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The International Phonetic Alphabet is occasionally modified by the Association. After each modification, the Association provides an updated simplified presentation of the alphabet in the form of a chart. (See History of the IPA.) Not all aspects of the alphabet can be accommodated in a chart of the size published by the IPA. The alveolo-palatal and epiglottal consonants, for example, are not included in the consonant chart for reasons of space rather than of theory (two additional columns would be required, one between the retroflex and palatal columns and the other between the pharyngeal and glottal columns), and the lateral flap would require an additional row for that single consonant, so they are listed instead under the catchall block of \"other symbols\". The indefinitely large number of tone letters would make a full accounting impractical even on a larger page, and only a few examples are shown, and even the tone diacritics are not complete; the reversed tone letters are not illustrated at all.",
"title": "Modifying the IPA chart"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The procedure for modifying the alphabet or the chart is to propose the change in the Journal of the IPA. (See, for example, December 2008 on an open central unrounded vowel and August 2011 on central approximants.) Reactions to the proposal may be published in the same or subsequent issues of the Journal (as in August 2009 on the open central vowel). A formal proposal is then put to the Council of the IPA – which is elected by the membership – for further discussion and a formal vote.",
"title": "Modifying the IPA chart"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Many users of the alphabet, including the leadership of the Association itself, deviate from its standardized usage. The Journal of the IPA finds it acceptable to mix IPA and extIPA symbols in consonant charts in their articles. (For instance, including the extIPA letter ⟨⟩, rather than ⟨ʎ̝̊⟩, in an illustration of the IPA.)",
"title": "Modifying the IPA chart"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Of more than 160 IPA symbols, relatively few will be used to transcribe speech in any one language, with various levels of precision. A precise phonetic transcription, in which sounds are specified in detail, is known as a narrow transcription. A coarser transcription with less detail is called a broad transcription. Both are relative terms, and both are generally enclosed in square brackets. Broad phonetic transcriptions may restrict themselves to easily heard details, or only to details that are relevant to the discussion at hand, and may differ little if at all from phonemic transcriptions, but they make no theoretical claim that all the distinctions transcribed are necessarily meaningful in the language.",
"title": "Usage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "For example, the English word little may be transcribed broadly as [ˈlɪtəl], approximately describing many pronunciations. A narrower transcription may focus on individual or dialectical details: [ˈɫɪɾɫ] in General American, [ˈlɪʔo] in Cockney, or [ˈɫɪːɫ] in Southern US English.",
"title": "Usage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Phonemic transcriptions, which express the conceptual counterparts of spoken sounds, are usually enclosed in slashes (/ /) and tend to use simpler letters with few diacritics. The choice of IPA letters may reflect theoretical claims of how speakers conceptualize sounds as phonemes or they may be merely a convenience for typesetting. Phonemic approximations between slashes do not have absolute sound values. For instance, in English, either the vowel of pick or the vowel of peak may be transcribed as /i/, so that pick, peak would be transcribed as /ˈpik, ˈpiːk/ or as /ˈpɪk, ˈpik/; and neither is identical to the vowel of the French pique which would also be transcribed /pik/. By contrast, a narrow phonetic transcription of pick, peak, pique could be: [pʰɪk], [pʰiːk], [pikʲ].",
"title": "Usage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "IPA is popular for transcription by linguists. Some American linguists, however, use a mix of IPA with Americanist phonetic notation or Sinological phonetic notation or otherwise use nonstandard symbols for various reasons. Authors who employ such nonstandard use are encouraged to include a chart or other explanation of their choices, which is good practice in general, as linguists differ in their understanding of the exact meaning of IPA symbols and common conventions change over time.",
"title": "Usage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Many British dictionaries, including the Oxford English Dictionary and some learner's dictionaries such as the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary and the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, now use the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent the pronunciation of words. However, most American (and some British) volumes use one of a variety of pronunciation respelling systems, intended to be more comfortable for readers of English and to be more acceptable across dialects, without the implication of a preferred pronunciation that the IPA might convey. For example, the respelling systems in many American dictionaries (such as Merriam-Webster) use ⟨y⟩ for IPA [ j] and ⟨sh⟩ for IPA [ ʃ ], reflecting the usual spelling of those sounds in English. (In IPA, [y] represents the sound of the French ⟨u⟩, as in tu, and [sh] represents the sequence of consonants in grasshopper.)",
"title": "Usage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The IPA is also not universal among dictionaries in languages other than English. Monolingual dictionaries of languages with phonemic orthographies generally do not bother with indicating the pronunciation of most words, and tend to use respelling systems for words with unexpected pronunciations. Dictionaries produced in Israel use the IPA rarely and sometimes use the Hebrew alphabet for transcription of foreign words. Bilingual dictionaries that translate from foreign languages into Russian usually employ the IPA, but monolingual Russian dictionaries occasionally use pronunciation respelling for foreign words. The IPA is more common in bilingual dictionaries, but there are exceptions here too. Mass-market bilingual Czech dictionaries, for instance, tend to use the IPA only for sounds not found in Czech.",
"title": "Usage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "IPA letters have been incorporated into the alphabets of various languages, notably via the Africa Alphabet in many sub-Saharan languages such as Hausa, Fula, Akan, Gbe languages, Manding languages, Lingala, etc. Capital case variants have been created for use in these languages. For example, Kabiyè of northern Togo has Ɖ ɖ, Ŋ ŋ, Ɣ ɣ, Ɔ ɔ, Ɛ ɛ, Ʋ ʋ. These, and others, are supported by Unicode, but appear in Latin ranges other than the IPA extensions.",
"title": "Usage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In the IPA itself, however, only lower-case letters are used. The 1949 edition of the IPA handbook indicated that an asterisk ⟨*⟩ might be prefixed to indicate that a word was a proper name, but this convention was not included in the 1999 Handbook, which notes the contrary use of the asterisk as a placeholder for a sound or feature that does not have a symbol.",
"title": "Usage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The IPA has widespread use among classical singers during preparation as they are frequently required to sing in a variety of foreign languages. They are also taught by vocal coaches to perfect diction and improve tone quality and tuning. Opera librettos are authoritatively transcribed in IPA, such as Nico Castel's volumes and Timothy Cheek's book Singing in Czech. Opera singers' ability to read IPA was used by the site Visual Thesaurus, which employed several opera singers \"to make recordings for the 150,000 words and phrases in VT's lexical database ... for their vocal stamina, attention to the details of enunciation, and most of all, knowledge of IPA\".",
"title": "Usage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The International Phonetic Association organizes the letters of the IPA into three categories: pulmonic consonants, non-pulmonic consonants, and vowels.",
"title": "Letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Pulmonic consonant letters are arranged singly or in pairs of voiceless (tenuis) and voiced sounds, with these then grouped in columns from front (labial) sounds on the left to back (glottal) sounds on the right. In official publications by the IPA, two columns are omitted to save space, with the letters listed among 'other symbols' even though theoretically they belong in the main chart. They are arranged in rows from full closure (occlusives: stops and nasals) at top, to brief closure (vibrants: trills and taps), to partial closure (fricatives), and finally minimal closure (approximants) at bottom, again with a row left out to save space. In the table below, a slightly different arrangement is made: All pulmonic consonants are included in the pulmonic-consonant table, and the vibrants and laterals are separated out so that the rows reflect the common lenition pathway of stop → fricative → approximant, as well as the fact that several letters pull double duty as both fricative and approximant; affricates may then be created by joining stops and fricatives from adjacent cells. Shaded cells represent articulations that are judged to be impossible.",
"title": "Letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Vowel letters are also grouped in pairs—of unrounded and rounded vowel sounds—with these pairs also arranged from front on the left to back on the right, and from maximal closure at top to minimal closure at bottom. No vowel letters are omitted from the chart, though in the past some of the mid central vowels were listed among the 'other symbols'.",
"title": "Letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "A pulmonic consonant is a consonant made by obstructing the glottis (the space between the vocal folds) or oral cavity (the mouth) and either simultaneously or subsequently letting out air from the lungs. Pulmonic consonants make up the majority of consonants in the IPA, as well as in human language. All consonants in English fall into this category.",
"title": "Letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "The pulmonic consonant table, which includes most consonants, is arranged in rows that designate manner of articulation, meaning how the consonant is produced, and columns that designate place of articulation, meaning where in the vocal tract the consonant is produced. The main chart includes only consonants with a single place of articulation.",
"title": "Letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Notes",
"title": "Letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Non-pulmonic consonants are sounds whose airflow is not dependent on the lungs. These include clicks (found in the Khoisan languages and some neighboring Bantu languages of Africa), implosives (found in languages such as Sindhi, Hausa, Swahili and Vietnamese), and ejectives (found in many Amerindian and Caucasian languages).",
"title": "Letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Notes",
"title": "Letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Affricates and co-articulated stops are represented by two letters joined by a tie bar, either above or below the letters with no difference in meaning. Affricates are optionally represented by ligatures (e.g. ⟨ʧ, ʤ ⟩), though this is no longer official IPA usage because a great number of ligatures would be required to represent all affricates this way. Alternatively, a superscript notation for a consonant release is sometimes used to transcribe affricates, for example ⟨tˢ⟩ for [t͜s], paralleling [kˣ] ~ [k͜x]. The letters for the palatal plosives ⟨c⟩ and ⟨ɟ⟩ are often used as a convenience for [t͜ʃ] and [d͜ʒ] or similar affricates, even in official IPA publications, so they must be interpreted with care.",
"title": "Letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Co-articulated consonants are sounds that involve two simultaneous places of articulation (are pronounced using two parts of the vocal tract). In English, the [w] in \"went\" is a coarticulated consonant, being pronounced by rounding the lips and raising the back of the tongue. Similar sounds are [ʍ] and [ɥ]. In some languages, plosives can be double-articulated, for example in the name of Laurent Gbagbo.",
"title": "Letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Notes",
"title": "Letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The IPA defines a vowel as a sound which occurs at a syllable center. Below is a chart depicting the vowels of the IPA. The IPA maps the vowels according to the position of the tongue.",
"title": "Letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The vertical axis of the chart is mapped by vowel height. Vowels pronounced with the tongue lowered are at the bottom, and vowels pronounced with the tongue raised are at the top. For example, [ɑ] (the first vowel in father) is at the bottom because the tongue is lowered in this position. [i] (the vowel in \"meet\") is at the top because the sound is said with the tongue raised to the roof of the mouth.",
"title": "Letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In a similar fashion, the horizontal axis of the chart is determined by vowel backness. Vowels with the tongue moved towards the front of the mouth (such as [ɛ], the vowel in \"met\") are to the left in the chart, while those in which it is moved to the back (such as [ʌ], the vowel in \"but\") are placed to the right in the chart.",
"title": "Letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "In places where vowels are paired, the right represents a rounded vowel (in which the lips are rounded) while the left is its unrounded counterpart.",
"title": "Letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Diphthongs are typically specified with a non-syllabic diacritic, as in ⟨ui̯⟩ or ⟨u̯i⟩, or with a superscript for the on- or off-glide, as in ⟨uⁱ⟩ or ⟨ᵘi⟩. Sometimes a tie bar is used: ⟨u͜i⟩, especially when it is difficult to tell if the diphthong is characterized by an on-glide or an off-glide or when it is variable.",
"title": "Letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Notes",
"title": "Letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Diacritics are used for phonetic detail. They are added to IPA letters to indicate a modification or specification of that letter's normal pronunciation.",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "By being made superscript, any IPA letter may function as a diacritic, conferring elements of its articulation to the base letter. Those superscript letters listed below are specifically provided for by the IPA Handbook; other uses can be illustrated with ⟨tˢ⟩ ([t] with fricative release), ⟨ᵗs⟩ ([s] with affricate onset), ⟨ⁿd⟩ (prenasalized [d]), ⟨bʱ⟩ ([b] with breathy voice), ⟨mˀ⟩ (glottalized [m]), ⟨sᶴ⟩ ([s] with a flavor of [ʃ], i.e. a voiceless alveolar retracted sibilant), ⟨oᶷ⟩ ([o] with diphthongization), ⟨ɯᵝ⟩ (compressed [ɯ]). Superscript diacritics placed after a letter are ambiguous between simultaneous modification of the sound and phonetic detail at the end of the sound. For example, labialized ⟨kʷ⟩ may mean either simultaneous [k] and [w] or else [k] with a labialized release. Superscript diacritics placed before a letter, on the other hand, normally indicate a modification of the onset of the sound (⟨mˀ⟩ glottalized [m], ⟨ˀm⟩ [m] with a glottal onset). (See § Superscript IPA.)",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Notes:",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Subdiacritics (diacritics normally placed below a letter) may be moved above a letter to avoid conflict with a descender, as in voiceless ⟨ŋ̊⟩. The raising and lowering diacritics have optional spacing forms ⟨˔⟩, ⟨˕⟩ that avoid descenders.",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "The state of the glottis can be finely transcribed with diacritics. A series of alveolar plosives ranging from open-glottis to closed-glottis phonation is:",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Additional diacritics are provided by the Extensions to the IPA for speech pathology.",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "These symbols describe the features of a language above the level of individual consonants and vowels, that is, at the level of syllable, word or phrase. These include prosody, pitch, length, stress, intensity, tone and gemination of the sounds of a language, as well as the rhythm and intonation of speech. Various ligatures of pitch/tone letters and diacritics are provided for by the Kiel Convention and used in the IPA Handbook despite not being found in the summary of the IPA alphabet found on the one-page chart.",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Under capital letters below we will see how a carrier letter may be used to indicate suprasegmental features such as labialization or nasalization. Some authors omit the carrier letter, for e.g. suffixed [kʰuˣt̪s̟]ʷ or prefixed [ʷkʰuˣt̪s̟], or place a spacing variant of a diacritic such as ⟨˔⟩ or ⟨˜⟩ at the beginning or end of a word to indicate that it applies to the entire word.",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Notes:",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "The old staveless tone letters, which are effectively obsolete, include high ⟨ˉe⟩, mid ⟨˗e⟩, low ⟨ˍe⟩, rising ⟨ˊe⟩ and falling ⟨ˋe⟩.",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Officially, the stress marks ⟨ˈ ˌ⟩ appear before the stressed syllable, and thus mark the syllable boundary as well as stress (though the syllable boundary may still be explicitly marked with a period). Occasionally the stress mark is placed immediately before the nucleus of the syllable, after any consonantal onset. In such transcriptions, the stress mark does not mark a syllable boundary. The primary stress mark may be doubled ⟨ˈˈ⟩ for extra stress (such as prosodic stress). The secondary stress mark is sometimes seen doubled ⟨ˌˌ⟩ for extra-weak stress, but this convention has not been adopted by the IPA. Some dictionaries place both stress marks before a syllable, ⟨¦⟩, to indicate that pronunciations with either primary or secondary stress are heard, though this is not IPA usage.",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "There are three boundary markers: ⟨.⟩ for a syllable break, ⟨|⟩ for a minor prosodic break and ⟨‖⟩ for a major prosodic break. The tags 'minor' and 'major' are intentionally ambiguous. Depending on need, 'minor' may vary from a foot break to a break in list-intonation to a continuing–prosodic unit boundary (equivalent to a comma), and while 'major' is often any intonation break, it may be restricted to a final–prosodic unit boundary (equivalent to a period). The 'major' symbol may also be doubled, ⟨‖‖⟩, for a stronger break.",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Although not part of the IPA, the following additional boundary markers are often used in conjunction with the IPA: ⟨μ⟩ for a mora or mora boundary, ⟨σ⟩ for a syllable or syllable boundary, ⟨+⟩ for a morpheme boundary, ⟨#⟩ for a word boundary (may be doubled, ⟨##⟩, for e.g. a breath-group boundary), ⟨$⟩ for a phrase or intermediate boundary and ⟨%⟩ for a prosodic boundary. For example, C# is a word-final consonant, %V a post-pausa vowel, and σC a syllable-initial consonant.",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "⟨ꜛ ꜜ⟩ are defined in the Handbook as \"upstep\" and \"downstep\", concepts from tonal languages. However, the upstep symbol can also be used for pitch reset, and the IPA Handbook uses it for prosody in the illustration for Portuguese, a non-tonal language.",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Phonetic pitch and phonemic tone may be indicated by either diacritics placed over the nucleus of the syllable (e.g., high-pitch ⟨é⟩) or by Chao tone letters placed either before or after the word or syllable. There are three graphic variants of the tone letters: with or without a stave, and facing left or facing right from the stave. The stave was introduced with the 1989 Kiel Convention, as was the option of placing a staved letter after the word or syllable, while retaining the older conventions. There are therefore six ways to transcribe pitch/tone in the IPA: i.e., ⟨é⟩, ⟨˦e⟩, ⟨e˦⟩, ⟨꜓e⟩, ⟨e꜓⟩ and ⟨ˉe⟩ for a high pitch/tone. Of the tone letters, only left-facing staved letters and a few representative combinations are shown in the summary on the Chart, and in practice it is currently more common for tone letters to occur after the syllable/word than before, as in the Chao tradition. Placement before the word is a carry-over from the pre-Kiel IPA convention, as is still the case for the stress and upstep/downstep marks. The IPA endorses the Chao tradition of using the left-facing tone letters, ⟨˥ ˦ ˧ ˨ ˩⟩, for underlying tone, and the right-facing letters, ⟨꜒ ꜓ ꜔ ꜕ ꜖⟩, for surface tone, as occurs in tone sandhi, and for the intonation of non-tonal languages. In the Portuguese illustration in the 1999 Handbook, tone letters are placed before a word or syllable to indicate prosodic pitch (equivalent to [↗︎] global rise and [↘︎] global fall, but allowing more precision), and in the Cantonese illustration they are placed after a word/syllable to indicate lexical tone. Theoretically therefore prosodic pitch and lexical tone could be simultaneously transcribed in a single text, though this is not a formalized distinction.",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Rising and falling pitch, as in contour tones, are indicated by combining the pitch diacritics and letters in the table, such as grave plus acute for rising [ě] and acute plus grave for falling [ê]. Only six combinations of two diacritics are supported, and only across three levels (high, mid, low), despite the diacritics supporting five levels of pitch in isolation. The four other explicitly approved rising and falling diacritic combinations are high/mid rising [e᷄], low rising [e᷅], high falling [e᷇], and low/mid falling [e᷆].",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "The Chao tone letters, on the other hand, may be combined in any pattern, and are therefore used for more complex contours and finer distinctions than the diacritics allow, such as mid-rising [e˨˦], extra-high falling [e˥˦], etc. There are 20 such possibilities. However, in Chao's original proposal, which was adopted by the IPA in 1989, he stipulated that the half-high and half-low letters ⟨˦ ˨⟩ may be combined with each other, but not with the other three tone letters, so as not to create spuriously precise distinctions. With this restriction, there are 8 possibilities.",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "The old staveless tone letters tend to be more restricted than the staved letters, though not as restricted as the diacritics. Officially, they support as many distinctions as the staved letters, but typically only three pitch levels are distinguished. Unicode supports default or high-pitch ⟨ˉ ˊ ˋ ˆ ˇ ˜ ˙⟩ and low-pitch ⟨ˍ ˏ ˎ ꞈ ˬ ˷⟩. Only a few mid-pitch tones are supported (such as ⟨˗ ˴⟩), and then only accidentally.",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Although tone diacritics and tone letters are presented as equivalent on the chart, \"this was done only to simplify the layout of the chart. The two sets of symbols are not comparable in this way.\" Using diacritics, a high tone is ⟨é⟩ and a low tone is ⟨è⟩; in tone letters, these are ⟨e˥⟩ and ⟨e˩⟩. One can double the diacritics for extra-high ⟨e̋⟩ and extra-low ⟨ȅ⟩; there is no parallel to this using tone letters. Instead, tone letters have mid-high ⟨e˦⟩ and mid-low ⟨e˨⟩; again, there is no equivalent among the diacritics. Thus in a three-register tone system, ⟨é ē è⟩ are equivalent to ⟨e˥ e˧ e˩⟩, while in a four-register system, ⟨e̋ é è ȅ⟩ may be equivalent to ⟨e˥ e˦ e˨ e˩⟩.",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "The correspondence breaks down even further once they start combining. For more complex tones, one may combine three or four tone diacritics in any permutation, though in practice only generic peaking (rising-falling) e᷈ and dipping (falling-rising) e᷉ combinations are used. Chao tone letters are required for finer detail (e˧˥˧, e˩˨˩, e˦˩˧, e˨˩˦, etc.). Although only 10 peaking and dipping tones were proposed in Chao's original, limited set of tone letters, phoneticians often make finer distinctions, and indeed an example is found on the IPA Chart. The system allows the transcription of 112 peaking and dipping pitch contours, including tones that are level for part of their length.",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "More complex contours are possible. Chao gave an example of [꜔꜒꜖꜔] (mid-high-low-mid) from English prosody.",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Chao tone letters generally appear after each syllable, for a language with syllable tone (⟨a˧vɔ˥˩⟩), or after the phonological word, for a language with word tone (⟨avɔ˧˥˩⟩). The IPA gives the option of placing the tone letters before the word or syllable (⟨˧a˥˩vɔ⟩, ⟨˧˥˩avɔ⟩), but this is rare for lexical tone. (And indeed reversed tone letters may be used to clarify that they apply to the following rather than to the preceding syllable: ⟨꜔a꜒꜖vɔ⟩, ⟨꜔꜒꜖avɔ⟩.) The staveless letters are not directly supported by Unicode, but some fonts allow the stave in Chao tone letters to be suppressed.",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "IPA diacritics may be doubled to indicate an extra degree (greater intensity) of the feature indicated. This is a productive process, but apart from extra-high and extra-low tones being marked by doubled high- and low-tone diacritics, ⟨ə̋, ə̏⟩, the major prosodic break ⟨‖⟩ being marked as a doubled minor break ⟨|⟩, and a couple other instances, this usage is not enumerated by the IPA.",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "For example, the stress mark may be doubled to indicate an extra degree of stress, such as prosodic stress in English. An example in French, with a single stress mark for normal prosodic stress at the end of each prosodic unit (marked as a minor prosodic break), and a double stress mark for contrastive/emphatic stress: [ˈˈɑ̃ːˈtre | məˈsjø ‖ ˈˈvwala maˈdam ‖] Entrez monsieur, voilà madame. Similarly, a doubled secondary stress mark ⟨ˌˌ⟩ is commonly used for tertiary (extra-light) stress. In a similar vein, the effectively obsolete staveless tone letters were once doubled for an emphatic rising intonation ⟨˶⟩ and an emphatic falling intonation ⟨˵⟩.",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Length is commonly extended by repeating the length mark, as in English shhh! [ʃːːː], or for \"overlong\" segments, such as in Estonian:",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "(Normally additional degrees of length are handled by the extra-short or half-long diacritic, i.e. ⟨e eˑ eː⟩ or ⟨ĕ e eː⟩, but the first two words in each of the Estonian examples are analyzed as typically short and long, /e eː/ and /n nː/, requiring a different remedy for the additional words.)",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Delimiters are similar: double slashes indicate extra phonemic (morpho-phonemic), double square brackets especially precise transcription, and double parentheses especially unintelligible.",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Occasionally other diacritics are doubled:",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "The extIPA provides combining parentheses for weak intensity, which when combined with a doubled diacritic indicate an intermediate degree. For instance, increasing degrees of nasalization of the vowel [e] might be written ⟨e ẽ᪻ ẽ ẽ̃᪻ ẽ̃⟩.",
"title": "Diacritics and prosodic notation "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "A number of IPA letters are not consistently used for their official values. A distinction between voiced fricatives and approximants is only partially implemented by the IPA, for example. Even with the relatively recent addition of the palatal fricative ⟨ʝ⟩ and the velar approximant ⟨ɰ⟩ to the alphabet, other letters, though defined as fricatives, are often ambiguous between fricative and approximant. For forward places, ⟨β⟩ and ⟨ð⟩ can generally be assumed to be fricatives unless they carry a lowering diacritic. Rearward, however, ⟨ʁ⟩ and ⟨ʕ⟩ are perhaps more commonly intended to be approximants even without a lowering diacritic. ⟨h⟩ and ⟨ɦ⟩ are similarly either fricatives or approximants, depending on the language, or even glottal \"transitions\", without that often being specified in the transcription.",
"title": "Ambiguous letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Another common ambiguity is among the letters for palatal consonants. ⟨c⟩ and ⟨ɟ⟩ are not uncommonly used as a typographic convenience for affricates, typically [t͜ʃ] and [d͜ʒ], while ⟨ɲ⟩ and ⟨ʎ⟩ are commonly used for palatalized alveolar [n̠ʲ] and [l̠ʲ]. To some extent this may be an effect of analysis, but it is common to match up single IPA letters to the phonemes of a language, without overly worrying about phonetic precision.",
"title": "Ambiguous letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "It has been argued that the lower-pharyngeal (epiglottal) fricatives ⟨ʜ⟩ and ⟨ʢ⟩ are better characterized as trills, rather than as fricatives that have incidental trilling. This has the advantage of merging the upper-pharyngeal fricatives [ħ, ʕ] together with the epiglottal plosive [ʡ] and trills [ʜ ʢ] into a single pharyngeal column in the consonant chart. However, in Shilha Berber the epiglottal fricatives are not trilled. Although they might be transcribed ⟨ħ̠ ʢ̠⟩ to indicate this, the far more common transcription is ⟨ʜ ʢ⟩, which is therefore ambiguous between languages.",
"title": "Ambiguous letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Among vowels, ⟨a⟩ is officially a front vowel, but is more commonly treated as a central vowel. The difference, to the extent it is even possible, is not phonemic in any language.",
"title": "Ambiguous letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "For all phonetic notation, it is good practice for an author to specify exactly what they mean by the symbols that they use.",
"title": "Ambiguous letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "",
"title": "Superscript letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Superscript IPA letters are used to indicate secondary aspects of articulation. These may be aspects of simultaneous articulation that are considered to be in some sense less dominant than the basic sound, or may be transitional articulations that are interpreted as secondary elements. Examples include secondary articulation; onsets, releases and other transitions; shades of sound; light epenthetic sounds and incompletely articulated sounds. The IPA and ICPLA endorse Unicode encoding of superscript variants of all contemporary segmental letters, including the \"implicit\" IPA retroflex letters ⟨ꞎ ᶑ ⟩.",
"title": "Superscript letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Superscript letters can be meaningfully modified by combining diacritics, just as baseline letters can. For example, a superscript dental nasal is ⟨ⁿ̪d̪⟩, a superscript voiceless velar nasal is ⟨ᵑ̊ǂ⟩, and labial-velar prenasalization is ⟨ᵑ͡ᵐɡ͡b⟩. Although the diacritic may seem a bit oversized compared to the superscript letter it modifies, e.g. ⟨ᵓ̃⟩, this can be an aid to legibility, just as it is with the composite superscript c-cedilla ⟨ᶜ̧⟩ and rhotic vowels ⟨ᵊ˞ ᶟ˞⟩. Superscript length marks can be used to indicate the length of aspiration of a consonant, e.g. [pʰ tʰ kʰ]. Another option is to double the diacritic: ⟨kʰʰ⟩.",
"title": "Superscript letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "A number of IPA letters and diacritics have been retired or replaced over the years. This number includes duplicate symbols, symbols that were replaced due to user preference, and unitary symbols that were rendered with diacritics or digraphs to reduce the inventory of the IPA. The rejected symbols are now considered obsolete, though some are still seen in the literature.",
"title": "Obsolete and nonstandard symbols"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "The IPA once had several pairs of duplicate symbols from alternative proposals, but eventually settled on one or the other. An example is the vowel letter ⟨ɷ⟩, rejected in favor of ⟨ʊ⟩. Affricates were once transcribed with ligatures, such as ⟨ʧ ʤ ⟩ (and others, some of which not found in Unicode). These have been officially retired but are still used. Letters for specific combinations of primary and secondary articulation have also been mostly retired, with the idea that such features should be indicated with tie bars or diacritics: ⟨ƍ⟩ for [zʷ] is one. In addition, the rare voiceless implosives, ⟨ƥ ƭ ƈ ƙ ʠ ⟩, were dropped soon after their introduction and are now usually written ⟨ɓ̥ ɗ̥ ʄ̊ ɠ̊ ʛ̥ ⟩. The original set of click letters, ⟨ʇ, ʗ, ʖ, ʞ⟩, was retired but is still sometimes seen, as the current pipe letters ⟨ǀ, ǃ, ǁ, ǂ⟩ can cause problems with legibility, especially when used with brackets ([ ] or / /), the letter ⟨l⟩, or the prosodic marks ⟨|, ‖⟩. (For this reason, some publications which use the current IPA pipe letters disallow IPA brackets.)",
"title": "Obsolete and nonstandard symbols"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Individual non-IPA letters may find their way into publications that otherwise use the standard IPA. This is especially common with:",
"title": "Obsolete and nonstandard symbols"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "In addition, it is common to see ad hoc typewriter substitutions, generally capital letters, for when IPA support is not available, e.g. A for ⟨ɑ⟩, B for ⟨β⟩ or ⟨ɓ⟩, D for ⟨ð⟩, ⟨ɗ ⟩ or ⟨ɖ ⟩, E for ⟨ɛ⟩, F or P for ⟨ɸ⟩, G ⟨ɣ⟩, I ⟨ɪ⟩, L ⟨ɬ⟩, N ⟨ŋ⟩, O ⟨ɔ⟩, S ⟨ ʃ ⟩, T ⟨θ⟩ or ⟨ʈ ⟩, U ⟨ʊ⟩, V ⟨ʋ⟩, X ⟨χ⟩, Z ⟨ʒ⟩, as well as @ for ⟨ə⟩ and 7 or ? for ⟨ʔ⟩. (See also SAMPA and X-SAMPA substitute notation.)",
"title": "Obsolete and nonstandard symbols"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "The Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for Disordered Speech, commonly abbreviated \"extIPA\" and sometimes called \"Extended IPA\", are symbols whose original purpose was to accurately transcribe disordered speech. At the Kiel Convention in 1989, a group of linguists drew up the initial extensions, which were based on the previous work of the PRDS (Phonetic Representation of Disordered Speech) Group in the early 1980s. The extensions were first published in 1990, then modified, and published again in 1994 in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association, when they were officially adopted by the ICPLA. While the original purpose was to transcribe disordered speech, linguists have used the extensions to designate a number of sounds within standard communication, such as hushing, gnashing teeth, and smacking lips, as well as regular lexical sounds such as lateral fricatives that do not have standard IPA symbols.",
"title": "Extensions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "In addition to the Extensions to the IPA for disordered speech, there are the conventions of the Voice Quality Symbols, which include a number of symbols for additional airstream mechanisms and secondary articulations in what they call \"voice quality\".",
"title": "Extensions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "Capital letters and various characters on the number row of the keyboard are commonly used to extend the alphabet in various ways.",
"title": "Associated notation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "There are various punctuation-like conventions for linguistic transcription that are commonly used together with IPA. Some of the more common are:",
"title": "Associated notation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "Full capital letters are not used as IPA symbols, except as typewriter substitutes (e.g. N for ⟨ŋ⟩, S for ⟨ ʃ ⟩, O for ⟨ɔ⟩ – see SAMPA). They are, however, often used in conjunction with the IPA in two cases:",
"title": "Associated notation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "Wildcards are commonly used in phonology to summarize syllable or word shapes, or to show the evolution of classes of sounds. For example, the possible syllable shapes of Mandarin can be abstracted as ranging from /V/ (an atonic vowel) to /CGVNᵀ/ (a consonant-glide-vowel-nasal syllable with tone), and word-final devoicing may be schematized as C → C̥/_#. In speech pathology, capital letters represent indeterminate sounds, and may be superscripted to indicate they are weakly articulated: e.g. [ᴰ] is a weak indeterminate alveolar, [ᴷ] a weak indeterminate velar.",
"title": "Associated notation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "There is a degree of variation between authors as to the capital letters used, but ⟨C⟩ for {consonant}, ⟨V⟩ for {vowel} and ⟨N⟩ for {nasal} are ubiquitous in English-language material. Other common conventions are ⟨T⟩ for {tone/accent} (tonicity), ⟨P⟩ for {plosive}, ⟨F⟩ for {fricative}, ⟨S⟩ for {sibilant}, ⟨G⟩ for {glide/semivowel}, ⟨L⟩ for {lateral} or {liquid}, ⟨R⟩ for {rhotic} or {resonant/sonorant}, ⟨₵⟩ for {obstruent}, ⟨Ʞ⟩ for {click}, ⟨A, E, O, Ɨ, U⟩ for {open, front, back, close, rounded vowel} and ⟨B, D, Ɉ, K, Q, Φ, H⟩ for {labial, alveolar, post-alveolar/palatal, velar, uvular, pharyngeal, glottal consonant}, respectively, and ⟨X⟩ for {any sound}. The letters can be modified with IPA diacritics, for example ⟨Cʼ⟩ for {ejective}, ⟨Ƈ ⟩ for {implosive}, ⟨N͡C⟩ or ⟨ᴺC⟩ for {prenasalized consonant}, ⟨Ṽ⟩ for {nasal vowel}, ⟨CʰV́⟩ for {aspirated CV syllable with high tone}, ⟨S̬⟩ for {voiced sibilant}, ⟨N̥⟩ for {voiceless nasal}, ⟨P͡F⟩ or ⟨P⟩ for {affricate}, ⟨Cʲ⟩ for {palatalized consonant} and ⟨D̪⟩ for {dental consonant}. ⟨H⟩, ⟨M⟩, ⟨L⟩ are also commonly used for high, mid and low tone, with ⟨LH⟩ for rising tone and ⟨HL⟩ for falling tone, rather than transcribing them overly precisely with IPA tone letters or with ambiguous digits.",
"title": "Associated notation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "Typical examples of archiphonemic use of capital letters are ⟨I⟩ for the Turkish harmonic vowel set {i y ɯ u}; ⟨D⟩ for the conflated flapped middle consonant of American English writer and rider; ⟨N⟩ for the homorganic syllable-coda nasal of languages such as Spanish and Japanese (essentially equivalent to the wild-card usage of the letter); and ⟨R⟩ in cases where a phonemic distinction between trill /r/ and flap /ɾ/ is conflated, as in Spanish enrejar /eNreˈxaR/ (the n is homorganic and the first r is a trill, but the second r is variable). Similar usage is found for phonemic analysis, where a language does not distinguish sounds that have separate letters in the IPA. For instance, Castillian Spanish has been analyzed as having phonemes /Θ/ and /S/, which surface as [θ] and [s] in voiceless environments and as [ð] and [z] in voiced environments (e.g. hazte /ˈaΘte/, → [ˈaθte], vs hazme /ˈaΘme/, → [ˈaðme]; or las manos /laS ˈmanoS/, → [lazˈmanos]).",
"title": "Associated notation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "⟨V⟩, ⟨F⟩ and ⟨C⟩ have completely different meanings as Voice Quality Symbols, where they stand for \"voice\" (VoQS jargon for secondary articulation), \"falsetto\" and \"creak\". These three letters may take diacritics to indicate what kind of voice quality an utterance has, and may be used as carrier letters to extract a suprasegmental feature that occurs on all susceptible segments in a stretch of IPA. For instance, the transcription of Scottish Gaelic [kʷʰuˣʷt̪ʷs̟ʷ] 'cat' and [kʷʰʉˣʷt͜ʃʷ] 'cats' (Islay dialect) can be made more economical by extracting the suprasegmental labialization of the words: Vʷ[kʰuˣt̪s̟] and Vʷ[kʰʉˣt͜ʃ]. The conventional wildcards ⟨X⟩ or ⟨C⟩ might be used instead of VoQS ⟨V⟩ so that the reader does not misinterpret ⟨Vʷ⟩ as meaning that only vowels are labialized (i.e. Xʷ[kʰuˣt̪s̟] for all segments labialized, Cʷ[kʰuˣt̪s̟] for all consonants labialized), or the carrier letter may be omitted altogether (e.g. ʷ[kʰuˣt̪s̟], [ʷkʰuˣt̪s̟] or [kʰuˣt̪s̟]ʷ). (See § Suprasegmentals for other transcription conventions.)",
"title": "Associated notation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "This summary is to some extent valid internationally, but linguistic material written in other languages may have different associations with capital letters used as wildcards. For example, in German ⟨K⟩ and ⟨V⟩ are used for Konsonant (consonant) and Vokal (vowel); in French, tone may be transcribed with ⟨H⟩ and ⟨B⟩ for haut (high) and bas (low).",
"title": "Associated notation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "The blank cells on the summary IPA chart can be filled without much difficulty if the need arises.",
"title": "Segments without letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "The missing retroflex letters, namely ⟨ᶑ ꞎ ⟩, are \"implicit\" in the alphabet, and the IPA supported their adoption into Unicode. Attested in the literature are the retroflex implosive ⟨ᶑ ⟩, the voiceless retroflex lateral fricative ⟨ꞎ ⟩, the retroflex lateral flap ⟨ ⟩ and the retroflex click ⟨ ⟩; the first is also mentioned in the IPA Handbook, and the lateral fricatives are provided for by the extIPA.",
"title": "Segments without letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "The epiglottal trill is arguably covered by the generally trilled epiglottal \"fricatives\" ⟨ʜ ʢ⟩. Ad hoc letters for near-close central vowels, ⟨ᵻ ᵿ⟩, are used in some descriptions of English, though those are specifically reduced vowels (forming a set with the IPA reduced vowels ⟨ə ɐ⟩), and the simple points in vowel space are easily transcribed with diacritics: ⟨ɪ̈ ʊ̈⟩ or ⟨ɨ̞ ʉ̞⟩. Diacritics are able to fill in most of the remainder of the charts. If a sound cannot be transcribed, an asterisk ⟨*⟩ may be used, either as a letter or as a diacritic (as in ⟨k*⟩ sometimes seen for the Korean \"fortis\" velar).",
"title": "Segments without letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "Representations of consonant sounds outside of the core set are created by adding diacritics to letters with similar sound values. The Spanish bilabial and dental approximants are commonly written as lowered fricatives, [β̞] and [ð̞] respectively. Similarly, voiced lateral fricatives can be written as raised lateral approximants, [ɭ˔ ʎ̝ ʟ̝], though the extIPA also provides ⟨⟩ for the first of these. A few languages such as Banda have a bilabial flap as the preferred allophone of what is elsewhere a labiodental flap. It has been suggested that this be written with the labiodental flap letter and the advanced diacritic, [ⱱ̟]. Similarly, a labiodental trill would be written [ʙ̪] (bilabial trill and the dental sign), and the labiodental plosives are now universally ⟨p̪ b̪⟩ rather than the ad hoc letters ⟨ȹ ȸ⟩ once found in Bantuist literature. Other taps can be written as extra-short plosives or laterals, e.g. [ ɟ̆ ɢ̆ ʟ̆], though in some cases the diacritic would need to be written below the letter. A retroflex trill can be written as a retracted [r̠], just as non-subapical retroflex fricatives sometimes are. The remaining pulmonic consonants – the uvular laterals ([ʟ̠ ̠ ʟ̠˔]) and the palatal trill – while not strictly impossible, are very difficult to pronounce and are unlikely to occur even as allophones in the world's languages.",
"title": "Segments without letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "The vowels are similarly manageable by using diacritics for raising, lowering, fronting, backing, centering, and mid-centering. For example, the unrounded equivalent of [ʊ] can be transcribed as mid-centered [ɯ̽], and the rounded equivalent of [æ] as raised [ɶ̝] or lowered [œ̞] (though for those who conceive of vowel space as a triangle, simple [ɶ] already is the rounded equivalent of [æ]). True mid vowels are lowered [e̞ ø̞ ɘ̞ ɵ̞ ɤ̞ o̞] or raised [ɛ̝ œ̝ ɜ̝ ɞ̝ ʌ̝ ɔ̝], while centered [ɪ̈ ʊ̈] and [ä] (or, less commonly, [ɑ̈]) are near-close and open central vowels, respectively.",
"title": "Segments without letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "The only known vowels that cannot be represented in this scheme are vowels with unexpected roundedness, which would require a dedicated diacritic, such as protruded ⟨ʏʷ⟩ and compressed ⟨uᵝ⟩ (or protruded ⟨ɪʷ⟩ and compressed ⟨ɯᶹ⟩), though this transcription suggests that they are diphthongs (as indeed they are in Swedish). The extIPA 'spread' diacritic ⟨◌͍⟩ is sometimes seen, for compressed ⟨u͍⟩, ⟨o͍⟩, ⟨ɔ͍⟩, ⟨ɒ͍⟩, though the intended meaning needs to be explained or they will be interpreted as being spread the way [i] is. Ladefoged & Maddieson used the old IPA omega diacritic for labialization, ⟨◌̫⟩, for protrusion (w-like labialization without velarization), e.g. protruded ⟨y⟩, ⟨ʏ̫⟩, ⟨ø̫⟩, ⟨œ̫⟩; while Kelly & Local use a combining w diacritic ⟨◌ᪿ⟩ for protrusion (e.g. ⟨yᷱ øᪿ⟩) and a combining turned w diacritic ⟨◌ᫀ⟩ for compression (e.g. ⟨uᫀ oᫀ⟩). ⟨◌̫⟩ is the cursive form of ⟨◌ᪿ⟩, and these solutions recall an old IPA convention of rounding an unrounded vowel letter like i with a subscript ⟨◌̫⟩/omega, and unrounding a rounded letter like u with a turned omega.",
"title": "Segments without letters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "An IPA symbol is often distinguished from the sound it is intended to represent, since there is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between letter and sound in broad transcription, making articulatory descriptions such as \"mid front rounded vowel\" or \"voiced velar stop\" unreliable. While the Handbook of the International Phonetic Association states that no official names exist for its symbols, it admits the presence of one or two common names for each. The symbols also have nonce names in the Unicode standard. In many cases, the names in Unicode and the IPA Handbook differ. For example, the Handbook calls ⟨ɛ⟩ \"epsilon\", while Unicode calls it \"small letter open e\".",
"title": "Symbol names"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "The traditional names of the Latin and Greek letters are usually used for unmodified letters. Letters which are not directly derived from these alphabets, such as ⟨ʕ⟩, may have a variety of names, sometimes based on the appearance of the symbol or on the sound that it represents. In Unicode, some of the letters of Greek origin have Latin forms for use in IPA; the others use the characters from the Greek block.",
"title": "Symbol names"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "For diacritics, there are two methods of naming. For traditional diacritics, the IPA notes the name in a well known language; for example, ⟨é⟩ is \"e-acute\", based on the name of the diacritic in English and French. Non-traditional diacritics are often named after objects they resemble, so ⟨d̪⟩ is called \"d-bridge\".",
"title": "Symbol names"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "Geoffrey Pullum and William Ladusaw list a variety of names in use for both current and retired IPA symbols in their Phonetic Symbol Guide. Many of them found their way into Unicode.",
"title": "Symbol names"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "Unicode supports nearly all of the IPA alphabet. Apart from basic Latin and Greek and general punctuation, the primary blocks are IPA Extensions, Spacing Modifier Letters and Combining Diacritical Marks, with lesser support from Phonetic Extensions, Phonetic Extensions Supplement, Combining Diacritical Marks Supplement, and scattered characters elsewhere. The extended IPA is supported primarily by those blocks and Latin Extended-G.",
"title": "Computer support"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "After the Kiel Convention in 1989, most IPA symbols were assigned an identifying number to prevent confusion between similar characters during the printing of manuscripts. The codes were never much used and have been superseded by Unicode.",
"title": "Computer support"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "Many typefaces have support for IPA characters, but good diacritic rendering remains rare. Web browsers generally do not need any configuration to display IPA characters, provided that a typeface capable of doing so is available to the operating system.",
"title": "Computer support"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "Typefaces that provide full IPA and nearly full extIPA support, including properly rendering the diacritics, include Gentium Plus, Charis SIL, Doulos SIL, and Andika. In addition to the level of support found in commercial and system fonts, these fonts support the full range of old-style (pre-Kiel) staveless tone letters, through a character variant option that suppresses the stave of the Chao tone letters. They also have an option to maintain the ⟨a⟩ ~ ⟨ɑ⟩ vowel distinction when set in italic. The only notable gaps are with the extIPA: the combining parentheses, which enclose diacritics, need to be set individually, as the paired parentheses are not supported; nor is the enclosing circle used to mark unidentified sounds supported, as the proper Unicode handling of that symbol has not been worked out.",
"title": "Computer support"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "The Microsoft Arial and Times New Roman fonts include IPA characters, but they are neither complete (especially Arial) nor render diacritics properly. The basic Latin Noto fonts are better, only failing with the more obscure characters. The Apple system fonts Geneva, Lucida Grande and Hiragino (certain weights) have basic IPA support. The Calibri font, which is the default font of Microsoft Office, has nearly complete IPA support with good diacritic rendering, though not as good as what is available with free fonts (see image at right).",
"title": "Computer support"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "Minion 3 has IPA support.",
"title": "Computer support"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "Brill has good IPA support. It is a commercial font but is freely available for non-commercial use.",
"title": "Computer support"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "Several systems have been developed that map the IPA symbols to ASCII characters. Notable systems include SAMPA and X-SAMPA. The usage of mapping systems in on-line text has to some extent been adopted in the context input methods, allowing convenient keying of IPA characters that would be otherwise unavailable on standard keyboard layouts.",
"title": "Computer support"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "IETF language tags have registered fonipa as a variant subtag identifying text as written in IPA. Thus, an IPA transcription of English could be tagged as en-fonipa. For the use of IPA without attribution to a concrete language, und-fonipa is available.",
"title": "Computer support"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 123,
"text": "Online IPA keyboard utilities are available, though none of them cover the complete range of IPA symbols and diacritics. Examples are the IPA 2018 i-charts hosted by the IPA, IPA character picker 27 at GitHub, Type IPA phonetic symbols at TypeIt.org, and an IPA Chart keyboard also at GitHub. In April 2019, Google's Gboard for Android added an IPA keyboard to its platform. For iOS there are multiple free keyboard layouts available, such as the IPA Phonetic Keyboard.",
"title": "Computer support"
}
]
| The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation of speech sounds in written form. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech–language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators. The IPA is designed to represent those qualities of speech that are part of lexical sounds in oral language: phones, intonation and the separation of syllables. To represent additional qualities of speech—such as tooth gnashing, lisping, and sounds made with a cleft palate—an extended set of symbols may be used. Segments are transcribed by one or more IPA symbols of two basic types: letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English digraph ⟨ch⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a single letter:, or with multiple letters plus diacritics:, depending on how precise one wishes to be. Slashes are used to signal phonemic transcription; therefore, is more abstract than either or and might refer to either, depending on the context and language. Occasionally, letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 segmental letters, an indefinitely large number of suprasegmental letters, 44 diacritics, and four extra-lexical prosodic marks in the IPA. Most of these are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA. | 2001-09-13T18:12:27Z | 2023-12-26T17:38:00Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet |
14,762 | Inspector Morse | Detective Chief Inspector Endeavour Morse, GM, is the eponymous fictional character in the series of detective novels by British author Colin Dexter. On television, he appears in the 33-episode drama series Inspector Morse (1987–2000), in which John Thaw played the character, as well as the (2012–2023) prequel series Endeavour, portrayed by Shaun Evans. The older Morse is a senior Criminal Investigation Department (CID) officer with the Thames Valley Police in Oxford in England and, in the prequel, Morse is a young detective constable rising through the ranks with the Oxford City Police and in later series the Thames Valley Police.
Morse presents, to some, a reasonably sympathetic personality, despite his sullen and snobbish temperament, with a classic Jaguar Mark 2 (a Lancia in the early novels), a thirst for English real ale, and a love of classical music (especially opera and Wagner), poetry, art and cryptic crossword puzzles. In his later career he is usually assisted by Sergeant Robbie Lewis. Morse's partnership and formal friendship with Lewis is fundamental to the series.
Morse's father was a taxi driver, and Morse likes to explain the origin of his additional private income by saying that he "used to drive the Aga Khan". In the episode of the television adaptation Cherubim and Seraphim, it is revealed that Morse's parents divorced when he was 12. He remained with his mother until her death three years later, upon which he had to return to his father. Morse had a dreadful relationship with his stepmother Gwen. He claims that he only read poetry to annoy her, and that her petty bullying almost drove him to suicide. He has a half-sister named Joyce with whom he is on better terms. Morse was devastated when Joyce's daughter Marilyn took her own life.
Morse prefers to use only his surname, and is generally evasive when asked about his first name, sometimes joking that it is Inspector. In The Dead of Jericho and The Wench Is Dead it is noted that his initial is E. At the end of Death Is Now My Neighbour, his name is revealed to be Endeavour. Two-thirds of the way through the television episode based on the book, he gives the cryptic clue "My whole life's effort has revolved around Eve, nine letters". In the series, it is noted that Morse's reluctance to use his Christian name led to his receiving the nickname Pagan while at Stamford School (which Colin Dexter, the author of the Morse novels, attended). In the novels, Morse's first name came from the vessel HMS Endeavour; his mother was a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) who have a tradition of "virtue names", and his father admired Captain James Cook.
Dexter was a fan of cryptic crosswords and named Morse after champion setter Jeremy Morse, one of Dexter's arch-rivals in writing crossword clues. Dexter used to walk along the bank of the River Thames at Oxford, opposite the boathouse belonging to 22nd Oxford Sea Scout Group; the building is named T.S. Endeavour.
Although details of Morse's education are deliberately kept vague, it is hinted that he won a scholarship to study at St John's College, Oxford. He lost the scholarship as the result of poor academic performance stemming from a failed love affair, which is mentioned in the second episode of the third series, "The Last Enemy", and recounted in detail in the novel The Riddle of the Third Mile, Chapter 7. Further details are revealed piece-by-piece in the prequel series. He often reflects on such renowned scholars as A. E. Housman who, like himself, failed to get an academic degree from Oxford.
After university, he entered the army on National Service. This included serving in West Germany with the Royal Corps of Signals as a cipher clerk. Upon leaving, he joined the police at Carshall-Newtown, before being posted to Oxford with the Oxford City Police. He was awarded the George Medal in the last episode of Endeavour Series 4. Despite being assigned to a uniformed position in Series 6 and having his opinions and observations disregarded by CID, he does not wear his GM ribbon, leaving his uniform breast bare.
Morse is ostensibly the embodiment of middle-class Englishness, with a set of prejudices and assumptions to match, although his background, being the son of a taxi driver, might be considered working class. As a result, he may be considered an example of the gentleman detective, a staple of British detective fiction. This is in sharp contrast to the working-class lifestyle of his assistant Lewis (named after another rival clue-writer, Mrs. B. Lewis); in the novels, Lewis is Welsh, but in the TV series this is altered to a Tyneside (Geordie) background, appropriately for the actor Kevin Whately. Morse is in his forties at the start of the books (Service of all the Dead, Chapter Six: "… a bachelor still, forty-seven years old …"), and Lewis slightly younger (e.g. The Secret of Annexe 3, Chapter Twenty-Six: "a slightly younger man – another policeman, and one also in plain clothes"). John Thaw was 45 at the beginning of shooting the TV series and Kevin Whately was 36.
Morse's relationships with authority, the establishment, bastions of power and the status quo, are markedly ambiguous, as are some of his relations with women. He is frequently portrayed as patronising female characters, and once stereotyped the female sex as not naturally prone to crime, being caring and non-violent, but also often empathises with women. He is not shy to show his liking for attractive women and often dates those involved in cases. Indeed, a woman he falls in love with sometimes turns out to be the culprit.
Morse is highly intelligent. He is a crossword addict and dislikes grammatical and spelling errors; in every personal or private document that he receives, he manages to point out at least one mistake. He claims that his approach to crime-solving is deductive, and one of his key tenets is that "there is a 50 per cent chance that the person who finds the body is the murderer". Morse uses immense intuition and his fantastic memory to apprehend the perpetrator.
Among Morse's conservative tastes are that he likes to drink real ale and whisky, and in the early novels, drives a Lancia. In the television and radio productions, this is altered to a suitably British classic Jaguar Mark 2. His favourite music is opera, which is echoed in the soundtracks to the television series, along with original music by Barrington Pheloung.
His dying words, said to Jim Strange, are "Thank Lewis for me."
Morse is portrayed as being an atheist. However, in some scenes, he does entertain the possibility of God and/or quote the Bible from memory, agreeing with the phrases, as he does with lines from various litterary books/texts.
The novels in the series are:
Inspector Morse also appears in several stories in Dexter's short story collection, Morse's Greatest Mystery and Other Stories (1993, expanded edition 1994).
The Inspector Morse novels were made into a TV series (also called Inspector Morse) for the British commercial TV network ITV. The series was made by Zenith Productions for Central (a company later acquired by Carlton) and comprises 33 two-hour episodes (100 minutes excluding commercials)—20 more episodes than there are novels—produced between 6 January 1987 and 15 November 2000. The last episode was adapted from the final novel The Remorseful Day, in which Morse dies from a heart attack in the end.
A spin-off series, similarly comprising 33 two-hour episodes and based on the television incarnation of Lewis, was titled Lewis; it first aired on 29 January 2006 and last showed on 10 November 2015. The spin-off consisted the following cast members: Kevin Whately as DI Robbie Lewis, Laurence Fox as DS James Hathaway, Clare Holman as Dr Laura Hobson and Rebecca Front as CS Jean Innocent.
In August 2011, ITV announced plans to film a prequel drama called Endeavour, with author Colin Dexter's participation. English actor Shaun Evans was cast as a young Morse in his early career. The pilot episode was broadcast on 2 January 2012 on ITV. The prequel was made by Mammoth Screen. Four new episodes were televised from 14 April 2013, showing Morse's early cases working for DI Fred Thursday (Roger Allam) and with Jim Strange (Sean Rigby), initially as PC Jim Strange, later DS Jim Strange, and pathologist Max De Bryn (James Bradshaw), plus Chief Superintendent Reginald Bright (Anton Lesser), DS Peter Jakes (Jack Laskey), WPC Shirley Trewlove (Dakota Blue Richards), DC George Fancy (Lewis Peek), DI Ronnie Box (Simon Harrison) and DS Alan Jago (Richard Riddell). Alongside the police department, the prequel also consisted of Fred Thursday’s family members: Win Thursday, (Caroline O’Neill), Sam Thursday (Jack Bannon), Joan Thursday (Sara Vickers) and the newspaper editor Dorothea Frazil (Abigail Thaw). A second series of four episodes followed, screening between 30 March 2014 and 20 April 2014. On 3 January 2016, the third series aired, also containing four episodes. A fourth series was aired, once again with four episodes, on 8 January 2017. Filming of a fifth series of six episodes began in early 2017 with the first episode of the fifth series aired on 4 February 2018. On 10 February 2019 the sixth series aired, which comprises four 1-hour-30-minute episodes. A seventh series of three episodes was filmed in late 2019, aired on 9 February 2020 and in August 2019 ITV announced that the series has been recommissioned for an eighth series, screened on 12 September 2021, also containing three episodes. Morse was voted number two on the top 25 list in ITV's Britain's Favourite Detective first broadcast on 30 August 2020.
On 23 May 2022, a day after filming began for the ninth series, ITV announced that Endeavour would end production after a decade on air at the conclusion of the ninth series, bringing the total number of Endeavour episodes to 36. The ninth and final series comprised the final three episodes, which aired from 26 February 2023 to 12 March 2023.
An adaptation by Melville Jones of Last Bus to Woodstock featured in BBC Radio 4's Saturday Night Theatre series in June 1985, with Andrew Burt as Morse and Christopher Douglas as Lewis.
In the 1990s, an occasional BBC Radio 4 series (for The Saturday Play) was made starring the voices of John Shrapnel as Morse and Robert Glenister as Lewis. The series was written by Guy Meredith and directed by Ned Chaillet. Episodes included: The Wench is Dead (23 March 1992); Last Seen Wearing (28 May 1994); and The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn (10 February 1996).
In 2018, Alma Cullen wrote an original drama entitled Morse: In The Shallows, with Neil Pearson as Morse and Lee Ingleby as Lewis.
An Inspector Morse stage play appeared in 2010, written by Alma Cullen (writer of four Morse screenplays for ITV). The part of Morse was played by Colin Baker. The play, entitled Morse—House of Ghosts, saw DCI Morse looking to his past, when an old acquaintance becomes the lead suspect in a murder case that involves the on-stage death of a young actress. The play toured the UK from August to December 2010. It was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on 25 March 2017 with Neil Pearson playing Morse and Lee Ingleby playing Lewis. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Detective Chief Inspector Endeavour Morse, GM, is the eponymous fictional character in the series of detective novels by British author Colin Dexter. On television, he appears in the 33-episode drama series Inspector Morse (1987–2000), in which John Thaw played the character, as well as the (2012–2023) prequel series Endeavour, portrayed by Shaun Evans. The older Morse is a senior Criminal Investigation Department (CID) officer with the Thames Valley Police in Oxford in England and, in the prequel, Morse is a young detective constable rising through the ranks with the Oxford City Police and in later series the Thames Valley Police.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Morse presents, to some, a reasonably sympathetic personality, despite his sullen and snobbish temperament, with a classic Jaguar Mark 2 (a Lancia in the early novels), a thirst for English real ale, and a love of classical music (especially opera and Wagner), poetry, art and cryptic crossword puzzles. In his later career he is usually assisted by Sergeant Robbie Lewis. Morse's partnership and formal friendship with Lewis is fundamental to the series.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Morse's father was a taxi driver, and Morse likes to explain the origin of his additional private income by saying that he \"used to drive the Aga Khan\". In the episode of the television adaptation Cherubim and Seraphim, it is revealed that Morse's parents divorced when he was 12. He remained with his mother until her death three years later, upon which he had to return to his father. Morse had a dreadful relationship with his stepmother Gwen. He claims that he only read poetry to annoy her, and that her petty bullying almost drove him to suicide. He has a half-sister named Joyce with whom he is on better terms. Morse was devastated when Joyce's daughter Marilyn took her own life.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Morse prefers to use only his surname, and is generally evasive when asked about his first name, sometimes joking that it is Inspector. In The Dead of Jericho and The Wench Is Dead it is noted that his initial is E. At the end of Death Is Now My Neighbour, his name is revealed to be Endeavour. Two-thirds of the way through the television episode based on the book, he gives the cryptic clue \"My whole life's effort has revolved around Eve, nine letters\". In the series, it is noted that Morse's reluctance to use his Christian name led to his receiving the nickname Pagan while at Stamford School (which Colin Dexter, the author of the Morse novels, attended). In the novels, Morse's first name came from the vessel HMS Endeavour; his mother was a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) who have a tradition of \"virtue names\", and his father admired Captain James Cook.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Dexter was a fan of cryptic crosswords and named Morse after champion setter Jeremy Morse, one of Dexter's arch-rivals in writing crossword clues. Dexter used to walk along the bank of the River Thames at Oxford, opposite the boathouse belonging to 22nd Oxford Sea Scout Group; the building is named T.S. Endeavour.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Although details of Morse's education are deliberately kept vague, it is hinted that he won a scholarship to study at St John's College, Oxford. He lost the scholarship as the result of poor academic performance stemming from a failed love affair, which is mentioned in the second episode of the third series, \"The Last Enemy\", and recounted in detail in the novel The Riddle of the Third Mile, Chapter 7. Further details are revealed piece-by-piece in the prequel series. He often reflects on such renowned scholars as A. E. Housman who, like himself, failed to get an academic degree from Oxford.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "After university, he entered the army on National Service. This included serving in West Germany with the Royal Corps of Signals as a cipher clerk. Upon leaving, he joined the police at Carshall-Newtown, before being posted to Oxford with the Oxford City Police. He was awarded the George Medal in the last episode of Endeavour Series 4. Despite being assigned to a uniformed position in Series 6 and having his opinions and observations disregarded by CID, he does not wear his GM ribbon, leaving his uniform breast bare.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Morse is ostensibly the embodiment of middle-class Englishness, with a set of prejudices and assumptions to match, although his background, being the son of a taxi driver, might be considered working class. As a result, he may be considered an example of the gentleman detective, a staple of British detective fiction. This is in sharp contrast to the working-class lifestyle of his assistant Lewis (named after another rival clue-writer, Mrs. B. Lewis); in the novels, Lewis is Welsh, but in the TV series this is altered to a Tyneside (Geordie) background, appropriately for the actor Kevin Whately. Morse is in his forties at the start of the books (Service of all the Dead, Chapter Six: \"… a bachelor still, forty-seven years old …\"), and Lewis slightly younger (e.g. The Secret of Annexe 3, Chapter Twenty-Six: \"a slightly younger man – another policeman, and one also in plain clothes\"). John Thaw was 45 at the beginning of shooting the TV series and Kevin Whately was 36.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Morse's relationships with authority, the establishment, bastions of power and the status quo, are markedly ambiguous, as are some of his relations with women. He is frequently portrayed as patronising female characters, and once stereotyped the female sex as not naturally prone to crime, being caring and non-violent, but also often empathises with women. He is not shy to show his liking for attractive women and often dates those involved in cases. Indeed, a woman he falls in love with sometimes turns out to be the culprit.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Morse is highly intelligent. He is a crossword addict and dislikes grammatical and spelling errors; in every personal or private document that he receives, he manages to point out at least one mistake. He claims that his approach to crime-solving is deductive, and one of his key tenets is that \"there is a 50 per cent chance that the person who finds the body is the murderer\". Morse uses immense intuition and his fantastic memory to apprehend the perpetrator.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Among Morse's conservative tastes are that he likes to drink real ale and whisky, and in the early novels, drives a Lancia. In the television and radio productions, this is altered to a suitably British classic Jaguar Mark 2. His favourite music is opera, which is echoed in the soundtracks to the television series, along with original music by Barrington Pheloung.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "His dying words, said to Jim Strange, are \"Thank Lewis for me.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Morse is portrayed as being an atheist. However, in some scenes, he does entertain the possibility of God and/or quote the Bible from memory, agreeing with the phrases, as he does with lines from various litterary books/texts.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The novels in the series are:",
"title": "Novels"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Inspector Morse also appears in several stories in Dexter's short story collection, Morse's Greatest Mystery and Other Stories (1993, expanded edition 1994).",
"title": "Novels"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The Inspector Morse novels were made into a TV series (also called Inspector Morse) for the British commercial TV network ITV. The series was made by Zenith Productions for Central (a company later acquired by Carlton) and comprises 33 two-hour episodes (100 minutes excluding commercials)—20 more episodes than there are novels—produced between 6 January 1987 and 15 November 2000. The last episode was adapted from the final novel The Remorseful Day, in which Morse dies from a heart attack in the end.",
"title": "In other media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "A spin-off series, similarly comprising 33 two-hour episodes and based on the television incarnation of Lewis, was titled Lewis; it first aired on 29 January 2006 and last showed on 10 November 2015. The spin-off consisted the following cast members: Kevin Whately as DI Robbie Lewis, Laurence Fox as DS James Hathaway, Clare Holman as Dr Laura Hobson and Rebecca Front as CS Jean Innocent.",
"title": "In other media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In August 2011, ITV announced plans to film a prequel drama called Endeavour, with author Colin Dexter's participation. English actor Shaun Evans was cast as a young Morse in his early career. The pilot episode was broadcast on 2 January 2012 on ITV. The prequel was made by Mammoth Screen. Four new episodes were televised from 14 April 2013, showing Morse's early cases working for DI Fred Thursday (Roger Allam) and with Jim Strange (Sean Rigby), initially as PC Jim Strange, later DS Jim Strange, and pathologist Max De Bryn (James Bradshaw), plus Chief Superintendent Reginald Bright (Anton Lesser), DS Peter Jakes (Jack Laskey), WPC Shirley Trewlove (Dakota Blue Richards), DC George Fancy (Lewis Peek), DI Ronnie Box (Simon Harrison) and DS Alan Jago (Richard Riddell). Alongside the police department, the prequel also consisted of Fred Thursday’s family members: Win Thursday, (Caroline O’Neill), Sam Thursday (Jack Bannon), Joan Thursday (Sara Vickers) and the newspaper editor Dorothea Frazil (Abigail Thaw). A second series of four episodes followed, screening between 30 March 2014 and 20 April 2014. On 3 January 2016, the third series aired, also containing four episodes. A fourth series was aired, once again with four episodes, on 8 January 2017. Filming of a fifth series of six episodes began in early 2017 with the first episode of the fifth series aired on 4 February 2018. On 10 February 2019 the sixth series aired, which comprises four 1-hour-30-minute episodes. A seventh series of three episodes was filmed in late 2019, aired on 9 February 2020 and in August 2019 ITV announced that the series has been recommissioned for an eighth series, screened on 12 September 2021, also containing three episodes. Morse was voted number two on the top 25 list in ITV's Britain's Favourite Detective first broadcast on 30 August 2020.",
"title": "In other media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "On 23 May 2022, a day after filming began for the ninth series, ITV announced that Endeavour would end production after a decade on air at the conclusion of the ninth series, bringing the total number of Endeavour episodes to 36. The ninth and final series comprised the final three episodes, which aired from 26 February 2023 to 12 March 2023.",
"title": "In other media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "An adaptation by Melville Jones of Last Bus to Woodstock featured in BBC Radio 4's Saturday Night Theatre series in June 1985, with Andrew Burt as Morse and Christopher Douglas as Lewis.",
"title": "In other media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In the 1990s, an occasional BBC Radio 4 series (for The Saturday Play) was made starring the voices of John Shrapnel as Morse and Robert Glenister as Lewis. The series was written by Guy Meredith and directed by Ned Chaillet. Episodes included: The Wench is Dead (23 March 1992); Last Seen Wearing (28 May 1994); and The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn (10 February 1996).",
"title": "In other media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In 2018, Alma Cullen wrote an original drama entitled Morse: In The Shallows, with Neil Pearson as Morse and Lee Ingleby as Lewis.",
"title": "In other media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "An Inspector Morse stage play appeared in 2010, written by Alma Cullen (writer of four Morse screenplays for ITV). The part of Morse was played by Colin Baker. The play, entitled Morse—House of Ghosts, saw DCI Morse looking to his past, when an old acquaintance becomes the lead suspect in a murder case that involves the on-stage death of a young actress. The play toured the UK from August to December 2010. It was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on 25 March 2017 with Neil Pearson playing Morse and Lee Ingleby playing Lewis.",
"title": "In other media"
}
]
| Detective Chief Inspector Endeavour Morse, GM, is the eponymous fictional character in the series of detective novels by British author Colin Dexter. On television, he appears in the 33-episode drama series Inspector Morse (1987–2000), in which John Thaw played the character, as well as the (2012–2023) prequel series Endeavour, portrayed by Shaun Evans. The older Morse is a senior Criminal Investigation Department (CID) officer with the Thames Valley Police in Oxford in England and, in the prequel, Morse is a young detective constable rising through the ranks with the Oxford City Police and in later series the Thames Valley Police. Morse presents, to some, a reasonably sympathetic personality, despite his sullen and snobbish temperament, with a classic Jaguar Mark 2, a thirst for English real ale, and a love of classical music, poetry, art and cryptic crossword puzzles. In his later career he is usually assisted by Sergeant Robbie Lewis. Morse's partnership and formal friendship with Lewis is fundamental to the series. | 2001-05-20T13:58:16Z | 2023-12-18T18:00:06Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspector_Morse |
14,763 | History of the Isle of Man | The Isle of Man had become physically separated from Great Britain and Ireland by 6500 BC. It appears that colonisation took place by sea sometime during the Mesolithic era (about 6500 BC). The island has been visited by various raiders and trading peoples over the years. After being settled by people from Ireland in the first millennium AD, the Isle of Man was converted to Christianity and then suffered raids by Vikings from Norway. After becoming subject to Norwegian suzerainty as part of the Kingdom of Mann and the Isles, the Isle of Man later became a possession of the Scottish and then the English crowns.
Since 1866, the Isle of Man has been a Crown Dependency and has democratic self-government.
The Isle of Man effectively became an island around 8,500 years ago at around the time when rising sea levels caused by the melting glaciers cut Mesolithic Britain off from continental Europe for the last time. There had earlier been a land bridge between the Isle of Man and Cumbria, but the location and opening of the land bridge remain poorly understood.
The earliest traces of people on the Isle of Man date back to the Mesolithic Period, also known as the Middle Stone Age. The first residents lived in small natural shelters, hunting, gathering and fishing for their food. They used small tools made of flint or bone, examples of which have been found near the coast. Examples of these artifacts are kept at the Manx National Heritage museum.
The Neolithic Period marked the coming of farming, improved stone tools and pottery. During this period megalithic monuments began to appear around the island. Examples are found at Cashtal yn Ard near Maughold, King Orry's Grave in Laxey, Meayll Circle near Cregneash, and Ballaharra Stones in St John's. The builders of the megaliths were not the only culture during this time; there are also remains of the local Ronaldsway culture (lasting from the late Neolithic into the Bronze Age).
The Iron Age marked the beginning of Celtic cultural influence. Large hill forts appeared on hill summits and smaller promontory forts along the coastal cliffs, while large timber-framed roundhouses were built.
It is likely that the first Celts to inhabit the Island were Brythonic tribes from mainland Britain. The secular history of the Isle of Man during the Brythonic period remains mysterious. It is not known if the Romans ever made a landing on the island and if they did, little evidence has been discovered. There is evidence for contact with Roman Britain as an amphora was discovered at the settlement on the South Barrule; it is hypothesised this may have been trade goods or plunder.
It is generally assumed that Irish invasion or immigration formed the basis of the modern Manx language; Irish migration to the island probably began in the 5th century AD. This is evident in the change in language used in Ogham inscriptions. The transition between Manx Brythonic (a Brythonic language like modern Welsh) and Manx Gaelic (a Goidelic language like modern Scottish Gaelic and Irish) may have been gradual. One question is whether the present-day Manx language survives from pre-Norse days or reflects a linguistic reintroduction after the Norse invasion. The island lends its name to Manannán, the Brythonic and Gaelic sea god who is said in myth to have once ruled the island.
Tradition attributes the island's conversion to Christianity to St Maughold (Maccul), an Irish missionary who gives his name to a parish. There are the remains of around 200 tiny early chapels called keeils scattered across the island. Evidence such as radiocarbon dating and magnetic drift points to many of these being built around AD 550–600.
The Brythonic culture of Manaw appears throughout early British tradition and later Welsh writings. The family origins of Gwriad ap Elidyr (father of Merfyn Frych and grandfather of Rhodri the Great) are attributed to a Manaw and he is sometimes named as Gwriad Manaw. The 1896 discovery of a cross inscribed Crux Guriat (Cross of Gwriad) and dated to the 8th or 9th century greatly supports this theory.
The best record of any event before the incursions of the Northmen is attributed to Báetán mac Cairill, king of Ulster, who (according to the Annals of Ulster) led an expedition to Man in 577–578, imposing his authority on the island (though some have thought this event may refer to Manau Gododdin between the Firths of Clyde and Forth, rather than the Isle of Man). After Báetán's death in 581, his rival Áedán mac Gabráin, king of Dál Riata, is said to have taken the island in 582.
Even if the supposed conquest of the Menavian islands – Mann and Anglesey – by Edwin of Northumbria, in 616, did take place, it could not have led to any permanent results, for when the English were driven from the coasts of Cumberland and Lancashire soon afterwards, they could not well have retained their hold on the island to the west of these coasts. One can speculate, however, that when Ecgfrið's Northumbrians laid Ireland waste from Dublin to Drogheda in 684, they temporarily occupied Mann.
The period of Scandinavian domination is divided into two main epochs – before and after the conquest of Mann by Godred Crovan in 1079. Warfare and unsettled rule characterise the earlier epoch, the later saw comparatively more peace.
Between about AD 800 and 815 the Vikings came to Mann chiefly for plunder. Between about 850 and 990, when they settled, the island fell under the rule of the Scandinavian Kings of Dublin and between 990 and 1079, it became subject to the powerful Earls of Orkney.
There was a mint producing coins on Mann between c. 1025 and c. 1065. These Manx coins were minted from an imported type 2 Hiberno-Norse penny die from Dublin. Hiberno-Norse coins were first minted under Sihtric, King of Dublin. This illustrates that Mann may have been under the thumb of Dublin at this time.
Little is known about the conqueror, Godred Crovan. According to the Chronicon Manniae he subdued Dublin, and a great part of Leinster, and held the Scots in such subjection that supposedly no one who set out to build a vessel dared to insert more than three bolts. The memory of such a ruler would be likely to survive in tradition, and it seems probable therefore that he is the person commemorated in Manx legend under the name of King Gorse or Orry. He created the Kingdom of Mann and the Isles in around 1079 including the south-western islands of Scotland until 1164, when two separate kingdoms were formed from it. In 1154, later known as the Diocese of Sodor and Man, was formed by the Catholic Church.
The islands under his rule were called the Suðr-eyjar (South isles, in contrast to the Norðr-eyjar North isles", i.e. Orkney and Shetland), consisting of the Hebrides, all the smaller western islands of Scotland, and Mann. At a later date his successors took the title of Rex Manniae et Insularum (King of Mann and of the Isles). The kingdom's capital was on St Patrick's Isle, where Peel Castle was built on the site of a Celtic monastery.
Olaf, Godred's son, exercised considerable power and according to the Chronicle, maintained such close alliance with the kings of Ireland and Scotland that no one ventured to disturb the Isles during his time (1113–1152). In 1156 his son Godred (reigned 1153–1158), who for a short period also ruled over Dublin, lost the smaller islands off the coast of Argyll as a result of a quarrel with Somerled (the ruler of Argyll). An independent sovereignty thus appeared between the two divisions of his kingdom.
In the 1130s the Catholic Church sent a small mission to establish the first bishopric on the Isle of Man, and appointed Wimund as the first bishop. He soon afterwards embarked with a band of followers on a career of murder and looting throughout Scotland and the surrounding islands.
During the whole of the Scandinavian period, the Isles remained nominally under the suzerainty of the Kings of Norway but the Norwegians only occasionally asserted it with any vigour. The first such king to assert control over the region was likely Magnus Barelegs, at the turn of the 12th century. It was not until Hakon Hakonarson's 1263 expedition that another king returned to the Isles.
From the middle of the 12th century until 1217 the suzerainty had remained of a very shadowy character; Norway had become a prey to civil dissensions. But after that date it became a reality, and Norway consequently came into collision with the growing power of the kingdom of Scotland.
Early in the 13th century, when Ragnald (reigned 1187–1229) paid homage to King John of England (reigned 1199–1216), we hear for the first time of English intervention in the affairs of Mann. But a period of Scots domination would precede the establishment of full English control.
Finally, in 1261, Alexander III of Scotland sent envoys to Norway to negotiate for the cession of the isles, but their efforts led to no result. He therefore initiated a war, which ended in the indecisive Battle of Largs against the Norwegian fleet in 1263. However, the Norwegian king Haakon Haakonsson died the following winter, and this allowed King Alexander to bring the war to a successful conclusion. Magnus Olafsson, King of Mann and the Isles (reigned 1252–1265), who had campaigned on the Norwegian side, had to surrender all the islands over which he had ruled, except Mann, for which he did homage. Two years later Magnus died and in 1266 King Magnus VI of Norway ceded the islands, including Mann, to Scotland in the Treaty of Perth in consideration of the sum of 4,000 marks (known as merks in Scotland) and an annuity of 100 marks. But Scotland's rule over Mann did not become firmly established until 1275, when the Manx suffered defeat in the decisive Battle of Ronaldsway, near Castletown.
In 1290 King Edward I of England sent Walter de Huntercombe to seize possession of Mann, and it remained in English hands until 1313, when Robert Bruce took it after besieging Castle Rushen for five weeks. In about 1333 King Edward III of England granted Mann to William de Montacute, 3rd Baron Montacute (later the 1st Earl of Salisbury), as his absolute possession, without reserving any service to be rendered to him.
Then, in 1346, the Battle of Neville's Cross decided the long struggle between England and Scotland in England's favour. King David II of Scotland, Robert Bruce's last male heir, had been captured in the Battle of Neville's Cross and ransomed; however, when Scotland was unable to raise one of the ransom installments, David made a secret agreement with King Edward III of England to cancel it, in return for transferring the Scottish kingdom to an English prince.
Following the secret agreement, there followed a confused period when Mann sometimes experienced English rule and sometimes Scottish. In 1388 the island was "ravaged" by Sir William Douglas of Nithsdale on his way home from the destruction of the town of Carlingford.
In 1392 William de Montacute's son sold the island, including sovereignty, to Sir William le Scrope. In 1399 Henry Bolinbroke brought about the beheading of Le Scrope, who had taken the side of Richard II when Bolinbroke usurped the throne and appointed himself Henry IV. The island then came into the de facto possession of Henry, who granted it to Henry Percy, 1st Earl of Northumberland; but following the latter's later attainder, Henry IV, in 1405, made a lifetime grant of it, with the patronage of the bishopric, to Sir John Stanley. In 1406 this grant was extended – on a feudatory basis under the English Crown – to Sir John's heirs and assigns, the feudal fee being the service of rendering homage and two falcons to all future Kings of England on their coronations.
With the accession of the Stanleys to the throne there begins a more settled epoch in Manx history. Though the island's new rulers rarely visited its shores, they placed it under governors, who, in the main, seem to have treated it with the justice of the time. Of the thirteen members of the family who ruled in Mann, the second Sir John Stanley (1414–1432), James, the 7th Earl (1627–1651), and the 10th Earl of the same name (1702–1736) had the most important influence on it. They first curbed the power of the spiritual barons, introduced trial by jury, which superseded trial by battle, and ordered the laws to be written. The second, known as the Great Stanley, and his wife, Charlotte de la Tremoille (or Tremouille), are probably the most striking figures in Manx history.
Shortly after the Wars of the Three Kingdoms began in June 1643, James Stanley, 7th Earl of Derby returned to Mann to find the island on the brink of rebellion. Among the causes were complaints at the level of tithes payable to the Church of England, and Derby's attempts to replace the Manx ‘tenure of straw’ by which many of his tenants held their lands, a customary tenure akin to freehold, with commercial leases. He managed to restore the situation through a series of meetings, but made minimal concessions.
Six months after Charles I was executed on 30 January 1649, Derby received a summons from General Ireton to surrender the island, but declined to do so. In August 1651, he and 300 Manxmen landed in Lancashire to take part in the Third English Civil War; defeated at Wigan Lane on 25 August 1651, Derby escaped with only 30 troops to join Charles II. Captured after the Battle of Worcester in September, he was imprisoned in Chester Castle, tried by court-martial and executed at Bolton on 15 October.
Soon after Stanley's death, the Manx Militia, under the command of William Christian (known by his Manx name of Illiam Dhone), rose against the Countess and captured all the insular forts except Rushen and Peel. They were then joined by a Parliamentarian force sent from the mainland, led by Colonels Thomas Birch and Robert Duckenfield, to whom the Countess surrendered after a brief resistance.
Oliver Cromwell had appointed Thomas Fairfax "Lord of Mann and the Isles" in September 1651, so that Mann continued under a monarchical government and remained in the same relation to England as before.
The restoration of Stanley government in 1660 therefore caused as little friction and alteration as its temporary cessation had. One of the first acts of the new Lord, Charles Stanley, 8th Earl of Derby, was to order Christian to be tried. He was found guilty and executed. Of the other persons implicated in the rebellion only three were excepted from the general amnesty. But by Order in Council, Charles II pardoned them, and the judges responsible for the sentence on Christian were punished.
Charles Stanley's next act was to dispute the permanency of the tenants' holdings, which they had not at first regarded as being affected by the acceptance of leases, a proceeding which led to an almost open rebellion against his authority and to the neglect of agriculture, in lieu of which the people devoted themselves to the fisheries and to contraband trade.
Charles Stanley, who died in 1672, was succeeded first by his son William Richard George Stanley, 9th Earl of Derby until his death in 1702.
The agrarian question subsided only in 1704, when James Stanley, 10th Earl of Derby, William's brother and successor, largely through the influence of Bishop Wilson, entered into a compact with his tenants, which became embodied in an Act, called the Act of Settlement. Their compact secured the tenants in the possession of their estates in perpetuity subject only to a fixed rent, and a small fine on succession or alienation. From the great importance of this act to the Manx people it has been called their Magna Carta. As time went on, and the value of the estates increased, the rent payable to the Lord became so small in proportion as to be almost nominal, being extinguished by purchase in 1916.
James died in 1736, and the suzerainty of the isle passed to James Murray, 2nd Duke of Atholl, his first cousin and heir-male. In 1764 he was succeeded by his only surviving child Charlotte, Baroness Strange, and her husband, John Murray, who (in right of his wife) became Lord of Mann. In about 1720 the contraband trade had greatly increased. In 1726 Parliament had checked it somewhat for a time, but during the last ten years of the Atholl regime (1756–1765) it assumed such proportions that, in the interests of the Imperial revenue, it became necessary to suppress it. With a view to so doing, Parliament passed the Isle of Man Purchase Act 1765 (commonly called the Revestment Act by the Manx), under which it purchased the rights of the Atholls as Lords of Mann, including the customs revenues of the island, for the sum of £70,000 sterling, and granted an annuity to the Duke and Duchess. The Atholls still retained their manorial rights, the patronage of the bishopric, and certain other perquisites, until they sold them for the sum of £417,144 in 1828.
Up to the time of the revestment [wikt], Tynwald had passed laws concerning the government of the island in all respects and had control over its finances, subject to the approval of the Lord of Mann. After the revestment, or rather after the passage of the Smuggling Act 1765 (commonly called the Mischief Act by the Manx), the Parliament at Westminster legislated with respect to customs, harbours and merchant shipping, and, in measures of a general character, it occasionally inserted clauses permitting the enforcement in the island of penalties in contravention of the Acts of which they formed part. It also assumed the control of the insular customs duties. Such changes, rather than the transference of the full suzerainty to the King of Great Britain and Ireland, modified the (unwritten) constitution of the Isle of Man. Its ancient laws and tenures remained untouched, but in many ways the revestment affected it adversely. The hereditary Lords of Mann had seldom, if ever, functioned as model rulers, but most of them had taken some personal share in its government, and had interested themselves in the well-being of the inhabitants. But now the whole direction of its affairs became the work of officials who regarded the island as a pestilent nest of smugglers, from which it seemed their duty to extract as much revenue as possible.
There was some alleviation of this state of things between 1793 and 1826, when John Murray, 4th Duke of Atholl served as governor, since, though he quarrelled with the House of Keys and unduly cared for his own pecuniary interests, he did occasionally exert himself to promote the welfare of the island. After his departure the English officials resumed their sway, but they showed more consideration than before. Moreover, since smuggling, which the Isle of Man Purchase Act had only checked – not suppressed – had by that time almost disappeared, and since the Manx revenue had started to produce a large and increasing surplus, the authorities looked more favourably on the Isle of Man, and, thanks to this fact and to the representations of the Manx people to British ministers in 1837, 1844 and 1853, it obtained a somewhat less stringent customs tariff and an occasional dole towards erecting its much neglected public works.
Since 1866, when the Isle of Man obtained a nominal measure of Home Rule, the Manx people have made remarkable progress, and currently form a prosperous community, with a thriving offshore financial centre, a tourist industry (albeit smaller than in the past) and a variety of other industries.
The Isle of Man was a base for alien civilian internment camps in both the First World War (1914–18) and the Second World War (1939–45). During the First World War there were two camps: one a requisitioned holiday camp in Douglas and the other the purpose-built Knockaloe camp near Peel in the parish of Patrick. During the Second World War there were a number of smaller camps in Douglas, Peel, Port Erin and Ramsey. The (now disbanded) Manx Regiment was raised in 1938 and saw action during the Second World War.
On 2 August 1973, a flash fire killed between 50 and 53 people at the Summerland amusement centre in Douglas.
The early 20th century saw a revival of music and dance, and a limited revival of the Manx language – although the last "native" speaker of Manx Gaelic died in the 1970s. In July 1947 the Taoiseach of the Republic of Ireland, Éamon de Valera, visited, and was so dissatisfied with the lack of support for Manx that he immediately had two recording vans sent over
During the 20th century the Manx tourist economy declined, as the English and Irish started flying to Spain for package holidays. The Manx Government responded to this by successfully promoting the island, with its low tax rates, as an offshore financial centre, although Man has avoided a place on a 2009 UK blacklist of tax havens. The financial centre has had its detractors who have pointed to the potential for money laundering.
In 1949 an Executive Council, chaired by the Lieutenant-Governor and including members of Tynwald, was established. This marked the start of a transfer of executive power from the unelected Lieutenant-Governor to democratically elected Manx politicians. Finance and the police passed to Manx control between 1958 and 1976. In 1980 a chairman elected by Tynwald replaced the Lieutenant-Governor as Chairman of the Executive Council. Following legislation in 1984, the Executive Council was reconstituted in 1985 to include the chairmen of the eight principal Boards; in 1986 they were given the title of Minister and the chairman was re-titled "Chief Minister". In 1986 Sir Miles Walker CBE became the first Chief Minister of the Isle of Man. In 1990 the Executive Council was renamed the "Council of Ministers".
The 1960s also saw a rise in Manx nationalism, spawning the parties Mec Vannin and the Manx National Party, as well as the now defunct Fo Halloo (literally "Underground"), which mounted a direct-action campaign of spray-painting and attempted house-burning.
On 5 July 1973 control of the postal service passed from the UK General Post Office to the new Isle of Man Post, which began to issue its own postage stamps.
The 1990s and early 21st century have seen a greater recognition of indigenous Manx culture, including the opening of the first Manx-language primary school.
Since 1983 the Isle of Man government has designated more than 250 historic structures as Registered Buildings of the Isle of Man. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Isle of Man had become physically separated from Great Britain and Ireland by 6500 BC. It appears that colonisation took place by sea sometime during the Mesolithic era (about 6500 BC). The island has been visited by various raiders and trading peoples over the years. After being settled by people from Ireland in the first millennium AD, the Isle of Man was converted to Christianity and then suffered raids by Vikings from Norway. After becoming subject to Norwegian suzerainty as part of the Kingdom of Mann and the Isles, the Isle of Man later became a possession of the Scottish and then the English crowns.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Since 1866, the Isle of Man has been a Crown Dependency and has democratic self-government.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The Isle of Man effectively became an island around 8,500 years ago at around the time when rising sea levels caused by the melting glaciers cut Mesolithic Britain off from continental Europe for the last time. There had earlier been a land bridge between the Isle of Man and Cumbria, but the location and opening of the land bridge remain poorly understood.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The earliest traces of people on the Isle of Man date back to the Mesolithic Period, also known as the Middle Stone Age. The first residents lived in small natural shelters, hunting, gathering and fishing for their food. They used small tools made of flint or bone, examples of which have been found near the coast. Examples of these artifacts are kept at the Manx National Heritage museum.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Neolithic Period marked the coming of farming, improved stone tools and pottery. During this period megalithic monuments began to appear around the island. Examples are found at Cashtal yn Ard near Maughold, King Orry's Grave in Laxey, Meayll Circle near Cregneash, and Ballaharra Stones in St John's. The builders of the megaliths were not the only culture during this time; there are also remains of the local Ronaldsway culture (lasting from the late Neolithic into the Bronze Age).",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The Iron Age marked the beginning of Celtic cultural influence. Large hill forts appeared on hill summits and smaller promontory forts along the coastal cliffs, while large timber-framed roundhouses were built.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "It is likely that the first Celts to inhabit the Island were Brythonic tribes from mainland Britain. The secular history of the Isle of Man during the Brythonic period remains mysterious. It is not known if the Romans ever made a landing on the island and if they did, little evidence has been discovered. There is evidence for contact with Roman Britain as an amphora was discovered at the settlement on the South Barrule; it is hypothesised this may have been trade goods or plunder.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "It is generally assumed that Irish invasion or immigration formed the basis of the modern Manx language; Irish migration to the island probably began in the 5th century AD. This is evident in the change in language used in Ogham inscriptions. The transition between Manx Brythonic (a Brythonic language like modern Welsh) and Manx Gaelic (a Goidelic language like modern Scottish Gaelic and Irish) may have been gradual. One question is whether the present-day Manx language survives from pre-Norse days or reflects a linguistic reintroduction after the Norse invasion. The island lends its name to Manannán, the Brythonic and Gaelic sea god who is said in myth to have once ruled the island.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Tradition attributes the island's conversion to Christianity to St Maughold (Maccul), an Irish missionary who gives his name to a parish. There are the remains of around 200 tiny early chapels called keeils scattered across the island. Evidence such as radiocarbon dating and magnetic drift points to many of these being built around AD 550–600.",
"title": "Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The Brythonic culture of Manaw appears throughout early British tradition and later Welsh writings. The family origins of Gwriad ap Elidyr (father of Merfyn Frych and grandfather of Rhodri the Great) are attributed to a Manaw and he is sometimes named as Gwriad Manaw. The 1896 discovery of a cross inscribed Crux Guriat (Cross of Gwriad) and dated to the 8th or 9th century greatly supports this theory.",
"title": "Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The best record of any event before the incursions of the Northmen is attributed to Báetán mac Cairill, king of Ulster, who (according to the Annals of Ulster) led an expedition to Man in 577–578, imposing his authority on the island (though some have thought this event may refer to Manau Gododdin between the Firths of Clyde and Forth, rather than the Isle of Man). After Báetán's death in 581, his rival Áedán mac Gabráin, king of Dál Riata, is said to have taken the island in 582.",
"title": "Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Even if the supposed conquest of the Menavian islands – Mann and Anglesey – by Edwin of Northumbria, in 616, did take place, it could not have led to any permanent results, for when the English were driven from the coasts of Cumberland and Lancashire soon afterwards, they could not well have retained their hold on the island to the west of these coasts. One can speculate, however, that when Ecgfrið's Northumbrians laid Ireland waste from Dublin to Drogheda in 684, they temporarily occupied Mann.",
"title": "Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The period of Scandinavian domination is divided into two main epochs – before and after the conquest of Mann by Godred Crovan in 1079. Warfare and unsettled rule characterise the earlier epoch, the later saw comparatively more peace.",
"title": "Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Between about AD 800 and 815 the Vikings came to Mann chiefly for plunder. Between about 850 and 990, when they settled, the island fell under the rule of the Scandinavian Kings of Dublin and between 990 and 1079, it became subject to the powerful Earls of Orkney.",
"title": "Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "There was a mint producing coins on Mann between c. 1025 and c. 1065. These Manx coins were minted from an imported type 2 Hiberno-Norse penny die from Dublin. Hiberno-Norse coins were first minted under Sihtric, King of Dublin. This illustrates that Mann may have been under the thumb of Dublin at this time.",
"title": "Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Little is known about the conqueror, Godred Crovan. According to the Chronicon Manniae he subdued Dublin, and a great part of Leinster, and held the Scots in such subjection that supposedly no one who set out to build a vessel dared to insert more than three bolts. The memory of such a ruler would be likely to survive in tradition, and it seems probable therefore that he is the person commemorated in Manx legend under the name of King Gorse or Orry. He created the Kingdom of Mann and the Isles in around 1079 including the south-western islands of Scotland until 1164, when two separate kingdoms were formed from it. In 1154, later known as the Diocese of Sodor and Man, was formed by the Catholic Church.",
"title": "Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The islands under his rule were called the Suðr-eyjar (South isles, in contrast to the Norðr-eyjar North isles\", i.e. Orkney and Shetland), consisting of the Hebrides, all the smaller western islands of Scotland, and Mann. At a later date his successors took the title of Rex Manniae et Insularum (King of Mann and of the Isles). The kingdom's capital was on St Patrick's Isle, where Peel Castle was built on the site of a Celtic monastery.",
"title": "Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Olaf, Godred's son, exercised considerable power and according to the Chronicle, maintained such close alliance with the kings of Ireland and Scotland that no one ventured to disturb the Isles during his time (1113–1152). In 1156 his son Godred (reigned 1153–1158), who for a short period also ruled over Dublin, lost the smaller islands off the coast of Argyll as a result of a quarrel with Somerled (the ruler of Argyll). An independent sovereignty thus appeared between the two divisions of his kingdom.",
"title": "Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In the 1130s the Catholic Church sent a small mission to establish the first bishopric on the Isle of Man, and appointed Wimund as the first bishop. He soon afterwards embarked with a band of followers on a career of murder and looting throughout Scotland and the surrounding islands.",
"title": "Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "During the whole of the Scandinavian period, the Isles remained nominally under the suzerainty of the Kings of Norway but the Norwegians only occasionally asserted it with any vigour. The first such king to assert control over the region was likely Magnus Barelegs, at the turn of the 12th century. It was not until Hakon Hakonarson's 1263 expedition that another king returned to the Isles.",
"title": "Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "From the middle of the 12th century until 1217 the suzerainty had remained of a very shadowy character; Norway had become a prey to civil dissensions. But after that date it became a reality, and Norway consequently came into collision with the growing power of the kingdom of Scotland.",
"title": "Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Early in the 13th century, when Ragnald (reigned 1187–1229) paid homage to King John of England (reigned 1199–1216), we hear for the first time of English intervention in the affairs of Mann. But a period of Scots domination would precede the establishment of full English control.",
"title": "Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Finally, in 1261, Alexander III of Scotland sent envoys to Norway to negotiate for the cession of the isles, but their efforts led to no result. He therefore initiated a war, which ended in the indecisive Battle of Largs against the Norwegian fleet in 1263. However, the Norwegian king Haakon Haakonsson died the following winter, and this allowed King Alexander to bring the war to a successful conclusion. Magnus Olafsson, King of Mann and the Isles (reigned 1252–1265), who had campaigned on the Norwegian side, had to surrender all the islands over which he had ruled, except Mann, for which he did homage. Two years later Magnus died and in 1266 King Magnus VI of Norway ceded the islands, including Mann, to Scotland in the Treaty of Perth in consideration of the sum of 4,000 marks (known as merks in Scotland) and an annuity of 100 marks. But Scotland's rule over Mann did not become firmly established until 1275, when the Manx suffered defeat in the decisive Battle of Ronaldsway, near Castletown.",
"title": "Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In 1290 King Edward I of England sent Walter de Huntercombe to seize possession of Mann, and it remained in English hands until 1313, when Robert Bruce took it after besieging Castle Rushen for five weeks. In about 1333 King Edward III of England granted Mann to William de Montacute, 3rd Baron Montacute (later the 1st Earl of Salisbury), as his absolute possession, without reserving any service to be rendered to him.",
"title": "Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Then, in 1346, the Battle of Neville's Cross decided the long struggle between England and Scotland in England's favour. King David II of Scotland, Robert Bruce's last male heir, had been captured in the Battle of Neville's Cross and ransomed; however, when Scotland was unable to raise one of the ransom installments, David made a secret agreement with King Edward III of England to cancel it, in return for transferring the Scottish kingdom to an English prince.",
"title": "Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Following the secret agreement, there followed a confused period when Mann sometimes experienced English rule and sometimes Scottish. In 1388 the island was \"ravaged\" by Sir William Douglas of Nithsdale on his way home from the destruction of the town of Carlingford.",
"title": "Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In 1392 William de Montacute's son sold the island, including sovereignty, to Sir William le Scrope. In 1399 Henry Bolinbroke brought about the beheading of Le Scrope, who had taken the side of Richard II when Bolinbroke usurped the throne and appointed himself Henry IV. The island then came into the de facto possession of Henry, who granted it to Henry Percy, 1st Earl of Northumberland; but following the latter's later attainder, Henry IV, in 1405, made a lifetime grant of it, with the patronage of the bishopric, to Sir John Stanley. In 1406 this grant was extended – on a feudatory basis under the English Crown – to Sir John's heirs and assigns, the feudal fee being the service of rendering homage and two falcons to all future Kings of England on their coronations.",
"title": "Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "With the accession of the Stanleys to the throne there begins a more settled epoch in Manx history. Though the island's new rulers rarely visited its shores, they placed it under governors, who, in the main, seem to have treated it with the justice of the time. Of the thirteen members of the family who ruled in Mann, the second Sir John Stanley (1414–1432), James, the 7th Earl (1627–1651), and the 10th Earl of the same name (1702–1736) had the most important influence on it. They first curbed the power of the spiritual barons, introduced trial by jury, which superseded trial by battle, and ordered the laws to be written. The second, known as the Great Stanley, and his wife, Charlotte de la Tremoille (or Tremouille), are probably the most striking figures in Manx history.",
"title": "Early Modern period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Shortly after the Wars of the Three Kingdoms began in June 1643, James Stanley, 7th Earl of Derby returned to Mann to find the island on the brink of rebellion. Among the causes were complaints at the level of tithes payable to the Church of England, and Derby's attempts to replace the Manx ‘tenure of straw’ by which many of his tenants held their lands, a customary tenure akin to freehold, with commercial leases. He managed to restore the situation through a series of meetings, but made minimal concessions.",
"title": "Early Modern period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Six months after Charles I was executed on 30 January 1649, Derby received a summons from General Ireton to surrender the island, but declined to do so. In August 1651, he and 300 Manxmen landed in Lancashire to take part in the Third English Civil War; defeated at Wigan Lane on 25 August 1651, Derby escaped with only 30 troops to join Charles II. Captured after the Battle of Worcester in September, he was imprisoned in Chester Castle, tried by court-martial and executed at Bolton on 15 October.",
"title": "Early Modern period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Soon after Stanley's death, the Manx Militia, under the command of William Christian (known by his Manx name of Illiam Dhone), rose against the Countess and captured all the insular forts except Rushen and Peel. They were then joined by a Parliamentarian force sent from the mainland, led by Colonels Thomas Birch and Robert Duckenfield, to whom the Countess surrendered after a brief resistance.",
"title": "Early Modern period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Oliver Cromwell had appointed Thomas Fairfax \"Lord of Mann and the Isles\" in September 1651, so that Mann continued under a monarchical government and remained in the same relation to England as before.",
"title": "Early Modern period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The restoration of Stanley government in 1660 therefore caused as little friction and alteration as its temporary cessation had. One of the first acts of the new Lord, Charles Stanley, 8th Earl of Derby, was to order Christian to be tried. He was found guilty and executed. Of the other persons implicated in the rebellion only three were excepted from the general amnesty. But by Order in Council, Charles II pardoned them, and the judges responsible for the sentence on Christian were punished.",
"title": "Early Modern period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Charles Stanley's next act was to dispute the permanency of the tenants' holdings, which they had not at first regarded as being affected by the acceptance of leases, a proceeding which led to an almost open rebellion against his authority and to the neglect of agriculture, in lieu of which the people devoted themselves to the fisheries and to contraband trade.",
"title": "Early Modern period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Charles Stanley, who died in 1672, was succeeded first by his son William Richard George Stanley, 9th Earl of Derby until his death in 1702.",
"title": "Early Modern period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The agrarian question subsided only in 1704, when James Stanley, 10th Earl of Derby, William's brother and successor, largely through the influence of Bishop Wilson, entered into a compact with his tenants, which became embodied in an Act, called the Act of Settlement. Their compact secured the tenants in the possession of their estates in perpetuity subject only to a fixed rent, and a small fine on succession or alienation. From the great importance of this act to the Manx people it has been called their Magna Carta. As time went on, and the value of the estates increased, the rent payable to the Lord became so small in proportion as to be almost nominal, being extinguished by purchase in 1916.",
"title": "Early Modern period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "James died in 1736, and the suzerainty of the isle passed to James Murray, 2nd Duke of Atholl, his first cousin and heir-male. In 1764 he was succeeded by his only surviving child Charlotte, Baroness Strange, and her husband, John Murray, who (in right of his wife) became Lord of Mann. In about 1720 the contraband trade had greatly increased. In 1726 Parliament had checked it somewhat for a time, but during the last ten years of the Atholl regime (1756–1765) it assumed such proportions that, in the interests of the Imperial revenue, it became necessary to suppress it. With a view to so doing, Parliament passed the Isle of Man Purchase Act 1765 (commonly called the Revestment Act by the Manx), under which it purchased the rights of the Atholls as Lords of Mann, including the customs revenues of the island, for the sum of £70,000 sterling, and granted an annuity to the Duke and Duchess. The Atholls still retained their manorial rights, the patronage of the bishopric, and certain other perquisites, until they sold them for the sum of £417,144 in 1828.",
"title": "Early Modern period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Up to the time of the revestment [wikt], Tynwald had passed laws concerning the government of the island in all respects and had control over its finances, subject to the approval of the Lord of Mann. After the revestment, or rather after the passage of the Smuggling Act 1765 (commonly called the Mischief Act by the Manx), the Parliament at Westminster legislated with respect to customs, harbours and merchant shipping, and, in measures of a general character, it occasionally inserted clauses permitting the enforcement in the island of penalties in contravention of the Acts of which they formed part. It also assumed the control of the insular customs duties. Such changes, rather than the transference of the full suzerainty to the King of Great Britain and Ireland, modified the (unwritten) constitution of the Isle of Man. Its ancient laws and tenures remained untouched, but in many ways the revestment affected it adversely. The hereditary Lords of Mann had seldom, if ever, functioned as model rulers, but most of them had taken some personal share in its government, and had interested themselves in the well-being of the inhabitants. But now the whole direction of its affairs became the work of officials who regarded the island as a pestilent nest of smugglers, from which it seemed their duty to extract as much revenue as possible.",
"title": "Early Modern period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "There was some alleviation of this state of things between 1793 and 1826, when John Murray, 4th Duke of Atholl served as governor, since, though he quarrelled with the House of Keys and unduly cared for his own pecuniary interests, he did occasionally exert himself to promote the welfare of the island. After his departure the English officials resumed their sway, but they showed more consideration than before. Moreover, since smuggling, which the Isle of Man Purchase Act had only checked – not suppressed – had by that time almost disappeared, and since the Manx revenue had started to produce a large and increasing surplus, the authorities looked more favourably on the Isle of Man, and, thanks to this fact and to the representations of the Manx people to British ministers in 1837, 1844 and 1853, it obtained a somewhat less stringent customs tariff and an occasional dole towards erecting its much neglected public works.",
"title": "Early Modern period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Since 1866, when the Isle of Man obtained a nominal measure of Home Rule, the Manx people have made remarkable progress, and currently form a prosperous community, with a thriving offshore financial centre, a tourist industry (albeit smaller than in the past) and a variety of other industries.",
"title": "Modern period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "The Isle of Man was a base for alien civilian internment camps in both the First World War (1914–18) and the Second World War (1939–45). During the First World War there were two camps: one a requisitioned holiday camp in Douglas and the other the purpose-built Knockaloe camp near Peel in the parish of Patrick. During the Second World War there were a number of smaller camps in Douglas, Peel, Port Erin and Ramsey. The (now disbanded) Manx Regiment was raised in 1938 and saw action during the Second World War.",
"title": "Modern period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "On 2 August 1973, a flash fire killed between 50 and 53 people at the Summerland amusement centre in Douglas.",
"title": "Modern period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The early 20th century saw a revival of music and dance, and a limited revival of the Manx language – although the last \"native\" speaker of Manx Gaelic died in the 1970s. In July 1947 the Taoiseach of the Republic of Ireland, Éamon de Valera, visited, and was so dissatisfied with the lack of support for Manx that he immediately had two recording vans sent over",
"title": "Modern period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "During the 20th century the Manx tourist economy declined, as the English and Irish started flying to Spain for package holidays. The Manx Government responded to this by successfully promoting the island, with its low tax rates, as an offshore financial centre, although Man has avoided a place on a 2009 UK blacklist of tax havens. The financial centre has had its detractors who have pointed to the potential for money laundering.",
"title": "Modern period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In 1949 an Executive Council, chaired by the Lieutenant-Governor and including members of Tynwald, was established. This marked the start of a transfer of executive power from the unelected Lieutenant-Governor to democratically elected Manx politicians. Finance and the police passed to Manx control between 1958 and 1976. In 1980 a chairman elected by Tynwald replaced the Lieutenant-Governor as Chairman of the Executive Council. Following legislation in 1984, the Executive Council was reconstituted in 1985 to include the chairmen of the eight principal Boards; in 1986 they were given the title of Minister and the chairman was re-titled \"Chief Minister\". In 1986 Sir Miles Walker CBE became the first Chief Minister of the Isle of Man. In 1990 the Executive Council was renamed the \"Council of Ministers\".",
"title": "Modern period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The 1960s also saw a rise in Manx nationalism, spawning the parties Mec Vannin and the Manx National Party, as well as the now defunct Fo Halloo (literally \"Underground\"), which mounted a direct-action campaign of spray-painting and attempted house-burning.",
"title": "Modern period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "On 5 July 1973 control of the postal service passed from the UK General Post Office to the new Isle of Man Post, which began to issue its own postage stamps.",
"title": "Modern period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The 1990s and early 21st century have seen a greater recognition of indigenous Manx culture, including the opening of the first Manx-language primary school.",
"title": "Modern period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Since 1983 the Isle of Man government has designated more than 250 historic structures as Registered Buildings of the Isle of Man.",
"title": "Modern period"
}
]
| The Isle of Man had become physically separated from Great Britain and Ireland by 6500 BC. It appears that colonisation took place by sea sometime during the Mesolithic era. The island has been visited by various raiders and trading peoples over the years. After being settled by people from Ireland in the first millennium AD, the Isle of Man was converted to Christianity and then suffered raids by Vikings from Norway. After becoming subject to Norwegian suzerainty as part of the Kingdom of Mann and the Isles, the Isle of Man later became a possession of the Scottish and then the English crowns. Since 1866, the Isle of Man has been a Crown Dependency and has democratic self-government. | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-11-01T09:11:55Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Isle_of_Man |
14,764 | Geography of the Isle of Man | The Isle of Man is an island in the Irish Sea, between Great Britain and Ireland in Northern Europe, with a population of almost 85,000. It is a British Crown dependency. It has a small islet, the Calf of Man, to its south. It is located at 54°15′N 4°30′W / 54.250°N 4.500°W / 54.250; -4.500.
Area:
Land: 571 km (220 sq mi; 57,100 ha) Water: 1 km (0.4 sq mi) (100 ha) Total: 572 km (221 sq mi; 57,200 ha)
This makes it:
The Isle of Man has a coastline of 160 km (99 mi), and a territorial sea extending to a maximum of 12 nm from the coast, or the midpoint between it and other countries. The total territorial sea area is about 4000 km or 1500 sq miles, which is about 87% of the total area of the jurisdiction of the Isle of Man. The Isle of Man only holds exclusive fishing rights in the first 3 nm. The territorial sea is managed by the Isle of Man Government Department of Infrastructure.
The Raad ny Foillan long-distance footpath runs 153 km (95 mi) around the Manx coast.
The Isle of Man enjoys a temperate climate, with cool summers and mild winters. Average rainfall is high compared to the majority of the British Isles, due to its location to the western side of Great Britain and sufficient distance from Ireland for moisture to be accumulated by the prevailing south-westerly winds. Average rainfall is highest at Snaefell, where it is around 1,900 mm (74.8 in) a year. At lower levels it can fall to around 800 mm (31.5 in) a year.
Temperatures remain fairly cool, with the recorded maximum being 28.9 °C (84.0 °F) at Ronaldsway.
The island's terrain is varied. There are two mountainous areas divided by a central valley which runs between Douglas and Peel. The highest point in the Isle of Man, Snaefell, is in the northern area and reaches 620 metres (2,034 ft) above sea level. The northern end of the island is a flat plain, consisting of glacial tills and marine sediments. To the south the island is more hilly, with distinct valleys. There is no land below sea level.
There are few severe natural hazards, the most common being high winds, rough seas and dense fog. In recent years there has been a marked increase in the frequency of high winds, heavy rains, summer droughts and flooding both from heavy rain and from high seas. Snow fall has decreased significantly over the past century while temperatures are increasing year round with rainfall decreasing.
Air pollution, marine pollution and waste disposal are issues in the Isle of Man.
In order of importance, international first, non-statutory last. Note that ASSIs and MNRs have equal levels of statutory protection under the Wildlife Act 1990.
Designated:
Candidate:
The UK RSPB and UK JNCC have designated five areas of the Isle of Man which are of global significance to birdlife.
There are 25 ASSIs on the Isle of Man as of November 2022. One additional ASSI has been designated but later rescinded (Ramsey Estuary). Dates below refer to year of formal confirmation.
The Island's first marine nature reserve was designated in Ramsey Bay in October 2011. In 2018, nine further Marine Nature Reserves were given statutory protection. The ten Marine Nature Reserves around the Isle of Man cover over 10% of the country's territorial waters, in accordance with international requirements.
Eelgrass Zostera marina is a legally protected species on the Isle of Man. Between 2011 and 2018, four strictly protected Eelgrass Conservation Zones have been designated to protect this important species.
In 2023, three existing statutory Eelgrass Conservation Zones were expanded on a voluntary basis (noting that, regardless of this 'voluntary' status, the species is still legally fully protected from reckless disturbance), with a further new site identified.
Bird sanctuaries were formerly designated by that name under the Wild Birds Protection Act 1932. This designation was superseded by "Areas of Special Protection for Birds" under the Wildlife Act 1990; however the following formerly designated Bird Sanctuaries remain protected:
Manx Wildlife Trust was founded on 6 March 1973 and (as of May 2023) manages 29 nature reserves, including the Calf of Man which is managed with and on behalf of Manx National Trust. These reserves total 456.09 ha (1,127.0 acres), or 0.8% of the Isle of Man and include:
The Isle of Man has (as of March 2023) 92 non-statutory 'Wildlife Sites' sites covering 1,230.54 hectares (3,040.7 acres) in addition to the 10.4 km of coastline. As of 30 January 2009 this total was 45 wildlife sites, covering about 195 ha of land and an additional 10.5 km (6.5 mi) of inter-tidal coast. Wildlife Sites are not recognised in law, but are recognised in terms of Government policy, including planning and zonation (by the Isle of Man Strategic Plan) and agricultural policy (under Cross Compliance regulations). Wildlife Sites are shown on the MANNGIS Island Environment map.
The following properties are under the protection of Manx National Heritage:
The majority of the island is formed from highly faulted and folded sedimentary rocks of the Ordovician period. There is a belt of younger Silurian rocks along the west coast between Niarbyl and Peel, and a small area of Devonian sandstones around Peel. A band of Carboniferous period rocks underlies part of the northern plain, but is nowhere seen at the surface; however similar age rocks do outcrop in the south between Castletown, Silverdale and Port St Mary. Permo- Triassic age rocks are known to lie beneath the Point of Ayre but, as with the rest of the northern plain, these rocks are concealed by substantial thicknesses of superficial deposits.
The island has significant deposits of copper, lead and silver, zinc, iron, and plumbago (a mix of graphite and clay). There are also quarries of black marble, limestone flags, clay schist, and granite. These are all modern, and there was no noticeable exploitation of metals or minerals prior to the modern era.
The island has a census-estimated population of 84,497 according to the most recent 2011 census: up from 79,805 in 2006 and 76,315 in 2001.
The island's largest town and administrative centre is Douglas, whose population is 23,000 – over a quarter of the population of the island. Neighbouring Onchan, Ramsey in the north, Peel in the west and the three southern ports of Castletown, Port Erin and Port St Mary are the island's other main settlements. Almost all its population lives on or very near the coast. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Isle of Man is an island in the Irish Sea, between Great Britain and Ireland in Northern Europe, with a population of almost 85,000. It is a British Crown dependency. It has a small islet, the Calf of Man, to its south. It is located at 54°15′N 4°30′W / 54.250°N 4.500°W / 54.250; -4.500.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Area:",
"title": "Dimensions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Land: 571 km (220 sq mi; 57,100 ha) Water: 1 km (0.4 sq mi) (100 ha) Total: 572 km (221 sq mi; 57,200 ha)",
"title": "Dimensions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "This makes it:",
"title": "Dimensions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Isle of Man has a coastline of 160 km (99 mi), and a territorial sea extending to a maximum of 12 nm from the coast, or the midpoint between it and other countries. The total territorial sea area is about 4000 km or 1500 sq miles, which is about 87% of the total area of the jurisdiction of the Isle of Man. The Isle of Man only holds exclusive fishing rights in the first 3 nm. The territorial sea is managed by the Isle of Man Government Department of Infrastructure.",
"title": "Coast and territorial sea"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The Raad ny Foillan long-distance footpath runs 153 km (95 mi) around the Manx coast.",
"title": "Coast and territorial sea"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The Isle of Man enjoys a temperate climate, with cool summers and mild winters. Average rainfall is high compared to the majority of the British Isles, due to its location to the western side of Great Britain and sufficient distance from Ireland for moisture to be accumulated by the prevailing south-westerly winds. Average rainfall is highest at Snaefell, where it is around 1,900 mm (74.8 in) a year. At lower levels it can fall to around 800 mm (31.5 in) a year.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Temperatures remain fairly cool, with the recorded maximum being 28.9 °C (84.0 °F) at Ronaldsway.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The island's terrain is varied. There are two mountainous areas divided by a central valley which runs between Douglas and Peel. The highest point in the Isle of Man, Snaefell, is in the northern area and reaches 620 metres (2,034 ft) above sea level. The northern end of the island is a flat plain, consisting of glacial tills and marine sediments. To the south the island is more hilly, with distinct valleys. There is no land below sea level.",
"title": "Terrain"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "There are few severe natural hazards, the most common being high winds, rough seas and dense fog. In recent years there has been a marked increase in the frequency of high winds, heavy rains, summer droughts and flooding both from heavy rain and from high seas. Snow fall has decreased significantly over the past century while temperatures are increasing year round with rainfall decreasing.",
"title": "Natural hazards and environmental issues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Air pollution, marine pollution and waste disposal are issues in the Isle of Man.",
"title": "Natural hazards and environmental issues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In order of importance, international first, non-statutory last. Note that ASSIs and MNRs have equal levels of statutory protection under the Wildlife Act 1990.",
"title": "Protected or recognised sites for nature conservation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Designated:",
"title": "Protected or recognised sites for nature conservation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Candidate:",
"title": "Protected or recognised sites for nature conservation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The UK RSPB and UK JNCC have designated five areas of the Isle of Man which are of global significance to birdlife.",
"title": "Protected or recognised sites for nature conservation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "There are 25 ASSIs on the Isle of Man as of November 2022. One additional ASSI has been designated but later rescinded (Ramsey Estuary). Dates below refer to year of formal confirmation.",
"title": "Protected or recognised sites for nature conservation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The Island's first marine nature reserve was designated in Ramsey Bay in October 2011. In 2018, nine further Marine Nature Reserves were given statutory protection. The ten Marine Nature Reserves around the Isle of Man cover over 10% of the country's territorial waters, in accordance with international requirements.",
"title": "Protected or recognised sites for nature conservation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Eelgrass Zostera marina is a legally protected species on the Isle of Man. Between 2011 and 2018, four strictly protected Eelgrass Conservation Zones have been designated to protect this important species.",
"title": "Protected or recognised sites for nature conservation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In 2023, three existing statutory Eelgrass Conservation Zones were expanded on a voluntary basis (noting that, regardless of this 'voluntary' status, the species is still legally fully protected from reckless disturbance), with a further new site identified.",
"title": "Protected or recognised sites for nature conservation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Bird sanctuaries were formerly designated by that name under the Wild Birds Protection Act 1932. This designation was superseded by \"Areas of Special Protection for Birds\" under the Wildlife Act 1990; however the following formerly designated Bird Sanctuaries remain protected:",
"title": "Protected or recognised sites for nature conservation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Manx Wildlife Trust was founded on 6 March 1973 and (as of May 2023) manages 29 nature reserves, including the Calf of Man which is managed with and on behalf of Manx National Trust. These reserves total 456.09 ha (1,127.0 acres), or 0.8% of the Isle of Man and include:",
"title": "Protected or recognised sites for nature conservation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The Isle of Man has (as of March 2023) 92 non-statutory 'Wildlife Sites' sites covering 1,230.54 hectares (3,040.7 acres) in addition to the 10.4 km of coastline. As of 30 January 2009 this total was 45 wildlife sites, covering about 195 ha of land and an additional 10.5 km (6.5 mi) of inter-tidal coast. Wildlife Sites are not recognised in law, but are recognised in terms of Government policy, including planning and zonation (by the Isle of Man Strategic Plan) and agricultural policy (under Cross Compliance regulations). Wildlife Sites are shown on the MANNGIS Island Environment map.",
"title": "Protected or recognised sites for nature conservation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The following properties are under the protection of Manx National Heritage:",
"title": "Protected or recognised sites for nature conservation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The majority of the island is formed from highly faulted and folded sedimentary rocks of the Ordovician period. There is a belt of younger Silurian rocks along the west coast between Niarbyl and Peel, and a small area of Devonian sandstones around Peel. A band of Carboniferous period rocks underlies part of the northern plain, but is nowhere seen at the surface; however similar age rocks do outcrop in the south between Castletown, Silverdale and Port St Mary. Permo- Triassic age rocks are known to lie beneath the Point of Ayre but, as with the rest of the northern plain, these rocks are concealed by substantial thicknesses of superficial deposits.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The island has significant deposits of copper, lead and silver, zinc, iron, and plumbago (a mix of graphite and clay). There are also quarries of black marble, limestone flags, clay schist, and granite. These are all modern, and there was no noticeable exploitation of metals or minerals prior to the modern era.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The island has a census-estimated population of 84,497 according to the most recent 2011 census: up from 79,805 in 2006 and 76,315 in 2001.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The island's largest town and administrative centre is Douglas, whose population is 23,000 – over a quarter of the population of the island. Neighbouring Onchan, Ramsey in the north, Peel in the west and the three southern ports of Castletown, Port Erin and Port St Mary are the island's other main settlements. Almost all its population lives on or very near the coast.",
"title": "Demographics"
}
]
| The Isle of Man is an island in the Irish Sea, between Great Britain and Ireland in Northern Europe, with a population of almost 85,000. It is a British Crown dependency. It has a small islet, the Calf of Man, to its south. It is located at 54°15′N 4°30′W. | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-12-20T04:54:39Z | [
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14,765 | Demographics of the Isle of Man | Demographic features of the population of the Isle of Man include population density, ethnicity, level of education, health, economic status, and religious affiliations. | [
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"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Demographic features of the population of the Isle of Man include population density, ethnicity, level of education, health, economic status, and religious affiliations.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "",
"title": "Vital statistics"
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| Demographic features of the population of the Isle of Man include population density, ethnicity, level of education, health, economic status, and religious affiliations. | 2023-07-02T16:01:34Z | [
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14,766 | Politics of the Isle of Man | The government of the Isle of Man is a parliamentary representative democracy. The Monarch of the United Kingdom is also the head of state of the Isle of Man, and generally referred to as "The King, Lord of Mann". Legislation of the Isle of Man defines "the Crown in right of the Isle of Man" as separate from the "Crown in right of the United Kingdom". His representative on the island is the Lieutenant Governor of the Isle of Man, but his role is mostly ceremonial, though he does have the power to grant Royal Assent (the withholding of which is the same as a veto).
The Isle of Man is not part of the United Kingdom, and the island has no representation in the UK parliament. As a Crown Dependency, it is not subordinate to the government of the United Kingdom. That government, however, is responsible for defence and island's external affairs and could intervene in the domestic affairs of the island under its residual responsibilities to guarantee "good government" in all Crown dependencies. Manx people are British citizens under UK law — there is no separate Manx citizenship.
The legislative power of the government is vested in a bicameral (sometimes called tricameral) parliament called Tynwald (said to be the world's oldest continuously existing parliament), which consists of the directly-elected House of Keys and the indirectly chosen Legislative Council. After every House of Keys general election, the members of Tynwald elect from amongst themselves the Chief Minister of the Isle of Man, who serves as the head of government for five years (until the next general election). Executive power is vested in the Lieutenant Governor (as Governor-in-Council), the Chief Minister, and the Isle of Man's Council of Ministers. The judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature.
Douglas, the largest town on the Isle of Man, is its capital and seat of government, where the Government offices and the parliament chambers (Tynwald) are located.
The Head of State is the Lord of Mann, which is a hereditary position held by the British monarch (currently King Charles III). The Lieutenant Governor is appointed by the King, on the advice of the UK's Secretary of State for Justice, for a five-year term and nominally exercises executive power on behalf of the King. The Chief Minister is elected by the House of Keys (formerly by Tynwald) following every House of Keys general election and serves for five years until the next general election.
When acting as Lord of Mann, the King acts on the advice of the Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor of the United Kingdom having prime responsibility as Privy Counsellor for Manx affairs.
The executive branch under the Chief Minister is referred to as "the Government" or the "Civil Service", and consists of the Council of Ministers, nine Departments, ten Statutory Boards and three Offices. Each Department is run by a Minister who reports directly to the Council of Ministers. The Civil Service has more than 2000 employees and the total number of public sector employees including the Civil Service, teachers, nurses, police, etc. is about 9000 people. This is somewhat more than 10% of the population of the island, and a full 23% of the working population. This does not include any military forces, as defence is the responsibility of the United Kingdom.
The Manx legislature is Tynwald, which consists of two chambers or "branches". The House of Keys has 24 members, elected for a five-year term in two-seat constituencies by the whole island. The minimum voting age is 16. The Legislative Council has eleven members: the President of Tynwald, the Bishop of Sodor and Man, the Attorney General (non-voting) and eight other members elected by the House of Keys for a five-year term, with four retiring at a time. (In the past they have often already been Members of the House of Keys, but must leave the Keys if elected to the Council.) There are also joint sittings of the Tynwald Court (the two branches together).
In the 2021 Manx general election, the Manx Labour Party won two seats and the Liberal Vannin Party won one seat; all 21 remaining seats were won by independents.
Most Manx politicians stand for election as independents rather than as representatives of political parties. Though political parties do exist, their influence is not nearly as strong as in the United Kingdom. Consequently, much Manx legislation develops through consensus among the members of Tynwald, which contrasts with the much more adversarial nature of the British Parliament.
The largest political party is the Liberal Vannin Party, which promotes liberalism, greater Manx independence and more accountability in Government.
The Manx Labour Party is unaffiliated to the British Labour Party.
A political pressure group Mec Vannin advocates the establishment of a sovereign republic.
The Isle of Man Green Party, which was founded in 2016, holds two local government seats and promotes Green politics.
The island also formerly had a Manx National Party. There are Manx members in the Celtic League, a political pressure group that advocates greater co-operation between and political autonomy for the Celtic nations.
The UK Parliament has paramount power to legislate for the Isle of Man on all matters, but it is a long-standing convention that it does not do so on domestic ("insular") matters without Tynwald's consent.
Occasionally, the UK Parliament acts against the wishes of Tynwald: the most recent example was the Marine, &c., Broadcasting (Offences) Act 1967, which banned pirate radio stations from operating in Manx waters. Legislation to accomplish this was defeated on its second reading in the House of Keys, prompting Westminster to legislate directly.
The UK's secondary legislation (regulations and Statutory Instruments) cannot be extended to apply to the Isle of Man.
The UK has had several disputes with the European Court of Human Rights about the Isle of Man's laws concerning birching (corporal punishment) in the case of Tyrer v. the United Kingdom, and sodomy.
The lowest courts in the Isle of Man are presided over by the High Bailiff and the Deputy High Bailiff, along with lay Justices of the Peace. The High Court of Justice consists of three civil divisions and is presided over by a Deemster. Appeals are dealt with by the Staff of Government Division with final appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in the United Kingdom. The head of the Judiciary is the First Deemster and Clerk of the Rolls. The other High and Appeal Court Judges are the Second Deemster, The Deemster and the Judge of Appeal, all of whom are appointed by the Lieutenant Governor.
The Court of General Gaol Delivery is the criminal court for serious offences (effectively the equivalent of a Crown Court in England). It is theoretically not part of the High Court, but is effectively the criminal division of the court. The Second Deemster normally sits as the judge in this court. In 1992, His Honour Deemster Callow passed the last sentence of death in a court in the British Islands (which was commuted to life imprisonment). Capital punishment in the Isle of Man was formally abolished by Tynwald in 1993 (although the last execution on the island took place in 1872). | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The government of the Isle of Man is a parliamentary representative democracy. The Monarch of the United Kingdom is also the head of state of the Isle of Man, and generally referred to as \"The King, Lord of Mann\". Legislation of the Isle of Man defines \"the Crown in right of the Isle of Man\" as separate from the \"Crown in right of the United Kingdom\". His representative on the island is the Lieutenant Governor of the Isle of Man, but his role is mostly ceremonial, though he does have the power to grant Royal Assent (the withholding of which is the same as a veto).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The Isle of Man is not part of the United Kingdom, and the island has no representation in the UK parliament. As a Crown Dependency, it is not subordinate to the government of the United Kingdom. That government, however, is responsible for defence and island's external affairs and could intervene in the domestic affairs of the island under its residual responsibilities to guarantee \"good government\" in all Crown dependencies. Manx people are British citizens under UK law — there is no separate Manx citizenship.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The legislative power of the government is vested in a bicameral (sometimes called tricameral) parliament called Tynwald (said to be the world's oldest continuously existing parliament), which consists of the directly-elected House of Keys and the indirectly chosen Legislative Council. After every House of Keys general election, the members of Tynwald elect from amongst themselves the Chief Minister of the Isle of Man, who serves as the head of government for five years (until the next general election). Executive power is vested in the Lieutenant Governor (as Governor-in-Council), the Chief Minister, and the Isle of Man's Council of Ministers. The judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Douglas, the largest town on the Isle of Man, is its capital and seat of government, where the Government offices and the parliament chambers (Tynwald) are located.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Head of State is the Lord of Mann, which is a hereditary position held by the British monarch (currently King Charles III). The Lieutenant Governor is appointed by the King, on the advice of the UK's Secretary of State for Justice, for a five-year term and nominally exercises executive power on behalf of the King. The Chief Minister is elected by the House of Keys (formerly by Tynwald) following every House of Keys general election and serves for five years until the next general election.",
"title": "Executive branch"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "When acting as Lord of Mann, the King acts on the advice of the Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor of the United Kingdom having prime responsibility as Privy Counsellor for Manx affairs.",
"title": "Executive branch"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The executive branch under the Chief Minister is referred to as \"the Government\" or the \"Civil Service\", and consists of the Council of Ministers, nine Departments, ten Statutory Boards and three Offices. Each Department is run by a Minister who reports directly to the Council of Ministers. The Civil Service has more than 2000 employees and the total number of public sector employees including the Civil Service, teachers, nurses, police, etc. is about 9000 people. This is somewhat more than 10% of the population of the island, and a full 23% of the working population. This does not include any military forces, as defence is the responsibility of the United Kingdom.",
"title": "Executive branch"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The Manx legislature is Tynwald, which consists of two chambers or \"branches\". The House of Keys has 24 members, elected for a five-year term in two-seat constituencies by the whole island. The minimum voting age is 16. The Legislative Council has eleven members: the President of Tynwald, the Bishop of Sodor and Man, the Attorney General (non-voting) and eight other members elected by the House of Keys for a five-year term, with four retiring at a time. (In the past they have often already been Members of the House of Keys, but must leave the Keys if elected to the Council.) There are also joint sittings of the Tynwald Court (the two branches together).",
"title": "Legislative branch"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In the 2021 Manx general election, the Manx Labour Party won two seats and the Liberal Vannin Party won one seat; all 21 remaining seats were won by independents.",
"title": "Legislative branch"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Most Manx politicians stand for election as independents rather than as representatives of political parties. Though political parties do exist, their influence is not nearly as strong as in the United Kingdom. Consequently, much Manx legislation develops through consensus among the members of Tynwald, which contrasts with the much more adversarial nature of the British Parliament.",
"title": "Legislative branch"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The largest political party is the Liberal Vannin Party, which promotes liberalism, greater Manx independence and more accountability in Government.",
"title": "Legislative branch"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The Manx Labour Party is unaffiliated to the British Labour Party.",
"title": "Legislative branch"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "A political pressure group Mec Vannin advocates the establishment of a sovereign republic.",
"title": "Legislative branch"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The Isle of Man Green Party, which was founded in 2016, holds two local government seats and promotes Green politics.",
"title": "Legislative branch"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The island also formerly had a Manx National Party. There are Manx members in the Celtic League, a political pressure group that advocates greater co-operation between and political autonomy for the Celtic nations.",
"title": "Legislative branch"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The UK Parliament has paramount power to legislate for the Isle of Man on all matters, but it is a long-standing convention that it does not do so on domestic (\"insular\") matters without Tynwald's consent.",
"title": "Legislative branch"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Occasionally, the UK Parliament acts against the wishes of Tynwald: the most recent example was the Marine, &c., Broadcasting (Offences) Act 1967, which banned pirate radio stations from operating in Manx waters. Legislation to accomplish this was defeated on its second reading in the House of Keys, prompting Westminster to legislate directly.",
"title": "Legislative branch"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The UK's secondary legislation (regulations and Statutory Instruments) cannot be extended to apply to the Isle of Man.",
"title": "Legislative branch"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The UK has had several disputes with the European Court of Human Rights about the Isle of Man's laws concerning birching (corporal punishment) in the case of Tyrer v. the United Kingdom, and sodomy.",
"title": "Legislative branch"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The lowest courts in the Isle of Man are presided over by the High Bailiff and the Deputy High Bailiff, along with lay Justices of the Peace. The High Court of Justice consists of three civil divisions and is presided over by a Deemster. Appeals are dealt with by the Staff of Government Division with final appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in the United Kingdom. The head of the Judiciary is the First Deemster and Clerk of the Rolls. The other High and Appeal Court Judges are the Second Deemster, The Deemster and the Judge of Appeal, all of whom are appointed by the Lieutenant Governor.",
"title": "Judicial branch"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The Court of General Gaol Delivery is the criminal court for serious offences (effectively the equivalent of a Crown Court in England). It is theoretically not part of the High Court, but is effectively the criminal division of the court. The Second Deemster normally sits as the judge in this court. In 1992, His Honour Deemster Callow passed the last sentence of death in a court in the British Islands (which was commuted to life imprisonment). Capital punishment in the Isle of Man was formally abolished by Tynwald in 1993 (although the last execution on the island took place in 1872).",
"title": "Judicial branch"
}
]
| The government of the Isle of Man is a parliamentary representative democracy. The Monarch of the United Kingdom is also the head of state of the Isle of Man, and generally referred to as "The King, Lord of Mann". Legislation of the Isle of Man defines "the Crown in right of the Isle of Man" as separate from the "Crown in right of the United Kingdom". His representative on the island is the Lieutenant Governor of the Isle of Man, but his role is mostly ceremonial, though he does have the power to grant Royal Assent. The Isle of Man is not part of the United Kingdom, and the island has no representation in the UK parliament. As a Crown Dependency, it is not subordinate to the government of the United Kingdom. That government, however, is responsible for defence and island's external affairs and could intervene in the domestic affairs of the island under its residual responsibilities to guarantee "good government" in all Crown dependencies. Manx people are British citizens under UK law — there is no separate Manx citizenship. The legislative power of the government is vested in a bicameral parliament called Tynwald, which consists of the directly-elected House of Keys and the indirectly chosen Legislative Council. After every House of Keys general election, the members of Tynwald elect from amongst themselves the Chief Minister of the Isle of Man, who serves as the head of government for five years. Executive power is vested in the Lieutenant Governor, the Chief Minister, and the Isle of Man's Council of Ministers. The judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature. Douglas, the largest town on the Isle of Man, is its capital and seat of government, where the Government offices and the parliament chambers (Tynwald) are located. | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-11-09T17:37:22Z | [
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14,767 | Economy of the Isle of Man | The economy of the Isle of Man is a low-tax economy with insurance, online gambling operators and developers, information and communications technology (ICT), and offshore banking forming key sectors of the island's economy.
As an offshore financial centre located in the Irish Sea, the Isle of Man is within the British Isles but does not form part of the United Kingdom and was never a part of the European Union.
As of 2016, the Crown dependency's gross national income (GNI) per capita was US$89,970 as assessed by the World Bank. The Isle of Man Government's own National Income Report shows the largest sectors of the economy are insurance and eGaming with 17% of GNI each, followed by ICT and banking with 9% each, with tourist accommodation in the lowest sector at 0.3%.
After 32 years of continued Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, the financial year 2015/16 showed the first drop in GDP, of 0.9%, triggered by decline in eGaming revenues.
The unemployment rate is around 5%.
Property prices are flat or declining, but recent figures also show an increase in resident income tax payers.
The government's policy of offering incentives to high-technology companies and financial institutions to locate on the island has expanded employment opportunities in high-income industries. Agriculture, fishing, and the hospitality industry, once the mainstays of the economy, now make declining contributions to the island's GNP. The hospitality sector contributed just of 0.3% of GNP in 2015/16, and 629 jobs in 2016. eGaming and ICT contribute the great bulk of GNP. The stability of the island's government and its openness for business make the Isle of Man an attractive alternative jurisdiction (DAW Index ranked 3).
In the Vision2020 the Isle of Man government lays out the national strategy of economic growth, seeking an increase of the economically active population an promoting the Island as an 'Enterprise Island, ''Tech Isle', 'Manufacturing centre of excellence', 'Offshore energy hub', 'Destination Island' and for 'Distinctive local food and drink'. The government has published its national economic strategies for several emerging sectors: aerospace, biomed, digital media, ICT.
The Isle of Man is a low-tax economy with no capital gains tax, wealth tax, stamp duty, or inheritance tax; and a top rate of income tax of 20%. A tax cap is in force: the maximum amount of tax payable by an individual is £200,000; or £400,000 for couples if they choose to have their incomes jointly assessed. Personal income is assessed and taxed on a total worldwide income basis rather than on a remittance basis. This means that all income earned throughout the world is assessable for Manx tax, rather than only income earned in or brought into the Island.
The standard rate of corporation tax for residents and non-residents is 0%; retail business profits above £500,000 and banking business income are taxed at 10%, and rental (or other) income from land and buildings situated on the Isle of Man is taxed at 20%.
Trade is mostly with the United Kingdom. The Isle of Man has free access to European Union markets for goods, but only has restricted access for services, people, or financial products.
The Isle of Man as an offshore financial centre has been repeatedly featured in the press as a tax haven, most recently in the wake of the Paradise Papers.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes has rated the Isle of Man as 'top compliant' for a second time: a status which only three jurisdictions in the world have achieved so far. The island has become the second nation after Austria to ratify a multilateral convention with the OECD to implement measures to prevent Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS).
In a report the European Council lists the Isle of Man together with the other two Crown Dependencies (Guernsey and Jersey) as well as Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and Vanuatu, as committed to addressing the Council's concerns of "Existence of tax regimes that facilitate offshore structures which attract profits without real economic activity" by 2018.
The Isle of Man's Department for Enterprise manages the diversified economy in twelve key sectors. The largest individual sectors by GNI are insurance and eGaming with 17% of GNI each, followed by ICT and banking with 9% each. The 2016 census lists 41,636 total employed. The largest sectors by employment are "medical and health", "financial and business services", construction, retail and public administration. Manufacturing, focused on aerospace and the food and drink industry, employs almost 2000 workers and contributes about 5% of GDP. The sector provides laser optics, industrial diamonds, electronics, plastics and aerospace precision engineering.
Insurance, banking (includes retail banking, offshore banking and other banking services), other finance and business services, and corporate service providers together contribute the most to the GNI and most of the jobs, with 10,057 people employed in 2016.
Among the largest employers of the Island's private sector are eGaming (online gambling) companies like The Stars Group, Microgaming, Newfield, and Playtech. The Manx eGaming Association MEGA is representing the sector. Licenses are issued by the Gambling Supervision Commission.
In 2005 PokerStars, one of the world's largest online poker sites, relocated its headquarters to the Isle of Man from Costa Rica. In 2006, RNG Gaming a large gaming software developer of P2P tournaments and Get21, a multiplayer online blackjack site, based their corporate offices on the island.
The Isle of Man Government Lottery operated from 1986 to 1997. Since 2 December 1999 the island has participated in the United Kingdom National Lottery. The island is the only jurisdiction outside the United Kingdom where it is possible to play the UK National Lottery. Since 2010 it has also been possible for projects in the Isle of Man to receive national lottery Good Causes Funding. The good causes funding is distributed by the Manx Lottery Trust. Tynwald receives the 12p lottery duty for tickets sold in the Island.
The shortage of workers with ICT skills is tackled by several initiatives, like an IT and education campus, a new cyber security degree at the University College of Man, a Code Club, and a work permit waiver for skilled immigrants.
Since 1995 Isle of Man Film has co-financed and co-produced over 100 feature film and television dramas which have all filmed on the Island.
Among the most successful productions funded in part by Isle of Man Film agency were Waking Ned, where the Manx countryside stood in for rural Ireland, and films like Stormbreaker, Shergar, Tom Brown's Schooldays, I Capture the Castle, The Libertine, Island at War (TV series), Five Children and It, Colour Me Kubrick, Sparkle, and others. Other films that have been filmed on the Isle of Man include Thomas and the Magic Railroad, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Keeping Mum and Mindhorn.
2011 Isle of Man Film Oxford Economics was commissioned by Isle of Man Film Ltd to conduct a study into the economic impact of the film industry on the Isle of. Man. The recommendation of this report for Isle of Man Film was to partner with a more established film institution in the UK to source more Isle of Man film production opportunities. This led to the investment of the Isle of Man Government to take shares in Pinewood Shepperton Plc which were sold later with profit.
Once one of the busiest areas of film production in the British Isles, the Isle of Man hopes to use its strong foundation in film to grow its television and new digital media industry. In a recent Isle of Man Department of Economic Development strategic review, the Island's over 2,000 jobs counting digital sector features 'digital media' and the creative industries, and embraces partnerships with the industry and its individual sector bodies like the Isle of Media, a new media cluster.
Hosting of motorsports events, like the Isle of Man Car Rally and the more-prominent TT motorcycle races, contributes to the tourism economy.
Tourism in the Isle of Man developed from advances in transport to the island. In 1819 the first steamship Robert Bruce came to the island, only seven years after the first steam vessel in the UK. In the 1820s, tourism was growing due to improved transport. The island government's own report for the financial years 2014/15-2015/16 shows tourist accommodation to be in the lowest sector at 0.3%, ranking slightly above 'mining and quarrying' (0.1%).
Since 1999, the Isle of Man has received electricity through the world's second longest submarine AC cable, the 90 kV Isle of Man to England Interconnector, as well as from a natural gas power station in Douglas, an oil power station in Peel and a small hydro-electric power station in Sulby Glen.
Gas for lighting and heating has been supplied to users on the Isle of Man since 1836, firstly as town gas, then as liquid petroleum gas (LPG); since 2003 natural gas has been available. The future use of hydrogen as a supplementary or substitute fuel is being studied.
The Island is connected with five submarine cables to the UK and Ireland.
While the Isle of Man Communications Commission refers to Akamai’s recent State of the Internet Report for Q1 2017, with "the Island ranked 8th in the world for percentage of broadband connections with >4 Mb/s connectivity, with 96% of users connecting at speeds greater than 4Mb/s", an "international league table of broadband speeds puts the Isle of Man at 50th in the world". Manx Telecom recently announced to roll out Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) superfast broadband with download speeds of up to 1Gigabit per second.
Ronaldsway Airport links the Isle of Man with six airlines to eleven UK and Irish scheduled flight destinations.
The Steam Packet Company provides ferry services to Liverpool, Heysham, Belfast and Dublin.
Labour force—by occupation: agriculture, forestry and fishing 3%, manufacturing 11%, construction 10%, transport and communication 8%, wholesale and retail distribution 11%, professional and scientific services 18%, public administration 6%, banking and finance 18%, tourism 2%, entertainment and catering 3%, miscellaneous services 10%
Unemployment rate: nominally 5.0% (July 2020)
Industries: financial services, light manufacturing, tourism
Agriculture—products: cereals, vegetables, cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry
Exports: $NA
Exports—commodities: tweeds, herring, processed shellfish, beef, lamb
Exports—partners: UK
Imports: $NA
Imports—commodities: timber, fertilizers, fish
Imports—partners: UK
Debt—external: $NA
Economic aid—recipient: $NA
Currency: 1 Isle of Man pound = 100 pence
Exchange rates: the Manx pound is at par with the British pound
Fiscal year: 1 April – 31 March | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The economy of the Isle of Man is a low-tax economy with insurance, online gambling operators and developers, information and communications technology (ICT), and offshore banking forming key sectors of the island's economy.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "As an offshore financial centre located in the Irish Sea, the Isle of Man is within the British Isles but does not form part of the United Kingdom and was never a part of the European Union.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "As of 2016, the Crown dependency's gross national income (GNI) per capita was US$89,970 as assessed by the World Bank. The Isle of Man Government's own National Income Report shows the largest sectors of the economy are insurance and eGaming with 17% of GNI each, followed by ICT and banking with 9% each, with tourist accommodation in the lowest sector at 0.3%.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "After 32 years of continued Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, the financial year 2015/16 showed the first drop in GDP, of 0.9%, triggered by decline in eGaming revenues.",
"title": "Economic performance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The unemployment rate is around 5%.",
"title": "Economic performance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Property prices are flat or declining, but recent figures also show an increase in resident income tax payers.",
"title": "Economic performance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The government's policy of offering incentives to high-technology companies and financial institutions to locate on the island has expanded employment opportunities in high-income industries. Agriculture, fishing, and the hospitality industry, once the mainstays of the economy, now make declining contributions to the island's GNP. The hospitality sector contributed just of 0.3% of GNP in 2015/16, and 629 jobs in 2016. eGaming and ICT contribute the great bulk of GNP. The stability of the island's government and its openness for business make the Isle of Man an attractive alternative jurisdiction (DAW Index ranked 3).",
"title": "Economic performance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In the Vision2020 the Isle of Man government lays out the national strategy of economic growth, seeking an increase of the economically active population an promoting the Island as an 'Enterprise Island, ''Tech Isle', 'Manufacturing centre of excellence', 'Offshore energy hub', 'Destination Island' and for 'Distinctive local food and drink'. The government has published its national economic strategies for several emerging sectors: aerospace, biomed, digital media, ICT.",
"title": "Economic strategy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The Isle of Man is a low-tax economy with no capital gains tax, wealth tax, stamp duty, or inheritance tax; and a top rate of income tax of 20%. A tax cap is in force: the maximum amount of tax payable by an individual is £200,000; or £400,000 for couples if they choose to have their incomes jointly assessed. Personal income is assessed and taxed on a total worldwide income basis rather than on a remittance basis. This means that all income earned throughout the world is assessable for Manx tax, rather than only income earned in or brought into the Island.",
"title": "Taxation and trade"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The standard rate of corporation tax for residents and non-residents is 0%; retail business profits above £500,000 and banking business income are taxed at 10%, and rental (or other) income from land and buildings situated on the Isle of Man is taxed at 20%.",
"title": "Taxation and trade"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Trade is mostly with the United Kingdom. The Isle of Man has free access to European Union markets for goods, but only has restricted access for services, people, or financial products.",
"title": "Taxation and trade"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The Isle of Man as an offshore financial centre has been repeatedly featured in the press as a tax haven, most recently in the wake of the Paradise Papers.",
"title": "Taxation and trade"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes has rated the Isle of Man as 'top compliant' for a second time: a status which only three jurisdictions in the world have achieved so far. The island has become the second nation after Austria to ratify a multilateral convention with the OECD to implement measures to prevent Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS).",
"title": "Taxation and trade"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In a report the European Council lists the Isle of Man together with the other two Crown Dependencies (Guernsey and Jersey) as well as Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and Vanuatu, as committed to addressing the Council's concerns of \"Existence of tax regimes that facilitate offshore structures which attract profits without real economic activity\" by 2018.",
"title": "Taxation and trade"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The Isle of Man's Department for Enterprise manages the diversified economy in twelve key sectors. The largest individual sectors by GNI are insurance and eGaming with 17% of GNI each, followed by ICT and banking with 9% each. The 2016 census lists 41,636 total employed. The largest sectors by employment are \"medical and health\", \"financial and business services\", construction, retail and public administration. Manufacturing, focused on aerospace and the food and drink industry, employs almost 2000 workers and contributes about 5% of GDP. The sector provides laser optics, industrial diamonds, electronics, plastics and aerospace precision engineering.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Insurance, banking (includes retail banking, offshore banking and other banking services), other finance and business services, and corporate service providers together contribute the most to the GNI and most of the jobs, with 10,057 people employed in 2016.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Among the largest employers of the Island's private sector are eGaming (online gambling) companies like The Stars Group, Microgaming, Newfield, and Playtech. The Manx eGaming Association MEGA is representing the sector. Licenses are issued by the Gambling Supervision Commission.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In 2005 PokerStars, one of the world's largest online poker sites, relocated its headquarters to the Isle of Man from Costa Rica. In 2006, RNG Gaming a large gaming software developer of P2P tournaments and Get21, a multiplayer online blackjack site, based their corporate offices on the island.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The Isle of Man Government Lottery operated from 1986 to 1997. Since 2 December 1999 the island has participated in the United Kingdom National Lottery. The island is the only jurisdiction outside the United Kingdom where it is possible to play the UK National Lottery. Since 2010 it has also been possible for projects in the Isle of Man to receive national lottery Good Causes Funding. The good causes funding is distributed by the Manx Lottery Trust. Tynwald receives the 12p lottery duty for tickets sold in the Island.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The shortage of workers with ICT skills is tackled by several initiatives, like an IT and education campus, a new cyber security degree at the University College of Man, a Code Club, and a work permit waiver for skilled immigrants.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Since 1995 Isle of Man Film has co-financed and co-produced over 100 feature film and television dramas which have all filmed on the Island.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Among the most successful productions funded in part by Isle of Man Film agency were Waking Ned, where the Manx countryside stood in for rural Ireland, and films like Stormbreaker, Shergar, Tom Brown's Schooldays, I Capture the Castle, The Libertine, Island at War (TV series), Five Children and It, Colour Me Kubrick, Sparkle, and others. Other films that have been filmed on the Isle of Man include Thomas and the Magic Railroad, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Keeping Mum and Mindhorn.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "2011 Isle of Man Film Oxford Economics was commissioned by Isle of Man Film Ltd to conduct a study into the economic impact of the film industry on the Isle of. Man. The recommendation of this report for Isle of Man Film was to partner with a more established film institution in the UK to source more Isle of Man film production opportunities. This led to the investment of the Isle of Man Government to take shares in Pinewood Shepperton Plc which were sold later with profit.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Once one of the busiest areas of film production in the British Isles, the Isle of Man hopes to use its strong foundation in film to grow its television and new digital media industry. In a recent Isle of Man Department of Economic Development strategic review, the Island's over 2,000 jobs counting digital sector features 'digital media' and the creative industries, and embraces partnerships with the industry and its individual sector bodies like the Isle of Media, a new media cluster.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Hosting of motorsports events, like the Isle of Man Car Rally and the more-prominent TT motorcycle races, contributes to the tourism economy.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Tourism in the Isle of Man developed from advances in transport to the island. In 1819 the first steamship Robert Bruce came to the island, only seven years after the first steam vessel in the UK. In the 1820s, tourism was growing due to improved transport. The island government's own report for the financial years 2014/15-2015/16 shows tourist accommodation to be in the lowest sector at 0.3%, ranking slightly above 'mining and quarrying' (0.1%).",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Since 1999, the Isle of Man has received electricity through the world's second longest submarine AC cable, the 90 kV Isle of Man to England Interconnector, as well as from a natural gas power station in Douglas, an oil power station in Peel and a small hydro-electric power station in Sulby Glen.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Gas for lighting and heating has been supplied to users on the Isle of Man since 1836, firstly as town gas, then as liquid petroleum gas (LPG); since 2003 natural gas has been available. The future use of hydrogen as a supplementary or substitute fuel is being studied.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The Island is connected with five submarine cables to the UK and Ireland.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "While the Isle of Man Communications Commission refers to Akamai’s recent State of the Internet Report for Q1 2017, with \"the Island ranked 8th in the world for percentage of broadband connections with >4 Mb/s connectivity, with 96% of users connecting at speeds greater than 4Mb/s\", an \"international league table of broadband speeds puts the Isle of Man at 50th in the world\". Manx Telecom recently announced to roll out Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) superfast broadband with download speeds of up to 1Gigabit per second.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Ronaldsway Airport links the Isle of Man with six airlines to eleven UK and Irish scheduled flight destinations.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The Steam Packet Company provides ferry services to Liverpool, Heysham, Belfast and Dublin.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Labour force—by occupation: agriculture, forestry and fishing 3%, manufacturing 11%, construction 10%, transport and communication 8%, wholesale and retail distribution 11%, professional and scientific services 18%, public administration 6%, banking and finance 18%, tourism 2%, entertainment and catering 3%, miscellaneous services 10%",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Unemployment rate: nominally 5.0% (July 2020)",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Industries: financial services, light manufacturing, tourism",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Agriculture—products: cereals, vegetables, cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Exports: $NA",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Exports—commodities: tweeds, herring, processed shellfish, beef, lamb",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Exports—partners: UK",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Imports: $NA",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Imports—commodities: timber, fertilizers, fish",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Imports—partners: UK",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Debt—external: $NA",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Economic aid—recipient: $NA",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Currency: 1 Isle of Man pound = 100 pence",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Exchange rates: the Manx pound is at par with the British pound",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Fiscal year: 1 April – 31 March",
"title": "Statistics"
}
]
| The economy of the Isle of Man is a low-tax economy with insurance, online gambling operators and developers, information and communications technology (ICT), and offshore banking forming key sectors of the island's economy. As an offshore financial centre located in the Irish Sea, the Isle of Man is within the British Isles but does not form part of the United Kingdom and was never a part of the European Union. As of 2016, the Crown dependency's gross national income (GNI) per capita was US$89,970 as assessed by the World Bank. The Isle of Man Government's own National Income Report shows the largest sectors of the economy are insurance and eGaming with 17% of GNI each, followed by ICT and banking with 9% each, with tourist accommodation in the lowest sector at 0.3%. | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-12-17T13:58:35Z | [
"Template:Portal",
"Template:Reflist",
"Template:Cite web",
"Template:Cite book",
"Template:Use dmy dates",
"Template:Main"
]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Isle_of_Man |
14,768 | Communications in the Isle of Man | The Isle of Man has an extensive communications infrastructure consisting of telephone cables, submarine cables, and an array of television and mobile phone transmitters and towers.
The history of Manx telecommunications starts in 1859, when the Isle of Man Electric Telegraph Company was formed on the island with the intention of connecting across the island by telegraph, and allowing messages to be sent onwards to the UK. In August 1859, a 36-nautical-mile (67 km; 41 mi) long cable was commissioned from Glass, Elliot and Company of Greenwich and laid from Cranstal (north of Ramsey) to St Bees in Cumbria using the chartered cable ship Resolute. The cable was single-core, with gutta-percha insulation.
Twenty miles of overhead cable were also erected from Cranstal south to Ramsey, and on to Douglas. In England, the telegraph was connected to Whitehaven and the circuits of the Electric Telegraph Company.
The telegraph offices were located at 64 Athol Street, Douglas (also the company's head office) and at East Quay, Ramsey (now Marina House).
On 10 August 1860 the company was statutorily incorporated by an Act of Tynwald with a capital of £5,500.
The currents at Cranstal proved too strong, and in 1864 the cable was taken up and relaid further south, at Port-e-Vullen in Ramsey Bay. It was later relaid to land even further south at Port Cornaa.
Following the 1869 finalisation of UK telegraph nationalisation into a General Post Office monopoly, the Isle of Man Electric Telegraph Company was nationalised in 1870 under the Telegraph Act 1870 (an Act of Parliament) at a cost to the British Government of £16,106 (paid in 1872 following arbitration proceedings over the value). Prior to nationalisation, the island's telegraph operations had been performing poorly and the company's share price valued it at around £100.
Subsequent to nationalisation, operations were taken over by the GPO. The internal telegraph system was extended within a year to Castletown and Peel, however by then the previous lack of modern communications in Castletown had already started the Isle of Man Government on its move to Douglas.
Due to increasing usage in the years following nationalisation, further cables between Port Cornaa and St Bees were laid in 1875 and 1885.
By 1883 Smith's Directory listed several telegraph offices operated by the Post Office, in addition to those at Douglas, Ramsey, Castletown and Peel the telegraph was also available at Laxey, Ballaugh, and Port St. Mary.
Throughout the First World War, the cable landing station at Port Cornaa was guarded by the Isle of Man Volunteer Corps.
The undersea telegraph cables have been disused since the 1950s, but remain in place.
A Teleport, with several earth stations, is currently under construction on the Isle of Man. SES Satellite Leasing, the entrepreneurial investment arm of SES. The teleport is expected to enter into service in 2017. It will be a state-of-the-art facility providing satellite telemetry, tracking and commanding (TT&C) facilities and capacity management, together with a wide range of teleport services such as uplink, downlink, and contribution services for broadcasters and data centres.
The main telephone provider on the Isle of Man today is Manx Telecom.
In 1889 George Gillmore, formerly an electrician for the GPO's Manx telegraph operations, was granted a licence by the Postmaster General to operate the Isle of Man's first telephone service. Based in an exchange in Athol Street, early customers of Gilbert's telephone service included the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company and the Isle of Man Railway. Not having the resources to fund expansion or a link to England, Gillmore sold his licence to the National Telephone Company and stayed on as their manager on the island.
By 1901 there were 600 subscribers, and the telephone system had been extended to Ramsey, Castletown, Peel, Port Erin, Port St. Mary and Onchan.
On 1 January 1912 the National Telephone Company was nationalised and merged into the General Post Office by the Telephone Transfer Act 1911. Only Guernsey, Portsmouth and Hull remained outside of the GPO.
In 1922, the General Post Office offered to sell the island's telephone service to the Manx government, but the offer was not taken up. A similar arrangement in Jersey for that island's telephone service was concluded in 1923.
The first off-island telephone link was established in 1929, with the laying of a cable by the CS Faraday between Port Erin and Ballyhornan in Northern Ireland, a distance of 57 km, and then between Port Grenaugh and Blackpool, primarily to provide a link to Northern Ireland. The cable was completed on 6 June 1929 and the first call between the Isle of Man and the outside world was made on 28 June 1929 by Lieutenant Governor Sir Claude Hill in Douglas to the Postmaster General in Liverpool. The cable initially carried only two trunk circuits.
In 1942, a pioneering VHF frequency-modulated radio-link was established between Creg-na-Baa and the UK to provide an alternative to the sub-sea cable. This has since been discontinued.
This was augmented on 24 June 1943 by a 74-kilometre (46 mi) long cable between Cemaes Bay in Anglesey and Port Erin, which had the world's first submerged repeater, laid by HMCS Iris. The repeater doubled the possible number of circuits on the cable, and although it failed after only five months, its replacement worked for seven years.
In 1962 a further undersea cable was laid by HMTS Ariel between Colwyn Bay and the Island.
Historically, the telephone system on the Isle of Man had been run as a monopoly by the British General Post Office, and later British Telecommunications, and operated as part of the Liverpool telephone district.
By 1985 the privatised British Telecom had inherited the telephone operations of the GPO, including those on the Isle of Man. At this time the Manx Government announced that it would award a 20-year licence to operate the telephone system in a tender process. As part of this process, in 1986 British Telecom created a Manx-registered subsidiary company, Manx Telecom, to bid for the tender. It was believed that a local identity and management would be more politically acceptable in the tendering process as they competed with Cable & Wireless to win the licence. Manx Telecom won the tender, and commenced operations under the new identity from 1 January 1987.
On 28 March 1988 an 8,000 telephone circuit fibre optic cable, the longest unregenerated system in Europe, was inaugurated. It links Port Grenaugh to Silecroft in Cumbria, and was laid in September 1987. The cable was buried in the seabed along its entire length.
A further fibre optic cable, known as BT-MT1 was laid in October 1990 between Millom in Cumbria and Douglas, a distance of 43 nautical miles (80 km). Jointly operated by BT and Manx Telecom, it provides six channels each with a bandwidth of 140 Mbit/s. This cable remains in use today.
In July 1992, Mercury Communications laid the LANIS fibre-optic cables. LANIS-1 runs for 61 nautical miles (113 km) between Port Grenaugh and Blackpool, and LANIS-2 runs for 36 nautical miles (67 km) between the Isle of Man and Northern Ireland. They have six channels each with a bandwidth of 565 Mbit/s. The LANIS cables are now operated by Cable & Wireless. The LANIS-1 cable was damaged 600 m off Port Grenaugh on 27 November 2006, causing loss of the link and resulting in temporary Internet access issues for some Manx customers whilst it was awaiting repair.
On 17 November 2001 Manx Telecom became part of mmO2 following the demerger of BT Wireless's operations from BT Group, and the company was owned by Telefónica. On 4 June 2010 Manx Telecom was sold by Telefónica to UK private equity investor HgCapital (who were buying the majority stake), alongside telecoms management company CPS Partners
In December 2007, the Manx Electricity Authority and its telecoms subsidiary, e-llan Communications, commissioned the lighting of a new undersea fibre-optic link. It was laid in 1999 between Blackpool and Douglas as part of the Isle of Man to England Interconnector which connects the Manx electricity system to the UK's National Grid.
In December 2017, Horizon Electronics Isle of Man (formerly Horizon Electro) helped with the online TV services of the Isle of Man.
According to the CIA World Factbook, in 1999 there were 51,000 fixed telephone lines in use in the Isle of Man.
The Isle of Man is included within the UK telephone numbering system, and is accessed externally via UK area codes, rather than by its own country calling code. The area codes currently in use are: +44 1624 (landlines) and +44 7425 / +44 7624 / +44 7924 (mobiles).
Submarine cables in Manx waters are governed by the Submarine Cables Act 2003 (an Act of Tynwald).
The mobile phone network operated by Manx Telecom has been used by O2 as an environment for developing and testing new products and services prior to wider rollout. In December 2001, the company became the first telecommunications operator in Europe to launch a live 3G network. In November 2005, the company became the first in Europe to offer its customers an HSDPA (3.5G) service.
Sure built their own mobile network on the island in 2007 and following various upgrades now deliver 2G/3G and 4G services
In 1996 the Isle of Man government obtained permission to use the .im national top level domain (TLD) and has ultimate responsibility for its use. The domain is managed on a daily basis by Domicilium (IOM) Limited, an island based Internet service provider. Broadband Internet services are available through five local providers which are Manx Telecom, Sure, Wi-Manx, Domicilium, Opti-Fi Limited and BlueWave Communications.
In 2021 it was revealed Bluewave host a Ground station for the Starlink Satellite Internet system
The public-service commercial radio station for the island is Manx Radio. Manx Radio is part funded by government grant, and partly by advertising. There are two other Manx-based FM radio stations, Energy FM and 3 FM.
BBC national radio stations are also relayed locally via a transmitter located to the south of Douglas, relayed from Sandale transmitting station in Cumbria, as well as a signal feed from the Holme Moss transmitting station in West Yorkshire. The Douglas transmitter also broadcasts the BBC's DAB digital radio services and Classic FM.
Manx Radio is the only local service to broadcast on AM medium wave. No UK services are relayed via local AM transmitters. No longwave stations operate from the Island, although one (MusicMann 279) was proposed. There are currently no proposals to broadcast any of the three insular FM stations on DAB.
There is no island-specific television service. Local transmitters retransmit UK Freeview broadcasts. The BBC region is BBC North West and the ITV region is Granada Television.
Many television services are available by satellite, such as Sky, and Freesat from the Astra 2/Eurobird 1 group, as well as services from a range of other satellites around Europe such as Astra 1 and Hot Bird.
Manx ViaSat-IOM, ManSat, Telesat-IOM companies uses the first communications satellite ViaSat-1 that launched in 2011 and positioned at the Isle of Man registered 115.1 degrees West longitude geostationary orbit point. In some areas, terrestrial television directly from the United Kingdom or Republic of Ireland can also be received.
Analogue television transmission ceased between 2008 and 2009, when limited local transmission of digital terrestrial television commenced. The UK's television licence regime extends to the island.
There is no island-specific opt-out of the BBC regional news programme North West Tonight, in the way that the Channel Islands get their own version of Spotlight.
Television was first received on the Isle of Man from the Holme Moss transmitter which started broadcasting BBC Television (later BBC One) from 12 October 1951. Signals from Holme Moss were easily received on the Isle of Man.
ITV television has been available on parts of the east of the Isle of Man on 3 May 1956 when Granada Television (and ABC Television from 5 May 1956 to 28 July 1968) transmissions started from the Winter Hill transmitting station, and to parts of the west of the island on 31 October 1959 from the Black Mountain transmitting station in Northern Ireland which broadcasts Ulster Television. Parts of the north of the island received Border Television since 1 September 1961, initially directly from the Caldbeck transmitting station in Cumberland (later became Cumbria from 1974). On 26 March 1965, Border Television commenced relay of their signal through a local transmitter on Richmond Hill, 542 ft (165 m) above sea level and three miles (4.8 km) from the centre of Douglas. The site allowed reliable reception of the Caldbeck signal, which is rebroadcast on a different frequency. The 200 ft (61 m) high transmission tower was re-sited from London, where it had been used for early ITV transmissions. Richmond Hill was decommissioned after the close of 405-line broadcasts, although the 200 ft tower remained in use for radio with Manx Radio transmitting on 96.9 MHz and then 97.3 MHz until 1989. Manx Radio moved their FM service to the Carnane site and the frequency changed to the current 97.2 MHz.
The television broadcasts are now transmitted from a 195 ft (59 m) high transmitter on a hill to the south of Douglas. The transmitter is operated by Arqiva and is directly fed using a fibre optic cable. There are further sub-relay transmitters across the island. Following a realignment of ITV regional services and the digital switchover, the Douglas relay switched ITV broadcasts to Granada Television on Thursday 17 July 2009.
The Broadcasting Act 1993 (An Act of Tynwald) allows for the establishment of local television services. Only one application for a licence to run such a service was received by the Communications Commission. That application was rejected.
According to the CIA World Factbook, in 1999 there were 27,490 televisions in use in the Isle of Man.
Isle of Man Post issues its own stamps for use within the island and for sending post off-island. Only Manx stamps are valid for sending mail using the postal system. The Isle of Man adopted postcodes in 1993 using the prefix IM to fit in with the already established UK postcode system. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Isle of Man has an extensive communications infrastructure consisting of telephone cables, submarine cables, and an array of television and mobile phone transmitters and towers.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The history of Manx telecommunications starts in 1859, when the Isle of Man Electric Telegraph Company was formed on the island with the intention of connecting across the island by telegraph, and allowing messages to be sent onwards to the UK. In August 1859, a 36-nautical-mile (67 km; 41 mi) long cable was commissioned from Glass, Elliot and Company of Greenwich and laid from Cranstal (north of Ramsey) to St Bees in Cumbria using the chartered cable ship Resolute. The cable was single-core, with gutta-percha insulation.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Twenty miles of overhead cable were also erected from Cranstal south to Ramsey, and on to Douglas. In England, the telegraph was connected to Whitehaven and the circuits of the Electric Telegraph Company.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The telegraph offices were located at 64 Athol Street, Douglas (also the company's head office) and at East Quay, Ramsey (now Marina House).",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "On 10 August 1860 the company was statutorily incorporated by an Act of Tynwald with a capital of £5,500.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The currents at Cranstal proved too strong, and in 1864 the cable was taken up and relaid further south, at Port-e-Vullen in Ramsey Bay. It was later relaid to land even further south at Port Cornaa.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Following the 1869 finalisation of UK telegraph nationalisation into a General Post Office monopoly, the Isle of Man Electric Telegraph Company was nationalised in 1870 under the Telegraph Act 1870 (an Act of Parliament) at a cost to the British Government of £16,106 (paid in 1872 following arbitration proceedings over the value). Prior to nationalisation, the island's telegraph operations had been performing poorly and the company's share price valued it at around £100.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Subsequent to nationalisation, operations were taken over by the GPO. The internal telegraph system was extended within a year to Castletown and Peel, however by then the previous lack of modern communications in Castletown had already started the Isle of Man Government on its move to Douglas.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Due to increasing usage in the years following nationalisation, further cables between Port Cornaa and St Bees were laid in 1875 and 1885.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "By 1883 Smith's Directory listed several telegraph offices operated by the Post Office, in addition to those at Douglas, Ramsey, Castletown and Peel the telegraph was also available at Laxey, Ballaugh, and Port St. Mary.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Throughout the First World War, the cable landing station at Port Cornaa was guarded by the Isle of Man Volunteer Corps.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The undersea telegraph cables have been disused since the 1950s, but remain in place.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "A Teleport, with several earth stations, is currently under construction on the Isle of Man. SES Satellite Leasing, the entrepreneurial investment arm of SES. The teleport is expected to enter into service in 2017. It will be a state-of-the-art facility providing satellite telemetry, tracking and commanding (TT&C) facilities and capacity management, together with a wide range of teleport services such as uplink, downlink, and contribution services for broadcasters and data centres.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The main telephone provider on the Isle of Man today is Manx Telecom.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In 1889 George Gillmore, formerly an electrician for the GPO's Manx telegraph operations, was granted a licence by the Postmaster General to operate the Isle of Man's first telephone service. Based in an exchange in Athol Street, early customers of Gilbert's telephone service included the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company and the Isle of Man Railway. Not having the resources to fund expansion or a link to England, Gillmore sold his licence to the National Telephone Company and stayed on as their manager on the island.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "By 1901 there were 600 subscribers, and the telephone system had been extended to Ramsey, Castletown, Peel, Port Erin, Port St. Mary and Onchan.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "On 1 January 1912 the National Telephone Company was nationalised and merged into the General Post Office by the Telephone Transfer Act 1911. Only Guernsey, Portsmouth and Hull remained outside of the GPO.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In 1922, the General Post Office offered to sell the island's telephone service to the Manx government, but the offer was not taken up. A similar arrangement in Jersey for that island's telephone service was concluded in 1923.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The first off-island telephone link was established in 1929, with the laying of a cable by the CS Faraday between Port Erin and Ballyhornan in Northern Ireland, a distance of 57 km, and then between Port Grenaugh and Blackpool, primarily to provide a link to Northern Ireland. The cable was completed on 6 June 1929 and the first call between the Isle of Man and the outside world was made on 28 June 1929 by Lieutenant Governor Sir Claude Hill in Douglas to the Postmaster General in Liverpool. The cable initially carried only two trunk circuits.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In 1942, a pioneering VHF frequency-modulated radio-link was established between Creg-na-Baa and the UK to provide an alternative to the sub-sea cable. This has since been discontinued.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "This was augmented on 24 June 1943 by a 74-kilometre (46 mi) long cable between Cemaes Bay in Anglesey and Port Erin, which had the world's first submerged repeater, laid by HMCS Iris. The repeater doubled the possible number of circuits on the cable, and although it failed after only five months, its replacement worked for seven years.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In 1962 a further undersea cable was laid by HMTS Ariel between Colwyn Bay and the Island.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Historically, the telephone system on the Isle of Man had been run as a monopoly by the British General Post Office, and later British Telecommunications, and operated as part of the Liverpool telephone district.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "By 1985 the privatised British Telecom had inherited the telephone operations of the GPO, including those on the Isle of Man. At this time the Manx Government announced that it would award a 20-year licence to operate the telephone system in a tender process. As part of this process, in 1986 British Telecom created a Manx-registered subsidiary company, Manx Telecom, to bid for the tender. It was believed that a local identity and management would be more politically acceptable in the tendering process as they competed with Cable & Wireless to win the licence. Manx Telecom won the tender, and commenced operations under the new identity from 1 January 1987.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "On 28 March 1988 an 8,000 telephone circuit fibre optic cable, the longest unregenerated system in Europe, was inaugurated. It links Port Grenaugh to Silecroft in Cumbria, and was laid in September 1987. The cable was buried in the seabed along its entire length.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "A further fibre optic cable, known as BT-MT1 was laid in October 1990 between Millom in Cumbria and Douglas, a distance of 43 nautical miles (80 km). Jointly operated by BT and Manx Telecom, it provides six channels each with a bandwidth of 140 Mbit/s. This cable remains in use today.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In July 1992, Mercury Communications laid the LANIS fibre-optic cables. LANIS-1 runs for 61 nautical miles (113 km) between Port Grenaugh and Blackpool, and LANIS-2 runs for 36 nautical miles (67 km) between the Isle of Man and Northern Ireland. They have six channels each with a bandwidth of 565 Mbit/s. The LANIS cables are now operated by Cable & Wireless. The LANIS-1 cable was damaged 600 m off Port Grenaugh on 27 November 2006, causing loss of the link and resulting in temporary Internet access issues for some Manx customers whilst it was awaiting repair.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "On 17 November 2001 Manx Telecom became part of mmO2 following the demerger of BT Wireless's operations from BT Group, and the company was owned by Telefónica. On 4 June 2010 Manx Telecom was sold by Telefónica to UK private equity investor HgCapital (who were buying the majority stake), alongside telecoms management company CPS Partners",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In December 2007, the Manx Electricity Authority and its telecoms subsidiary, e-llan Communications, commissioned the lighting of a new undersea fibre-optic link. It was laid in 1999 between Blackpool and Douglas as part of the Isle of Man to England Interconnector which connects the Manx electricity system to the UK's National Grid.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In December 2017, Horizon Electronics Isle of Man (formerly Horizon Electro) helped with the online TV services of the Isle of Man.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "According to the CIA World Factbook, in 1999 there were 51,000 fixed telephone lines in use in the Isle of Man.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The Isle of Man is included within the UK telephone numbering system, and is accessed externally via UK area codes, rather than by its own country calling code. The area codes currently in use are: +44 1624 (landlines) and +44 7425 / +44 7624 / +44 7924 (mobiles).",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Submarine cables in Manx waters are governed by the Submarine Cables Act 2003 (an Act of Tynwald).",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The mobile phone network operated by Manx Telecom has been used by O2 as an environment for developing and testing new products and services prior to wider rollout. In December 2001, the company became the first telecommunications operator in Europe to launch a live 3G network. In November 2005, the company became the first in Europe to offer its customers an HSDPA (3.5G) service.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Sure built their own mobile network on the island in 2007 and following various upgrades now deliver 2G/3G and 4G services",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In 1996 the Isle of Man government obtained permission to use the .im national top level domain (TLD) and has ultimate responsibility for its use. The domain is managed on a daily basis by Domicilium (IOM) Limited, an island based Internet service provider. Broadband Internet services are available through five local providers which are Manx Telecom, Sure, Wi-Manx, Domicilium, Opti-Fi Limited and BlueWave Communications.",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In 2021 it was revealed Bluewave host a Ground station for the Starlink Satellite Internet system",
"title": "Telecommunications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The public-service commercial radio station for the island is Manx Radio. Manx Radio is part funded by government grant, and partly by advertising. There are two other Manx-based FM radio stations, Energy FM and 3 FM.",
"title": "Broadcasting"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "BBC national radio stations are also relayed locally via a transmitter located to the south of Douglas, relayed from Sandale transmitting station in Cumbria, as well as a signal feed from the Holme Moss transmitting station in West Yorkshire. The Douglas transmitter also broadcasts the BBC's DAB digital radio services and Classic FM.",
"title": "Broadcasting"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Manx Radio is the only local service to broadcast on AM medium wave. No UK services are relayed via local AM transmitters. No longwave stations operate from the Island, although one (MusicMann 279) was proposed. There are currently no proposals to broadcast any of the three insular FM stations on DAB.",
"title": "Broadcasting"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "There is no island-specific television service. Local transmitters retransmit UK Freeview broadcasts. The BBC region is BBC North West and the ITV region is Granada Television.",
"title": "Broadcasting"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Many television services are available by satellite, such as Sky, and Freesat from the Astra 2/Eurobird 1 group, as well as services from a range of other satellites around Europe such as Astra 1 and Hot Bird.",
"title": "Broadcasting"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Manx ViaSat-IOM, ManSat, Telesat-IOM companies uses the first communications satellite ViaSat-1 that launched in 2011 and positioned at the Isle of Man registered 115.1 degrees West longitude geostationary orbit point. In some areas, terrestrial television directly from the United Kingdom or Republic of Ireland can also be received.",
"title": "Broadcasting"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Analogue television transmission ceased between 2008 and 2009, when limited local transmission of digital terrestrial television commenced. The UK's television licence regime extends to the island.",
"title": "Broadcasting"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "There is no island-specific opt-out of the BBC regional news programme North West Tonight, in the way that the Channel Islands get their own version of Spotlight.",
"title": "Broadcasting"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Television was first received on the Isle of Man from the Holme Moss transmitter which started broadcasting BBC Television (later BBC One) from 12 October 1951. Signals from Holme Moss were easily received on the Isle of Man.",
"title": "Broadcasting"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "ITV television has been available on parts of the east of the Isle of Man on 3 May 1956 when Granada Television (and ABC Television from 5 May 1956 to 28 July 1968) transmissions started from the Winter Hill transmitting station, and to parts of the west of the island on 31 October 1959 from the Black Mountain transmitting station in Northern Ireland which broadcasts Ulster Television. Parts of the north of the island received Border Television since 1 September 1961, initially directly from the Caldbeck transmitting station in Cumberland (later became Cumbria from 1974). On 26 March 1965, Border Television commenced relay of their signal through a local transmitter on Richmond Hill, 542 ft (165 m) above sea level and three miles (4.8 km) from the centre of Douglas. The site allowed reliable reception of the Caldbeck signal, which is rebroadcast on a different frequency. The 200 ft (61 m) high transmission tower was re-sited from London, where it had been used for early ITV transmissions. Richmond Hill was decommissioned after the close of 405-line broadcasts, although the 200 ft tower remained in use for radio with Manx Radio transmitting on 96.9 MHz and then 97.3 MHz until 1989. Manx Radio moved their FM service to the Carnane site and the frequency changed to the current 97.2 MHz.",
"title": "Broadcasting"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The television broadcasts are now transmitted from a 195 ft (59 m) high transmitter on a hill to the south of Douglas. The transmitter is operated by Arqiva and is directly fed using a fibre optic cable. There are further sub-relay transmitters across the island. Following a realignment of ITV regional services and the digital switchover, the Douglas relay switched ITV broadcasts to Granada Television on Thursday 17 July 2009.",
"title": "Broadcasting"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The Broadcasting Act 1993 (An Act of Tynwald) allows for the establishment of local television services. Only one application for a licence to run such a service was received by the Communications Commission. That application was rejected.",
"title": "Broadcasting"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "According to the CIA World Factbook, in 1999 there were 27,490 televisions in use in the Isle of Man.",
"title": "Broadcasting"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Isle of Man Post issues its own stamps for use within the island and for sending post off-island. Only Manx stamps are valid for sending mail using the postal system. The Isle of Man adopted postcodes in 1993 using the prefix IM to fit in with the already established UK postcode system.",
"title": "Post"
}
]
| The Isle of Man has an extensive communications infrastructure consisting of telephone cables, submarine cables, and an array of television and mobile phone transmitters and towers. | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-12-31T23:34:34Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_in_the_Isle_of_Man |
14,769 | Transport in the Isle of Man | There are a number of transport services around the Isle of Man, mostly consisting of paved roads, public transport, rail services, sea ports and an airport.
The island has a total of 688 miles (1,107 km) of public roads, all of which are paved. Roads are numbered using a numbering scheme similar to the numbering schemes of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; each road is assigned a letter, which represents the road's category, followed by a 1 or 2 digit number. A roads are the main roads of the island whilst roads labelled B, C, D or U decrease in size and/or quality. (The C, D and U numbers are not marked on most maps or on signposts.) There is no national speed limit – some roads may be driven at any speed which is safe and appropriate. Careless and dangerous driving laws still apply, so one may not drive at absolutely any speed, and there are local speed limits on many roads. Many unrestricted roads have frequent bends which even the most experienced driver cannot see round. Drivers are limited to 50 miles per hour (80 km/h) in the first full year after passing their driving test (Isle of Man citizens are permitted to start driving at the age of sixteen) and some are not used to having to make progress in the same way as on a larger road network such as that in the UK: even a cautious driver can get from anywhere in the island to anywhere else in no more than sixty minutes.
Set against this is a strong culture of motor sport enthusiasm (pinnacled in the TT, but there are many events during the year) and many residents familiar with the roads are well used to traversing country roads at speeds illegal on similar roads elsewhere. This leads to a very diverse spread of both driving competence and speed. In an official survey in 2006 the introduction of blanket speed limits was refused by the population, suggesting that a large number appreciate the freedom.
There is a comprehensive bus network, operated by Bus Vannin, a department of the Isle of Man Government, with most routes originating or terminating in Douglas.
An organisation on the Isle of Man called the Fare Free Campaign supports making bus and tram travel on the island free of charge for all routes. One of the reasons the campaign gives for supporting this is to encourage people to change their transportation habits to help mitigate climate change.
The island has a total of 68.5 km (42.6 mi) of railway. There are seven separate public rail or tram systems on the island:
Reopened 2022, on a shortened route with its western terminus at Broadway.
(The last three are short-distance tourist rides which cannot be said to be transport services.)
All of these routes are seasonal.
The only commercial airport on the island is the Isle of Man Airport at Ronaldsway. Scheduled services operate to and from various cities in the United Kingdom and Ireland, operated by several different airlines.
The island's other paved runways are at Jurby and Andreas. Jurby remains in Isle of Man Government ownership and is used for motorsport events and, previously, airshows, while Andreas is privately owned and used by a local glider club. The old Hall Caine Airport, a grass field near Ramsey, is no longer used.
The Isle of Man Aircraft Register became operational on 1 May 2007. The register is open to all non-commercial aircraft and is intended to be of particular interest to professionally flown corporate operators. As of November 2012 a total of 537 corporate and private aircraft had been registered.
There are ports at Castletown, Douglas, Peel, Port St Mary and Ramsey. Douglas is served by frequent ferries to/from England and occasional ferries to/from Ireland; the sole operator is the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company, with exclusive use of the Isle of Man Sea Terminal and the Douglas port linkspans under the conditions of the user agreement with the Isle of Man Government.
The Isle of Man register comprised 404 merchant ships of 1,000 GT or over at the end of 2017. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "There are a number of transport services around the Isle of Man, mostly consisting of paved roads, public transport, rail services, sea ports and an airport.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The island has a total of 688 miles (1,107 km) of public roads, all of which are paved. Roads are numbered using a numbering scheme similar to the numbering schemes of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; each road is assigned a letter, which represents the road's category, followed by a 1 or 2 digit number. A roads are the main roads of the island whilst roads labelled B, C, D or U decrease in size and/or quality. (The C, D and U numbers are not marked on most maps or on signposts.) There is no national speed limit – some roads may be driven at any speed which is safe and appropriate. Careless and dangerous driving laws still apply, so one may not drive at absolutely any speed, and there are local speed limits on many roads. Many unrestricted roads have frequent bends which even the most experienced driver cannot see round. Drivers are limited to 50 miles per hour (80 km/h) in the first full year after passing their driving test (Isle of Man citizens are permitted to start driving at the age of sixteen) and some are not used to having to make progress in the same way as on a larger road network such as that in the UK: even a cautious driver can get from anywhere in the island to anywhere else in no more than sixty minutes.",
"title": "Roads"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Set against this is a strong culture of motor sport enthusiasm (pinnacled in the TT, but there are many events during the year) and many residents familiar with the roads are well used to traversing country roads at speeds illegal on similar roads elsewhere. This leads to a very diverse spread of both driving competence and speed. In an official survey in 2006 the introduction of blanket speed limits was refused by the population, suggesting that a large number appreciate the freedom.",
"title": "Roads"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "There is a comprehensive bus network, operated by Bus Vannin, a department of the Isle of Man Government, with most routes originating or terminating in Douglas.",
"title": "Roads"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "An organisation on the Isle of Man called the Fare Free Campaign supports making bus and tram travel on the island free of charge for all routes. One of the reasons the campaign gives for supporting this is to encourage people to change their transportation habits to help mitigate climate change.",
"title": "Roads"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The island has a total of 68.5 km (42.6 mi) of railway. There are seven separate public rail or tram systems on the island:",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Reopened 2022, on a shortened route with its western terminus at Broadway.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "(The last three are short-distance tourist rides which cannot be said to be transport services.)",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "All of these routes are seasonal.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The only commercial airport on the island is the Isle of Man Airport at Ronaldsway. Scheduled services operate to and from various cities in the United Kingdom and Ireland, operated by several different airlines.",
"title": "Airports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The island's other paved runways are at Jurby and Andreas. Jurby remains in Isle of Man Government ownership and is used for motorsport events and, previously, airshows, while Andreas is privately owned and used by a local glider club. The old Hall Caine Airport, a grass field near Ramsey, is no longer used.",
"title": "Airports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The Isle of Man Aircraft Register became operational on 1 May 2007. The register is open to all non-commercial aircraft and is intended to be of particular interest to professionally flown corporate operators. As of November 2012 a total of 537 corporate and private aircraft had been registered.",
"title": "Aircraft Register"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "There are ports at Castletown, Douglas, Peel, Port St Mary and Ramsey. Douglas is served by frequent ferries to/from England and occasional ferries to/from Ireland; the sole operator is the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company, with exclusive use of the Isle of Man Sea Terminal and the Douglas port linkspans under the conditions of the user agreement with the Isle of Man Government.",
"title": "Ports and harbours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The Isle of Man register comprised 404 merchant ships of 1,000 GT or over at the end of 2017.",
"title": "Merchant marine"
}
]
| There are a number of transport services around the Isle of Man, mostly consisting of paved roads, public transport, rail services, sea ports and an airport. | 2023-04-20T15:20:15Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_the_Isle_of_Man |
|
14,773 | Information theory | Information theory is the mathematical study of the quantification, storage, and communication of information. The field was originally established by the works of Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley, in the 1920s, and Claude Shannon in the 1940s. The field, in applied mathematics, is at the intersection of probability theory, statistics, computer science, statistical mechanics, information engineering, and electrical engineering.
A key measure in information theory is entropy. Entropy quantifies the amount of uncertainty involved in the value of a random variable or the outcome of a random process. For example, identifying the outcome of a fair coin flip (with two equally likely outcomes) provides less information (lower entropy, less uncertainty) than specifying the outcome from a roll of a die (with six equally likely outcomes). Some other important measures in information theory are mutual information, channel capacity, error exponents, and relative entropy. Important sub-fields of information theory include source coding, algorithmic complexity theory, algorithmic information theory and information-theoretic security.
Applications of fundamental topics of information theory include source coding/data compression (e.g. for ZIP files), and channel coding/error detection and correction (e.g. for DSL). Its impact has been crucial to the success of the Voyager missions to deep space, the invention of the compact disc, the feasibility of mobile phones and the development of the Internet. The theory has also found applications in other areas, including statistical inference, cryptography, neurobiology, perception, linguistics, the evolution and function of molecular codes (bioinformatics), thermal physics, molecular dynamics, quantum computing, black holes, information retrieval, intelligence gathering, plagiarism detection, pattern recognition, anomaly detection and even art creation.
Information theory studies the transmission, processing, extraction, and utilization of information. Abstractly, information can be thought of as the resolution of uncertainty. In the case of communication of information over a noisy channel, this abstract concept was formalized in 1948 by Claude Shannon in a paper entitled A Mathematical Theory of Communication, in which information is thought of as a set of possible messages, and the goal is to send these messages over a noisy channel, and to have the receiver reconstruct the message with low probability of error, in spite of the channel noise. Shannon's main result, the noisy-channel coding theorem showed that, in the limit of many channel uses, the rate of information that is asymptotically achievable is equal to the channel capacity, a quantity dependent merely on the statistics of the channel over which the messages are sent.
Coding theory is concerned with finding explicit methods, called codes, for increasing the efficiency and reducing the error rate of data communication over noisy channels to near the channel capacity. These codes can be roughly subdivided into data compression (source coding) and error-correction (channel coding) techniques. In the latter case, it took many years to find the methods Shannon's work proved were possible.
A third class of information theory codes are cryptographic algorithms (both codes and ciphers). Concepts, methods and results from coding theory and information theory are widely used in cryptography and cryptanalysis. See the article ban (unit) for a historical application.
The landmark event establishing the discipline of information theory and bringing it to immediate worldwide attention was the publication of Claude E. Shannon's classic paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" in the Bell System Technical Journal in July and October 1948. He came to be known as the "father of information theory".
Prior to this paper, limited information-theoretic ideas had been developed at Bell Labs, all implicitly assuming events of equal probability. Harry Nyquist's 1924 paper, Certain Factors Affecting Telegraph Speed, contains a theoretical section quantifying "intelligence" and the "line speed" at which it can be transmitted by a communication system, giving the relation W = K log m (recalling the Boltzmann constant), where W is the speed of transmission of intelligence, m is the number of different voltage levels to choose from at each time step, and K is a constant. Ralph Hartley's 1928 paper, Transmission of Information, uses the word information as a measurable quantity, reflecting the receiver's ability to distinguish one sequence of symbols from any other, thus quantifying information as H = log S = n log S, where S was the number of possible symbols, and n the number of symbols in a transmission. The unit of information was therefore the decimal digit, which since has sometimes been called the hartley in his honor as a unit or scale or measure of information. Alan Turing in 1940 used similar ideas as part of the statistical analysis of the breaking of the German second world war Enigma ciphers.
Much of the mathematics behind information theory with events of different probabilities were developed for the field of thermodynamics by Ludwig Boltzmann and J. Willard Gibbs. Connections between information-theoretic entropy and thermodynamic entropy, including the important contributions by Rolf Landauer in the 1960s, are explored in Entropy in thermodynamics and information theory.
In Shannon's revolutionary and groundbreaking paper, the work for which had been substantially completed at Bell Labs by the end of 1944, Shannon for the first time introduced the qualitative and quantitative model of communication as a statistical process underlying information theory, opening with the assertion:
With it came the ideas of
Information theory is based on probability theory and statistics, where quantified information is usually described in terms of bits. Information theory often concerns itself with measures of information of the distributions associated with random variables. One of the most important measures is called entropy, which forms the building block of many other measures. Entropy allows quantification of measure of information in a single random variable. Another useful concept is mutual information defined on two random variables, which describes the measure of information in common between those variables, which can be used to describe their correlation. The former quantity is a property of the probability distribution of a random variable and gives a limit on the rate at which data generated by independent samples with the given distribution can be reliably compressed. The latter is a property of the joint distribution of two random variables, and is the maximum rate of reliable communication across a noisy channel in the limit of long block lengths, when the channel statistics are determined by the joint distribution.
The choice of logarithmic base in the following formulae determines the unit of information entropy that is used. A common unit of information is the bit, based on the binary logarithm. Other units include the nat, which is based on the natural logarithm, and the decimal digit, which is based on the common logarithm.
In what follows, an expression of the form p log p is considered by convention to be equal to zero whenever p = 0. This is justified because lim p → 0 + p log p = 0 {\displaystyle \lim _{p\rightarrow 0+}p\log p=0} for any logarithmic base.
Based on the probability mass function of each source symbol to be communicated, the Shannon entropy H, in units of bits (per symbol), is given by
where pi is the probability of occurrence of the i-th possible value of the source symbol. This equation gives the entropy in the units of "bits" (per symbol) because it uses a logarithm of base 2, and this base-2 measure of entropy has sometimes been called the shannon in his honor. Entropy is also commonly computed using the natural logarithm (base e, where e is Euler's number), which produces a measurement of entropy in nats per symbol and sometimes simplifies the analysis by avoiding the need to include extra constants in the formulas. Other bases are also possible, but less commonly used. For example, a logarithm of base 2 = 256 will produce a measurement in bytes per symbol, and a logarithm of base 10 will produce a measurement in decimal digits (or hartleys) per symbol.
Intuitively, the entropy HX of a discrete random variable X is a measure of the amount of uncertainty associated with the value of X when only its distribution is known.
The entropy of a source that emits a sequence of N symbols that are independent and identically distributed (iid) is N ⋅ H bits (per message of N symbols). If the source data symbols are identically distributed but not independent, the entropy of a message of length N will be less than N ⋅ H.
If one transmits 1000 bits (0s and 1s), and the value of each of these bits is known to the receiver (has a specific value with certainty) ahead of transmission, it is clear that no information is transmitted. If, however, each bit is independently equally likely to be 0 or 1, 1000 shannons of information (more often called bits) have been transmitted. Between these two extremes, information can be quantified as follows. If X {\displaystyle \mathbb {X} } is the set of all messages {x1, ..., xn} that X could be, and p(x) is the probability of some x ∈ X {\displaystyle x\in \mathbb {X} } , then the entropy, H, of X is defined:
(Here, I(x) is the self-information, which is the entropy contribution of an individual message, and E X {\displaystyle \mathbb {E} _{X}} is the expected value.) A property of entropy is that it is maximized when all the messages in the message space are equiprobable p(x) = 1/n; i.e., most unpredictable, in which case H(X) = log n.
The special case of information entropy for a random variable with two outcomes is the binary entropy function, usually taken to the logarithmic base 2, thus having the shannon (Sh) as unit:
The joint entropy of two discrete random variables X and Y is merely the entropy of their pairing: (X, Y). This implies that if X and Y are independent, then their joint entropy is the sum of their individual entropies.
For example, if (X, Y) represents the position of a chess piece—X the row and Y the column, then the joint entropy of the row of the piece and the column of the piece will be the entropy of the position of the piece.
Despite similar notation, joint entropy should not be confused with cross-entropy.
The conditional entropy or conditional uncertainty of X given random variable Y (also called the equivocation of X about Y) is the average conditional entropy over Y:
Because entropy can be conditioned on a random variable or on that random variable being a certain value, care should be taken not to confuse these two definitions of conditional entropy, the former of which is in more common use. A basic property of this form of conditional entropy is that:
Mutual information measures the amount of information that can be obtained about one random variable by observing another. It is important in communication where it can be used to maximize the amount of information shared between sent and received signals. The mutual information of X relative to Y is given by:
where SI (Specific mutual Information) is the pointwise mutual information.
A basic property of the mutual information is that
That is, knowing Y, we can save an average of I(X; Y) bits in encoding X compared to not knowing Y.
Mutual information is symmetric:
Mutual information can be expressed as the average Kullback–Leibler divergence (information gain) between the posterior probability distribution of X given the value of Y and the prior distribution on X:
In other words, this is a measure of how much, on the average, the probability distribution on X will change if we are given the value of Y. This is often recalculated as the divergence from the product of the marginal distributions to the actual joint distribution:
Mutual information is closely related to the log-likelihood ratio test in the context of contingency tables and the multinomial distribution and to Pearson's χ test: mutual information can be considered a statistic for assessing independence between a pair of variables, and has a well-specified asymptotic distribution.
The Kullback–Leibler divergence (or information divergence, information gain, or relative entropy) is a way of comparing two distributions: a "true" probability distribution p ( X ) {\displaystyle p(X)} , and an arbitrary probability distribution q ( X ) {\displaystyle q(X)} . If we compress data in a manner that assumes q ( X ) {\displaystyle q(X)} is the distribution underlying some data, when, in reality, p ( X ) {\displaystyle p(X)} is the correct distribution, the Kullback–Leibler divergence is the number of average additional bits per datum necessary for compression. It is thus defined
Although it is sometimes used as a 'distance metric', KL divergence is not a true metric since it is not symmetric and does not satisfy the triangle inequality (making it a semi-quasimetric).
Another interpretation of the KL divergence is the "unnecessary surprise" introduced by a prior from the truth: suppose a number X is about to be drawn randomly from a discrete set with probability distribution p ( x ) {\displaystyle p(x)} . If Alice knows the true distribution p ( x ) {\displaystyle p(x)} , while Bob believes (has a prior) that the distribution is q ( x ) {\displaystyle q(x)} , then Bob will be more surprised than Alice, on average, upon seeing the value of X. The KL divergence is the (objective) expected value of Bob's (subjective) surprisal minus Alice's surprisal, measured in bits if the log is in base 2. In this way, the extent to which Bob's prior is "wrong" can be quantified in terms of how "unnecessarily surprised" it is expected to make him.
Directed information, I ( X n → Y n ) {\displaystyle I(X^{n}\to Y^{n})} , is an information theory measure that quantifies the information flow from the random process X n = { X 1 , X 2 , … , X n } {\displaystyle X^{n}=\{X_{1},X_{2},\dots ,X_{n}\}} to the random process Y n = { Y 1 , Y 2 , … , Y n } {\displaystyle Y^{n}=\{Y_{1},Y_{2},\dots ,Y_{n}\}} . The term directed information was coined by James Massey and is defined as
where I ( X i ; Y i | Y i − 1 ) {\displaystyle I(X^{i};Y_{i}|Y^{i-1})} is the conditional mutual information I ( X 1 , X 2 , . . . , X i ; Y i | Y 1 , Y 2 , . . . , Y i − 1 ) {\displaystyle I(X_{1},X_{2},...,X_{i};Y_{i}|Y_{1},Y_{2},...,Y_{i-1})} .
In contrast to mutual information, directed information is not symmetric. The I ( X n → Y n ) {\displaystyle I(X^{n}\to Y^{n})} measures the information bits that are transmitted causally from X n {\displaystyle X^{n}} to Y n {\displaystyle Y^{n}} . The Directed information has many applications in problems where causality plays an important role such as capacity of channel with feedback, capacity of discrete memoryless networks with feedback, gambling with causal side information, compression with causal side information, and in real-time control communication settings, statistical physics.
Other important information theoretic quantities include Rényi entropy (a generalization of entropy), differential entropy (a generalization of quantities of information to continuous distributions), and the conditional mutual information. Also, pragmatic information has been proposed as a measure of how much information has been used in making a decision.
Coding theory is one of the most important and direct applications of information theory. It can be subdivided into source coding theory and channel coding theory. Using a statistical description for data, information theory quantifies the number of bits needed to describe the data, which is the information entropy of the source.
This division of coding theory into compression and transmission is justified by the information transmission theorems, or source–channel separation theorems that justify the use of bits as the universal currency for information in many contexts. However, these theorems only hold in the situation where one transmitting user wishes to communicate to one receiving user. In scenarios with more than one transmitter (the multiple-access channel), more than one receiver (the broadcast channel) or intermediary "helpers" (the relay channel), or more general networks, compression followed by transmission may no longer be optimal.
Any process that generates successive messages can be considered a source of information. A memoryless source is one in which each message is an independent identically distributed random variable, whereas the properties of ergodicity and stationarity impose less restrictive constraints. All such sources are stochastic. These terms are well studied in their own right outside information theory.
Information rate is the average entropy per symbol. For memoryless sources, this is merely the entropy of each symbol, while, in the case of a stationary stochastic process, it is
that is, the conditional entropy of a symbol given all the previous symbols generated. For the more general case of a process that is not necessarily stationary, the average rate is
that is, the limit of the joint entropy per symbol. For stationary sources, these two expressions give the same result.
Information rate is defined as
It is common in information theory to speak of the "rate" or "entropy" of a language. This is appropriate, for example, when the source of information is English prose. The rate of a source of information is related to its redundancy and how well it can be compressed, the subject of source coding.
Communications over a channel is the primary motivation of information theory. However, channels often fail to produce exact reconstruction of a signal; noise, periods of silence, and other forms of signal corruption often degrade quality.
Consider the communications process over a discrete channel. A simple model of the process is shown below:
Here X represents the space of messages transmitted, and Y the space of messages received during a unit time over our channel. Let p(y|x) be the conditional probability distribution function of Y given X. We will consider p(y|x) to be an inherent fixed property of our communications channel (representing the nature of the noise of our channel). Then the joint distribution of X and Y is completely determined by our channel and by our choice of f(x), the marginal distribution of messages we choose to send over the channel. Under these constraints, we would like to maximize the rate of information, or the signal, we can communicate over the channel. The appropriate measure for this is the mutual information, and this maximum mutual information is called the channel capacity and is given by:
This capacity has the following property related to communicating at information rate R (where R is usually bits per symbol). For any information rate R < C and coding error ε > 0, for large enough N, there exists a code of length N and rate ≥ R and a decoding algorithm, such that the maximal probability of block error is ≤ ε; that is, it is always possible to transmit with arbitrarily small block error. In addition, for any rate R > C, it is impossible to transmit with arbitrarily small block error.
Channel coding is concerned with finding such nearly optimal codes that can be used to transmit data over a noisy channel with a small coding error at a rate near the channel capacity.
In practice many channels have memory. Namely, at time i {\displaystyle i} the channel is given by the conditional probability P ( y i | x i , x i − 1 , x i − 2 , . . . , x 1 , y i − 1 , y i − 2 , . . . , y 1 ) . {\displaystyle P(y_{i}|x_{i},x_{i-1},x_{i-2},...,x_{1},y_{i-1},y_{i-2},...,y_{1}).} . It is often more comfortable to use the notation x i = ( x i , x i − 1 , x i − 2 , . . . , x 1 ) {\displaystyle x^{i}=(x_{i},x_{i-1},x_{i-2},...,x_{1})} and the channel become P ( y i | x i , y i − 1 ) . {\displaystyle P(y_{i}|x^{i},y^{i-1}).} . In such a case the capacity is given by the mutual information rate when there is no feedback available and the Directed information rate in the case that either there is feedback or not (if there is no feedback the directed information equals the mutual information).
Information theoretic concepts apply to cryptography and cryptanalysis. Turing's information unit, the ban, was used in the Ultra project, breaking the German Enigma machine code and hastening the end of World War II in Europe. Shannon himself defined an important concept now called the unicity distance. Based on the redundancy of the plaintext, it attempts to give a minimum amount of ciphertext necessary to ensure unique decipherability.
Information theory leads us to believe it is much more difficult to keep secrets than it might first appear. A brute force attack can break systems based on asymmetric key algorithms or on most commonly used methods of symmetric key algorithms (sometimes called secret key algorithms), such as block ciphers. The security of all such methods comes from the assumption that no known attack can break them in a practical amount of time.
Information theoretic security refers to methods such as the one-time pad that are not vulnerable to such brute force attacks. In such cases, the positive conditional mutual information between the plaintext and ciphertext (conditioned on the key) can ensure proper transmission, while the unconditional mutual information between the plaintext and ciphertext remains zero, resulting in absolutely secure communications. In other words, an eavesdropper would not be able to improve his or her guess of the plaintext by gaining knowledge of the ciphertext but not of the key. However, as in any other cryptographic system, care must be used to correctly apply even information-theoretically secure methods; the Venona project was able to crack the one-time pads of the Soviet Union due to their improper reuse of key material.
Pseudorandom number generators are widely available in computer language libraries and application programs. They are, almost universally, unsuited to cryptographic use as they do not evade the deterministic nature of modern computer equipment and software. A class of improved random number generators is termed cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generators, but even they require random seeds external to the software to work as intended. These can be obtained via extractors, if done carefully. The measure of sufficient randomness in extractors is min-entropy, a value related to Shannon entropy through Rényi entropy; Rényi entropy is also used in evaluating randomness in cryptographic systems. Although related, the distinctions among these measures mean that a random variable with high Shannon entropy is not necessarily satisfactory for use in an extractor and so for cryptography uses.
One early commercial application of information theory was in the field of seismic oil exploration. Work in this field made it possible to strip off and separate the unwanted noise from the desired seismic signal. Information theory and digital signal processing offer a major improvement of resolution and image clarity over previous analog methods.
Semioticians Doede Nauta and Winfried Nöth both considered Charles Sanders Peirce as having created a theory of information in his works on semiotics. Nauta defined semiotic information theory as the study of "the internal processes of coding, filtering, and information processing."
Concepts from information theory such as redundancy and code control have been used by semioticians such as Umberto Eco and Ferruccio Rossi-Landi to explain ideology as a form of message transmission whereby a dominant social class emits its message by using signs that exhibit a high degree of redundancy such that only one message is decoded among a selection of competing ones.
Quantitative information theoretic methods have been applied in cognitive science to analyze the integrated process organization of neural information in the context of the binding problem in cognitive neuroscience. In this context, either an information-theoretical measure, such as functional clusters (Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi's functional clustering model and dynamic core hypothesis (DCH)) or effective information (Tononi's integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness), is defined (on the basis of a reentrant process organization, i.e. the synchronization of neurophysiological activity between groups of neuronal populations), or the measure of the minimization of free energy on the basis of statistical methods (Karl J. Friston's free energy principle (FEP), an information-theoretical measure which states that every adaptive change in a self-organized system leads to a minimization of free energy, and the Bayesian brain hypothesis).
Information theory also has applications in gambling, black holes, and bioinformatics. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Information theory is the mathematical study of the quantification, storage, and communication of information. The field was originally established by the works of Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley, in the 1920s, and Claude Shannon in the 1940s. The field, in applied mathematics, is at the intersection of probability theory, statistics, computer science, statistical mechanics, information engineering, and electrical engineering.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "A key measure in information theory is entropy. Entropy quantifies the amount of uncertainty involved in the value of a random variable or the outcome of a random process. For example, identifying the outcome of a fair coin flip (with two equally likely outcomes) provides less information (lower entropy, less uncertainty) than specifying the outcome from a roll of a die (with six equally likely outcomes). Some other important measures in information theory are mutual information, channel capacity, error exponents, and relative entropy. Important sub-fields of information theory include source coding, algorithmic complexity theory, algorithmic information theory and information-theoretic security.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Applications of fundamental topics of information theory include source coding/data compression (e.g. for ZIP files), and channel coding/error detection and correction (e.g. for DSL). Its impact has been crucial to the success of the Voyager missions to deep space, the invention of the compact disc, the feasibility of mobile phones and the development of the Internet. The theory has also found applications in other areas, including statistical inference, cryptography, neurobiology, perception, linguistics, the evolution and function of molecular codes (bioinformatics), thermal physics, molecular dynamics, quantum computing, black holes, information retrieval, intelligence gathering, plagiarism detection, pattern recognition, anomaly detection and even art creation.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Information theory studies the transmission, processing, extraction, and utilization of information. Abstractly, information can be thought of as the resolution of uncertainty. In the case of communication of information over a noisy channel, this abstract concept was formalized in 1948 by Claude Shannon in a paper entitled A Mathematical Theory of Communication, in which information is thought of as a set of possible messages, and the goal is to send these messages over a noisy channel, and to have the receiver reconstruct the message with low probability of error, in spite of the channel noise. Shannon's main result, the noisy-channel coding theorem showed that, in the limit of many channel uses, the rate of information that is asymptotically achievable is equal to the channel capacity, a quantity dependent merely on the statistics of the channel over which the messages are sent.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Coding theory is concerned with finding explicit methods, called codes, for increasing the efficiency and reducing the error rate of data communication over noisy channels to near the channel capacity. These codes can be roughly subdivided into data compression (source coding) and error-correction (channel coding) techniques. In the latter case, it took many years to find the methods Shannon's work proved were possible.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "A third class of information theory codes are cryptographic algorithms (both codes and ciphers). Concepts, methods and results from coding theory and information theory are widely used in cryptography and cryptanalysis. See the article ban (unit) for a historical application.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The landmark event establishing the discipline of information theory and bringing it to immediate worldwide attention was the publication of Claude E. Shannon's classic paper \"A Mathematical Theory of Communication\" in the Bell System Technical Journal in July and October 1948. He came to be known as the \"father of information theory\".",
"title": "Historical background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Prior to this paper, limited information-theoretic ideas had been developed at Bell Labs, all implicitly assuming events of equal probability. Harry Nyquist's 1924 paper, Certain Factors Affecting Telegraph Speed, contains a theoretical section quantifying \"intelligence\" and the \"line speed\" at which it can be transmitted by a communication system, giving the relation W = K log m (recalling the Boltzmann constant), where W is the speed of transmission of intelligence, m is the number of different voltage levels to choose from at each time step, and K is a constant. Ralph Hartley's 1928 paper, Transmission of Information, uses the word information as a measurable quantity, reflecting the receiver's ability to distinguish one sequence of symbols from any other, thus quantifying information as H = log S = n log S, where S was the number of possible symbols, and n the number of symbols in a transmission. The unit of information was therefore the decimal digit, which since has sometimes been called the hartley in his honor as a unit or scale or measure of information. Alan Turing in 1940 used similar ideas as part of the statistical analysis of the breaking of the German second world war Enigma ciphers.",
"title": "Historical background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Much of the mathematics behind information theory with events of different probabilities were developed for the field of thermodynamics by Ludwig Boltzmann and J. Willard Gibbs. Connections between information-theoretic entropy and thermodynamic entropy, including the important contributions by Rolf Landauer in the 1960s, are explored in Entropy in thermodynamics and information theory.",
"title": "Historical background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In Shannon's revolutionary and groundbreaking paper, the work for which had been substantially completed at Bell Labs by the end of 1944, Shannon for the first time introduced the qualitative and quantitative model of communication as a statistical process underlying information theory, opening with the assertion:",
"title": "Historical background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "With it came the ideas of",
"title": "Historical background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Information theory is based on probability theory and statistics, where quantified information is usually described in terms of bits. Information theory often concerns itself with measures of information of the distributions associated with random variables. One of the most important measures is called entropy, which forms the building block of many other measures. Entropy allows quantification of measure of information in a single random variable. Another useful concept is mutual information defined on two random variables, which describes the measure of information in common between those variables, which can be used to describe their correlation. The former quantity is a property of the probability distribution of a random variable and gives a limit on the rate at which data generated by independent samples with the given distribution can be reliably compressed. The latter is a property of the joint distribution of two random variables, and is the maximum rate of reliable communication across a noisy channel in the limit of long block lengths, when the channel statistics are determined by the joint distribution.",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The choice of logarithmic base in the following formulae determines the unit of information entropy that is used. A common unit of information is the bit, based on the binary logarithm. Other units include the nat, which is based on the natural logarithm, and the decimal digit, which is based on the common logarithm.",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In what follows, an expression of the form p log p is considered by convention to be equal to zero whenever p = 0. This is justified because lim p → 0 + p log p = 0 {\\displaystyle \\lim _{p\\rightarrow 0+}p\\log p=0} for any logarithmic base.",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Based on the probability mass function of each source symbol to be communicated, the Shannon entropy H, in units of bits (per symbol), is given by",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "where pi is the probability of occurrence of the i-th possible value of the source symbol. This equation gives the entropy in the units of \"bits\" (per symbol) because it uses a logarithm of base 2, and this base-2 measure of entropy has sometimes been called the shannon in his honor. Entropy is also commonly computed using the natural logarithm (base e, where e is Euler's number), which produces a measurement of entropy in nats per symbol and sometimes simplifies the analysis by avoiding the need to include extra constants in the formulas. Other bases are also possible, but less commonly used. For example, a logarithm of base 2 = 256 will produce a measurement in bytes per symbol, and a logarithm of base 10 will produce a measurement in decimal digits (or hartleys) per symbol.",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Intuitively, the entropy HX of a discrete random variable X is a measure of the amount of uncertainty associated with the value of X when only its distribution is known.",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The entropy of a source that emits a sequence of N symbols that are independent and identically distributed (iid) is N ⋅ H bits (per message of N symbols). If the source data symbols are identically distributed but not independent, the entropy of a message of length N will be less than N ⋅ H.",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "If one transmits 1000 bits (0s and 1s), and the value of each of these bits is known to the receiver (has a specific value with certainty) ahead of transmission, it is clear that no information is transmitted. If, however, each bit is independently equally likely to be 0 or 1, 1000 shannons of information (more often called bits) have been transmitted. Between these two extremes, information can be quantified as follows. If X {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {X} } is the set of all messages {x1, ..., xn} that X could be, and p(x) is the probability of some x ∈ X {\\displaystyle x\\in \\mathbb {X} } , then the entropy, H, of X is defined:",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "(Here, I(x) is the self-information, which is the entropy contribution of an individual message, and E X {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {E} _{X}} is the expected value.) A property of entropy is that it is maximized when all the messages in the message space are equiprobable p(x) = 1/n; i.e., most unpredictable, in which case H(X) = log n.",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The special case of information entropy for a random variable with two outcomes is the binary entropy function, usually taken to the logarithmic base 2, thus having the shannon (Sh) as unit:",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The joint entropy of two discrete random variables X and Y is merely the entropy of their pairing: (X, Y). This implies that if X and Y are independent, then their joint entropy is the sum of their individual entropies.",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "For example, if (X, Y) represents the position of a chess piece—X the row and Y the column, then the joint entropy of the row of the piece and the column of the piece will be the entropy of the position of the piece.",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Despite similar notation, joint entropy should not be confused with cross-entropy.",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The conditional entropy or conditional uncertainty of X given random variable Y (also called the equivocation of X about Y) is the average conditional entropy over Y:",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Because entropy can be conditioned on a random variable or on that random variable being a certain value, care should be taken not to confuse these two definitions of conditional entropy, the former of which is in more common use. A basic property of this form of conditional entropy is that:",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Mutual information measures the amount of information that can be obtained about one random variable by observing another. It is important in communication where it can be used to maximize the amount of information shared between sent and received signals. The mutual information of X relative to Y is given by:",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "where SI (Specific mutual Information) is the pointwise mutual information.",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "A basic property of the mutual information is that",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "That is, knowing Y, we can save an average of I(X; Y) bits in encoding X compared to not knowing Y.",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Mutual information is symmetric:",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Mutual information can be expressed as the average Kullback–Leibler divergence (information gain) between the posterior probability distribution of X given the value of Y and the prior distribution on X:",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In other words, this is a measure of how much, on the average, the probability distribution on X will change if we are given the value of Y. This is often recalculated as the divergence from the product of the marginal distributions to the actual joint distribution:",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Mutual information is closely related to the log-likelihood ratio test in the context of contingency tables and the multinomial distribution and to Pearson's χ test: mutual information can be considered a statistic for assessing independence between a pair of variables, and has a well-specified asymptotic distribution.",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The Kullback–Leibler divergence (or information divergence, information gain, or relative entropy) is a way of comparing two distributions: a \"true\" probability distribution p ( X ) {\\displaystyle p(X)} , and an arbitrary probability distribution q ( X ) {\\displaystyle q(X)} . If we compress data in a manner that assumes q ( X ) {\\displaystyle q(X)} is the distribution underlying some data, when, in reality, p ( X ) {\\displaystyle p(X)} is the correct distribution, the Kullback–Leibler divergence is the number of average additional bits per datum necessary for compression. It is thus defined",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Although it is sometimes used as a 'distance metric', KL divergence is not a true metric since it is not symmetric and does not satisfy the triangle inequality (making it a semi-quasimetric).",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Another interpretation of the KL divergence is the \"unnecessary surprise\" introduced by a prior from the truth: suppose a number X is about to be drawn randomly from a discrete set with probability distribution p ( x ) {\\displaystyle p(x)} . If Alice knows the true distribution p ( x ) {\\displaystyle p(x)} , while Bob believes (has a prior) that the distribution is q ( x ) {\\displaystyle q(x)} , then Bob will be more surprised than Alice, on average, upon seeing the value of X. The KL divergence is the (objective) expected value of Bob's (subjective) surprisal minus Alice's surprisal, measured in bits if the log is in base 2. In this way, the extent to which Bob's prior is \"wrong\" can be quantified in terms of how \"unnecessarily surprised\" it is expected to make him.",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Directed information, I ( X n → Y n ) {\\displaystyle I(X^{n}\\to Y^{n})} , is an information theory measure that quantifies the information flow from the random process X n = { X 1 , X 2 , … , X n } {\\displaystyle X^{n}=\\{X_{1},X_{2},\\dots ,X_{n}\\}} to the random process Y n = { Y 1 , Y 2 , … , Y n } {\\displaystyle Y^{n}=\\{Y_{1},Y_{2},\\dots ,Y_{n}\\}} . The term directed information was coined by James Massey and is defined as",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "where I ( X i ; Y i | Y i − 1 ) {\\displaystyle I(X^{i};Y_{i}|Y^{i-1})} is the conditional mutual information I ( X 1 , X 2 , . . . , X i ; Y i | Y 1 , Y 2 , . . . , Y i − 1 ) {\\displaystyle I(X_{1},X_{2},...,X_{i};Y_{i}|Y_{1},Y_{2},...,Y_{i-1})} .",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In contrast to mutual information, directed information is not symmetric. The I ( X n → Y n ) {\\displaystyle I(X^{n}\\to Y^{n})} measures the information bits that are transmitted causally from X n {\\displaystyle X^{n}} to Y n {\\displaystyle Y^{n}} . The Directed information has many applications in problems where causality plays an important role such as capacity of channel with feedback, capacity of discrete memoryless networks with feedback, gambling with causal side information, compression with causal side information, and in real-time control communication settings, statistical physics.",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Other important information theoretic quantities include Rényi entropy (a generalization of entropy), differential entropy (a generalization of quantities of information to continuous distributions), and the conditional mutual information. Also, pragmatic information has been proposed as a measure of how much information has been used in making a decision.",
"title": "Quantities of information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Coding theory is one of the most important and direct applications of information theory. It can be subdivided into source coding theory and channel coding theory. Using a statistical description for data, information theory quantifies the number of bits needed to describe the data, which is the information entropy of the source.",
"title": "Coding theory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "This division of coding theory into compression and transmission is justified by the information transmission theorems, or source–channel separation theorems that justify the use of bits as the universal currency for information in many contexts. However, these theorems only hold in the situation where one transmitting user wishes to communicate to one receiving user. In scenarios with more than one transmitter (the multiple-access channel), more than one receiver (the broadcast channel) or intermediary \"helpers\" (the relay channel), or more general networks, compression followed by transmission may no longer be optimal.",
"title": "Coding theory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Any process that generates successive messages can be considered a source of information. A memoryless source is one in which each message is an independent identically distributed random variable, whereas the properties of ergodicity and stationarity impose less restrictive constraints. All such sources are stochastic. These terms are well studied in their own right outside information theory.",
"title": "Coding theory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Information rate is the average entropy per symbol. For memoryless sources, this is merely the entropy of each symbol, while, in the case of a stationary stochastic process, it is",
"title": "Coding theory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "that is, the conditional entropy of a symbol given all the previous symbols generated. For the more general case of a process that is not necessarily stationary, the average rate is",
"title": "Coding theory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "that is, the limit of the joint entropy per symbol. For stationary sources, these two expressions give the same result.",
"title": "Coding theory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Information rate is defined as",
"title": "Coding theory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "It is common in information theory to speak of the \"rate\" or \"entropy\" of a language. This is appropriate, for example, when the source of information is English prose. The rate of a source of information is related to its redundancy and how well it can be compressed, the subject of source coding.",
"title": "Coding theory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Communications over a channel is the primary motivation of information theory. However, channels often fail to produce exact reconstruction of a signal; noise, periods of silence, and other forms of signal corruption often degrade quality.",
"title": "Coding theory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Consider the communications process over a discrete channel. A simple model of the process is shown below:",
"title": "Coding theory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Here X represents the space of messages transmitted, and Y the space of messages received during a unit time over our channel. Let p(y|x) be the conditional probability distribution function of Y given X. We will consider p(y|x) to be an inherent fixed property of our communications channel (representing the nature of the noise of our channel). Then the joint distribution of X and Y is completely determined by our channel and by our choice of f(x), the marginal distribution of messages we choose to send over the channel. Under these constraints, we would like to maximize the rate of information, or the signal, we can communicate over the channel. The appropriate measure for this is the mutual information, and this maximum mutual information is called the channel capacity and is given by:",
"title": "Coding theory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "This capacity has the following property related to communicating at information rate R (where R is usually bits per symbol). For any information rate R < C and coding error ε > 0, for large enough N, there exists a code of length N and rate ≥ R and a decoding algorithm, such that the maximal probability of block error is ≤ ε; that is, it is always possible to transmit with arbitrarily small block error. In addition, for any rate R > C, it is impossible to transmit with arbitrarily small block error.",
"title": "Coding theory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Channel coding is concerned with finding such nearly optimal codes that can be used to transmit data over a noisy channel with a small coding error at a rate near the channel capacity.",
"title": "Coding theory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "In practice many channels have memory. Namely, at time i {\\displaystyle i} the channel is given by the conditional probability P ( y i | x i , x i − 1 , x i − 2 , . . . , x 1 , y i − 1 , y i − 2 , . . . , y 1 ) . {\\displaystyle P(y_{i}|x_{i},x_{i-1},x_{i-2},...,x_{1},y_{i-1},y_{i-2},...,y_{1}).} . It is often more comfortable to use the notation x i = ( x i , x i − 1 , x i − 2 , . . . , x 1 ) {\\displaystyle x^{i}=(x_{i},x_{i-1},x_{i-2},...,x_{1})} and the channel become P ( y i | x i , y i − 1 ) . {\\displaystyle P(y_{i}|x^{i},y^{i-1}).} . In such a case the capacity is given by the mutual information rate when there is no feedback available and the Directed information rate in the case that either there is feedback or not (if there is no feedback the directed information equals the mutual information).",
"title": "Coding theory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Information theoretic concepts apply to cryptography and cryptanalysis. Turing's information unit, the ban, was used in the Ultra project, breaking the German Enigma machine code and hastening the end of World War II in Europe. Shannon himself defined an important concept now called the unicity distance. Based on the redundancy of the plaintext, it attempts to give a minimum amount of ciphertext necessary to ensure unique decipherability.",
"title": "Applications to other fields"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Information theory leads us to believe it is much more difficult to keep secrets than it might first appear. A brute force attack can break systems based on asymmetric key algorithms or on most commonly used methods of symmetric key algorithms (sometimes called secret key algorithms), such as block ciphers. The security of all such methods comes from the assumption that no known attack can break them in a practical amount of time.",
"title": "Applications to other fields"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Information theoretic security refers to methods such as the one-time pad that are not vulnerable to such brute force attacks. In such cases, the positive conditional mutual information between the plaintext and ciphertext (conditioned on the key) can ensure proper transmission, while the unconditional mutual information between the plaintext and ciphertext remains zero, resulting in absolutely secure communications. In other words, an eavesdropper would not be able to improve his or her guess of the plaintext by gaining knowledge of the ciphertext but not of the key. However, as in any other cryptographic system, care must be used to correctly apply even information-theoretically secure methods; the Venona project was able to crack the one-time pads of the Soviet Union due to their improper reuse of key material.",
"title": "Applications to other fields"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Pseudorandom number generators are widely available in computer language libraries and application programs. They are, almost universally, unsuited to cryptographic use as they do not evade the deterministic nature of modern computer equipment and software. A class of improved random number generators is termed cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generators, but even they require random seeds external to the software to work as intended. These can be obtained via extractors, if done carefully. The measure of sufficient randomness in extractors is min-entropy, a value related to Shannon entropy through Rényi entropy; Rényi entropy is also used in evaluating randomness in cryptographic systems. Although related, the distinctions among these measures mean that a random variable with high Shannon entropy is not necessarily satisfactory for use in an extractor and so for cryptography uses.",
"title": "Applications to other fields"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "One early commercial application of information theory was in the field of seismic oil exploration. Work in this field made it possible to strip off and separate the unwanted noise from the desired seismic signal. Information theory and digital signal processing offer a major improvement of resolution and image clarity over previous analog methods.",
"title": "Applications to other fields"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Semioticians Doede Nauta and Winfried Nöth both considered Charles Sanders Peirce as having created a theory of information in his works on semiotics. Nauta defined semiotic information theory as the study of \"the internal processes of coding, filtering, and information processing.\"",
"title": "Applications to other fields"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Concepts from information theory such as redundancy and code control have been used by semioticians such as Umberto Eco and Ferruccio Rossi-Landi to explain ideology as a form of message transmission whereby a dominant social class emits its message by using signs that exhibit a high degree of redundancy such that only one message is decoded among a selection of competing ones.",
"title": "Applications to other fields"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Quantitative information theoretic methods have been applied in cognitive science to analyze the integrated process organization of neural information in the context of the binding problem in cognitive neuroscience. In this context, either an information-theoretical measure, such as functional clusters (Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi's functional clustering model and dynamic core hypothesis (DCH)) or effective information (Tononi's integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness), is defined (on the basis of a reentrant process organization, i.e. the synchronization of neurophysiological activity between groups of neuronal populations), or the measure of the minimization of free energy on the basis of statistical methods (Karl J. Friston's free energy principle (FEP), an information-theoretical measure which states that every adaptive change in a self-organized system leads to a minimization of free energy, and the Bayesian brain hypothesis).",
"title": "Applications to other fields"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Information theory also has applications in gambling, black holes, and bioinformatics.",
"title": "Applications to other fields"
}
]
| Information theory is the mathematical study of the quantification, storage, and communication of information. The field was originally established by the works of Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley, in the 1920s, and Claude Shannon in the 1940s. The field, in applied mathematics, is at the intersection of probability theory, statistics, computer science, statistical mechanics, information engineering, and electrical engineering. A key measure in information theory is entropy. Entropy quantifies the amount of uncertainty involved in the value of a random variable or the outcome of a random process. For example, identifying the outcome of a fair coin flip provides less information than specifying the outcome from a roll of a die. Some other important measures in information theory are mutual information, channel capacity, error exponents, and relative entropy. Important sub-fields of information theory include source coding, algorithmic complexity theory, algorithmic information theory and information-theoretic security. Applications of fundamental topics of information theory include source coding/data compression, and channel coding/error detection and correction. Its impact has been crucial to the success of the Voyager missions to deep space, the invention of the compact disc, the feasibility of mobile phones and the development of the Internet. The theory has also found applications in other areas, including statistical inference, cryptography, neurobiology, perception, linguistics, the evolution and function of molecular codes (bioinformatics), thermal physics, molecular dynamics, quantum computing, black holes, information retrieval, intelligence gathering, plagiarism detection, pattern recognition, anomaly detection and even art creation. | 2001-05-20T08:08:30Z | 2023-12-21T01:32:12Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory |
14,774 | Information explosion | The information explosion is the rapid increase in the amount of published information or data and the effects of this abundance. As the amount of available data grows, the problem of managing the information becomes more difficult, which can lead to information overload. The Online Oxford English Dictionary indicates use of the phrase in a March 1964 New Statesman article. The New York Times first used the phrase in its editorial content in an article by Walter Sullivan on June 7, 1964, in which he described the phrase as "much discussed". (p11.) The earliest known use of the phrase was in a speech about television by NBC president Pat Weaver at the Institute of Practitioners of Advertising in London on September 27, 1955. The speech was rebroadcast on radio station WSUI in Iowa and excerpted in the Daily Iowan newspaper two months later.
Many sectors are seeing this rapid increase in the amount of information available such as healthcare, supermarkets, and governments. Another sector that is being affected by this phenomenon is journalism. Such a profession, which in the past was responsible for the dissemination of information, may be suppressed by the overabundance of information today.
Techniques to gather knowledge from an overabundance of electronic information (e.g., data fusion may help in data mining) have existed since the 1970s. Another common technique to deal with such amount of information is qualitative research. Such approaches aim to organize the information, synthesizing, categorizing and systematizing in order to be more usable and easier to search.
A new metric that is being used in an attempt to characterize the growth in person-specific information, is the disk storage per person (DSP), which is measured in megabytes/person (where megabytes is 10 bytes and is abbreviated MB). Global DSP (GDSP) is the total rigid disk drive space (in MB) of new units sold in a year divided by the world population in that year. The GDSP metric is a crude measure of how much disk storage could possibly be used to collect person-specific data on the world population. In 1983, one million fixed drives with an estimated total of 90 terabytes were sold worldwide; 30MB drives had the largest market segment. In 1996, 105 million drives, totaling 160,623 terabytes were sold with 1 and 2 gigabyte drives leading the industry. By the year 2000, with 20GB drive leading the industry, rigid drives sold for the year are projected to total 2,829,288 terabytes Rigid disk drive sales to top $34 billion in 1997.
According to Latanya Sweeney, there are three trends in data gathering today:
Type 1. Expansion of the number of fields being collected, known as the “collect more” trend.
Type 2. Replace an existing aggregate data collection with a person-specific one, known as the “collect specifically” trend.
Type 3. Gather information by starting a new person-specific data collection, known as the “collect it if you can” trend.
Since "information" in electronic media is often used synonymously with "data", the term information explosion is closely related to the concept of data flood (also dubbed data deluge). Sometimes the term information flood is used as well. All of those basically boil down to the ever-increasing amount of electronic data exchanged per time unit. The awareness about non-manageable amounts of data grew along with the advent of ever more powerful data processing since the mid-1960s.
Even though the abundance of information can be beneficial in several levels, some problems may be of concern such as privacy, legal and ethical guidelines, filtering and data accuracy. Filtering refers to finding useful information in the middle of so much data, which relates to the job of data scientists. A typical example of a necessity of data filtering (data mining) is in healthcare since in the next years is due to have EHRs (Electronic Health Records) of patients available. With so much information available, the doctors will need to be able to identify patterns and select important data for the diagnosis of the patient. On the other hand, according to some experts, having so much public data available makes it difficult to provide data that is actually anonymous. Another point to take into account is the legal and ethical guidelines, which relates to who will be the owner of the data and how frequently he/she is obliged to the release this and for how long. With so many sources of data, another problem will be accuracy of such. An untrusted source may be challenged by others, by ordering a new set of data, causing a repetition in the information. According to Edward Huth, another concern is the accessibility and cost of such information. The accessibility rate could be improved by either reducing the costs or increasing the utility of the information. The reduction of costs according to the author, could be done by associations, which should assess which information was relevant and gather it in a more organized fashion.
As of August 2005, there were over 70 million web servers. As of September 2007 there were over 135 million web servers.
According to Technorati, the number of blogs doubles about every 6 months with a total of 35.3 million blogs as of April 2006. This is an example of the early stages of logistic growth, where growth is approximately exponential, since blogs are a recent innovation. As the number of blogs approaches the number of possible producers (humans), saturation occurs, growth declines, and the number of blogs eventually stabilizes. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The information explosion is the rapid increase in the amount of published information or data and the effects of this abundance. As the amount of available data grows, the problem of managing the information becomes more difficult, which can lead to information overload. The Online Oxford English Dictionary indicates use of the phrase in a March 1964 New Statesman article. The New York Times first used the phrase in its editorial content in an article by Walter Sullivan on June 7, 1964, in which he described the phrase as \"much discussed\". (p11.) The earliest known use of the phrase was in a speech about television by NBC president Pat Weaver at the Institute of Practitioners of Advertising in London on September 27, 1955. The speech was rebroadcast on radio station WSUI in Iowa and excerpted in the Daily Iowan newspaper two months later.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Many sectors are seeing this rapid increase in the amount of information available such as healthcare, supermarkets, and governments. Another sector that is being affected by this phenomenon is journalism. Such a profession, which in the past was responsible for the dissemination of information, may be suppressed by the overabundance of information today.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Techniques to gather knowledge from an overabundance of electronic information (e.g., data fusion may help in data mining) have existed since the 1970s. Another common technique to deal with such amount of information is qualitative research. Such approaches aim to organize the information, synthesizing, categorizing and systematizing in order to be more usable and easier to search.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "A new metric that is being used in an attempt to characterize the growth in person-specific information, is the disk storage per person (DSP), which is measured in megabytes/person (where megabytes is 10 bytes and is abbreviated MB). Global DSP (GDSP) is the total rigid disk drive space (in MB) of new units sold in a year divided by the world population in that year. The GDSP metric is a crude measure of how much disk storage could possibly be used to collect person-specific data on the world population. In 1983, one million fixed drives with an estimated total of 90 terabytes were sold worldwide; 30MB drives had the largest market segment. In 1996, 105 million drives, totaling 160,623 terabytes were sold with 1 and 2 gigabyte drives leading the industry. By the year 2000, with 20GB drive leading the industry, rigid drives sold for the year are projected to total 2,829,288 terabytes Rigid disk drive sales to top $34 billion in 1997.",
"title": "Growth patterns"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "According to Latanya Sweeney, there are three trends in data gathering today:",
"title": "Growth patterns"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Type 1. Expansion of the number of fields being collected, known as the “collect more” trend.",
"title": "Growth patterns"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Type 2. Replace an existing aggregate data collection with a person-specific one, known as the “collect specifically” trend.",
"title": "Growth patterns"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Type 3. Gather information by starting a new person-specific data collection, known as the “collect it if you can” trend.",
"title": "Growth patterns"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Since \"information\" in electronic media is often used synonymously with \"data\", the term information explosion is closely related to the concept of data flood (also dubbed data deluge). Sometimes the term information flood is used as well. All of those basically boil down to the ever-increasing amount of electronic data exchanged per time unit. The awareness about non-manageable amounts of data grew along with the advent of ever more powerful data processing since the mid-1960s.",
"title": "Related terms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Even though the abundance of information can be beneficial in several levels, some problems may be of concern such as privacy, legal and ethical guidelines, filtering and data accuracy. Filtering refers to finding useful information in the middle of so much data, which relates to the job of data scientists. A typical example of a necessity of data filtering (data mining) is in healthcare since in the next years is due to have EHRs (Electronic Health Records) of patients available. With so much information available, the doctors will need to be able to identify patterns and select important data for the diagnosis of the patient. On the other hand, according to some experts, having so much public data available makes it difficult to provide data that is actually anonymous. Another point to take into account is the legal and ethical guidelines, which relates to who will be the owner of the data and how frequently he/she is obliged to the release this and for how long. With so many sources of data, another problem will be accuracy of such. An untrusted source may be challenged by others, by ordering a new set of data, causing a repetition in the information. According to Edward Huth, another concern is the accessibility and cost of such information. The accessibility rate could be improved by either reducing the costs or increasing the utility of the information. The reduction of costs according to the author, could be done by associations, which should assess which information was relevant and gather it in a more organized fashion.",
"title": "Challenges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "As of August 2005, there were over 70 million web servers. As of September 2007 there were over 135 million web servers.",
"title": "Web servers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "According to Technorati, the number of blogs doubles about every 6 months with a total of 35.3 million blogs as of April 2006. This is an example of the early stages of logistic growth, where growth is approximately exponential, since blogs are a recent innovation. As the number of blogs approaches the number of possible producers (humans), saturation occurs, growth declines, and the number of blogs eventually stabilizes.",
"title": "Blogs"
}
]
| The information explosion is the rapid increase in the amount of published information or data and the effects of this abundance. As the amount of available data grows, the problem of managing the information becomes more difficult, which can lead to information overload. The Online Oxford English Dictionary indicates use of the phrase in a March 1964 New Statesman article. The New York Times first used the phrase in its editorial content in an article by Walter Sullivan on June 7, 1964, in which he described the phrase as "much discussed". (p11.) The earliest known use of the phrase was in a speech about television by NBC president Pat Weaver at the Institute of Practitioners of Advertising in London on September 27, 1955. The speech was rebroadcast on radio station WSUI in Iowa and excerpted in the Daily Iowan newspaper two months later. Many sectors are seeing this rapid increase in the amount of information available such as healthcare, supermarkets, and governments. Another sector that is being affected by this phenomenon is journalism. Such a profession, which in the past was responsible for the dissemination of information, may be suppressed by the overabundance of information today. Techniques to gather knowledge from an overabundance of electronic information have existed since the 1970s. Another common technique to deal with such amount of information is qualitative research. Such approaches aim to organize the information, synthesizing, categorizing and systematizing in order to be more usable and easier to search. | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-08-04T14:58:52Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_explosion |
14,775 | Inch | The inch (symbol: in or ″) is a unit of length in the British imperial and the United States customary systems of measurement. It is equal to 1/36 yard or 1/12 of a foot. Derived from the Roman uncia ("twelfth"), the word inch is also sometimes used to translate similar units in other measurement systems, usually understood as deriving from the width of the human thumb.
Standards for the exact length of an inch have varied in the past, but since the adoption of the international yard during the 1950s and 1960s the inch has been based on the metric system and defined as exactly 25.4 mm.
The English word "inch" (Old English: ynce) was an early borrowing from Latin uncia ("one-twelfth; Roman inch; Roman ounce"). The vowel change from Latin /u/ to Old English /y/ (which became Modern English /ɪ/) is known as umlaut. The consonant change from the Latin /k/ (spelled c) to English /tʃ/ is palatalisation. Both were features of Old English phonology; see Phonological history of Old English § Palatalization and Germanic umlaut § I-mutation in Old English for more information.
"Inch" is cognate with "ounce" (Old English: ynse), whose separate pronunciation and spelling reflect its reborrowing in Middle English from Anglo-Norman unce and ounce.
In many other European languages, the word for "inch" is the same as or derived from the word for "thumb", as a man's thumb is about an inch wide (and this was even sometimes used to define the inch). In the Dutch language a term for inch is engelse duim (english thumb). Examples include Catalan: polzada ("inch") and polze ("thumb"); Czech: palec ("thumb"); Danish and Norwegian: tomme ("inch") tommel ("thumb"); Dutch: duim (whence Afrikaans: duim and Russian: дюйм); French: pouce; Georgian: დუიმი, Hungarian: hüvelyk; Italian: pollice; Portuguese: polegada ("inch") and polegar ("thumb"); ("duim"); Slovak: palec ("thumb"); Spanish: pulgada ("inch") and pulgar ("thumb"); and Swedish: tum ("inch") and tumme ("thumb").
The inch is a commonly used customary unit of length in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. It is also used in Japan for electronic parts, especially display screens. In most of continental Europe, the inch is also used informally as a measure for display screens. For the United Kingdom, guidance on public sector use states that, since 1 October 1995, without time limit, the inch (along with the foot) is to be used as a primary unit for road signs and related measurements of distance (with the possible exception of clearance heights and widths) and may continue to be used as a secondary or supplementary indication following a metric measurement for other purposes.
Inches are commonly used to specify the diameter of vehicle wheel rims, and the corresponding inner diameter of tyres in tyre codes.
The international standard symbol for inch is in (see ISO 31-1, Annex A) but traditionally the inch is denoted by a double prime, which is often approximated by a double quote symbol, and the foot by a prime, which is often approximated by an apostrophe. For example; three feet, two inches can be written as 3′ 2″. (This is akin to how the first and second "cuts" of the hour are likewise indicated by prime and double prime symbols, and also the first and second cuts of the degree.)
Subdivisions of an inch are typically written using dyadic fractions with odd number numerators; for example, two and three-eighths of an inch would be written as 2+3/8″ and not as 2.375″ nor as 2+6/16″. However, for engineering purposes fractions are commonly given to three or four places of decimals and have been for many years.
1 international inch is equal to:
The earliest known reference to the inch in England is from the Laws of Æthelberht dating to the early 7th century, surviving in a single manuscript, the Textus Roffensis from 1120. Paragraph LXVII sets out the fine for wounds of various depths: one inch, one shilling; two inches, two shillings, etc.
An Anglo-Saxon unit of length was the barleycorn. After 1066, 1 inch was equal to 3 barleycorns, which continued to be its legal definition for several centuries, with the barleycorn being the base unit. One of the earliest such definitions is that of 1324, where the legal definition of the inch was set out in a statute of Edward II of England, defining it as "three grains of barley, dry and round, placed end to end, lengthwise".
Similar definitions are recorded in both English and Welsh medieval law tracts. One, dating from the first half of the 10th century, is contained in the Laws of Hywel Dda which superseded those of Dyfnwal, an even earlier definition of the inch in Wales. Both definitions, as recorded in Ancient Laws and Institutes of Wales (vol i., pp. 184, 187, 189), are that "three lengths of a barleycorn is the inch".
King David I of Scotland in his Assize of Weights and Measures (c. 1150) is said to have defined the Scottish inch as the width of an average man's thumb at the base of the nail, even including the requirement to calculate the average of a small, a medium, and a large man's measures. However, the oldest surviving manuscripts date from the early 14th century and appear to have been altered with the inclusion of newer material.
In 1814, Charles Butler, a mathematics teacher at Cheam School, recorded the old legal definition of the inch to be "three grains of sound ripe barley being taken out the middle of the ear, well dried, and laid end to end in a row", and placed the barleycorn, not the inch, as the base unit of the English Long Measure system, from which all other units were derived. John Bouvier similarly recorded in his 1843 law dictionary that the barleycorn was the fundamental measure. Butler observed, however, that "[a]s the length of the barley-corn cannot be fixed, so the inch according to this method will be uncertain", noting that a standard inch measure was now [i.e. by 1843] kept in the Exchequer chamber, Guildhall, and that was the legal definition of the inch.
This was a point also made by George Long in his 1842 Penny Cyclopædia, observing that standard measures had since surpassed the barleycorn definition of the inch, and that to recover the inch measure from its original definition, in case the standard measure were destroyed, would involve the measurement of large numbers of barleycorns and taking their average lengths. He noted that this process would not perfectly recover the standard, since it might introduce errors of anywhere between one hundredth and one tenth of an inch in the definition of a yard.
Before the adoption of the international yard and pound, various definitions were in use. In the United Kingdom and most countries of the British Commonwealth, the inch was defined in terms of the Imperial Standard Yard. The United States adopted the conversion factor 1 metre = 39.37 inches by an act in 1866. In 1893, Mendenhall ordered the physical realization of the inch to be based on the international prototype metres numbers 21 and 27, which had been received from the CGPM, together with the previously adopted conversion factor.
As a result of the definitions above, the U.S. inch was effectively defined as 25.4000508 mm (with a reference temperature of 68 degrees Fahrenheit) and the UK inch at 25.399977 mm (with a reference temperature of 62 degrees Fahrenheit). When Carl Edvard Johansson started manufacturing gauge blocks in inch sizes in 1912, Johansson's compromise was to manufacture gauge blocks with a nominal size of 25.4mm, with a reference temperature of 20 degrees Celsius, accurate to within a few parts per million of both official definitions. Because Johansson's blocks were so popular, his blocks became the de facto standard for manufacturers internationally, with other manufacturers of gauge blocks following Johansson's definition by producing blocks designed to be equivalent to his.
In 1930, the British Standards Institution adopted an inch of exactly 25.4 mm. The American Standards Association followed suit in 1933. By 1935, industry in 16 countries had adopted the "industrial inch" as it came to be known, effectively endorsing Johansson's pragmatic choice of conversion ratio.
In 1946, the Commonwealth Science Congress recommended a yard of exactly 0.9144 metres for adoption throughout the British Commonwealth. This was adopted by Canada in 1951; the United States on 1 July 1959; Australia in 1961, effective 1 January 1964; and the United Kingdom in 1963, effective on 1 January 1964. The new standards gave an inch of exactly 25.4 mm, 1.7 millionths of an inch longer than the old imperial inch and 2 millionths of an inch shorter than the old US inch.
The United States retained the 1/39.37-metre definition for surveying, producing a 2 millionth part difference between standard and US survey inches. This is approximately 1/8 inch per mile; 12.7 kilometres is exactly 500,000 standard inches and exactly 499,999 survey inches. This difference is substantial when doing calculations in State Plane Coordinate Systems with coordinate values in the hundreds of thousands or millions of feet.
In 2020, the National Institute of Standards and Technology announced that the U.S. survey foot would "be phased out" on 1 January 2023 and be superseded by the international foot (also known as the foot) equal to 0.3048 metres exactly, for all further applications. This implies that the survey inch was replaced by the international inch.
Before the adoption of the metric system, several European countries had customary units whose name translates into "inch". The French pouce measured roughly 27.0 mm, at least when applied to describe the calibre of artillery pieces. The Amsterdam foot (voet) consisted of 11 Amsterdam inches (duim). The Amsterdam foot is about 8% shorter than an English foot.
The now obsolete Scottish inch (Scottish Gaelic: òirleach), 1/12 of a Scottish foot, was about 1.0016 imperial inches (about 25.44 mm). | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The inch (symbol: in or ″) is a unit of length in the British imperial and the United States customary systems of measurement. It is equal to 1/36 yard or 1/12 of a foot. Derived from the Roman uncia (\"twelfth\"), the word inch is also sometimes used to translate similar units in other measurement systems, usually understood as deriving from the width of the human thumb.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Standards for the exact length of an inch have varied in the past, but since the adoption of the international yard during the 1950s and 1960s the inch has been based on the metric system and defined as exactly 25.4 mm.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The English word \"inch\" (Old English: ynce) was an early borrowing from Latin uncia (\"one-twelfth; Roman inch; Roman ounce\"). The vowel change from Latin /u/ to Old English /y/ (which became Modern English /ɪ/) is known as umlaut. The consonant change from the Latin /k/ (spelled c) to English /tʃ/ is palatalisation. Both were features of Old English phonology; see Phonological history of Old English § Palatalization and Germanic umlaut § I-mutation in Old English for more information.",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "\"Inch\" is cognate with \"ounce\" (Old English: ynse), whose separate pronunciation and spelling reflect its reborrowing in Middle English from Anglo-Norman unce and ounce.",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In many other European languages, the word for \"inch\" is the same as or derived from the word for \"thumb\", as a man's thumb is about an inch wide (and this was even sometimes used to define the inch). In the Dutch language a term for inch is engelse duim (english thumb). Examples include Catalan: polzada (\"inch\") and polze (\"thumb\"); Czech: palec (\"thumb\"); Danish and Norwegian: tomme (\"inch\") tommel (\"thumb\"); Dutch: duim (whence Afrikaans: duim and Russian: дюйм); French: pouce; Georgian: დუიმი, Hungarian: hüvelyk; Italian: pollice; Portuguese: polegada (\"inch\") and polegar (\"thumb\"); (\"duim\"); Slovak: palec (\"thumb\"); Spanish: pulgada (\"inch\") and pulgar (\"thumb\"); and Swedish: tum (\"inch\") and tumme (\"thumb\").",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The inch is a commonly used customary unit of length in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. It is also used in Japan for electronic parts, especially display screens. In most of continental Europe, the inch is also used informally as a measure for display screens. For the United Kingdom, guidance on public sector use states that, since 1 October 1995, without time limit, the inch (along with the foot) is to be used as a primary unit for road signs and related measurements of distance (with the possible exception of clearance heights and widths) and may continue to be used as a secondary or supplementary indication following a metric measurement for other purposes.",
"title": "Usage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Inches are commonly used to specify the diameter of vehicle wheel rims, and the corresponding inner diameter of tyres in tyre codes.",
"title": "Usage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The international standard symbol for inch is in (see ISO 31-1, Annex A) but traditionally the inch is denoted by a double prime, which is often approximated by a double quote symbol, and the foot by a prime, which is often approximated by an apostrophe. For example; three feet, two inches can be written as 3′ 2″. (This is akin to how the first and second \"cuts\" of the hour are likewise indicated by prime and double prime symbols, and also the first and second cuts of the degree.)",
"title": "Usage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Subdivisions of an inch are typically written using dyadic fractions with odd number numerators; for example, two and three-eighths of an inch would be written as 2+3/8″ and not as 2.375″ nor as 2+6/16″. However, for engineering purposes fractions are commonly given to three or four places of decimals and have been for many years.",
"title": "Usage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "1 international inch is equal to:",
"title": "Usage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The earliest known reference to the inch in England is from the Laws of Æthelberht dating to the early 7th century, surviving in a single manuscript, the Textus Roffensis from 1120. Paragraph LXVII sets out the fine for wounds of various depths: one inch, one shilling; two inches, two shillings, etc.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "An Anglo-Saxon unit of length was the barleycorn. After 1066, 1 inch was equal to 3 barleycorns, which continued to be its legal definition for several centuries, with the barleycorn being the base unit. One of the earliest such definitions is that of 1324, where the legal definition of the inch was set out in a statute of Edward II of England, defining it as \"three grains of barley, dry and round, placed end to end, lengthwise\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Similar definitions are recorded in both English and Welsh medieval law tracts. One, dating from the first half of the 10th century, is contained in the Laws of Hywel Dda which superseded those of Dyfnwal, an even earlier definition of the inch in Wales. Both definitions, as recorded in Ancient Laws and Institutes of Wales (vol i., pp. 184, 187, 189), are that \"three lengths of a barleycorn is the inch\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "King David I of Scotland in his Assize of Weights and Measures (c. 1150) is said to have defined the Scottish inch as the width of an average man's thumb at the base of the nail, even including the requirement to calculate the average of a small, a medium, and a large man's measures. However, the oldest surviving manuscripts date from the early 14th century and appear to have been altered with the inclusion of newer material.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In 1814, Charles Butler, a mathematics teacher at Cheam School, recorded the old legal definition of the inch to be \"three grains of sound ripe barley being taken out the middle of the ear, well dried, and laid end to end in a row\", and placed the barleycorn, not the inch, as the base unit of the English Long Measure system, from which all other units were derived. John Bouvier similarly recorded in his 1843 law dictionary that the barleycorn was the fundamental measure. Butler observed, however, that \"[a]s the length of the barley-corn cannot be fixed, so the inch according to this method will be uncertain\", noting that a standard inch measure was now [i.e. by 1843] kept in the Exchequer chamber, Guildhall, and that was the legal definition of the inch.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "This was a point also made by George Long in his 1842 Penny Cyclopædia, observing that standard measures had since surpassed the barleycorn definition of the inch, and that to recover the inch measure from its original definition, in case the standard measure were destroyed, would involve the measurement of large numbers of barleycorns and taking their average lengths. He noted that this process would not perfectly recover the standard, since it might introduce errors of anywhere between one hundredth and one tenth of an inch in the definition of a yard.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Before the adoption of the international yard and pound, various definitions were in use. In the United Kingdom and most countries of the British Commonwealth, the inch was defined in terms of the Imperial Standard Yard. The United States adopted the conversion factor 1 metre = 39.37 inches by an act in 1866. In 1893, Mendenhall ordered the physical realization of the inch to be based on the international prototype metres numbers 21 and 27, which had been received from the CGPM, together with the previously adopted conversion factor.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "As a result of the definitions above, the U.S. inch was effectively defined as 25.4000508 mm (with a reference temperature of 68 degrees Fahrenheit) and the UK inch at 25.399977 mm (with a reference temperature of 62 degrees Fahrenheit). When Carl Edvard Johansson started manufacturing gauge blocks in inch sizes in 1912, Johansson's compromise was to manufacture gauge blocks with a nominal size of 25.4mm, with a reference temperature of 20 degrees Celsius, accurate to within a few parts per million of both official definitions. Because Johansson's blocks were so popular, his blocks became the de facto standard for manufacturers internationally, with other manufacturers of gauge blocks following Johansson's definition by producing blocks designed to be equivalent to his.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In 1930, the British Standards Institution adopted an inch of exactly 25.4 mm. The American Standards Association followed suit in 1933. By 1935, industry in 16 countries had adopted the \"industrial inch\" as it came to be known, effectively endorsing Johansson's pragmatic choice of conversion ratio.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In 1946, the Commonwealth Science Congress recommended a yard of exactly 0.9144 metres for adoption throughout the British Commonwealth. This was adopted by Canada in 1951; the United States on 1 July 1959; Australia in 1961, effective 1 January 1964; and the United Kingdom in 1963, effective on 1 January 1964. The new standards gave an inch of exactly 25.4 mm, 1.7 millionths of an inch longer than the old imperial inch and 2 millionths of an inch shorter than the old US inch.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The United States retained the 1/39.37-metre definition for surveying, producing a 2 millionth part difference between standard and US survey inches. This is approximately 1/8 inch per mile; 12.7 kilometres is exactly 500,000 standard inches and exactly 499,999 survey inches. This difference is substantial when doing calculations in State Plane Coordinate Systems with coordinate values in the hundreds of thousands or millions of feet.",
"title": "Related units"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In 2020, the National Institute of Standards and Technology announced that the U.S. survey foot would \"be phased out\" on 1 January 2023 and be superseded by the international foot (also known as the foot) equal to 0.3048 metres exactly, for all further applications. This implies that the survey inch was replaced by the international inch.",
"title": "Related units"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Before the adoption of the metric system, several European countries had customary units whose name translates into \"inch\". The French pouce measured roughly 27.0 mm, at least when applied to describe the calibre of artillery pieces. The Amsterdam foot (voet) consisted of 11 Amsterdam inches (duim). The Amsterdam foot is about 8% shorter than an English foot.",
"title": "Related units"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The now obsolete Scottish inch (Scottish Gaelic: òirleach), 1/12 of a Scottish foot, was about 1.0016 imperial inches (about 25.44 mm).",
"title": "Related units"
}
]
| The inch is a unit of length in the British imperial and the United States customary systems of measurement. It is equal to 1/36 yard or 1/12 of a foot. Derived from the Roman uncia ("twelfth"), the word inch is also sometimes used to translate similar units in other measurement systems, usually understood as deriving from the width of the human thumb. Standards for the exact length of an inch have varied in the past, but since the adoption of the international yard during the 1950s and 1960s the inch has been based on the metric system and defined as exactly 25.4 mm. | 2001-10-29T01:40:25Z | 2023-12-28T05:12:26Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inch |
14,776 | Inn | Inns are generally establishments or buildings where travelers can seek lodging, and usually, food and drink. Inns are typically located in the country or along a highway. Before the advent of motorized transportation, they also provided accommodation for horses.
An innkeeper is the name of a person who runs an inn.
Inns in Europe were possibly first established when the Romans built their system of Roman roads two millennia ago. Many inns in Europe are several centuries old. In addition to providing for the needs of travelers, inns traditionally acted as community gathering places.
Historically, inns provided not only food and lodging, but stabling and fodder for the travelers' horses, as well. Famous London examples of inns include The George and The Tabard. However, there is no longer a formal distinction between an inn and several other kinds of establishments: many pubs use the name "inn", either because they are long established and may have been formerly coaching inns, or to summon up a particular kind of image.
Inns were like bed and breakfasts, with a community dining room which was also used for town meetings or rented for wedding parties. The front, facing the road, was ornamental and welcoming for travelers. The back also usually had at least one livery barn for travelers to keep their horses. There were no lobbies as in modern inns; rather, the innkeeper would answer the door for each visitor and judge the people whom he decided to accommodate, it was up to the visitors to convince the innkeeper for accommodation. In some English towns, bye-laws would require innkeepers to offer all visitors a bed. Many inns were simply large houses that had extra rooms for renting.
In 14th century England, the courtyards of the inns were often not paved or cobbled but rather flattened earth or mud. These inns would be made of two-storey timber framed buildings with steep shingle roofs. Stableboys were in charge of stabling horses at the rear yard of the inn where they are watered and fed. Usual foods served included pottage, bread and cheese with ale for drinking. In some towns, innkeepers are only allowed to offer food and drinks to guests. The better managed inns would place fresh rushes on the floor, mixed with rose petals, lavender and herbs. Lighting would be dim, as candles were made of tallow. For toilet facilities, inns would simply provide a seat and a barrel which were emptied every morning. Beds would accommodate more than one man, sometimes even a dozen.
During the 19th century, the inn played a major role in the growing transportation system of England. Industry was on the rise, and people were traveling more in order to keep and maintain business. The English inn was considered an important part of English infrastructure, as it helped maintain a smooth flow of travel throughout the country.
As modes of transport have evolved, tourist lodging has adapted to serve each generation of traveller. A stagecoach made frequent stops at roadside coaching inns for water, food, and horses. A passenger train stopped only at designated stations in the city centre, around which were built grand railway hotels. Motorcar traffic on old-style two-lane highways might have paused at any camp, cabin court, or motel along the way, while freeway traffic was restricted to access from designated off-ramps to side roads which quickly become crowded with hotel chain operators.
The original functions of an inn are now usually split among separate establishments. For example, hotels, lodges and motels might provide the traditional functions of an inn but focus more on lodging customers than on other services; public houses (pubs) are primarily alcohol-serving establishments; and restaurants and taverns serve food and drink. (Hotels often contain restaurants serving full breakfasts and meals, thus providing all of the functions of traditional inns. Economy, limited service properties, however, lack a kitchen and bar, and therefore claim at most an included continental breakfast.)
The lodging aspect of the word inn lives on in some hotel brand names, like Holiday Inn, and the Inns of Court in London were once accommodations for members of the legal profession. Some laws refer to lodging operators as innkeepers.
Other forms of inns exist throughout the world. Among them are the honjin and ryokan of Japan, caravanserai of Central Asia and the Middle East, and Jiuguan in ancient China.
In Asia Minor, during the periods of rule by the Seljuq and Ottoman Turks, impressive structures functioning as inns (Turkish: han) were built because inns were considered socially significant. These inns provided accommodations for people and either their vehicles or animals, and served as a resting place to those travelling on foot or by other means.
These inns were built between towns if the distance between municipalities was too far for one day's travel. These structures, called caravansarais, were inns with large courtyards and ample supplies of water for drinking and other uses. They typically contained a café, in addition to supplies of food and fodder. After the caravans traveled a while they would take a break at these caravansarais, and often spend the night to rest the human travellers and their animals.
The term "inn" historically characterized a rural hotel which provided lodging, food and refreshments, and accommodations for travelers' horses. To capitalize on this nostalgic image many typically lower end and middling modern motor hotel operators seek to distance themselves from similar motels by styling themselves "inns", regardless of services and accommodations provided. Examples are Comfort Inn, Days Inn, Holiday Inn, Knights Inn, and Premier Inn.
The term "inn" is also retained in its historic use in many laws governing motels and hotels, often known as "innkeeper's acts", or refer to hôteliers and motel operators as "innkeepers" in the body of the legislation These laws typically define the innkeepers' liability for valuables entrusted to them by clients and determine whether an innkeeper holds any lien against such goods. In some jurisdictions, an offence named as "defrauding an innkeeper" prohibits fraudulently obtaining "food, lodging, or other accommodation at any hotel, inn, boarding house, or eating house"; in this context, the term is often an anachronism as the majority of modern restaurants are free-standing and not attached to coaching inns or tourist lodging. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Inns are generally establishments or buildings where travelers can seek lodging, and usually, food and drink. Inns are typically located in the country or along a highway. Before the advent of motorized transportation, they also provided accommodation for horses.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "An innkeeper is the name of a person who runs an inn.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Inns in Europe were possibly first established when the Romans built their system of Roman roads two millennia ago. Many inns in Europe are several centuries old. In addition to providing for the needs of travelers, inns traditionally acted as community gathering places.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Historically, inns provided not only food and lodging, but stabling and fodder for the travelers' horses, as well. Famous London examples of inns include The George and The Tabard. However, there is no longer a formal distinction between an inn and several other kinds of establishments: many pubs use the name \"inn\", either because they are long established and may have been formerly coaching inns, or to summon up a particular kind of image.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Inns were like bed and breakfasts, with a community dining room which was also used for town meetings or rented for wedding parties. The front, facing the road, was ornamental and welcoming for travelers. The back also usually had at least one livery barn for travelers to keep their horses. There were no lobbies as in modern inns; rather, the innkeeper would answer the door for each visitor and judge the people whom he decided to accommodate, it was up to the visitors to convince the innkeeper for accommodation. In some English towns, bye-laws would require innkeepers to offer all visitors a bed. Many inns were simply large houses that had extra rooms for renting.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In 14th century England, the courtyards of the inns were often not paved or cobbled but rather flattened earth or mud. These inns would be made of two-storey timber framed buildings with steep shingle roofs. Stableboys were in charge of stabling horses at the rear yard of the inn where they are watered and fed. Usual foods served included pottage, bread and cheese with ale for drinking. In some towns, innkeepers are only allowed to offer food and drinks to guests. The better managed inns would place fresh rushes on the floor, mixed with rose petals, lavender and herbs. Lighting would be dim, as candles were made of tallow. For toilet facilities, inns would simply provide a seat and a barrel which were emptied every morning. Beds would accommodate more than one man, sometimes even a dozen.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "During the 19th century, the inn played a major role in the growing transportation system of England. Industry was on the rise, and people were traveling more in order to keep and maintain business. The English inn was considered an important part of English infrastructure, as it helped maintain a smooth flow of travel throughout the country.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "As modes of transport have evolved, tourist lodging has adapted to serve each generation of traveller. A stagecoach made frequent stops at roadside coaching inns for water, food, and horses. A passenger train stopped only at designated stations in the city centre, around which were built grand railway hotels. Motorcar traffic on old-style two-lane highways might have paused at any camp, cabin court, or motel along the way, while freeway traffic was restricted to access from designated off-ramps to side roads which quickly become crowded with hotel chain operators.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The original functions of an inn are now usually split among separate establishments. For example, hotels, lodges and motels might provide the traditional functions of an inn but focus more on lodging customers than on other services; public houses (pubs) are primarily alcohol-serving establishments; and restaurants and taverns serve food and drink. (Hotels often contain restaurants serving full breakfasts and meals, thus providing all of the functions of traditional inns. Economy, limited service properties, however, lack a kitchen and bar, and therefore claim at most an included continental breakfast.)",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The lodging aspect of the word inn lives on in some hotel brand names, like Holiday Inn, and the Inns of Court in London were once accommodations for members of the legal profession. Some laws refer to lodging operators as innkeepers.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Other forms of inns exist throughout the world. Among them are the honjin and ryokan of Japan, caravanserai of Central Asia and the Middle East, and Jiuguan in ancient China.",
"title": "Forms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In Asia Minor, during the periods of rule by the Seljuq and Ottoman Turks, impressive structures functioning as inns (Turkish: han) were built because inns were considered socially significant. These inns provided accommodations for people and either their vehicles or animals, and served as a resting place to those travelling on foot or by other means.",
"title": "Forms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "These inns were built between towns if the distance between municipalities was too far for one day's travel. These structures, called caravansarais, were inns with large courtyards and ample supplies of water for drinking and other uses. They typically contained a café, in addition to supplies of food and fodder. After the caravans traveled a while they would take a break at these caravansarais, and often spend the night to rest the human travellers and their animals.",
"title": "Forms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The term \"inn\" historically characterized a rural hotel which provided lodging, food and refreshments, and accommodations for travelers' horses. To capitalize on this nostalgic image many typically lower end and middling modern motor hotel operators seek to distance themselves from similar motels by styling themselves \"inns\", regardless of services and accommodations provided. Examples are Comfort Inn, Days Inn, Holiday Inn, Knights Inn, and Premier Inn.",
"title": "Usage of the term"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The term \"inn\" is also retained in its historic use in many laws governing motels and hotels, often known as \"innkeeper's acts\", or refer to hôteliers and motel operators as \"innkeepers\" in the body of the legislation These laws typically define the innkeepers' liability for valuables entrusted to them by clients and determine whether an innkeeper holds any lien against such goods. In some jurisdictions, an offence named as \"defrauding an innkeeper\" prohibits fraudulently obtaining \"food, lodging, or other accommodation at any hotel, inn, boarding house, or eating house\"; in this context, the term is often an anachronism as the majority of modern restaurants are free-standing and not attached to coaching inns or tourist lodging.",
"title": "Usage of the term"
}
]
| Inns are generally establishments or buildings where travelers can seek lodging, and usually, food and drink. Inns are typically located in the country or along a highway. Before the advent of motorized transportation, they also provided accommodation for horses. An innkeeper is the name of a person who runs an inn. | 2002-02-11T05:35:30Z | 2023-10-25T16:07:33Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inn |
14,777 | International Olympiad in Informatics | The International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) is an annual competitive programming competition and one of the International Science Olympiads for secondary school students. The first IOI was held in 1989 in Pravetz, Bulgaria. It is the second largest science olympiad, after the International Mathematical Olympiad, in terms of number of participating countries (88 at IOI 2022). Each country sends a team of up to four students, plus one team leader, one deputy leader, and guests.
The contest consists of two days of computer programming/coding and problem-solving of algorithmic nature. To deal with problems involving very large amounts of data, it is necessary to have not only programmers, "but also creative coders, who can dream up what it is that the programmers need to tell the computer to do. The hard part isn't the programming, but the mathematics underneath it."
Students in each country are selected for their country's team through national computing contests. Students at the IOI compete on an individual basis. There is no official team ranking.
The IOI is one of the most prestigious computer science competitions in the world. UNESCO and IFIP are patrons.
On each of the two competition days, the students are typically given three problems which they have to solve in five hours. Each student works on his/her own, with only a computer and no other help allowed, specifically no communication with other contestants, books etc. Usually to solve a task the contestant has to write a computer program (only in C++) and submit it before the five-hour competition time ends. The program is graded by being run with secret test data. From IOI 2010, tasks are divided into subtasks with graduated difficulty, and points are awarded only when all tests for a particular subtask yield correct results, within specific time and memory limits. In some cases, the contestant's program has to interact with a secret computer library, which allows problems where the input is not fixed, but depends on the program's actions – for example in game problems. Another type of problem has known inputs which are publicly available already during the five hours of the contest. For these, the contestants have to submit an output file instead of a program, and it is up to them whether they obtain the output files by writing a program (possibly exploiting special characteristics of the input), or by hand, or by a combination of these means. Pascal has been removed as an available programming language as of 2019.
IOI 2010 for the first time had a live web scoreboard with real-time provisional results. Submissions will be scored as soon as possible during the contest, and the results posted. Contestants will be aware of their scores, but not others', and may resubmit to improve their scores. Starting from 2012, IOI has been using the Contest Management System (CMS) for developing and monitoring the contest.
The scores from the two competition days and all problems are summed up separately for each contestant. At the awarding ceremony, contestants are awarded medals depending on their relative total score. The top 50% of the contestants are awarded medals, such that the relative number of gold : silver : bronze : no medal is approximately 1:2:3:6 (thus 1/12 of the contestants get a gold medal).
Prior to IOI 2010, students who did not receive medals did not have their scores published, making it impossible for a country to be ranked by adding together scores of its competitors unless each wins a medal. From IOI 2010, although the scores of students who did not receive medals are still not available in the official results, they are known from the live web scoreboard. In IOI 2012 the top 3 nations ranked by aggregate score (Russia, China and USA) were subsequently awarded during the closing ceremony.
Analysis of female performance shows 77.9% of women obtain no medal, while 49.2% of men obtain no medal. "The average female participation was 4.4% in 1989–1994 and 2.2% in 1996–2014." It also suggests much higher participation of women on the national level, claiming sometimes double-digit percentages in total participation on the first stage. President of the IOI, Richard Forster, says the competition has difficulty attracting women and that in spite of trying to solve it, "none of us have hit on quite what the problem is, let alone the solution."
In IOI 2017 held in Iran, due to not being able to participate in Iran, the Israeli students participated in an offsite competition organized by IOI in Russia. Due to visa issues, the full USA team was unable to attend, although one contestant Zhezheng Luo was able to attend by traveling with the Chinese team and winning gold medal and 3rd place in standings.
In IOI 2019 held in Azerbaijan, the Armenia team did not participate due to the dispute between the two countries, despite the guarantees provided and official invitation letter sent by the host Azerbaijan.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, both the IOI 2020 and IOI 2021, originally scheduled to be hosted by Singapore, were held as online contests. The IOI 2022, hosted by Indonesia, was held as a hybrid event, with around 25% of the contestants participating online.
The following is a list of the top performers in the history of the IOI. The sign indicates a perfect score, a rare achievement in IOI history. The sign indicates an unofficial participation, where a contestant participated in a host's second team. Also, first (I), second (II) and third (III) places among gold medalists are indicated where appropriate. This list includes only those countries where the national selection contest allows the same participant to go multiple times to the IOI.
Most participating countries use feeder competitions to select their team. A number of these are listed below: | [
{
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"text": "The International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) is an annual competitive programming competition and one of the International Science Olympiads for secondary school students. The first IOI was held in 1989 in Pravetz, Bulgaria. It is the second largest science olympiad, after the International Mathematical Olympiad, in terms of number of participating countries (88 at IOI 2022). Each country sends a team of up to four students, plus one team leader, one deputy leader, and guests.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The contest consists of two days of computer programming/coding and problem-solving of algorithmic nature. To deal with problems involving very large amounts of data, it is necessary to have not only programmers, \"but also creative coders, who can dream up what it is that the programmers need to tell the computer to do. The hard part isn't the programming, but the mathematics underneath it.\"",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Students in each country are selected for their country's team through national computing contests. Students at the IOI compete on an individual basis. There is no official team ranking.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The IOI is one of the most prestigious computer science competitions in the world. UNESCO and IFIP are patrons.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "On each of the two competition days, the students are typically given three problems which they have to solve in five hours. Each student works on his/her own, with only a computer and no other help allowed, specifically no communication with other contestants, books etc. Usually to solve a task the contestant has to write a computer program (only in C++) and submit it before the five-hour competition time ends. The program is graded by being run with secret test data. From IOI 2010, tasks are divided into subtasks with graduated difficulty, and points are awarded only when all tests for a particular subtask yield correct results, within specific time and memory limits. In some cases, the contestant's program has to interact with a secret computer library, which allows problems where the input is not fixed, but depends on the program's actions – for example in game problems. Another type of problem has known inputs which are publicly available already during the five hours of the contest. For these, the contestants have to submit an output file instead of a program, and it is up to them whether they obtain the output files by writing a program (possibly exploiting special characteristics of the input), or by hand, or by a combination of these means. Pascal has been removed as an available programming language as of 2019.",
"title": "Competition structure and participation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "IOI 2010 for the first time had a live web scoreboard with real-time provisional results. Submissions will be scored as soon as possible during the contest, and the results posted. Contestants will be aware of their scores, but not others', and may resubmit to improve their scores. Starting from 2012, IOI has been using the Contest Management System (CMS) for developing and monitoring the contest.",
"title": "Competition structure and participation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The scores from the two competition days and all problems are summed up separately for each contestant. At the awarding ceremony, contestants are awarded medals depending on their relative total score. The top 50% of the contestants are awarded medals, such that the relative number of gold : silver : bronze : no medal is approximately 1:2:3:6 (thus 1/12 of the contestants get a gold medal).",
"title": "Competition structure and participation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Prior to IOI 2010, students who did not receive medals did not have their scores published, making it impossible for a country to be ranked by adding together scores of its competitors unless each wins a medal. From IOI 2010, although the scores of students who did not receive medals are still not available in the official results, they are known from the live web scoreboard. In IOI 2012 the top 3 nations ranked by aggregate score (Russia, China and USA) were subsequently awarded during the closing ceremony.",
"title": "Competition structure and participation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Analysis of female performance shows 77.9% of women obtain no medal, while 49.2% of men obtain no medal. \"The average female participation was 4.4% in 1989–1994 and 2.2% in 1996–2014.\" It also suggests much higher participation of women on the national level, claiming sometimes double-digit percentages in total participation on the first stage. President of the IOI, Richard Forster, says the competition has difficulty attracting women and that in spite of trying to solve it, \"none of us have hit on quite what the problem is, let alone the solution.\"",
"title": "Competition structure and participation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In IOI 2017 held in Iran, due to not being able to participate in Iran, the Israeli students participated in an offsite competition organized by IOI in Russia. Due to visa issues, the full USA team was unable to attend, although one contestant Zhezheng Luo was able to attend by traveling with the Chinese team and winning gold medal and 3rd place in standings.",
"title": "Competition structure and participation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In IOI 2019 held in Azerbaijan, the Armenia team did not participate due to the dispute between the two countries, despite the guarantees provided and official invitation letter sent by the host Azerbaijan.",
"title": "Competition structure and participation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, both the IOI 2020 and IOI 2021, originally scheduled to be hosted by Singapore, were held as online contests. The IOI 2022, hosted by Indonesia, was held as a hybrid event, with around 25% of the contestants participating online.",
"title": "Competition structure and participation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The following is a list of the top performers in the history of the IOI. The sign indicates a perfect score, a rare achievement in IOI history. The sign indicates an unofficial participation, where a contestant participated in a host's second team. Also, first (I), second (II) and third (III) places among gold medalists are indicated where appropriate. This list includes only those countries where the national selection contest allows the same participant to go multiple times to the IOI.",
"title": "Multiple IOI winners"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Most participating countries use feeder competitions to select their team. A number of these are listed below:",
"title": "Feeder competitions"
}
]
| The International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) is an annual competitive programming competition and one of the International Science Olympiads for secondary school students. The first IOI was held in 1989 in Pravetz, Bulgaria. It is the second largest science olympiad, after the International Mathematical Olympiad, in terms of number of participating countries. Each country sends a team of up to four students, plus one team leader, one deputy leader, and guests. The contest consists of two days of computer programming/coding and problem-solving of algorithmic nature. To deal with problems involving very large amounts of data, it is necessary to have not only programmers, "but also creative coders, who can dream up what it is that the programmers need to tell the computer to do. The hard part isn't the programming, but the mathematics underneath it." Students in each country are selected for their country's team through national computing contests. Students at the IOI compete on an individual basis. There is no official team ranking. The IOI is one of the most prestigious computer science competitions in the world. UNESCO and IFIP are patrons. | 2001-05-20T15:44:17Z | 2023-11-06T19:56:22Z | [
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14,779 | Iota | Iota (/aɪˈoʊtə/; uppercase: Ι, lowercase: ι; Greek: ιώτα) is the ninth letter of the Greek alphabet. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Yodh. Letters that arose from this letter include the Latin I and J, the Cyrillic І (І, і), Yi (Ї, ї), and Je (Ј, ј), and iotated letters (e.g. Yu (Ю, ю)). In the system of Greek numerals, iota has a value of 10.
Iota represents the close front unrounded vowel IPA: [i]. In early forms of ancient Greek, it occurred in both long [iː] and short [i] versions, but this distinction was lost in Koine Greek. Iota participated as the second element in falling diphthongs, with both long and short vowels as the first element. Where the first element was long, the iota was lost in pronunciation at an early date, and was written in polytonic orthography as iota subscript, in other words as a very small ι under the main vowel. Examples include ᾼ ᾳ ῌ ῃ ῼ ῳ. The former diphthongs became digraphs for simple vowels in Koine Greek.
The word is used in a common English phrase, "not one iota", meaning "not the slightest amount". This refers to iota, the smallest letter, or possibly yodh, י, the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet. The English word jot derives from iota. The German, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish name for the letter J (Jot / jota) is derived from iota.
These characters are used only as mathematical symbols. Stylized Greek text should be encoded using the normal Greek letters, with markup and formatting to indicate text style. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Iota (/aɪˈoʊtə/; uppercase: Ι, lowercase: ι; Greek: ιώτα) is the ninth letter of the Greek alphabet. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Yodh. Letters that arose from this letter include the Latin I and J, the Cyrillic І (І, і), Yi (Ї, ї), and Je (Ј, ј), and iotated letters (e.g. Yu (Ю, ю)). In the system of Greek numerals, iota has a value of 10.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Iota represents the close front unrounded vowel IPA: [i]. In early forms of ancient Greek, it occurred in both long [iː] and short [i] versions, but this distinction was lost in Koine Greek. Iota participated as the second element in falling diphthongs, with both long and short vowels as the first element. Where the first element was long, the iota was lost in pronunciation at an early date, and was written in polytonic orthography as iota subscript, in other words as a very small ι under the main vowel. Examples include ᾼ ᾳ ῌ ῃ ῼ ῳ. The former diphthongs became digraphs for simple vowels in Koine Greek.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The word is used in a common English phrase, \"not one iota\", meaning \"not the slightest amount\". This refers to iota, the smallest letter, or possibly yodh, י, the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet. The English word jot derives from iota. The German, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish name for the letter J (Jot / jota) is derived from iota.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "These characters are used only as mathematical symbols. Stylized Greek text should be encoded using the normal Greek letters, with markup and formatting to indicate text style.",
"title": "Character encodings"
}
]
| Iota is the ninth letter of the Greek alphabet. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Yodh. Letters that arose from this letter include the Latin I and J, the Cyrillic І, Yi, and Je, and iotated letters. In the system of Greek numerals, iota has a value of 10. Iota represents the close front unrounded vowel IPA:. In early forms of ancient Greek, it occurred in both long and short versions, but this distinction was lost in Koine Greek. Iota participated as the second element in falling diphthongs, with both long and short vowels as the first element. Where the first element was long, the iota was lost in pronunciation at an early date, and was written in polytonic orthography as iota subscript, in other words as a very small ι under the main vowel. Examples include ᾼ ᾳ ῌ ῃ ῼ ῳ. The former diphthongs became digraphs for simple vowels in Koine Greek. The word is used in a common English phrase, "not one iota", meaning "not the slightest amount". This refers to iota, the smallest letter, or possibly yodh, י, the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet. The English word jot derives from iota. The German, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish name for the letter J is derived from iota. | 2002-02-25T15:43:11Z | 2023-09-29T03:47:36Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iota |
14,780 | ISP (disambiguation) | ISP often refers to Internet service provider. ISP may also refer to: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "ISP often refers to Internet service provider. ISP may also refer to:",
"title": ""
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| ISP often refers to Internet service provider. ISP may also refer to: | 2001-05-21T09:29:44Z | 2023-12-10T21:15:14Z | [
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14,783 | Erectile dysfunction | Erectile dysfunction (ED), also referred to as impotence, is a form of sexual dysfunction in males characterized by the persistent or recurring inability to achieve or maintain a penile erection with sufficient rigidity and duration for satisfactory sexual activity. It is the most common sexual problem in males and can cause psychological distress due to its impact on self-image and sexual relationships. Majority of ED cases are attributed to physical risk factors and predictive factors. These factors can be categorized as vascular, neurological, local penile, hormonal, and drug-induced. Notable predictors of ED include aging, cardiovascular disease, diabetes mellitus, high blood pressure, obesity, abnormal lipid levels in the blood, hypogonadism, smoking, depression, and medication use. Approximately 10% of cases are linked to psychosocial factors, encompassing conditions like depression, stress, and problems within relationships.
It is worth noting that the term erectile dysfunction does not encompass other erection-related disorders, such as priapism.
Treatment of ED encompasses addressing the underlying causes, lifestyle modification, and addressing psychosocial issues. In many instances, medication-based therapies are used, specifically PDE5 inhibitors like sildenafil. These drugs function by dilating blood vessels, facilitating increased blood flow into the spongy tissue of the penis, analogous to opening a valve wider to enhance water flow in a fire hose. Less frequently employed treatments encompass prostaglandin pellets inserted into the urethra, the injection of smooth-muscle relaxants and vasodilators directly into the penis, penile implants, the use of penis pumps, and vascular surgery.
ED is reported in 18% of males aged 50 to 59 years, and 37% in males aged 70 to 75.
ED is characterized by the persistent or recurring inability to achieve or maintain an erection of the penis with sufficient rigidity and duration for satisfactory sexual activity. It is defined as the "persistent or recurrent inability to achieve and maintain a penile erection of sufficient rigidity to permit satisfactory sexual activity for at least 3 months."
ED often has an impact on the emotional well-being of both males and their partners. Many males do not seek treatment due to feelings of embarrassment. About 75% of diagnosed cases of ED go untreated.
Causes of or contributors to ED include the following:
Surgical intervention for a number of conditions may remove anatomical structures necessary to erection, damage nerves, or impair blood supply. ED is a common complication of treatments for prostate cancer, including prostatectomy and destruction of the prostate by external beam radiation, although the prostate gland itself is not necessary to achieve an erection. As far as inguinal hernia surgery is concerned, in most cases, and in the absence of postoperative complications, the operative repair can lead to a recovery of the sexual life of people with preoperative sexual dysfunction, while, in most cases, it does not affect people with a preoperative normal sexual life.
ED can also be associated with bicycling due to both neurological and vascular problems due to compression. The increased risk appears to be about 1.7-fold.
Concerns that use of pornography can cause ED have little support in epidemiological studies, according to a 2015 literature review. According to Gunter de Win, a Belgian professor and sex researcher, "Put simply, respondents who watch 60 minutes a week and think they're addicted were more likely to report sexual dysfunction than those who watch a care-free 160 minutes weekly."
In seemingly rare cases, medications such as SSRIs, isotretinoin (Accutane) and finasteride (Propecia) are reported to induce long-lasting iatrogenic disorders characterized by sexual dysfunction symptoms, including erectile dysfunction in males; these disorders are known as post-SSRI sexual dysfunction (PSSD), post-retinoid sexual dysfunction/post-Accutane syndrome (PRSD/PAS), and post-finasteride syndrome (PFS). These conditions remain poorly understood and lack effective treatments, although they have been suggested to share a common etiology.
Penile erection is managed by two mechanisms: the reflex erection, which is achieved by directly touching the penile shaft, and the psychogenic erection, which is achieved by erotic or emotional stimuli. The former involves the peripheral nerves and the lower parts of the spinal cord, whereas the latter involves the limbic system of the brain. In both cases, an intact neural system is required for a successful and complete erection. Stimulation of the penile shaft by the nervous system leads to the secretion of nitric oxide (NO), which causes the relaxation of the smooth muscles of the corpora cavernosa (the main erectile tissue of the penis), and subsequently penile erection. Additionally, adequate levels of testosterone (produced by the testes) and an intact pituitary gland are required for the development of a healthy erectile system. As can be understood from the mechanisms of a normal erection, impotence may develop due to hormonal deficiency, disorders of the neural system, lack of adequate penile blood supply or psychological problems. Spinal cord injury causes sexual dysfunction, including ED. Restriction of blood flow can arise from impaired endothelial function due to the usual causes associated with coronary artery disease, but can also be caused by prolonged exposure to bright light.
In many cases, the diagnosis can be made based on the person's history of symptoms. In other cases, a physical examination and laboratory investigations are done to rule out more serious causes such as hypogonadism or prolactinoma.
One of the first steps is to distinguish between physiological and psychological ED. Determining whether involuntary erections are present is important in eliminating the possibility of psychogenic causes for ED. Obtaining full erections occasionally, such as nocturnal penile tumescence when asleep (that is, when the mind and psychological issues, if any, are less present), tends to suggest that the physical structures are functionally working. Similarly, performance with manual stimulation, as well as any performance anxiety or acute situational ED, may indicate a psychogenic component to ED.
Another factor leading to ED is diabetes mellitus, a well known cause of neuropathy. ED is also related to generally poor physical health, poor dietary habits, obesity, and most specifically cardiovascular disease, such as coronary artery disease and peripheral vascular disease. Screening for cardiovascular risk factors, such as smoking, dyslipidemia, hypertension, and alcoholism, is helpful.
In some cases, the simple search for a previously undetected groin hernia can prove useful since it can affect sexual functions in males and is relatively easily curable.
The current diagnostic and statistical manual of mental diseases (DSM-IV) lists ED.
Penile ultrasonography with doppler can be used to examine the erect penis. Most cases of ED of organic causes are related to changes in blood flow in the corpora cavernosa, represented by occlusive artery disease (in which less blood is allowed to enter the penis), most often of atherosclerotic origin, or due to failure of the veno-occlusive mechanism (in which too much blood circulates back out of the penis). Before the Doppler sonogram, the penis should be examined in B mode, in order to identify possible tumors, fibrotic plaques, calcifications, or hematomas, and to evaluate the appearance of the cavernous arteries, which can be tortuous or atheromatous.
Erection can be induced by injecting 10–20 µg of prostaglandin E1, with evaluations of the arterial flow every five minutes for 25–30 min (see image). The use of prostaglandin E1 is contraindicated in patients with predisposition to priapism (e.g., those with sickle cell anemia), anatomical deformity of the penis, or penile implants. Phentolamine (2 mg) is often added. Visual and tactile stimulation produces better results. Some authors recommend the use of sildenafil by mouth to replace the injectable drugs in cases of contraindications, although the efficacy of such medication is controversial.
Before the injection of the chosen drug, the flow pattern is monophasic, with low systolic velocities and an absence of diastolic flow. After injection, systolic and diastolic peak velocities should increase, decreasing progressively with vein occlusion and becoming negative when the penis becomes rigid (see image below). The reference values vary across studies, ranging from > 25 cm/s to > 35 cm/s. Values above 35 cm/s indicate the absence of arterial disease, values below 25 cm/s indicate arterial insufficiency, and values of 25–35 cm/s are indeterminate because they are less specific (see image below). The data obtained should be correlated with the degree of erection observed. If the peak systolic velocities are normal, the final diastolic velocities should be evaluated, those above 5 cm/s being associated with venogenic ED.
Treatment depends on the underlying cause. In general, exercise, particularly of the aerobic type, is effective for preventing ED during midlife. Counseling can be used if the underlying cause is psychological, including how to lower stress or anxiety related to sex. Medications by mouth and vacuum erection devices are first-line treatments, followed by injections of drugs into the penis, as well as penile implants. Vascular reconstructive surgeries are beneficial in certain groups. Treatments, other than surgery, do not fix the underlying physiological problem, but are used as needed before sex.
The PDE5 inhibitors sildenafil (Viagra), vardenafil (Levitra) and tadalafil (Cialis) are prescription drugs which are taken by mouth. As of 2018, sildenafil is available in the UK without a prescription. Additionally, a cream combining alprostadil with the permeation enhancer DDAIP has been approved in Canada as a first line treatment for ED. Penile injections, on the other hand, can involve one of the following medications: papaverine, phentolamine, and prostaglandin E1, also known as alprostadil. In addition to injections, there is an alprostadil suppository that can be inserted into the urethra. Once inserted, an erection can begin within 10 minutes and last up to an hour. Medications to treat ED may cause a side effect called priapism.
In a study published in 2016, based on US health insurance claims data, out of 19,833,939 US males aged ≥18 years, only 1,108,842 (5.6%), were medically diagnosed with erectile dysfunction or on a PDE5I prescription (μ age 55.2 years, σ 11.2 years). Prevalence of diagnosis or prescription was the highest for age group 60–69 at 11.5%, lowest for age group 18–29 at 0.4%, and 2.1% for 30–39, 5.7% for 40–49, 10% for 50–59, 11% for 70–79, 4.6% for 80–89, 0.9% for ≥90, respectively.
Focused shockwave therapy involves passing short, high frequency acoustic pulses through the skin and into the penis. These waves break down any plaques within the blood vessels, encourage the formation of new vessels, and stimulate repair and tissue regeneration.
Focused shockwave therapy appears to work best for males with vasculogenic ED, which is a blood vessel disorder that affects blood flow to tissue in the penis. The treatment is painless and has no known side effects. Treatment with shockwave therapy can lead to a significant improvement of the IIEF (International Index of Erectile Function).
Men with low levels of testosterone can experience ED. Taking testosterone may help maintain an erection. males with type 2 diabetes are twice as likely to have lower levels of testosterone, and are three times more likely to experience ED than non-diabetic men.
A vacuum erection device helps draw blood into the penis by applying negative pressure. This type of device is sometimes referred to as penis pump and may be used just prior to sexual intercourse. Several types of FDA approved vacuum therapy devices are available under prescription. When pharmacological methods fail, a purpose-designed external vacuum pump can be used to attain erection, with a separate compression ring fitted to the base of the penis to maintain it. These pumps should be distinguished from other penis pumps (supplied without compression rings) which, rather than being used for temporary treatment of impotence, are claimed to increase penis length if used frequently, or vibrate as an aid to masturbation. More drastically, inflatable or rigid penile implants may be fitted surgically.
The vibrator was invented in the late 19th century as a medical instrument for pain relief and the treatment of various ailments. Sometimes described as a massager, the vibrator is used on the body to produce sexual stimulation. Several clinical studies have found vibrators to be an effective solution for Erectile Dysfunction. Examples of FDA registered vibrators for erectile dysfunction include MysteryVibe's Tenuto and Reflexonic's Viberect.
Often, as a last resort, if other treatments have failed, the most common procedure is prosthetic implants which involves the insertion of artificial rods into the penis. Some sources show that vascular reconstructive surgeries are viable options for some people.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not recommend alternative therapies to treat sexual dysfunction. Many products are advertised as "herbal viagra" or "natural" sexual enhancement products, but no clinical trials or scientific studies support the effectiveness of these products for the treatment of ED, and synthetic chemical compounds similar to sildenafil have been found as adulterants in many of these products. The FDA has warned consumers that any sexual enhancement product that claims to work as well as prescription products is likely to contain such a contaminant. A 2021 review indicated that ginseng had "only trivial effects on erectile function or satisfaction with intercourse compared to placebo".
Attempts to treat the symptoms described by ED date back well over 1,000 years. In the 8th century, males of Ancient Rome and Greece wore talismans of rooster and goat genitalia, believing these talismans would serve as an aphrodisiac and promote sexual function. In the 13th century, Albertus Magnus recommended ingesting roasted wolf penis as a remedy for impotence. During the late 16th and 17th centuries in France, male impotence was considered a crime, as well as legal grounds for a divorce. The practice, which involved inspection of the complainants by court experts, was declared obscene in 1677.
The first major publication describing a broad medicalization of sexual disorders was the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1952. In the early 20th century, medical folklore held that 90-95% of cases of ED were psychological in origin, but around the 1980s research took the opposite direction of searching for physical causes of sexual dysfunction, which also happened in the 1920s and 30s. Physical causes as explanations continue to dominate literature when compared with psychological explanations as of 2022.
Treatments in the 80s for ED included penile implants and intracavernosal injections. The first successful vacuum erection device, or penis pump, was developed by Vincent Marie Mondat in the early 1800s. A more advanced device based on a bicycle pump was developed by Geddings Osbon, a Pentecostal preacher, in the 1970s. In 1982, he received FDA approval to market the product. John R. Brinkley initiated a boom in male impotence treatments in the U.S. in the 1920s and 1930s, with radio programs that recommended expensive goat gland implants and "mercurochrome" injections as the path to restored male virility, including operations by surgeon Serge Voronoff.
Modern drug therapy for ED made a significant advance in 1983, when British physiologist Giles Brindley dropped his trousers and demonstrated to a shocked Urodynamics Society audience showing his papaverine-induced erection. The current most common treatment for ED, the oral PDE5 inhibitor known as sildenafil (Viagra) was approved for use for Pfizer by the FDA in 1998, which at the time of release was the fastest selling drug in history. Sildenafil largely replaced SSRI treatments for ED at the time and proliferated new types of specialised pharmaceutical marketing which emphasised social connotations of ED and Viagra rather than its physical effects.
Anthropological research presents ED not as a disorder but, as a normal, and sometimes even welcome sign of healthy aging. Wentzell's study of 250 Mexican males in their 50s and 60s found that "most simply did not see decreasing erectile function as a biological pathology". The males interviewed described the decrease in erectile function "as an aid for aging in socially appropriate ways". A common theme amongst the interviewees showed that respectable older males shifted their focus toward the domestic sphere into a "second stage of life". The Mexican males of this generation often pursued sex outside of marriage; decreasing erectile function acted as an aid to overcoming infidelity thus helping to attain the ideal "second stage" of life. A 56-year-old about to retire from the public health service said he would now "dedicate myself to my wife, the house, gardening, caring for the grandchildren—the Mexican classic". Wentzell found that treating ED as a pathology was antithetical to the social view these males held of themselves, and their purpose at this stage of their lives.
In the 20th and 21st centuries, anthropologists investigated how common treatments for ED are built upon assumptions of institutionalized social norms. In offering a range of clinical treatments to 'correct' a person's ability to produce an erection, biomedical institutions encourage the public to strive for prolonged sexual function. Anthropologists argue that a biomedical focus places emphasis on the biological processes of fixing the body thereby disregarding holistic ideals of health and aging. By relying on a wholly medical approach, Western biomedicine can become blindsided by bodily dysfunctions which can be understood as appropriate functions of age, and not as a medical problem. Anthropologists understand that a biosocial approach to ED considers a person's decision to undergo clinical treatment more likely a result of "society, political economy, history, and culture" than a matter of personal choice. In rejecting biomedical treatment for ED, males can challenge common forms of medicalized social control by deviating from what is considered the normal approach to dysfunction.
The Latin term impotentia coeundi describes simple inability to insert the penis into the vagina; it is now mostly replaced by more precise terms, such as erectile dysfunction (ED). The study of ED within medicine is covered by andrology, a sub-field within urology. Research indicates that ED is common, and it is suggested that approximately 40% of males experience symptoms compatible with ED, at least occasionally. The condition is also on occasion called phallic impotence. Its antonym, or opposite condition, is priapism. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Erectile dysfunction (ED), also referred to as impotence, is a form of sexual dysfunction in males characterized by the persistent or recurring inability to achieve or maintain a penile erection with sufficient rigidity and duration for satisfactory sexual activity. It is the most common sexual problem in males and can cause psychological distress due to its impact on self-image and sexual relationships. Majority of ED cases are attributed to physical risk factors and predictive factors. These factors can be categorized as vascular, neurological, local penile, hormonal, and drug-induced. Notable predictors of ED include aging, cardiovascular disease, diabetes mellitus, high blood pressure, obesity, abnormal lipid levels in the blood, hypogonadism, smoking, depression, and medication use. Approximately 10% of cases are linked to psychosocial factors, encompassing conditions like depression, stress, and problems within relationships.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "It is worth noting that the term erectile dysfunction does not encompass other erection-related disorders, such as priapism.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Treatment of ED encompasses addressing the underlying causes, lifestyle modification, and addressing psychosocial issues. In many instances, medication-based therapies are used, specifically PDE5 inhibitors like sildenafil. These drugs function by dilating blood vessels, facilitating increased blood flow into the spongy tissue of the penis, analogous to opening a valve wider to enhance water flow in a fire hose. Less frequently employed treatments encompass prostaglandin pellets inserted into the urethra, the injection of smooth-muscle relaxants and vasodilators directly into the penis, penile implants, the use of penis pumps, and vascular surgery.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "ED is reported in 18% of males aged 50 to 59 years, and 37% in males aged 70 to 75.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "ED is characterized by the persistent or recurring inability to achieve or maintain an erection of the penis with sufficient rigidity and duration for satisfactory sexual activity. It is defined as the \"persistent or recurrent inability to achieve and maintain a penile erection of sufficient rigidity to permit satisfactory sexual activity for at least 3 months.\"",
"title": "Signs and symptoms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "ED often has an impact on the emotional well-being of both males and their partners. Many males do not seek treatment due to feelings of embarrassment. About 75% of diagnosed cases of ED go untreated.",
"title": "Signs and symptoms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Causes of or contributors to ED include the following:",
"title": "Causes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Surgical intervention for a number of conditions may remove anatomical structures necessary to erection, damage nerves, or impair blood supply. ED is a common complication of treatments for prostate cancer, including prostatectomy and destruction of the prostate by external beam radiation, although the prostate gland itself is not necessary to achieve an erection. As far as inguinal hernia surgery is concerned, in most cases, and in the absence of postoperative complications, the operative repair can lead to a recovery of the sexual life of people with preoperative sexual dysfunction, while, in most cases, it does not affect people with a preoperative normal sexual life.",
"title": "Causes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "ED can also be associated with bicycling due to both neurological and vascular problems due to compression. The increased risk appears to be about 1.7-fold.",
"title": "Causes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Concerns that use of pornography can cause ED have little support in epidemiological studies, according to a 2015 literature review. According to Gunter de Win, a Belgian professor and sex researcher, \"Put simply, respondents who watch 60 minutes a week and think they're addicted were more likely to report sexual dysfunction than those who watch a care-free 160 minutes weekly.\"",
"title": "Causes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In seemingly rare cases, medications such as SSRIs, isotretinoin (Accutane) and finasteride (Propecia) are reported to induce long-lasting iatrogenic disorders characterized by sexual dysfunction symptoms, including erectile dysfunction in males; these disorders are known as post-SSRI sexual dysfunction (PSSD), post-retinoid sexual dysfunction/post-Accutane syndrome (PRSD/PAS), and post-finasteride syndrome (PFS). These conditions remain poorly understood and lack effective treatments, although they have been suggested to share a common etiology.",
"title": "Causes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Penile erection is managed by two mechanisms: the reflex erection, which is achieved by directly touching the penile shaft, and the psychogenic erection, which is achieved by erotic or emotional stimuli. The former involves the peripheral nerves and the lower parts of the spinal cord, whereas the latter involves the limbic system of the brain. In both cases, an intact neural system is required for a successful and complete erection. Stimulation of the penile shaft by the nervous system leads to the secretion of nitric oxide (NO), which causes the relaxation of the smooth muscles of the corpora cavernosa (the main erectile tissue of the penis), and subsequently penile erection. Additionally, adequate levels of testosterone (produced by the testes) and an intact pituitary gland are required for the development of a healthy erectile system. As can be understood from the mechanisms of a normal erection, impotence may develop due to hormonal deficiency, disorders of the neural system, lack of adequate penile blood supply or psychological problems. Spinal cord injury causes sexual dysfunction, including ED. Restriction of blood flow can arise from impaired endothelial function due to the usual causes associated with coronary artery disease, but can also be caused by prolonged exposure to bright light.",
"title": "Pathophysiology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In many cases, the diagnosis can be made based on the person's history of symptoms. In other cases, a physical examination and laboratory investigations are done to rule out more serious causes such as hypogonadism or prolactinoma.",
"title": "Diagnosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "One of the first steps is to distinguish between physiological and psychological ED. Determining whether involuntary erections are present is important in eliminating the possibility of psychogenic causes for ED. Obtaining full erections occasionally, such as nocturnal penile tumescence when asleep (that is, when the mind and psychological issues, if any, are less present), tends to suggest that the physical structures are functionally working. Similarly, performance with manual stimulation, as well as any performance anxiety or acute situational ED, may indicate a psychogenic component to ED.",
"title": "Diagnosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Another factor leading to ED is diabetes mellitus, a well known cause of neuropathy. ED is also related to generally poor physical health, poor dietary habits, obesity, and most specifically cardiovascular disease, such as coronary artery disease and peripheral vascular disease. Screening for cardiovascular risk factors, such as smoking, dyslipidemia, hypertension, and alcoholism, is helpful.",
"title": "Diagnosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In some cases, the simple search for a previously undetected groin hernia can prove useful since it can affect sexual functions in males and is relatively easily curable.",
"title": "Diagnosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The current diagnostic and statistical manual of mental diseases (DSM-IV) lists ED.",
"title": "Diagnosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Penile ultrasonography with doppler can be used to examine the erect penis. Most cases of ED of organic causes are related to changes in blood flow in the corpora cavernosa, represented by occlusive artery disease (in which less blood is allowed to enter the penis), most often of atherosclerotic origin, or due to failure of the veno-occlusive mechanism (in which too much blood circulates back out of the penis). Before the Doppler sonogram, the penis should be examined in B mode, in order to identify possible tumors, fibrotic plaques, calcifications, or hematomas, and to evaluate the appearance of the cavernous arteries, which can be tortuous or atheromatous.",
"title": "Diagnosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Erection can be induced by injecting 10–20 µg of prostaglandin E1, with evaluations of the arterial flow every five minutes for 25–30 min (see image). The use of prostaglandin E1 is contraindicated in patients with predisposition to priapism (e.g., those with sickle cell anemia), anatomical deformity of the penis, or penile implants. Phentolamine (2 mg) is often added. Visual and tactile stimulation produces better results. Some authors recommend the use of sildenafil by mouth to replace the injectable drugs in cases of contraindications, although the efficacy of such medication is controversial.",
"title": "Diagnosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Before the injection of the chosen drug, the flow pattern is monophasic, with low systolic velocities and an absence of diastolic flow. After injection, systolic and diastolic peak velocities should increase, decreasing progressively with vein occlusion and becoming negative when the penis becomes rigid (see image below). The reference values vary across studies, ranging from > 25 cm/s to > 35 cm/s. Values above 35 cm/s indicate the absence of arterial disease, values below 25 cm/s indicate arterial insufficiency, and values of 25–35 cm/s are indeterminate because they are less specific (see image below). The data obtained should be correlated with the degree of erection observed. If the peak systolic velocities are normal, the final diastolic velocities should be evaluated, those above 5 cm/s being associated with venogenic ED.",
"title": "Diagnosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Treatment depends on the underlying cause. In general, exercise, particularly of the aerobic type, is effective for preventing ED during midlife. Counseling can be used if the underlying cause is psychological, including how to lower stress or anxiety related to sex. Medications by mouth and vacuum erection devices are first-line treatments, followed by injections of drugs into the penis, as well as penile implants. Vascular reconstructive surgeries are beneficial in certain groups. Treatments, other than surgery, do not fix the underlying physiological problem, but are used as needed before sex.",
"title": "Treatment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The PDE5 inhibitors sildenafil (Viagra), vardenafil (Levitra) and tadalafil (Cialis) are prescription drugs which are taken by mouth. As of 2018, sildenafil is available in the UK without a prescription. Additionally, a cream combining alprostadil with the permeation enhancer DDAIP has been approved in Canada as a first line treatment for ED. Penile injections, on the other hand, can involve one of the following medications: papaverine, phentolamine, and prostaglandin E1, also known as alprostadil. In addition to injections, there is an alprostadil suppository that can be inserted into the urethra. Once inserted, an erection can begin within 10 minutes and last up to an hour. Medications to treat ED may cause a side effect called priapism.",
"title": "Treatment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In a study published in 2016, based on US health insurance claims data, out of 19,833,939 US males aged ≥18 years, only 1,108,842 (5.6%), were medically diagnosed with erectile dysfunction or on a PDE5I prescription (μ age 55.2 years, σ 11.2 years). Prevalence of diagnosis or prescription was the highest for age group 60–69 at 11.5%, lowest for age group 18–29 at 0.4%, and 2.1% for 30–39, 5.7% for 40–49, 10% for 50–59, 11% for 70–79, 4.6% for 80–89, 0.9% for ≥90, respectively.",
"title": "Treatment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Focused shockwave therapy involves passing short, high frequency acoustic pulses through the skin and into the penis. These waves break down any plaques within the blood vessels, encourage the formation of new vessels, and stimulate repair and tissue regeneration.",
"title": "Treatment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Focused shockwave therapy appears to work best for males with vasculogenic ED, which is a blood vessel disorder that affects blood flow to tissue in the penis. The treatment is painless and has no known side effects. Treatment with shockwave therapy can lead to a significant improvement of the IIEF (International Index of Erectile Function).",
"title": "Treatment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Men with low levels of testosterone can experience ED. Taking testosterone may help maintain an erection. males with type 2 diabetes are twice as likely to have lower levels of testosterone, and are three times more likely to experience ED than non-diabetic men.",
"title": "Treatment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "A vacuum erection device helps draw blood into the penis by applying negative pressure. This type of device is sometimes referred to as penis pump and may be used just prior to sexual intercourse. Several types of FDA approved vacuum therapy devices are available under prescription. When pharmacological methods fail, a purpose-designed external vacuum pump can be used to attain erection, with a separate compression ring fitted to the base of the penis to maintain it. These pumps should be distinguished from other penis pumps (supplied without compression rings) which, rather than being used for temporary treatment of impotence, are claimed to increase penis length if used frequently, or vibrate as an aid to masturbation. More drastically, inflatable or rigid penile implants may be fitted surgically.",
"title": "Treatment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The vibrator was invented in the late 19th century as a medical instrument for pain relief and the treatment of various ailments. Sometimes described as a massager, the vibrator is used on the body to produce sexual stimulation. Several clinical studies have found vibrators to be an effective solution for Erectile Dysfunction. Examples of FDA registered vibrators for erectile dysfunction include MysteryVibe's Tenuto and Reflexonic's Viberect.",
"title": "Treatment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Often, as a last resort, if other treatments have failed, the most common procedure is prosthetic implants which involves the insertion of artificial rods into the penis. Some sources show that vascular reconstructive surgeries are viable options for some people.",
"title": "Treatment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not recommend alternative therapies to treat sexual dysfunction. Many products are advertised as \"herbal viagra\" or \"natural\" sexual enhancement products, but no clinical trials or scientific studies support the effectiveness of these products for the treatment of ED, and synthetic chemical compounds similar to sildenafil have been found as adulterants in many of these products. The FDA has warned consumers that any sexual enhancement product that claims to work as well as prescription products is likely to contain such a contaminant. A 2021 review indicated that ginseng had \"only trivial effects on erectile function or satisfaction with intercourse compared to placebo\".",
"title": "Treatment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Attempts to treat the symptoms described by ED date back well over 1,000 years. In the 8th century, males of Ancient Rome and Greece wore talismans of rooster and goat genitalia, believing these talismans would serve as an aphrodisiac and promote sexual function. In the 13th century, Albertus Magnus recommended ingesting roasted wolf penis as a remedy for impotence. During the late 16th and 17th centuries in France, male impotence was considered a crime, as well as legal grounds for a divorce. The practice, which involved inspection of the complainants by court experts, was declared obscene in 1677.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The first major publication describing a broad medicalization of sexual disorders was the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1952. In the early 20th century, medical folklore held that 90-95% of cases of ED were psychological in origin, but around the 1980s research took the opposite direction of searching for physical causes of sexual dysfunction, which also happened in the 1920s and 30s. Physical causes as explanations continue to dominate literature when compared with psychological explanations as of 2022.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Treatments in the 80s for ED included penile implants and intracavernosal injections. The first successful vacuum erection device, or penis pump, was developed by Vincent Marie Mondat in the early 1800s. A more advanced device based on a bicycle pump was developed by Geddings Osbon, a Pentecostal preacher, in the 1970s. In 1982, he received FDA approval to market the product. John R. Brinkley initiated a boom in male impotence treatments in the U.S. in the 1920s and 1930s, with radio programs that recommended expensive goat gland implants and \"mercurochrome\" injections as the path to restored male virility, including operations by surgeon Serge Voronoff.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Modern drug therapy for ED made a significant advance in 1983, when British physiologist Giles Brindley dropped his trousers and demonstrated to a shocked Urodynamics Society audience showing his papaverine-induced erection. The current most common treatment for ED, the oral PDE5 inhibitor known as sildenafil (Viagra) was approved for use for Pfizer by the FDA in 1998, which at the time of release was the fastest selling drug in history. Sildenafil largely replaced SSRI treatments for ED at the time and proliferated new types of specialised pharmaceutical marketing which emphasised social connotations of ED and Viagra rather than its physical effects.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Anthropological research presents ED not as a disorder but, as a normal, and sometimes even welcome sign of healthy aging. Wentzell's study of 250 Mexican males in their 50s and 60s found that \"most simply did not see decreasing erectile function as a biological pathology\". The males interviewed described the decrease in erectile function \"as an aid for aging in socially appropriate ways\". A common theme amongst the interviewees showed that respectable older males shifted their focus toward the domestic sphere into a \"second stage of life\". The Mexican males of this generation often pursued sex outside of marriage; decreasing erectile function acted as an aid to overcoming infidelity thus helping to attain the ideal \"second stage\" of life. A 56-year-old about to retire from the public health service said he would now \"dedicate myself to my wife, the house, gardening, caring for the grandchildren—the Mexican classic\". Wentzell found that treating ED as a pathology was antithetical to the social view these males held of themselves, and their purpose at this stage of their lives.",
"title": "Anthropology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In the 20th and 21st centuries, anthropologists investigated how common treatments for ED are built upon assumptions of institutionalized social norms. In offering a range of clinical treatments to 'correct' a person's ability to produce an erection, biomedical institutions encourage the public to strive for prolonged sexual function. Anthropologists argue that a biomedical focus places emphasis on the biological processes of fixing the body thereby disregarding holistic ideals of health and aging. By relying on a wholly medical approach, Western biomedicine can become blindsided by bodily dysfunctions which can be understood as appropriate functions of age, and not as a medical problem. Anthropologists understand that a biosocial approach to ED considers a person's decision to undergo clinical treatment more likely a result of \"society, political economy, history, and culture\" than a matter of personal choice. In rejecting biomedical treatment for ED, males can challenge common forms of medicalized social control by deviating from what is considered the normal approach to dysfunction.",
"title": "Anthropology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The Latin term impotentia coeundi describes simple inability to insert the penis into the vagina; it is now mostly replaced by more precise terms, such as erectile dysfunction (ED). The study of ED within medicine is covered by andrology, a sub-field within urology. Research indicates that ED is common, and it is suggested that approximately 40% of males experience symptoms compatible with ED, at least occasionally. The condition is also on occasion called phallic impotence. Its antonym, or opposite condition, is priapism.",
"title": "Lexicology"
}
]
| Erectile dysfunction (ED), also referred to as impotence, is a form of sexual dysfunction in males characterized by the persistent or recurring inability to achieve or maintain a penile erection with sufficient rigidity and duration for satisfactory sexual activity. It is the most common sexual problem in males and can cause psychological distress due to its impact on self-image and sexual relationships. Majority of ED cases are attributed to physical risk factors and predictive factors. These factors can be categorized as vascular, neurological, local penile, hormonal, and drug-induced. Notable predictors of ED include aging, cardiovascular disease, diabetes mellitus, high blood pressure, obesity, abnormal lipid levels in the blood, hypogonadism, smoking, depression, and medication use. Approximately 10% of cases are linked to psychosocial factors, encompassing conditions like depression, stress, and problems within relationships. It is worth noting that the term erectile dysfunction does not encompass other erection-related disorders, such as priapism. Treatment of ED encompasses addressing the underlying causes, lifestyle modification, and addressing psychosocial issues. In many instances, medication-based therapies are used, specifically PDE5 inhibitors like sildenafil. These drugs function by dilating blood vessels, facilitating increased blood flow into the spongy tissue of the penis, analogous to opening a valve wider to enhance water flow in a fire hose. Less frequently employed treatments encompass prostaglandin pellets inserted into the urethra, the injection of smooth-muscle relaxants and vasodilators directly into the penis, penile implants, the use of penis pumps, and vascular surgery. ED is reported in 18% of males aged 50 to 59 years, and 37% in males aged 70 to 75. | 2001-05-23T18:59:54Z | 2023-12-28T19:11:43Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erectile_dysfunction |
14,787 | Iran–Contra affair | The Iran–Contra affair (Persian: ماجرای ایران-کنترا; Spanish: Caso Irán-Contra), often referred to as the Iran–Contra scandal, was a political scandal in the United States that occurred during the second term of the Reagan administration. Between 1981 and 1986, senior administration officials secretly facilitated the illegal sale of arms to Iran, who was subjected to an arms embargo at the time. The administration hoped to use the proceeds of the arms sale to fund the Contras, an anti-Sandinista rebel group in Nicaragua. Under the Boland Amendment, further funding of the Contras by legislative appropriations was prohibited by Congress, but the Reagan administration figured out a loophole by secretively using non-appropriated funds instead. The Iran–Contra affair is sometimes referred to as the McFarlane affair in Iran.
The official justification for the arms shipments was that they were part of an operation to free seven US hostages being held in Lebanon by Hezbollah, an Islamist paramilitary group with Iranian ties connected to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The idea to exchange arms for hostages was proposed by Manucher Ghorbanifar, an expatriate Iranian arms dealer. Some within the Reagan administration hoped the sales would influence Iran to get Hezbollah to release the hostages.
In late 1985, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council (NSC) diverted a portion of the proceeds from the Iranian weapon sales to fund the Contras, a group of anti-Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) rebels, in their insurgency against the socialist government of Nicaragua. North later claimed that Ghorbanifar had given him the idea for diverting profits from BGM-71 TOW and MIM-23 Hawk missile sales to Iran to the Nicaraguan Contras. While President Ronald Reagan was a vocal supporter of the Contra cause, the evidence is disputed as to whether he personally authorized the diversion of funds to the Contras. Handwritten notes taken by Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger on 7 December 1985 indicate that Reagan was aware of potential hostage transfers with Iran, by Israel, as well as the sale of Hawk and TOW missiles to "moderate elements" within that country. Weinberger wrote that Reagan said "he could answer charges of illegality but he couldn't answer charge [sic] that 'big strong President Reagan passed up a chance to free hostages.'" After the weapon sales were revealed in November 1986, Reagan appeared on national television and stated that the weapons transfers had indeed occurred, but that the US did not trade arms for hostages. The investigation was impeded when large volumes of documents relating to the affair were destroyed or withheld from investigators by Reagan administration officials. On 4 March 1987, Reagan made a further nationally televised address, saying he was taking full responsibility for the affair and stating that "what began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages."
The affair was investigated by Congress and by the three-person, Reagan-appointed Tower Commission. Neither investigation found evidence that President Reagan himself knew of the extent of the multiple programs. Additionally, US Deputy Attorney General Lawrence Walsh was appointed Independent Counsel in December 1986 to investigate possible criminal actions by officials involved in the scheme. In the end, several dozen administration officials were indicted, including then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Eleven convictions resulted, some of which were vacated on appeal.
The rest of those indicted or convicted were all pardoned in the final days of the presidency of George H. W. Bush, who had been vice president at the time of the affair. Former Independent Counsel Walsh noted that, in issuing the pardons, Bush appeared to have been preempting being implicated himself by evidence that came to light during the Weinberger trial and noted that there was a pattern of "deception and obstruction" by Bush, Weinberger, and other senior Reagan administration officials. Walsh submitted his final report on 4 August 1993 and later wrote an account of his experiences as counsel, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up.
The US was the largest seller of arms to Iran under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and the vast majority of the weapons that the Islamic Republic of Iran inherited in January 1979 were US-made. To maintain this arsenal, Iran required a steady supply of spare parts to replace those broken and worn out. After Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and took 52 Americans hostage, US President Jimmy Carter imposed an arms embargo on Iran. After Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980, Iran desperately needed weapons and spare parts for its current weapons. After Ronald Reagan took office as president on 20 January 1981, he vowed to continue Carter's policy of blocking arms sales to Iran on the grounds that Iran supported terrorism.
A group of senior Reagan administration officials in the Senior Interdepartmental Group conducted a secret study on 21 July 1981 and concluded that the arms embargo was ineffective because Iran could always buy arms and spare parts for its US weapons elsewhere, while, at the same time, the arms embargo opened the door for Iran to fall into the Soviet sphere of influence as the Kremlin could sell Iran weapons if the US would not. The conclusion was that the US should start selling Iran arms as soon as it was politically possible in order to keep Iran from falling into the Soviet sphere of influence. At the same time, the openly declared goal of Ayatollah Khomeini to export his Islamic revolution all over the Middle East and overthrow the governments of Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the other states around the Persian Gulf led to the Americans perceiving Khomeini as a major threat to the US.
In the spring of 1983, the US launched Operation Staunch, a wide-ranging diplomatic effort to persuade other nations all over the world not to sell arms or spare parts for weapons to Iran. This was at least part of the reason the Iran–Contra affair proved so humiliating for the US when the story first broke in November 1986 that the US itself was selling arms to Iran.
At the same time that the US government was considering its options on selling arms to Iran, Contra militants based in Honduras were waging a guerrilla war to topple the FSLN revolutionary government of Nicaragua. Almost from the time he took office in 1981, a major goal of the Reagan administration was the overthrow of the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua and to support the Contra rebels. The Reagan administration's policy toward Nicaragua produced a major clash between the executive and legislative branches as Congress sought to limit, if not curb altogether, the ability of the White House to support the Contras. Direct US funding of the Contras insurgency was made illegal through the Boland Amendment, the name given to three US legislative amendments between 1982 and 1984 aimed at limiting US government assistance to Contra militants. By 1984, funding for the Contras had run out; and, in October of that year, a total ban came into effect. The second Boland Amendment, in effect from 3 October 1984 to 3 December 1985, stated:
During the fiscal year 1985 no funds available to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense or any other agency or entity of the United States involved in intelligence activities may be obligated or expended for the purpose of or which may have the effect of supporting directly or indirectly military or paramilitary operations in Nicaragua by any nation, organization, group, movement, or individual.
In violation of the Boland Amendment, senior officials of the Reagan administration continued to secretly arm and train the Contras and provide arms to Iran, an operation they called "the Enterprise". Given the Contras' heavy dependence on US military and financial support, the second Boland Amendment threatened to break the Contra movement and led to President Reagan ordering in 1984 that the NSC "keep the Contras together 'body and soul'", no matter what Congress voted for.
A major legal debate at the center of the Iran–Contra affair concerned the question of whether the NSC was one of the "any other agency or entity of the United States involved in intelligence activities" covered by the Boland Amendment. The Reagan administration argued it was not, and many in Congress argued that it was. The majority of constitutional scholars have asserted the NSC did indeed fall within the purview of the second Boland Amendment, though the amendment did not mention the NSC by name. The broader constitutional question at stake was the power of Congress versus the power of the presidency. The Reagan administration argued that, because the constitution assigned the right to conduct foreign policy to the executive, its efforts to overthrow the government of Nicaragua were a presidential prerogative that Congress had no right to try to halt via the Boland Amendments. By contrast, Congressional leaders argued that the constitution had assigned Congress control of the budget, and Congress had every right to use that power not to fund projects like attempting to overthrow the government of Nicaragua that they disapproved of. As part of the effort to circumvent the Boland Amendment, the NSC established "the Enterprise", an arms-smuggling network headed by a retired US Air Force officer turned arms dealer Richard Secord that supplied arms to the Contras. It was ostensibly a private sector operation, but in fact was controlled by the NSC. To fund "the Enterprise", the Reagan administration was constantly on the look-out for funds that came from outside the US government in order not to explicitly violate the letter of the Boland Amendment, though the efforts to find alternative funding for the Contras violated the spirit of the Boland Amendment. Ironically, military aid to the Contras was reinstated with Congressional consent in October 1986, a month before the scandal broke.
In his 1995 memoir My American Journey, General Colin Powell, the US Deputy National Security Advisor, wrote that the weapons sales to Iran were used "for purposes prohibited by the elected representatives of the American people [...] in a way that avoided accountability to the President and Congress. It was wrong."
In 1985, Manuel Noriega offered to help the US by allowing Panama as a staging ground for operations against the FSLN and offering to train Contras in Panama, but this would later be overshadowed by the Iran–Contra affair itself.
At around the same time, the Soviet Bloc also engaged in arms deals with ideologically opponent buyers, possibly involving some of the same players as the Iran–Contra affair. In 1986, a complex operation involving East Germany's Stasi and the Danish-registered ship Pia Vesta ultimately aimed to sell Soviet arms and military vehicles to South Africa's Armscor, using various intermediaries to distance themselves from the deal. Manuel Noriega of Panama was apparently one of these intermediaries but backed out on the deal as the ship and weapons were seized at a Panamanian port. The Pia Vesta led to a small controversy, as the Panama and Peru governments in 1986 accused the US and each other of being involved in the East Germany-originated shipment.
As reported in The New York Times in 1991, "continuing allegations that Reagan campaign officials made a deal with the Iranian Government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the fall of 1980" led to "limited investigations". However "limited", those investigations established that "Soon after taking office in 1981, the Reagan Administration secretly and abruptly changed United States policy." Secret Israeli arms sales and shipments to Iran began in that year, even as, in public, "the Reagan Administration" presented a different face, and "aggressively promoted a public campaign [...] to stop worldwide transfers of military goods to Iran". The New York Times explains: "Iran at that time was in dire need of arms and spare parts for its American-made arsenal to defend itself against Iraq, which had attacked it in September 1980", while "Israel [a US ally] was interested in keeping the war between Iran and Iraq going to ensure that these two potential enemies remained preoccupied with each other". Major General Avraham Tamir, a high-ranking Israeli Defense Ministry official in 1981, said there was an "oral agreement" to allow the sale of "spare parts" to Iran. This was based on an "understanding" with Secretary Alexander Haig (which a Haig adviser denied). This account was confirmed by a former senior US diplomat with a few modifications. The diplomat claimed that "[Ariel] Sharon violated it, and Haig backed away". A former "high-level" Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) official who saw reports of arms sales to Iran by Israel in the early 1980s estimated that the total was about $2 billion a year—but also said, "The degree to which it was sanctioned I don't know."
On 17 June 1985, National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane wrote a National Security Decision Directive which called for the US to begin a rapprochement with the Islamic Republic of Iran. The paper read:
Dynamic political evolution is taking place inside Iran. Instability caused by the pressures of the Iraq-Iran war, economic deterioration and regime in-fighting create the potential for major changes inside Iran. The Soviet Union is better positioned than the U.S. to exploit and benefit from any power struggle that results in changes from the Iranian regime [...]. The U.S. should encourage Western allies and friends to help Iran meet its import requirements so as to reduce the attractiveness of Soviet assistance [...]. This includes provision of selected military equipment.
Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger was highly negative, writing on his copy of McFarlane's paper: "This is almost too absurd to comment on [...] like asking Qaddafi to Washington for a cozy chat." Secretary of State George Shultz was also opposed, stating that having designated Iran a State Sponsor of Terrorism in January 1984, how could the US possibly sell arms to Iran? Only the Director of the CIA William J. Casey supported McFarlane's plan to start selling arms to Iran.
In early July 1985, the historian Michael Ledeen, a consultant of National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, requested assistance from Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres for help in the sale of arms to Iran. Having talked to an Israeli diplomat David Kimche and Ledeen, McFarlane learned that the Iranians were prepared to have Hezbollah release US hostages in Lebanon in exchange for Israelis shipping Iran US weapons. Having been designated a State Sponsor of Terrorism since January 1984, Iran was in the midst of the Iran–Iraq War and could find few Western nations willing to supply it with weapons. The idea behind the plan was for Israel to ship weapons through an intermediary (identified as Manucher Ghorbanifar) to the Islamic Republic as a way of aiding a supposedly moderate, politically influential faction within the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini who was believed to be seeking a rapprochement with the US; after the transaction, the US would reimburse Israel with the same weapons, while receiving monetary benefits. McFarlane in a memo to Shultz and Weinberger wrote:
The short term dimension concerns the seven hostages; the long term dimension involves the establishment of a private dialogue with Iranian officials on the broader relations [...]. They sought specifically the delivery from Israel of 100 TOW missiles [...].
The plan was discussed with President Reagan on 18 July 1985 and again on 6 August 1985. Shultz at the latter meeting warned Reagan that "we were just falling into the arms-for-hostages business and we shouldn't do it".
The Americans believed that there was a moderate faction in the Islamic Republic headed by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the powerful speaker of the Majlis who was seen as a leading potential successor to Khomeini and who was alleged to want a rapprochement with the US. The Americans believed that Rafsanjani had the power to order Hezbollah to free the US hostages and establishing a relationship with him by selling Iran arms would ultimately place Iran back within the US sphere of influence. It remains unclear if Rafsanjani really wanted a rapprochement with the US or was just deceiving Reagan administration officials who were willing to believe that he was a moderate who would effect a rapprochement. Rafsanjani, whose nickname is "the Shark", was described by the UK journalist Patrick Brogan as a man of great charm and formidable intelligence known for his subtlety and ruthlessness whose motives in the Iran–Contra affair remain completely mysterious. The Israeli government required that the sale of arms meet high-level approval from the US government, and, when McFarlane convinced them that the US government approved the sale, Israel obliged by agreeing to sell the arms.
In 1985, President Reagan entered Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for colon cancer surgery. Reagan's recovery was nothing short of miserable, as the 74-year-old President admitted having little sleep for days in addition to his immense physical discomfort. While doctors seemed to be confident that the surgery was successful, the discovery of his localized cancer was a daunting realization for Reagan. From seeing the recovery process of other patients, as well as medical “experts” on television predicting his death to be soon, Reagan's typical optimistic outlook was dampened. These factors were bound to contribute to psychological distress in the midst of an already distressing situation. Additionally, Reagan's invocation of the 25th Amendment prior to the surgery was a risky and unprecedented decision that smoothly flew under the radar for the duration of the complex situation. While it only lasted slightly longer than the length of the procedure (approximately seven hours and 54 minutes), this temporary transfer of power was never formally recognized by the White House. It was later revealed that this decision was made on the grounds that "Mr. Reagan and his advisors did not want his actions to establish a definition of incapacitation that would bind future presidents." Reagan expressed this transfer of power in two identical letters that were sent to the speaker of the House of Representatives, Representative Tip O'Neill, and the president pro tempore of the senate, Senator Strom Thurmond.
While the President was recovering in the hospital, McFarlane met with him and told him that representatives from Israel had contacted the National Security Agency to pass on confidential information from what Reagan later described as the "moderate" Iranian faction headed by Rafsanjani opposed to the Ayatollah's hardline anti-US policies. The visit from McFarlane in Reagan's hospital room was the first visit from an administration official outside of Donald Regan since the surgery. The meeting took place five days after the surgery and only three days after doctors gave the news that his polyp had been malignant. The three participants of this meeting had very different recollections of what was discussed during its 23-minute duration. Months later, Reagan even stated that he "had no recollection of a meeting in the hospital in July with McFarlane and that he had no notes which would show such a meeting". This does not come as a surprise considering the possible short and long-term effects of anesthesia on patients above the age of 60, in addition to his already weakened physical and mental state.
According to Reagan, these Iranians sought to establish a quiet relationship with the US, before establishing formal relationships upon the death of the aging Ayatollah. In Reagan's account, McFarlane told Reagan that the Iranians, to demonstrate their seriousness, offered to persuade the Hezbollah militants to release the seven US hostages. McFarlane met with the Israeli intermediaries; Reagan claimed that he allowed this because he believed that establishing relations with a strategically located country, and preventing the Soviet Union from doing the same, was a beneficial move. Although Reagan claims that the arms sales were to a "moderate" faction of Iranians, the Walsh Iran–Contra Report states that the arms sales were "to Iran" itself, which was under the control of the Ayatollah.
Following the Israeli–US meeting, Israel requested permission from the US to sell a small number of BGM-71 TOW antitank missiles to Iran, claiming that this would aid the "moderate" Iranian faction, by demonstrating that the group actually had high-level connections to the US government. Reagan initially rejected the plan, until Israel sent information to the US showing that the "moderate" Iranians were opposed to terrorism and had fought against it. Now having a reason to trust the "moderates", Reagan approved the transaction, which was meant to be between Israel and the "moderates" in Iran, with the US reimbursing Israel. In his 1990 autobiography An American Life, Reagan claimed that he was deeply committed to securing the release of the hostages; it was this compassion that supposedly motivated his support for the arms initiatives. The president requested that the "moderate" Iranians do everything in their capability to free the hostages held by Hezbollah. Reagan always publicly insisted after the scandal broke in late 1986 that the purpose behind the arms-for-hostages trade was to establish a working relationship with the "moderate" faction associated with Rafsanjani to facilitate the reestablishment of the US–Iranian alliance after the soon to be expected death of Khomeini, to end the Iran–Iraq War and end Iranian support for Islamic terrorism while downplaying the importance of freeing the hostages in Lebanon as a secondary issue. By contrast, when testifying before the Tower Commission, Reagan declared that hostage issue was the main reason for selling arms to Iran.
The following arms were supplied to Iran:
The first arms sales to Iran began in 1981, though the official paper trail has them beginning in 1985 (see above). On 20 August 1985, Israel sent 96 US-made TOW missiles to Iran through an arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. Subsequently, on 14 September 1985, 408 more TOW missiles were delivered. On 15 September 1985, following the second delivery, Reverend Benjamin Weir was released by his captors, the Islamic Jihad Organization. On 24 November 1985, 18 Hawk antiaircraft missiles were delivered.
Robert McFarlane resigned on 4 December 1985, stating that he wanted to spend more time with his family, and was replaced by Admiral John Poindexter. Two days later, Reagan met with his advisors at the White House, where a new plan was introduced. This called for a slight change in the arms transactions: instead of the weapons going to the "moderate" Iranian group, they would go to "moderate" Iranian army leaders. As each weapons delivery was made from Israel by air, hostages held by Hezbollah would be released. Israel would continue to be reimbursed by the US for the weapons. Though staunchly opposed by Secretary of State George Shultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, the plan was authorized by Reagan, who stated that, "We were not trading arms for hostages, nor were we negotiating with terrorists". In his notes of a meeting held in the White House on 7 December 1985, Weinberger wrote he told Reagan that this plan was illegal, writing:
I argued strongly that we have an embargo that makes arms sales to Iran illegal and President couldn't violate it and that 'washing' transactions through Israel wouldn't make it legal. Shultz, Don Regan agreed.
Weinberger's notes have Reagan saying he "could answer charges of illegality but he couldn't answer charge [sic] that 'big strong President Reagan passed up a chance to free hostages'." Now retired National Security Advisor McFarlane flew to London to meet with Israelis and Ghorbanifar in an attempt to persuade the Iranian to use his influence to release the hostages before any arms transactions occurred; this plan was rejected by Ghorbanifar.
On the day of McFarlane's resignation, Oliver North, a military aide to the US National Security Council (NSC), proposed a new plan for selling arms to Iran, which included two major adjustments: instead of selling arms through Israel, the sale was to be direct at a markup; and a portion of the proceeds would go to Contras, or Nicaraguan paramilitary fighters waging guerrilla warfare against the Sandinista government, claiming power after an election full of irregularities. The dealings with the Iranians were conducted via the NSC with Admiral Poindexter and his deputy Colonel North, with the US historians Malcolm Byrne and Peter Kornbluh writing that Poindexter granted much power to North "who made the most of the situation, often deciding important matters on his own, striking outlandish deals with the Iranians, and acting in the name of the president on issues that were far beyond his competence. All of these activities continued to take place within the framework of the president's broad authorization. Until the press reported on the existence of the operation, nobody in the administration questioned the authority of Poindexter's and North's team to implement the president's decisions". North proposed a $15 million markup, while contracted arms broker Ghorbanifar added a 41-percent markup of his own. Other members of the NSC were in favor of North's plan; with large support, Poindexter authorized it without notifying President Reagan, and it went into effect. At first, the Iranians refused to buy the arms at the inflated price because of the excessive markup imposed by North and Ghorbanifar. They eventually relented, and, in February 1986, 1,000 TOW missiles were shipped to the country. From May to November 1986, there were additional shipments of miscellaneous weapons and parts.
Both the sale of weapons to Iran and the funding of the Contras attempted to circumvent not only stated administration policy, but also the Boland Amendment. Administration officials argued that, regardless of Congress restricting funds for the Contras, or any affair, the President (or in this case the administration) could carry on by seeking alternative means of funding such as private entities and foreign governments. Funding from one foreign country, Brunei, was botched when North's secretary, Fawn Hall, transposed the numbers of North's Swiss bank account number. A Swiss businessperson, suddenly $10 million richer, alerted the authorities of the mistake. The money was eventually returned to the Sultan of Brunei, with interest.
On 7 January 1986, John Poindexter proposed to Reagan a modification of the approved plan: instead of negotiating with the "moderate" Iranian political group, the US would negotiate with "moderate" members of the Iranian government. Poindexter told Reagan that Ghorbanifar had important connections within the Iranian government, so, with the hope of the release of the hostages, Reagan approved this plan as well. Throughout February 1986, weapons were shipped directly to Iran by the US (as part of Oliver North's plan), but none of the hostages were released. Retired National Security Advisor McFarlane conducted another international voyage, this one to Tehran—bringing with him a gift of a Bible with a handwritten inscription by Ronald Reagan and, according to George W. Cave, a cake baked in the shape of a key. Howard Teicher described the cake as a joke between North and Ghorbanifar. McFarlane met directly with Iranian officials associated with Rafsanjani, who sought to establish US–Iranian relations in an attempt to free the four remaining hostages.
The US delegation comprised McFarlane, North, Cave (a retired CIA officer who served as the group's translator), Teicher, Israeli diplomat Amiram Nir, and a CIA communicator. They arrived in Tehran in an Israeli plane carrying forged Irish passports on 25 May 1986. This meeting also failed. Much to McFarlane's disgust, he did not meet ministers, and instead met in his words "third and fourth level officials". At one point, an angry McFarlane shouted: "As I am a Minister, I expect to meet with decision-makers. Otherwise, you can work with my staff." The Iranians requested concessions such as Israel's withdrawal from the Golan Heights, which the US rejected. More importantly, McFarlane refused to ship spare parts for the Hawk missiles until the Iranians had Hezbollah release the US hostages, whereas the Iranians wanted to reverse that sequence with the spare parts being shipped first before the hostages were freed. The differing negotiating positions led to McFarlane's mission going home after four days. After the failure of the secret visit to Tehran, McFarlane advised Reagan not to talk to the Iranians anymore, advice that was disregarded.
On 26 July 1986, Hezbollah freed the US hostage Father Lawrence Jenco, former head of Catholic Relief Services in Lebanon. Following this, William J. Casey, head of the CIA, requested that the US authorize sending a shipment of small missile parts to Iranian military forces as a way of expressing gratitude. Casey also justified this request by stating that the contact in the Iranian government might otherwise lose face or be executed, and hostages might be killed. Reagan authorized the shipment to ensure that those potential events would not occur. North used this release to persuade Reagan to switch over to a "sequential" policy of freeing the hostages one by one, instead of the "all or nothing" policy that the Americans had pursued until then. By this point, the Americans had grown tired of Ghorbanifar who had proven himself a dishonest intermediary who played off both sides to his own commercial advantage. In August 1986, the Americans had established a new contact in the Iranian government, Ali Hashemi Bahramani, the nephew of Rafsanjani and an officer in the Revolutionary Guard. The fact that the Revolutionary Guard was deeply involved in international terrorism seemed only to attract the Americans more to Bahramani, who was seen as someone with the influence to change Iran's policies. Richard Secord, a US arms dealer, who was being used as a contact with Iran, wrote to North: "My judgment is that we have opened up a new and probably better channel into Iran". North was so impressed with Bahramani that he arranged for him to secretly visit Washington DC and gave him a guided tour at midnight of the White House.
North frequently met with Bahramani in the summer and autumn of 1986 in West Germany, discussing arms sales to Iran, the freeing of hostages held by Hezbollah and how best to overthrow President Saddam Hussein of Iraq and the establishment of "a non-hostile regime in Baghdad". In September and October 1986, three more Americans—Frank Reed, Joseph Cicippio, and Edward Tracy—were abducted in Lebanon by a separate terrorist group, who referred to them simply as "G.I. Joe", after the popular US toy. The reasons for their abduction are unknown, although it is speculated that they were kidnapped to replace the freed Americans. One more original hostage, David Jacobsen, was later released. The captors promised to release the remaining two, but the release never happened.
During a secret meeting in Frankfurt in October 1986, North told Bahramani that: "Saddam Hussein must go". North also claimed that Reagan had told him to tell Bahramani that: "Saddam Hussein is an asshole." Behramani during a secret meeting in Mainz informed North that Rafsanjani "for his own politics [...] decided to get all the groups involved and give them a role to play". Thus, all the factions in the Iranian government would be jointly responsible for the talks with the Americans and "there would not be an internal war". This demand of Behramani caused much dismay on the US side as it made clear to them that they would not be dealing solely with a "moderate" faction in the Islamic Republic, as the Americans liked to pretend to themselves, but rather with all the factions in the Iranian government—including those who were very much involved in terrorism. Despite this, the talks were not broken off.
After a leak by Mehdi Hashemi, a senior official in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Lebanese magazine Ash-Shiraa exposed the arrangement on 3 November 1986. According to Seymour Hersh, an unnamed former military officer told him that the leak may have been orchestrated by a covert team led by Arthur S. Moreau Jr., assistant to the chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, due to fears the scheme had grown out of control.
This was the first public report of the weapons-for-hostages deal. The operation was discovered only after an airlift of guns (Corporate Air Services HPF821) was downed over Nicaragua. Eugene Hasenfus, who was captured by Nicaraguan authorities after surviving the plane crash, initially alleged in a press conference on Nicaraguan soil that two of his coworkers, Max Gomez and Ramon Medina, worked for the CIA. He later said he did not know whether they did or not. The Iranian government confirmed the Ash-Shiraa story, and, 10 days after the story was first published, President Reagan appeared on national television from the Oval Office on 13 November, stating:
My purpose was [...] to send a signal that the United States was prepared to replace the animosity between [the US and Iran] with a new relationship [...]. At the same time we undertook this initiative, we made clear that Iran must oppose all forms of international terrorism as a condition of progress in our relationship. The most significant step which Iran could take, we indicated, would be to use its influence in Lebanon to secure the release of all hostages held there.
The scandal was compounded when Oliver North destroyed or hid pertinent documents between 21 November and 25 November 1986. During North's trial in 1989, his secretary, Fawn Hall, testified extensively about helping North alter and shred official US National Security Council (NSC) documents from the White House. According to The New York Times, enough documents were put into a government shredder to jam it. Hall also testified that she smuggled classified documents out of the Old Executive Office Building by concealing them in her boots and dress. North's explanation for destroying some documents was to protect the lives of individuals involved in Iran and Contra operations. It was not until 1993, years after the trial, that North's notebooks were made public, and only after the National Security Archive and Public Citizen sued the Office of the Independent Counsel under the Freedom of Information Act.
What is involved is that in the course of the arms transfers, which involved the United States providing the arms to Israel and Israel in turn transferring the arms -- in effect, selling the arms to representatives of Iran. Certain monies which were received in the transaction between representatives of Israel and representatives of Iran were taken and made available to the forces in Central America, which are opposing the Sandinista government there.
– U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese, White House news conference on November 25, 1986
During the trial, North testified that on 21, 22 or 24 November, he witnessed Poindexter destroy what may have been the only signed copy of a presidential covert-action finding that sought to authorize CIA participation in the November 1985 Hawk missile shipment to Iran. U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese admitted on 25 November that profits from weapons sales to Iran were made available to assist the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. On the same day, John Poindexter resigned, and President Reagan fired Oliver North. Poindexter was replaced by Frank Carlucci on 2 December 1986.
When the story broke, many legal and constitutional scholars expressed dismay that the NSC, which was supposed to be just an advisory body to assist the President with formulating foreign policy, had "gone operational" by becoming an executive body covertly executing foreign policy on its own. The National Security Act of 1947, which created the NSC, gave it the vague right to perform "such other functions and duties related to the intelligence as the National Security Council may from time to time direct." However, the NSC had usually, although not always, acted as an advisory agency until the Reagan administration when the NSC had "gone operational", a situation that was condemned by both the Tower Commission and by Congress as a departure from the norm. The American historian John Canham-Clyne asserted that Iran-Contra affair and the NSC "going operational" were not departures from the norm, but were the logical and natural consequence of existence of the "national security state", the plethora of shadowy government agencies with multi-million dollar budgets operating with little oversight from Congress, the courts or the media, and for whom upholding national security justified almost everything. Canham-Clyne argued that for the "national security state", the law was an obstacle to be surmounted rather than something to uphold and that the Iran-Contra affair was just "business as usual", something he asserted that the media missed by focusing on the NSC having "gone operational."
In Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981–1987, journalist Bob Woodward chronicled the role of the CIA in facilitating the transfer of funds from the Iran arms sales to the Nicaraguan Contras spearheaded by Oliver North. According to Woodward, then-Director of the CIA William J. Casey admitted to him in February 1987 that he was aware of the diversion of funds to the Contras. The controversial admission occurred while Casey was hospitalized for a stroke, and, according to his wife, was unable to communicate. On 6 May 1987, William Casey died the day after Congress began public hearings on Iran-Contra. Independent Counsel, Lawrence Walsh later wrote: "Independent Counsel obtained no documentary evidence showing Casey knew about or approved the diversion. The only direct testimony linking Casey to early knowledge of the diversion came from [Oliver] North." Gust Avrakodos, who was responsible for the arms supplies to the Afghans at this time, was aware of the operation as well and strongly opposed it, in particular the diversion of funds allotted to the Afghan operation. According to his Middle Eastern experts, the operation was pointless because the moderates in Iran were not in a position to challenge the fundamentalists. However, he was overruled by Clair George.
On 25 November 1986, President Reagan announced the creation of a Special Review Board to look into the matter; the following day, he appointed former Senator John Tower, former Secretary of State Edmund Muskie, and former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft to serve as members. This Presidential Commission took effect on 1 December and became known as the Tower Commission. The main objectives of the commission were to inquire into "the circumstances surrounding the Iran-Contra matter, other case studies that might reveal strengths and weaknesses in the operation of the National Security Council system under stress, and the manner in which that system has served eight different presidents since its inception in 1947". The Tower Commission was the first presidential commission to review and evaluate the National Security Council.
President Reagan appeared before the Tower Commission on 2 December 1986, to answer questions regarding his involvement in the affair. When asked about his role in authorizing the arms deals, he first stated that he had; later, he appeared to contradict himself by stating that he had no recollection of doing so. In his 1990 autobiography, An American Life, Reagan acknowledges authorizing the shipments to Israel.
The report published by the Tower Commission was delivered to the president on 26 February 1987. The commission had interviewed 80 witnesses to the scheme, including Reagan, and two of the arms trade middlemen: Manucher Ghorbanifar and Adnan Khashoggi. The 200-page report was the most comprehensive of any released, criticizing the actions of Oliver North, John Poindexter, Caspar Weinberger, and others. It determined that President Reagan did not have knowledge of the extent of the program, especially about the diversion of funds to the Contras, although it argued that the president ought to have had better control of the National Security Council staff. The report heavily criticized Reagan for not properly supervising his subordinates or being aware of their actions. A major result of the Tower Commission was the consensus that Reagan should have listened to his National Security Advisor more, thereby placing more power in the hands of that chair.
In January 1987, Congress announced it was opening an investigation into the Iran-Contra affair. Depending upon one's political perspective, the Congressional investigation into the Iran-Contra affair was either an attempt by the legislative arm to gain control over an out-of-control executive arm, a partisan "witch hunt" by the Democrats against a Republican administration or a feeble effort by Congress that did far too little to rein in the "imperial presidency" that had run amok by breaking numerous laws. The Democratic-controlled United States Congress issued its own report on 18 November 1987, stating that "If the president did not know what his national security advisers were doing, he should have." The Congressional report wrote that the president bore "ultimate responsibility" for wrongdoing by his aides, and his administration exhibited "secrecy, deception and disdain for the law". It also read that "the central remaining question is the role of the President in the Iran-Contra affair. On this critical point, the shredding of documents by Poindexter, North and others, and the death of Casey, leave the record incomplete".
Reagan expressed regret with regard to the situation in a nationally televised address from the Oval Office on 4 March 1987, and in two other speeches. Reagan had not spoken to the American people directly for three months amidst the scandal, and he offered the following explanation for his silence:
The reason I haven't spoken to you before now is this: You deserve the truth. And as frustrating as the waiting has been, I felt it was improper to come to you with sketchy reports, or possibly even erroneous statements, which would then have to be corrected, creating even more doubt and confusion. There's been enough of that.
Reagan then took full responsibility for the acts committed:
First, let me say I take full responsibility for my own actions and for those of my administration. As angry as I may be about activities undertaken without my knowledge, I am still accountable for those activities. As disappointed as I may be in some who served me, I'm still the one who must answer to the American people for this behavior.
Finally, the president acknowledged that his previous assertions that the U.S. did not trade arms for hostages were incorrect:
A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not. As the Tower board reported, what began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages. This runs counter to my own beliefs, to administration policy, and to the original strategy we had in mind.
Reagan's role in these transactions is still not definitively known. It is unclear exactly what Reagan knew and when, and whether the arms sales were motivated by his desire to save the U.S. hostages. Oliver North wrote that "Ronald Reagan knew of and approved a great deal of what went on with both the Iranian initiative and private efforts on behalf of the contras and he received regular, detailed briefings on both...I have no doubt that he was told about the use of residuals for the Contras, and that he approved it. Enthusiastically." Handwritten notes by Defense Secretary Weinberger indicate that the President was aware of potential hostage transfers with Iran, as well as the sale of Hawk and TOW missiles to what he was told were "moderate elements" within Iran. Notes taken by Weinberger on 7 December 1985 record that Reagan said that "he could answer charges of illegality but he couldn't answer charge that 'big strong President Reagan passed up a chance to free hostages'". The Republican-written "Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair" made the following conclusion:
There is some question and dispute about precisely the level at which he chose to follow the operation details. There is no doubt, however, ... [that] the President set the US policy towards Nicaragua, with few if any ambiguities, and then left subordinates more or less free to implement it.
Domestically, the affair precipitated a drop in President Reagan's popularity. His approval ratings suffered "the largest single drop for any U.S. president in history", from 67% to 46% in November 1986, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll. The "Teflon President", as Reagan was nicknamed by critics, survived the affair, however, and his approval rating recovered.
Internationally, the damage was more severe. Magnus Ranstorp wrote, "U.S. willingness to engage in concessions with Iran and the Hezbollah not only signaled to its adversaries that hostage-taking was an extremely useful instrument in extracting political and financial concessions for the West but also undermined any credibility of U.S. criticism of other states' deviation from the principles of no-negotiation and no concession to terrorists and their demands."
In Iran, Mehdi Hashemi, the leaker of the scandal, was executed in 1987, allegedly for activities unrelated to the scandal. Though Hashemi made a full video confession to numerous serious charges, some observers find the coincidence of his leak and the subsequent prosecution highly suspicious.
In 1994, just five years after leaving office, President Reagan announced that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Lawrence Walsh, who was appointed Independent Counsel in 1986 to investigate the transactions later implied Reagan's declining health may have played a role in his handling of the situation. However, Walsh did note that he believed President Reagan's "instincts for the country's good were right".
The Independent Counsel, Lawrence E. Walsh, chose not to re-try North or Poindexter. In total, several dozen people were investigated by Walsh's office.
On 27 July 1986, Israeli counterterrorism expert Amiram Nir briefed Vice President Bush in Jerusalem about the weapon sales to Iran.
In an interview with The Washington Post in August 1987, Bush stated that he was denied information about the operation and did not know about the diversion of funds. Bush said that he had not advised Reagan to reject the initiative because he had not heard strong objections to it. The Post quoted him as stating, "We were not in the loop." The following month, Bush recounted meeting Nir in his September 1987 autobiography Looking Forward, stating that he began to develop misgivings about the Iran initiative. He wrote that he did not learn the full extent of the Iran dealings until he was briefed by Senator David Durenberger regarding a Senate inquiry into them. Bush added the briefing with Durenberger left him with the feeling he had "been deliberately excluded from key meetings involving details of the Iran operation".
In January 1988 during a live interview with Bush on CBS Evening News, Dan Rather told Bush that his unwillingness to speak about the scandal led "people to say 'either George Bush was irrelevant or he was ineffective, he set himself outside of the loop.'" Bush replied, "May I explain what I mean by 'out of the loop'? No operational role."
Although Bush publicly insisted that he knew little about the operation, his statements were contradicted by excerpts of his diary released by the White House in January 1993. An entry dated 5 November 1986 stated: "On the news at this time is the question of the hostages... I'm one of the few people that know fully the details, and there is a lot of flak and misinformation out there. It is not a subject we can talk about..."
On 24 December 1992, after he had been defeated for reelection, lame duck President George H. W. Bush pardoned five administration officials who had been found guilty on charges relating to the affair. They were:
Bush also pardoned Caspar Weinberger, who had not yet come to trial. Attorney General William P. Barr advised the President on these pardons, especially that of Caspar Weinberger.
In response to these Bush pardons, Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh, who headed the investigation of Reagan administration officials' criminal conduct in the Iran-Contra scandal, stated that "the Iran-Contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed." Walsh noted that in issuing the pardons Bush appears to have been preempting being implicated himself in the crimes of Iran-Contra by evidence that was to come to light during the Weinberger trial, and noted that there was a pattern of "deception and obstruction" by Bush, Weinberger and other senior Reagan administration officials.
The Iran-Contra affair and the ensuing deception to protect senior administration officials (including President Reagan) was cast as an example of post-truth politics by Malcolm Byrne of George Washington University.
The 100th Congress formed a Joint Committee of the United States Congress (Congressional Committees Investigating The Iran-Contra Affair) and held hearings in mid-1987. Transcripts were published as: Iran-Contra Investigation: Joint Hearings Before the Senate Select Committee on Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan Opposition and the House Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran (U.S. GPO 1987–88). A closed Executive Session heard classified testimony from North and Poindexter; this transcript was published in a redacted format. The joint committee's final report was Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair With Supplemental, Minority, and Additional Views (U.S. GPO 17 November 1987). The records of the committee are at the National Archives, but many are still non-public.
Testimony was also heard before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and can be found in the Congressional Record for those bodies. The Senate Intelligence Committee produced two reports: Preliminary Inquiry into the Sale of Arms to Iran and Possible Diversion of Funds to the Nicaraguan Resistance (2 February 1987) and Were Relevant Documents Withheld from the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair? (June 1989).
The Tower Commission Report was published as the Report of the President's Special Review Board (U.S. GPO 26 February 1987). It was also published as The Tower Commission Report by Bantam Books (ISBN 0-553-26968-2).
The Office of Independent Counsel/Walsh investigation produced four interim reports to Congress. Its final report was published as the Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters. Walsh's records are available at the National Archives. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Iran–Contra affair (Persian: ماجرای ایران-کنترا; Spanish: Caso Irán-Contra), often referred to as the Iran–Contra scandal, was a political scandal in the United States that occurred during the second term of the Reagan administration. Between 1981 and 1986, senior administration officials secretly facilitated the illegal sale of arms to Iran, who was subjected to an arms embargo at the time. The administration hoped to use the proceeds of the arms sale to fund the Contras, an anti-Sandinista rebel group in Nicaragua. Under the Boland Amendment, further funding of the Contras by legislative appropriations was prohibited by Congress, but the Reagan administration figured out a loophole by secretively using non-appropriated funds instead. The Iran–Contra affair is sometimes referred to as the McFarlane affair in Iran.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The official justification for the arms shipments was that they were part of an operation to free seven US hostages being held in Lebanon by Hezbollah, an Islamist paramilitary group with Iranian ties connected to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The idea to exchange arms for hostages was proposed by Manucher Ghorbanifar, an expatriate Iranian arms dealer. Some within the Reagan administration hoped the sales would influence Iran to get Hezbollah to release the hostages.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In late 1985, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council (NSC) diverted a portion of the proceeds from the Iranian weapon sales to fund the Contras, a group of anti-Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) rebels, in their insurgency against the socialist government of Nicaragua. North later claimed that Ghorbanifar had given him the idea for diverting profits from BGM-71 TOW and MIM-23 Hawk missile sales to Iran to the Nicaraguan Contras. While President Ronald Reagan was a vocal supporter of the Contra cause, the evidence is disputed as to whether he personally authorized the diversion of funds to the Contras. Handwritten notes taken by Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger on 7 December 1985 indicate that Reagan was aware of potential hostage transfers with Iran, by Israel, as well as the sale of Hawk and TOW missiles to \"moderate elements\" within that country. Weinberger wrote that Reagan said \"he could answer charges of illegality but he couldn't answer charge [sic] that 'big strong President Reagan passed up a chance to free hostages.'\" After the weapon sales were revealed in November 1986, Reagan appeared on national television and stated that the weapons transfers had indeed occurred, but that the US did not trade arms for hostages. The investigation was impeded when large volumes of documents relating to the affair were destroyed or withheld from investigators by Reagan administration officials. On 4 March 1987, Reagan made a further nationally televised address, saying he was taking full responsibility for the affair and stating that \"what began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages.\"",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The affair was investigated by Congress and by the three-person, Reagan-appointed Tower Commission. Neither investigation found evidence that President Reagan himself knew of the extent of the multiple programs. Additionally, US Deputy Attorney General Lawrence Walsh was appointed Independent Counsel in December 1986 to investigate possible criminal actions by officials involved in the scheme. In the end, several dozen administration officials were indicted, including then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Eleven convictions resulted, some of which were vacated on appeal.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The rest of those indicted or convicted were all pardoned in the final days of the presidency of George H. W. Bush, who had been vice president at the time of the affair. Former Independent Counsel Walsh noted that, in issuing the pardons, Bush appeared to have been preempting being implicated himself by evidence that came to light during the Weinberger trial and noted that there was a pattern of \"deception and obstruction\" by Bush, Weinberger, and other senior Reagan administration officials. Walsh submitted his final report on 4 August 1993 and later wrote an account of his experiences as counsel, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The US was the largest seller of arms to Iran under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and the vast majority of the weapons that the Islamic Republic of Iran inherited in January 1979 were US-made. To maintain this arsenal, Iran required a steady supply of spare parts to replace those broken and worn out. After Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and took 52 Americans hostage, US President Jimmy Carter imposed an arms embargo on Iran. After Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980, Iran desperately needed weapons and spare parts for its current weapons. After Ronald Reagan took office as president on 20 January 1981, he vowed to continue Carter's policy of blocking arms sales to Iran on the grounds that Iran supported terrorism.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "A group of senior Reagan administration officials in the Senior Interdepartmental Group conducted a secret study on 21 July 1981 and concluded that the arms embargo was ineffective because Iran could always buy arms and spare parts for its US weapons elsewhere, while, at the same time, the arms embargo opened the door for Iran to fall into the Soviet sphere of influence as the Kremlin could sell Iran weapons if the US would not. The conclusion was that the US should start selling Iran arms as soon as it was politically possible in order to keep Iran from falling into the Soviet sphere of influence. At the same time, the openly declared goal of Ayatollah Khomeini to export his Islamic revolution all over the Middle East and overthrow the governments of Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the other states around the Persian Gulf led to the Americans perceiving Khomeini as a major threat to the US.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In the spring of 1983, the US launched Operation Staunch, a wide-ranging diplomatic effort to persuade other nations all over the world not to sell arms or spare parts for weapons to Iran. This was at least part of the reason the Iran–Contra affair proved so humiliating for the US when the story first broke in November 1986 that the US itself was selling arms to Iran.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "At the same time that the US government was considering its options on selling arms to Iran, Contra militants based in Honduras were waging a guerrilla war to topple the FSLN revolutionary government of Nicaragua. Almost from the time he took office in 1981, a major goal of the Reagan administration was the overthrow of the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua and to support the Contra rebels. The Reagan administration's policy toward Nicaragua produced a major clash between the executive and legislative branches as Congress sought to limit, if not curb altogether, the ability of the White House to support the Contras. Direct US funding of the Contras insurgency was made illegal through the Boland Amendment, the name given to three US legislative amendments between 1982 and 1984 aimed at limiting US government assistance to Contra militants. By 1984, funding for the Contras had run out; and, in October of that year, a total ban came into effect. The second Boland Amendment, in effect from 3 October 1984 to 3 December 1985, stated:",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "During the fiscal year 1985 no funds available to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense or any other agency or entity of the United States involved in intelligence activities may be obligated or expended for the purpose of or which may have the effect of supporting directly or indirectly military or paramilitary operations in Nicaragua by any nation, organization, group, movement, or individual.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In violation of the Boland Amendment, senior officials of the Reagan administration continued to secretly arm and train the Contras and provide arms to Iran, an operation they called \"the Enterprise\". Given the Contras' heavy dependence on US military and financial support, the second Boland Amendment threatened to break the Contra movement and led to President Reagan ordering in 1984 that the NSC \"keep the Contras together 'body and soul'\", no matter what Congress voted for.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "A major legal debate at the center of the Iran–Contra affair concerned the question of whether the NSC was one of the \"any other agency or entity of the United States involved in intelligence activities\" covered by the Boland Amendment. The Reagan administration argued it was not, and many in Congress argued that it was. The majority of constitutional scholars have asserted the NSC did indeed fall within the purview of the second Boland Amendment, though the amendment did not mention the NSC by name. The broader constitutional question at stake was the power of Congress versus the power of the presidency. The Reagan administration argued that, because the constitution assigned the right to conduct foreign policy to the executive, its efforts to overthrow the government of Nicaragua were a presidential prerogative that Congress had no right to try to halt via the Boland Amendments. By contrast, Congressional leaders argued that the constitution had assigned Congress control of the budget, and Congress had every right to use that power not to fund projects like attempting to overthrow the government of Nicaragua that they disapproved of. As part of the effort to circumvent the Boland Amendment, the NSC established \"the Enterprise\", an arms-smuggling network headed by a retired US Air Force officer turned arms dealer Richard Secord that supplied arms to the Contras. It was ostensibly a private sector operation, but in fact was controlled by the NSC. To fund \"the Enterprise\", the Reagan administration was constantly on the look-out for funds that came from outside the US government in order not to explicitly violate the letter of the Boland Amendment, though the efforts to find alternative funding for the Contras violated the spirit of the Boland Amendment. Ironically, military aid to the Contras was reinstated with Congressional consent in October 1986, a month before the scandal broke.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In his 1995 memoir My American Journey, General Colin Powell, the US Deputy National Security Advisor, wrote that the weapons sales to Iran were used \"for purposes prohibited by the elected representatives of the American people [...] in a way that avoided accountability to the President and Congress. It was wrong.\"",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In 1985, Manuel Noriega offered to help the US by allowing Panama as a staging ground for operations against the FSLN and offering to train Contras in Panama, but this would later be overshadowed by the Iran–Contra affair itself.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "At around the same time, the Soviet Bloc also engaged in arms deals with ideologically opponent buyers, possibly involving some of the same players as the Iran–Contra affair. In 1986, a complex operation involving East Germany's Stasi and the Danish-registered ship Pia Vesta ultimately aimed to sell Soviet arms and military vehicles to South Africa's Armscor, using various intermediaries to distance themselves from the deal. Manuel Noriega of Panama was apparently one of these intermediaries but backed out on the deal as the ship and weapons were seized at a Panamanian port. The Pia Vesta led to a small controversy, as the Panama and Peru governments in 1986 accused the US and each other of being involved in the East Germany-originated shipment.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "As reported in The New York Times in 1991, \"continuing allegations that Reagan campaign officials made a deal with the Iranian Government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the fall of 1980\" led to \"limited investigations\". However \"limited\", those investigations established that \"Soon after taking office in 1981, the Reagan Administration secretly and abruptly changed United States policy.\" Secret Israeli arms sales and shipments to Iran began in that year, even as, in public, \"the Reagan Administration\" presented a different face, and \"aggressively promoted a public campaign [...] to stop worldwide transfers of military goods to Iran\". The New York Times explains: \"Iran at that time was in dire need of arms and spare parts for its American-made arsenal to defend itself against Iraq, which had attacked it in September 1980\", while \"Israel [a US ally] was interested in keeping the war between Iran and Iraq going to ensure that these two potential enemies remained preoccupied with each other\". Major General Avraham Tamir, a high-ranking Israeli Defense Ministry official in 1981, said there was an \"oral agreement\" to allow the sale of \"spare parts\" to Iran. This was based on an \"understanding\" with Secretary Alexander Haig (which a Haig adviser denied). This account was confirmed by a former senior US diplomat with a few modifications. The diplomat claimed that \"[Ariel] Sharon violated it, and Haig backed away\". A former \"high-level\" Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) official who saw reports of arms sales to Iran by Israel in the early 1980s estimated that the total was about $2 billion a year—but also said, \"The degree to which it was sanctioned I don't know.\"",
"title": "Arms sales to Iran"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "On 17 June 1985, National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane wrote a National Security Decision Directive which called for the US to begin a rapprochement with the Islamic Republic of Iran. The paper read:",
"title": "Arms sales to Iran"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Dynamic political evolution is taking place inside Iran. Instability caused by the pressures of the Iraq-Iran war, economic deterioration and regime in-fighting create the potential for major changes inside Iran. The Soviet Union is better positioned than the U.S. to exploit and benefit from any power struggle that results in changes from the Iranian regime [...]. The U.S. should encourage Western allies and friends to help Iran meet its import requirements so as to reduce the attractiveness of Soviet assistance [...]. This includes provision of selected military equipment.",
"title": "Arms sales to Iran"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger was highly negative, writing on his copy of McFarlane's paper: \"This is almost too absurd to comment on [...] like asking Qaddafi to Washington for a cozy chat.\" Secretary of State George Shultz was also opposed, stating that having designated Iran a State Sponsor of Terrorism in January 1984, how could the US possibly sell arms to Iran? Only the Director of the CIA William J. Casey supported McFarlane's plan to start selling arms to Iran.",
"title": "Arms sales to Iran"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In early July 1985, the historian Michael Ledeen, a consultant of National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, requested assistance from Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres for help in the sale of arms to Iran. Having talked to an Israeli diplomat David Kimche and Ledeen, McFarlane learned that the Iranians were prepared to have Hezbollah release US hostages in Lebanon in exchange for Israelis shipping Iran US weapons. Having been designated a State Sponsor of Terrorism since January 1984, Iran was in the midst of the Iran–Iraq War and could find few Western nations willing to supply it with weapons. The idea behind the plan was for Israel to ship weapons through an intermediary (identified as Manucher Ghorbanifar) to the Islamic Republic as a way of aiding a supposedly moderate, politically influential faction within the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini who was believed to be seeking a rapprochement with the US; after the transaction, the US would reimburse Israel with the same weapons, while receiving monetary benefits. McFarlane in a memo to Shultz and Weinberger wrote:",
"title": "Arms sales to Iran"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The short term dimension concerns the seven hostages; the long term dimension involves the establishment of a private dialogue with Iranian officials on the broader relations [...]. They sought specifically the delivery from Israel of 100 TOW missiles [...].",
"title": "Arms sales to Iran"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The plan was discussed with President Reagan on 18 July 1985 and again on 6 August 1985. Shultz at the latter meeting warned Reagan that \"we were just falling into the arms-for-hostages business and we shouldn't do it\".",
"title": "Arms sales to Iran"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The Americans believed that there was a moderate faction in the Islamic Republic headed by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the powerful speaker of the Majlis who was seen as a leading potential successor to Khomeini and who was alleged to want a rapprochement with the US. The Americans believed that Rafsanjani had the power to order Hezbollah to free the US hostages and establishing a relationship with him by selling Iran arms would ultimately place Iran back within the US sphere of influence. It remains unclear if Rafsanjani really wanted a rapprochement with the US or was just deceiving Reagan administration officials who were willing to believe that he was a moderate who would effect a rapprochement. Rafsanjani, whose nickname is \"the Shark\", was described by the UK journalist Patrick Brogan as a man of great charm and formidable intelligence known for his subtlety and ruthlessness whose motives in the Iran–Contra affair remain completely mysterious. The Israeli government required that the sale of arms meet high-level approval from the US government, and, when McFarlane convinced them that the US government approved the sale, Israel obliged by agreeing to sell the arms.",
"title": "Arms sales to Iran"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In 1985, President Reagan entered Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for colon cancer surgery. Reagan's recovery was nothing short of miserable, as the 74-year-old President admitted having little sleep for days in addition to his immense physical discomfort. While doctors seemed to be confident that the surgery was successful, the discovery of his localized cancer was a daunting realization for Reagan. From seeing the recovery process of other patients, as well as medical “experts” on television predicting his death to be soon, Reagan's typical optimistic outlook was dampened. These factors were bound to contribute to psychological distress in the midst of an already distressing situation. Additionally, Reagan's invocation of the 25th Amendment prior to the surgery was a risky and unprecedented decision that smoothly flew under the radar for the duration of the complex situation. While it only lasted slightly longer than the length of the procedure (approximately seven hours and 54 minutes), this temporary transfer of power was never formally recognized by the White House. It was later revealed that this decision was made on the grounds that \"Mr. Reagan and his advisors did not want his actions to establish a definition of incapacitation that would bind future presidents.\" Reagan expressed this transfer of power in two identical letters that were sent to the speaker of the House of Representatives, Representative Tip O'Neill, and the president pro tempore of the senate, Senator Strom Thurmond.",
"title": "Arms sales to Iran"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "While the President was recovering in the hospital, McFarlane met with him and told him that representatives from Israel had contacted the National Security Agency to pass on confidential information from what Reagan later described as the \"moderate\" Iranian faction headed by Rafsanjani opposed to the Ayatollah's hardline anti-US policies. The visit from McFarlane in Reagan's hospital room was the first visit from an administration official outside of Donald Regan since the surgery. The meeting took place five days after the surgery and only three days after doctors gave the news that his polyp had been malignant. The three participants of this meeting had very different recollections of what was discussed during its 23-minute duration. Months later, Reagan even stated that he \"had no recollection of a meeting in the hospital in July with McFarlane and that he had no notes which would show such a meeting\". This does not come as a surprise considering the possible short and long-term effects of anesthesia on patients above the age of 60, in addition to his already weakened physical and mental state.",
"title": "Arms sales to Iran"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "According to Reagan, these Iranians sought to establish a quiet relationship with the US, before establishing formal relationships upon the death of the aging Ayatollah. In Reagan's account, McFarlane told Reagan that the Iranians, to demonstrate their seriousness, offered to persuade the Hezbollah militants to release the seven US hostages. McFarlane met with the Israeli intermediaries; Reagan claimed that he allowed this because he believed that establishing relations with a strategically located country, and preventing the Soviet Union from doing the same, was a beneficial move. Although Reagan claims that the arms sales were to a \"moderate\" faction of Iranians, the Walsh Iran–Contra Report states that the arms sales were \"to Iran\" itself, which was under the control of the Ayatollah.",
"title": "Arms sales to Iran"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Following the Israeli–US meeting, Israel requested permission from the US to sell a small number of BGM-71 TOW antitank missiles to Iran, claiming that this would aid the \"moderate\" Iranian faction, by demonstrating that the group actually had high-level connections to the US government. Reagan initially rejected the plan, until Israel sent information to the US showing that the \"moderate\" Iranians were opposed to terrorism and had fought against it. Now having a reason to trust the \"moderates\", Reagan approved the transaction, which was meant to be between Israel and the \"moderates\" in Iran, with the US reimbursing Israel. In his 1990 autobiography An American Life, Reagan claimed that he was deeply committed to securing the release of the hostages; it was this compassion that supposedly motivated his support for the arms initiatives. The president requested that the \"moderate\" Iranians do everything in their capability to free the hostages held by Hezbollah. Reagan always publicly insisted after the scandal broke in late 1986 that the purpose behind the arms-for-hostages trade was to establish a working relationship with the \"moderate\" faction associated with Rafsanjani to facilitate the reestablishment of the US–Iranian alliance after the soon to be expected death of Khomeini, to end the Iran–Iraq War and end Iranian support for Islamic terrorism while downplaying the importance of freeing the hostages in Lebanon as a secondary issue. By contrast, when testifying before the Tower Commission, Reagan declared that hostage issue was the main reason for selling arms to Iran.",
"title": "Arms sales to Iran"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The following arms were supplied to Iran:",
"title": "Arms sales to Iran"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The first arms sales to Iran began in 1981, though the official paper trail has them beginning in 1985 (see above). On 20 August 1985, Israel sent 96 US-made TOW missiles to Iran through an arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. Subsequently, on 14 September 1985, 408 more TOW missiles were delivered. On 15 September 1985, following the second delivery, Reverend Benjamin Weir was released by his captors, the Islamic Jihad Organization. On 24 November 1985, 18 Hawk antiaircraft missiles were delivered.",
"title": "Arms sales to Iran"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Robert McFarlane resigned on 4 December 1985, stating that he wanted to spend more time with his family, and was replaced by Admiral John Poindexter. Two days later, Reagan met with his advisors at the White House, where a new plan was introduced. This called for a slight change in the arms transactions: instead of the weapons going to the \"moderate\" Iranian group, they would go to \"moderate\" Iranian army leaders. As each weapons delivery was made from Israel by air, hostages held by Hezbollah would be released. Israel would continue to be reimbursed by the US for the weapons. Though staunchly opposed by Secretary of State George Shultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, the plan was authorized by Reagan, who stated that, \"We were not trading arms for hostages, nor were we negotiating with terrorists\". In his notes of a meeting held in the White House on 7 December 1985, Weinberger wrote he told Reagan that this plan was illegal, writing:",
"title": "Arms sales to Iran"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "I argued strongly that we have an embargo that makes arms sales to Iran illegal and President couldn't violate it and that 'washing' transactions through Israel wouldn't make it legal. Shultz, Don Regan agreed.",
"title": "Arms sales to Iran"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Weinberger's notes have Reagan saying he \"could answer charges of illegality but he couldn't answer charge [sic] that 'big strong President Reagan passed up a chance to free hostages'.\" Now retired National Security Advisor McFarlane flew to London to meet with Israelis and Ghorbanifar in an attempt to persuade the Iranian to use his influence to release the hostages before any arms transactions occurred; this plan was rejected by Ghorbanifar.",
"title": "Arms sales to Iran"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "On the day of McFarlane's resignation, Oliver North, a military aide to the US National Security Council (NSC), proposed a new plan for selling arms to Iran, which included two major adjustments: instead of selling arms through Israel, the sale was to be direct at a markup; and a portion of the proceeds would go to Contras, or Nicaraguan paramilitary fighters waging guerrilla warfare against the Sandinista government, claiming power after an election full of irregularities. The dealings with the Iranians were conducted via the NSC with Admiral Poindexter and his deputy Colonel North, with the US historians Malcolm Byrne and Peter Kornbluh writing that Poindexter granted much power to North \"who made the most of the situation, often deciding important matters on his own, striking outlandish deals with the Iranians, and acting in the name of the president on issues that were far beyond his competence. All of these activities continued to take place within the framework of the president's broad authorization. Until the press reported on the existence of the operation, nobody in the administration questioned the authority of Poindexter's and North's team to implement the president's decisions\". North proposed a $15 million markup, while contracted arms broker Ghorbanifar added a 41-percent markup of his own. Other members of the NSC were in favor of North's plan; with large support, Poindexter authorized it without notifying President Reagan, and it went into effect. At first, the Iranians refused to buy the arms at the inflated price because of the excessive markup imposed by North and Ghorbanifar. They eventually relented, and, in February 1986, 1,000 TOW missiles were shipped to the country. From May to November 1986, there were additional shipments of miscellaneous weapons and parts.",
"title": "Arms sales to Iran"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Both the sale of weapons to Iran and the funding of the Contras attempted to circumvent not only stated administration policy, but also the Boland Amendment. Administration officials argued that, regardless of Congress restricting funds for the Contras, or any affair, the President (or in this case the administration) could carry on by seeking alternative means of funding such as private entities and foreign governments. Funding from one foreign country, Brunei, was botched when North's secretary, Fawn Hall, transposed the numbers of North's Swiss bank account number. A Swiss businessperson, suddenly $10 million richer, alerted the authorities of the mistake. The money was eventually returned to the Sultan of Brunei, with interest.",
"title": "Arms sales to Iran"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "On 7 January 1986, John Poindexter proposed to Reagan a modification of the approved plan: instead of negotiating with the \"moderate\" Iranian political group, the US would negotiate with \"moderate\" members of the Iranian government. Poindexter told Reagan that Ghorbanifar had important connections within the Iranian government, so, with the hope of the release of the hostages, Reagan approved this plan as well. Throughout February 1986, weapons were shipped directly to Iran by the US (as part of Oliver North's plan), but none of the hostages were released. Retired National Security Advisor McFarlane conducted another international voyage, this one to Tehran—bringing with him a gift of a Bible with a handwritten inscription by Ronald Reagan and, according to George W. Cave, a cake baked in the shape of a key. Howard Teicher described the cake as a joke between North and Ghorbanifar. McFarlane met directly with Iranian officials associated with Rafsanjani, who sought to establish US–Iranian relations in an attempt to free the four remaining hostages.",
"title": "Arms sales to Iran"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The US delegation comprised McFarlane, North, Cave (a retired CIA officer who served as the group's translator), Teicher, Israeli diplomat Amiram Nir, and a CIA communicator. They arrived in Tehran in an Israeli plane carrying forged Irish passports on 25 May 1986. This meeting also failed. Much to McFarlane's disgust, he did not meet ministers, and instead met in his words \"third and fourth level officials\". At one point, an angry McFarlane shouted: \"As I am a Minister, I expect to meet with decision-makers. Otherwise, you can work with my staff.\" The Iranians requested concessions such as Israel's withdrawal from the Golan Heights, which the US rejected. More importantly, McFarlane refused to ship spare parts for the Hawk missiles until the Iranians had Hezbollah release the US hostages, whereas the Iranians wanted to reverse that sequence with the spare parts being shipped first before the hostages were freed. The differing negotiating positions led to McFarlane's mission going home after four days. After the failure of the secret visit to Tehran, McFarlane advised Reagan not to talk to the Iranians anymore, advice that was disregarded.",
"title": "Arms sales to Iran"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "On 26 July 1986, Hezbollah freed the US hostage Father Lawrence Jenco, former head of Catholic Relief Services in Lebanon. Following this, William J. Casey, head of the CIA, requested that the US authorize sending a shipment of small missile parts to Iranian military forces as a way of expressing gratitude. Casey also justified this request by stating that the contact in the Iranian government might otherwise lose face or be executed, and hostages might be killed. Reagan authorized the shipment to ensure that those potential events would not occur. North used this release to persuade Reagan to switch over to a \"sequential\" policy of freeing the hostages one by one, instead of the \"all or nothing\" policy that the Americans had pursued until then. By this point, the Americans had grown tired of Ghorbanifar who had proven himself a dishonest intermediary who played off both sides to his own commercial advantage. In August 1986, the Americans had established a new contact in the Iranian government, Ali Hashemi Bahramani, the nephew of Rafsanjani and an officer in the Revolutionary Guard. The fact that the Revolutionary Guard was deeply involved in international terrorism seemed only to attract the Americans more to Bahramani, who was seen as someone with the influence to change Iran's policies. Richard Secord, a US arms dealer, who was being used as a contact with Iran, wrote to North: \"My judgment is that we have opened up a new and probably better channel into Iran\". North was so impressed with Bahramani that he arranged for him to secretly visit Washington DC and gave him a guided tour at midnight of the White House.",
"title": "Arms sales to Iran"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "North frequently met with Bahramani in the summer and autumn of 1986 in West Germany, discussing arms sales to Iran, the freeing of hostages held by Hezbollah and how best to overthrow President Saddam Hussein of Iraq and the establishment of \"a non-hostile regime in Baghdad\". In September and October 1986, three more Americans—Frank Reed, Joseph Cicippio, and Edward Tracy—were abducted in Lebanon by a separate terrorist group, who referred to them simply as \"G.I. Joe\", after the popular US toy. The reasons for their abduction are unknown, although it is speculated that they were kidnapped to replace the freed Americans. One more original hostage, David Jacobsen, was later released. The captors promised to release the remaining two, but the release never happened.",
"title": "Arms sales to Iran"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "During a secret meeting in Frankfurt in October 1986, North told Bahramani that: \"Saddam Hussein must go\". North also claimed that Reagan had told him to tell Bahramani that: \"Saddam Hussein is an asshole.\" Behramani during a secret meeting in Mainz informed North that Rafsanjani \"for his own politics [...] decided to get all the groups involved and give them a role to play\". Thus, all the factions in the Iranian government would be jointly responsible for the talks with the Americans and \"there would not be an internal war\". This demand of Behramani caused much dismay on the US side as it made clear to them that they would not be dealing solely with a \"moderate\" faction in the Islamic Republic, as the Americans liked to pretend to themselves, but rather with all the factions in the Iranian government—including those who were very much involved in terrorism. Despite this, the talks were not broken off.",
"title": "Arms sales to Iran"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "After a leak by Mehdi Hashemi, a senior official in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Lebanese magazine Ash-Shiraa exposed the arrangement on 3 November 1986. According to Seymour Hersh, an unnamed former military officer told him that the leak may have been orchestrated by a covert team led by Arthur S. Moreau Jr., assistant to the chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, due to fears the scheme had grown out of control.",
"title": "Discovery and scandal"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "This was the first public report of the weapons-for-hostages deal. The operation was discovered only after an airlift of guns (Corporate Air Services HPF821) was downed over Nicaragua. Eugene Hasenfus, who was captured by Nicaraguan authorities after surviving the plane crash, initially alleged in a press conference on Nicaraguan soil that two of his coworkers, Max Gomez and Ramon Medina, worked for the CIA. He later said he did not know whether they did or not. The Iranian government confirmed the Ash-Shiraa story, and, 10 days after the story was first published, President Reagan appeared on national television from the Oval Office on 13 November, stating:",
"title": "Discovery and scandal"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "My purpose was [...] to send a signal that the United States was prepared to replace the animosity between [the US and Iran] with a new relationship [...]. At the same time we undertook this initiative, we made clear that Iran must oppose all forms of international terrorism as a condition of progress in our relationship. The most significant step which Iran could take, we indicated, would be to use its influence in Lebanon to secure the release of all hostages held there.",
"title": "Discovery and scandal"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The scandal was compounded when Oliver North destroyed or hid pertinent documents between 21 November and 25 November 1986. During North's trial in 1989, his secretary, Fawn Hall, testified extensively about helping North alter and shred official US National Security Council (NSC) documents from the White House. According to The New York Times, enough documents were put into a government shredder to jam it. Hall also testified that she smuggled classified documents out of the Old Executive Office Building by concealing them in her boots and dress. North's explanation for destroying some documents was to protect the lives of individuals involved in Iran and Contra operations. It was not until 1993, years after the trial, that North's notebooks were made public, and only after the National Security Archive and Public Citizen sued the Office of the Independent Counsel under the Freedom of Information Act.",
"title": "Discovery and scandal"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "What is involved is that in the course of the arms transfers, which involved the United States providing the arms to Israel and Israel in turn transferring the arms -- in effect, selling the arms to representatives of Iran. Certain monies which were received in the transaction between representatives of Israel and representatives of Iran were taken and made available to the forces in Central America, which are opposing the Sandinista government there.",
"title": "Discovery and scandal"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "– U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese, White House news conference on November 25, 1986",
"title": "Discovery and scandal"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "During the trial, North testified that on 21, 22 or 24 November, he witnessed Poindexter destroy what may have been the only signed copy of a presidential covert-action finding that sought to authorize CIA participation in the November 1985 Hawk missile shipment to Iran. U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese admitted on 25 November that profits from weapons sales to Iran were made available to assist the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. On the same day, John Poindexter resigned, and President Reagan fired Oliver North. Poindexter was replaced by Frank Carlucci on 2 December 1986.",
"title": "Discovery and scandal"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "When the story broke, many legal and constitutional scholars expressed dismay that the NSC, which was supposed to be just an advisory body to assist the President with formulating foreign policy, had \"gone operational\" by becoming an executive body covertly executing foreign policy on its own. The National Security Act of 1947, which created the NSC, gave it the vague right to perform \"such other functions and duties related to the intelligence as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.\" However, the NSC had usually, although not always, acted as an advisory agency until the Reagan administration when the NSC had \"gone operational\", a situation that was condemned by both the Tower Commission and by Congress as a departure from the norm. The American historian John Canham-Clyne asserted that Iran-Contra affair and the NSC \"going operational\" were not departures from the norm, but were the logical and natural consequence of existence of the \"national security state\", the plethora of shadowy government agencies with multi-million dollar budgets operating with little oversight from Congress, the courts or the media, and for whom upholding national security justified almost everything. Canham-Clyne argued that for the \"national security state\", the law was an obstacle to be surmounted rather than something to uphold and that the Iran-Contra affair was just \"business as usual\", something he asserted that the media missed by focusing on the NSC having \"gone operational.\"",
"title": "Discovery and scandal"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981–1987, journalist Bob Woodward chronicled the role of the CIA in facilitating the transfer of funds from the Iran arms sales to the Nicaraguan Contras spearheaded by Oliver North. According to Woodward, then-Director of the CIA William J. Casey admitted to him in February 1987 that he was aware of the diversion of funds to the Contras. The controversial admission occurred while Casey was hospitalized for a stroke, and, according to his wife, was unable to communicate. On 6 May 1987, William Casey died the day after Congress began public hearings on Iran-Contra. Independent Counsel, Lawrence Walsh later wrote: \"Independent Counsel obtained no documentary evidence showing Casey knew about or approved the diversion. The only direct testimony linking Casey to early knowledge of the diversion came from [Oliver] North.\" Gust Avrakodos, who was responsible for the arms supplies to the Afghans at this time, was aware of the operation as well and strongly opposed it, in particular the diversion of funds allotted to the Afghan operation. According to his Middle Eastern experts, the operation was pointless because the moderates in Iran were not in a position to challenge the fundamentalists. However, he was overruled by Clair George.",
"title": "Discovery and scandal"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "On 25 November 1986, President Reagan announced the creation of a Special Review Board to look into the matter; the following day, he appointed former Senator John Tower, former Secretary of State Edmund Muskie, and former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft to serve as members. This Presidential Commission took effect on 1 December and became known as the Tower Commission. The main objectives of the commission were to inquire into \"the circumstances surrounding the Iran-Contra matter, other case studies that might reveal strengths and weaknesses in the operation of the National Security Council system under stress, and the manner in which that system has served eight different presidents since its inception in 1947\". The Tower Commission was the first presidential commission to review and evaluate the National Security Council.",
"title": "Tower Commission"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "President Reagan appeared before the Tower Commission on 2 December 1986, to answer questions regarding his involvement in the affair. When asked about his role in authorizing the arms deals, he first stated that he had; later, he appeared to contradict himself by stating that he had no recollection of doing so. In his 1990 autobiography, An American Life, Reagan acknowledges authorizing the shipments to Israel.",
"title": "Tower Commission"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The report published by the Tower Commission was delivered to the president on 26 February 1987. The commission had interviewed 80 witnesses to the scheme, including Reagan, and two of the arms trade middlemen: Manucher Ghorbanifar and Adnan Khashoggi. The 200-page report was the most comprehensive of any released, criticizing the actions of Oliver North, John Poindexter, Caspar Weinberger, and others. It determined that President Reagan did not have knowledge of the extent of the program, especially about the diversion of funds to the Contras, although it argued that the president ought to have had better control of the National Security Council staff. The report heavily criticized Reagan for not properly supervising his subordinates or being aware of their actions. A major result of the Tower Commission was the consensus that Reagan should have listened to his National Security Advisor more, thereby placing more power in the hands of that chair.",
"title": "Tower Commission"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "In January 1987, Congress announced it was opening an investigation into the Iran-Contra affair. Depending upon one's political perspective, the Congressional investigation into the Iran-Contra affair was either an attempt by the legislative arm to gain control over an out-of-control executive arm, a partisan \"witch hunt\" by the Democrats against a Republican administration or a feeble effort by Congress that did far too little to rein in the \"imperial presidency\" that had run amok by breaking numerous laws. The Democratic-controlled United States Congress issued its own report on 18 November 1987, stating that \"If the president did not know what his national security advisers were doing, he should have.\" The Congressional report wrote that the president bore \"ultimate responsibility\" for wrongdoing by his aides, and his administration exhibited \"secrecy, deception and disdain for the law\". It also read that \"the central remaining question is the role of the President in the Iran-Contra affair. On this critical point, the shredding of documents by Poindexter, North and others, and the death of Casey, leave the record incomplete\".",
"title": "Congressional committees investigating the affair"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Reagan expressed regret with regard to the situation in a nationally televised address from the Oval Office on 4 March 1987, and in two other speeches. Reagan had not spoken to the American people directly for three months amidst the scandal, and he offered the following explanation for his silence:",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The reason I haven't spoken to you before now is this: You deserve the truth. And as frustrating as the waiting has been, I felt it was improper to come to you with sketchy reports, or possibly even erroneous statements, which would then have to be corrected, creating even more doubt and confusion. There's been enough of that.",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Reagan then took full responsibility for the acts committed:",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "First, let me say I take full responsibility for my own actions and for those of my administration. As angry as I may be about activities undertaken without my knowledge, I am still accountable for those activities. As disappointed as I may be in some who served me, I'm still the one who must answer to the American people for this behavior.",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Finally, the president acknowledged that his previous assertions that the U.S. did not trade arms for hostages were incorrect:",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not. As the Tower board reported, what began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages. This runs counter to my own beliefs, to administration policy, and to the original strategy we had in mind.",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Reagan's role in these transactions is still not definitively known. It is unclear exactly what Reagan knew and when, and whether the arms sales were motivated by his desire to save the U.S. hostages. Oliver North wrote that \"Ronald Reagan knew of and approved a great deal of what went on with both the Iranian initiative and private efforts on behalf of the contras and he received regular, detailed briefings on both...I have no doubt that he was told about the use of residuals for the Contras, and that he approved it. Enthusiastically.\" Handwritten notes by Defense Secretary Weinberger indicate that the President was aware of potential hostage transfers with Iran, as well as the sale of Hawk and TOW missiles to what he was told were \"moderate elements\" within Iran. Notes taken by Weinberger on 7 December 1985 record that Reagan said that \"he could answer charges of illegality but he couldn't answer charge that 'big strong President Reagan passed up a chance to free hostages'\". The Republican-written \"Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair\" made the following conclusion:",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "There is some question and dispute about precisely the level at which he chose to follow the operation details. There is no doubt, however, ... [that] the President set the US policy towards Nicaragua, with few if any ambiguities, and then left subordinates more or less free to implement it.",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Domestically, the affair precipitated a drop in President Reagan's popularity. His approval ratings suffered \"the largest single drop for any U.S. president in history\", from 67% to 46% in November 1986, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll. The \"Teflon President\", as Reagan was nicknamed by critics, survived the affair, however, and his approval rating recovered.",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Internationally, the damage was more severe. Magnus Ranstorp wrote, \"U.S. willingness to engage in concessions with Iran and the Hezbollah not only signaled to its adversaries that hostage-taking was an extremely useful instrument in extracting political and financial concessions for the West but also undermined any credibility of U.S. criticism of other states' deviation from the principles of no-negotiation and no concession to terrorists and their demands.\"",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "In Iran, Mehdi Hashemi, the leaker of the scandal, was executed in 1987, allegedly for activities unrelated to the scandal. Though Hashemi made a full video confession to numerous serious charges, some observers find the coincidence of his leak and the subsequent prosecution highly suspicious.",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "In 1994, just five years after leaving office, President Reagan announced that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Lawrence Walsh, who was appointed Independent Counsel in 1986 to investigate the transactions later implied Reagan's declining health may have played a role in his handling of the situation. However, Walsh did note that he believed President Reagan's \"instincts for the country's good were right\".",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "The Independent Counsel, Lawrence E. Walsh, chose not to re-try North or Poindexter. In total, several dozen people were investigated by Walsh's office.",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "On 27 July 1986, Israeli counterterrorism expert Amiram Nir briefed Vice President Bush in Jerusalem about the weapon sales to Iran.",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "In an interview with The Washington Post in August 1987, Bush stated that he was denied information about the operation and did not know about the diversion of funds. Bush said that he had not advised Reagan to reject the initiative because he had not heard strong objections to it. The Post quoted him as stating, \"We were not in the loop.\" The following month, Bush recounted meeting Nir in his September 1987 autobiography Looking Forward, stating that he began to develop misgivings about the Iran initiative. He wrote that he did not learn the full extent of the Iran dealings until he was briefed by Senator David Durenberger regarding a Senate inquiry into them. Bush added the briefing with Durenberger left him with the feeling he had \"been deliberately excluded from key meetings involving details of the Iran operation\".",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "In January 1988 during a live interview with Bush on CBS Evening News, Dan Rather told Bush that his unwillingness to speak about the scandal led \"people to say 'either George Bush was irrelevant or he was ineffective, he set himself outside of the loop.'\" Bush replied, \"May I explain what I mean by 'out of the loop'? No operational role.\"",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Although Bush publicly insisted that he knew little about the operation, his statements were contradicted by excerpts of his diary released by the White House in January 1993. An entry dated 5 November 1986 stated: \"On the news at this time is the question of the hostages... I'm one of the few people that know fully the details, and there is a lot of flak and misinformation out there. It is not a subject we can talk about...\"",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "On 24 December 1992, after he had been defeated for reelection, lame duck President George H. W. Bush pardoned five administration officials who had been found guilty on charges relating to the affair. They were:",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Bush also pardoned Caspar Weinberger, who had not yet come to trial. Attorney General William P. Barr advised the President on these pardons, especially that of Caspar Weinberger.",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "In response to these Bush pardons, Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh, who headed the investigation of Reagan administration officials' criminal conduct in the Iran-Contra scandal, stated that \"the Iran-Contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed.\" Walsh noted that in issuing the pardons Bush appears to have been preempting being implicated himself in the crimes of Iran-Contra by evidence that was to come to light during the Weinberger trial, and noted that there was a pattern of \"deception and obstruction\" by Bush, Weinberger and other senior Reagan administration officials.",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "The Iran-Contra affair and the ensuing deception to protect senior administration officials (including President Reagan) was cast as an example of post-truth politics by Malcolm Byrne of George Washington University.",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "The 100th Congress formed a Joint Committee of the United States Congress (Congressional Committees Investigating The Iran-Contra Affair) and held hearings in mid-1987. Transcripts were published as: Iran-Contra Investigation: Joint Hearings Before the Senate Select Committee on Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan Opposition and the House Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran (U.S. GPO 1987–88). A closed Executive Session heard classified testimony from North and Poindexter; this transcript was published in a redacted format. The joint committee's final report was Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair With Supplemental, Minority, and Additional Views (U.S. GPO 17 November 1987). The records of the committee are at the National Archives, but many are still non-public.",
"title": "Reports and documents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Testimony was also heard before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and can be found in the Congressional Record for those bodies. The Senate Intelligence Committee produced two reports: Preliminary Inquiry into the Sale of Arms to Iran and Possible Diversion of Funds to the Nicaraguan Resistance (2 February 1987) and Were Relevant Documents Withheld from the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair? (June 1989).",
"title": "Reports and documents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "The Tower Commission Report was published as the Report of the President's Special Review Board (U.S. GPO 26 February 1987). It was also published as The Tower Commission Report by Bantam Books (ISBN 0-553-26968-2).",
"title": "Reports and documents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "The Office of Independent Counsel/Walsh investigation produced four interim reports to Congress. Its final report was published as the Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters. Walsh's records are available at the National Archives.",
"title": "Reports and documents"
}
]
| The Iran–Contra affair, often referred to as the Iran–Contra scandal, was a political scandal in the United States that occurred during the second term of the Reagan administration. Between 1981 and 1986, senior administration officials secretly facilitated the illegal sale of arms to Iran, who was subjected to an arms embargo at the time. The administration hoped to use the proceeds of the arms sale to fund the Contras, an anti-Sandinista rebel group in Nicaragua. Under the Boland Amendment, further funding of the Contras by legislative appropriations was prohibited by Congress, but the Reagan administration figured out a loophole by secretively using non-appropriated funds instead. The Iran–Contra affair is sometimes referred to as the McFarlane affair in Iran. The official justification for the arms shipments was that they were part of an operation to free seven US hostages being held in Lebanon by Hezbollah, an Islamist paramilitary group with Iranian ties connected to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The idea to exchange arms for hostages was proposed by Manucher Ghorbanifar, an expatriate Iranian arms dealer. Some within the Reagan administration hoped the sales would influence Iran to get Hezbollah to release the hostages. In late 1985, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council (NSC) diverted a portion of the proceeds from the Iranian weapon sales to fund the Contras, a group of anti-Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) rebels, in their insurgency against the socialist government of Nicaragua. North later claimed that Ghorbanifar had given him the idea for diverting profits from BGM-71 TOW and MIM-23 Hawk missile sales to Iran to the Nicaraguan Contras. While President Ronald Reagan was a vocal supporter of the Contra cause, the evidence is disputed as to whether he personally authorized the diversion of funds to the Contras. Handwritten notes taken by Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger on 7 December 1985 indicate that Reagan was aware of potential hostage transfers with Iran, by Israel, as well as the sale of Hawk and TOW missiles to "moderate elements" within that country. Weinberger wrote that Reagan said "he could answer charges of illegality but he couldn't answer charge [sic] that 'big strong President Reagan passed up a chance to free hostages.'" After the weapon sales were revealed in November 1986, Reagan appeared on national television and stated that the weapons transfers had indeed occurred, but that the US did not trade arms for hostages. The investigation was impeded when large volumes of documents relating to the affair were destroyed or withheld from investigators by Reagan administration officials. On 4 March 1987, Reagan made a further nationally televised address, saying he was taking full responsibility for the affair and stating that "what began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages." The affair was investigated by Congress and by the three-person, Reagan-appointed Tower Commission. Neither investigation found evidence that President Reagan himself knew of the extent of the multiple programs. Additionally, US Deputy Attorney General Lawrence Walsh was appointed Independent Counsel in December 1986 to investigate possible criminal actions by officials involved in the scheme. In the end, several dozen administration officials were indicted, including then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Eleven convictions resulted, some of which were vacated on appeal. The rest of those indicted or convicted were all pardoned in the final days of the presidency of George H. W. Bush, who had been vice president at the time of the affair. Former Independent Counsel Walsh noted that, in issuing the pardons, Bush appeared to have been preempting being implicated himself by evidence that came to light during the Weinberger trial and noted that there was a pattern of "deception and obstruction" by Bush, Weinberger, and other senior Reagan administration officials. Walsh submitted his final report on 4 August 1993 and later wrote an account of his experiences as counsel, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up. | 2001-11-19T15:38:31Z | 2023-12-22T06:19:49Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair |
14,788 | Infocom | Infocom was an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced a business application, a relational database called Cornerstone.
Infocom was founded on June 22, 1979, by staff and students of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and lasted as an independent company until 1986, when it was bought by Activision. Activision shut down the Infocom division in 1989, although they released some titles in the 1990s under the Infocom Zork brand. Activision abandoned the Infocom trademark in 2002.
Infocom games are text adventures where users direct the action by entering short strings of words to give commands when prompted. Generally the program will respond by describing the results of the action, often the contents of a room if the player has moved within the virtual world. The user reads this information, decides what to do, and enters another short series of words. Examples include "go west" or "take flashlight".
Infocom games were written using a programming language called ZIL (Zork Implementation Language), itself derived directly from MDL, that compiled into a bytecode able to run on a standardized virtual machine called the Z-machine. As the games were text based and used variants of the same Z-machine interpreter, the interpreter had to be ported to new computer architectures only once per architecture, rather than once per game. Each game file included a sophisticated parser which allowed the user to type complex instructions to the game. Unlike earlier works of interactive fiction which only understood commands of the form 'verb noun', Infocom's parser could understand a wider variety of sentences. For instance one might type "open the large door, then go west", or "go to festeron".
With the Z-machine, Infocom was able to release most of their games for most popular home computers simultaneously: Apple II, Atari 8-bit family, IBM PC compatibles, Amstrad CPC/PCW (one disc worked on both machines), Commodore 64, Commodore Plus/4, Commodore 128, Kaypro CP/M, TI-99/4A, Macintosh, Atari ST, Amiga, TRS-80, and TRS-80 Color Computer.
Infocom began as a collaboration between Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) faculty and alumni, some of whom had previously worked a text-based adventure game called Zork. Development of Zork began in 1977 at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, with an initial team including Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, and Dave Lebling, as well as Bruce Daniels. Inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure, the developers aspired to improve on the formula with a more robust text parser and more logical puzzles. They did not announce their game while it was in development, but a lack of security on the MIT systems meant that anyone who could access the PDP-10 computer over the ARPANET could see what programs were being run. As a result, a small community of people discovered the new "Zork" adventure game and spread word of it under that name. This community interacted with the developers as they created the game, playtesting additions and submitting bug reports.
Infocom was officially founded as a software company on June 22, 1979, with founding members Tim Anderson, Joel Berez, Marc Blank, Mike Broos, Scott Cutler, Stu Galley, Dave Lebling, J. C. R. Licklider, Chris Reeve, and Al Vezza. By the end of the year, the core Zork game was complete, and Berez was elected the company's president. The studio began seeking a professional publisher with store and distributor connections. After Microsoft passed on the project due to competition with their own Microsoft Adventure (1979), Infocom negotiated a publishing agreement with Personal Software, one of the first professional software publishing companies. However, Infocom grew wary of the publisher's lack of advertising for Zork I, and lack of enthusiasm for additional episodes and games. The developer decided to self-publish their games from that moment forward, buying out Personal Software's remaining inventory of Zork games.
Following its 1980 release, Zork I became a bestseller from 1983 through 1985. By 1986, the game had sold 380,000 copies, with 680,000 sales for the trilogy overall, comprising one-third of Infocom's two million game sales. Reviewers hailed Zork as the best adventure game to date, with later critics regarding it as one of the greatest games of all time. Historians noted the game as a foundation for the adventure game genre, as well as influencing the MUD and massively multiplayer online role-playing game genres.
Lebling and Blank each authored several more games, and additional game writers (or "Implementers") were hired, notably including Steve Meretzky. Other popular and inventive titles included a number of sequels and spinoff games in the Zork series, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, and A Mind Forever Voyaging.
In its first few years of operation, text adventures proved to be a huge revenue stream for the company. Whereas most computer games of the era would achieve initial success and then suffer a significant drop-off in sales, Infocom titles continued to sell for years and years. Employee Tim Anderson said of their situation, "It was phenomenal – we had a basement that just printed money." By 1983 Infocom was perhaps the dominant computer-game company; for example, all ten of its games were on the Softsel top 40 list of best-selling computer games for the week of December 12, 1983, with Zork in first place and two others in the top ten. In late 1984, management declined an offer by publisher Simon & Schuster to acquire Infocom for $28 million, far more than the board of directors's valuation of $10–12 million. In 1993, Computer Gaming World described this era as the "Cambridge Camelot, where the Great Underground Empire was formed".
Infocom games were popular, InfoWorld said, in part because "in offices all over America (more than anyone realizes) executives and managers are playing games on their computers". An estimated 25% had a computer game "hidden somewhere in their drawers", Inc. reported, and they preferred Infocom adventures to arcade games. The company stated that year that 75% of players were over 25 years old and that 80% were men; more women played its games than other companies', especially the mysteries. Most players enjoyed reading books; in 1987 president Joel Berez stated, "[Infocom's] audience tends to be composed of heavy readers. We sell to the minority that does read".
A 1996 article in Next Generation said Infocom's "games were noted for having more depth than any other adventure games, before or since." Three components proved key to Infocom's success: marketing strategy, rich storytelling and feelies. Whereas most game developers sold their games mainly in software stores, Infocom also distributed their games via bookstores. Infocom's products appealed more to those with expensive computers, such as the Apple Macintosh, IBM PC, and Commodore Amiga. Berez stated that "there is no noticeable correlation between graphics machines and our penetration. There is a high correlation between the price of the machine and our sales ... people who are putting more money into their machines tend to buy more of our software". Since their games were text-based, patrons of bookstores were drawn to the Infocom games as they were already interested in reading. Unlike most computer software, Infocom titles were distributed under a no-returns policy, which allowed them to make money from a single game for a longer period of time.
Next, Infocom titles featured strong storytelling and rich descriptions, eschewing the inherent restrictions of graphic displays and allowing users to use their own imaginations for the lavish and exotic locations the games described. Infocom's puzzles were unique in that they were usually tightly integrated into the storyline, and rarely did gamers feel like they were being made to jump through one arbitrary hoop after another, as was the case in many of the competitors' games. The puzzles were generally logical but also required close attention to the clues and hints given in the story, causing many gamers to keep copious notes as they went along.
Sometimes, though, Infocom threw in puzzles just for the humor of it—if the user never ran into these, they could still finish the game. But discovering these early Easter Eggs was satisfying for some fans of the games. For example, one popular Easter egg was in the Enchanter game, which involves collecting magic spells to use in accomplishing the quest. One of these is a summoning spell, which the player needs to use to summon certain characters at different parts of the game. At one point the game mentions the "Implementers" who were responsible for creating the land of Zork. If the player tries to summon the Implementers, the game produces a vision of Dave Lebling and Marc Blank at their computers, surprised at this "bug" in the game and working feverishly to fix it.
Third, the inclusion of "feelies"—imaginative props and extras tied to the game's theme—provided copy protection against copyright infringement. Some games were unsolvable without the extra content provided with the boxed game. And because of the cleverness and uniqueness of the feelies, users rarely felt like they were an intrusion or inconvenience, as was the case with most of the other copy-protection schemes of the time. Feelies also provided the player with a physical aspect to the gameplay of their text adventures, giving another dimension of strategy to what would other-wise just be a text parser.
Although Infocom started out with Zork, and although the Zork world was the centerpiece of their product line throughout the Zork and Enchanter series, the company quickly branched out into a wide variety of story lines: fantasy, science-fiction, mystery, horror, historical adventure, children's stories, and others that defied easy categorization. In an attempt to reach out to female customers, Infocom also produced Plundered Hearts, which cast the gamer in the role of the heroine of a swashbuckling adventure on the high seas, and which required the heroine to use more feminine tactics to win the game, since hacking-and-slashing was not a very ladylike way to behave. Infocom also came out with Leather Goddesses of Phobos in 1986, which featured "tame", "suggestive", and "lewd" playing modes. It included among its "feelies" a "scratch-and-sniff" card with six odors that corresponded to cues given to the player during the game.
Originally, hints for the game were provided as a "pay-per-hint" service created by Mike Dornbrook, called the Zork Users Group (ZUG). Dornbrook also started Infocom's customer newsletter, called The New Zork Times, to discuss game hints and preview and showcase new products.
The pay-per-hint service eventually led to the development of InvisiClues: books with hints, maps, clues, and solutions for puzzles in the games. The answers to the puzzles were printed in invisible ink that only became visible when rubbed with a special marker that was provided with each book. Usually, two or more answers were given for each question that a gamer might have. The first answer would provide a subtle hint, the second a less subtle hint, and so forth until the last one gave an explicit walkthrough. Gamers could thus reveal only the hints that they needed to have to play the game. To prevent the mere questions (printed in normal ink) from giving away too much information about the game, a certain number of misleading fake questions were included in every InvisiClues book. Answers to these questions would start by giving misleading or impossible to carry out answers, before the final answer revealed that the question was a fake (and usually admonishing the player that revealing random clues from the book would spoil their enjoyment of the game). The InvisiClues books were regularly ranked in near the top of best seller lists for computer books.
In the Solid Gold line of re-releases, InvisiClues were integrated into the game. By typing "HINT" twice the player would open up a screen of possible topics where they could then reveal one hint at a time for each puzzle, just like the books.
Infocom also released a small number of "interactive fiction paperbacks" (gamebooks), which were based on the games and featured the ability to choose a different path through the story. Similar to the Choose Your Own Adventure series, every couple of pages the book would give the reader the chance to make a choice, such as which direction they wanted to go or how they wanted to respond to another character. The reader would then choose one of the given answers and turn to the appropriate page. These books, however, never did sell particularly well, and quickly disappeared from the bookshelves.
Despite their success with computer games, Vezza and other company founders hoped to produce successful business programs like Lotus Development, also founded by people from MIT and located in the same building as Infocom. Lotus released its first product, 1-2-3, in January 1983; within a year it had earned $53 million, compared to Infocom's $6 million. In 1982 Infocom started putting resources into a new division to produce business products. In 1985 they released a database product, Cornerstone, aimed at capturing the then booming database market for small business. Though this application was hailed upon its release for ease of use, it sold only 10,000 copies; not enough to cover the development expenses.
The program failed for a number of reasons. Although it was packaged in a slick hard plastic carrying case and was a very good database for personal and home use, it was originally priced at USD$495 per copy and used copy-protected disks. Another serious miscalculation was that the program did not include any kind of scripting language, so it was not promoted by any of the database consultants that small businesses typically hired to create and maintain their DB applications. Reviewers were also consistently disappointed that Infocom—noted for the natural language syntax of their games—did not include a natural language query ability, which had been the most anticipated feature for this database application. In a final disappointment, Cornerstone was available only for IBM PCs; while Cornerstone had been programmed with its own virtual machine for maximum portability, it was not ported to any of the other platforms that Infocom supported for their games, so that feature had become essentially irrelevant. And because Cornerstone used this virtual machine for its processing, it suffered from slow, lackluster performance.
Infocom's games' sales benefited significantly from the portability offered by running on top of a virtual machine. InfoWorld wrote in 1984 that "the company always sells games for computers you don't normally think of as game machines, such as the DEC Rainbow or the Texas Instruments Professional Computer. This is one of the key reasons for the continued success of old titles such as Zork." Dornbrook estimated that year that of the 1.8 million home computers in America, one half million homes had Infocom games ("all, if you count the pirated games"). Computer companies sent prototypes of new systems to encourage Infocom to port Z-machine to them; the virtual machine supported more than 20 different systems, including orphaned computers for which Infocom games were among the only commercial products. The company produced the only third-party games available for the Macintosh at launch, and Berlyn promised that all 13 of its games would be available for the Atari ST within one month of its release.
The virtual machine significantly slowed Cornerstone's execution speed, however. Businesses were moving en masse to the IBM PC platform by that time, so portability was no longer a significant differentiator. Infocom had sunk much of the money from games sales into Cornerstone; this, in addition to a slump in computer game sales, left the company in a very precarious financial position. By the time Infocom removed the copy-protection and reduced the price to less than $100, it was too late, and the market had moved on to other database solutions.
By 1982 the market was moving to graphic adventures. Infocom was interested in producing them, that year proposing to Penguin Software that Antonio Antiochia, author of its Transylvania, provide artwork. Within Infocom the game designers tended to oppose graphics, while marketing and business employees supported using them for the company to remain competitive. The partnership negotiations failed, in part because of the difficulty of adding graphics to the Z-machine, and Infocom instead began a series of advertisements mocking graphical games as "graffiti" compared to the human imagination. The marketing campaign was very successful, and Infocom's success led to other companies like Broderbund and Electronic Arts also releasing their own text games.
After Cornerstone's failure, Infocom laid off half of its 100 employees, and Activision acquired the company on June 13, 1986, for $7.5 million. The merger was pushed by Activision's CEO Jim Levy, who was a fan of Infocom games and felt their two companies were in similar situations. Berez stated that although the two companies' headquarters and product lines would remain separate, "One of the effects of the merger will be for both of us to broaden our horizons". He said that "We're looking at graphics a lot", while Activision was reportedly interested in using Infocom's parser.
While relations were cordial between the two companies at first, Activision's ousting of Levy with new CEO Bruce Davis created problems in the working relationship with Infocom. Davis believed that his company had paid too much for Infocom and initiated a lawsuit against them to recoup some of the cost, along with changing the way Infocom was run. For example:
By 1988, rumors spread of disputes between Activision and Infocom. Infocom employees reportedly believed that Activision gave poorer-quality games to Infocom, such as Tom Snyder Productions' unsuccessful Infocomics. Activision moved Infocom development to California in 1989, and the company was now just a publishing label. Rising costs and falling profits, exacerbated by the lack of new products in 1988 and technical issues with its DOS products, caused Activision to close Infocom in 1989, after which some of the remaining Infocom designers such as Steve Meretzky moved to the company Legend Entertainment, founded by Bob Bates and Mike Verdu, to continue creating games in the Infocom tradition.
Activision itself was struggling in the marketplace following Davis' promotion to CEO. Activision had rebranded itself as Mediagenic and tried to produce business productivity software, but became significantly in debt. In 1991, Mediagenic was purchased by Bobby Kotick, who put into measures immediately to try to turn the company around, which included returning to its Activision name, and putting to use its past IP properties. This included the Infocom games; Kotick recognized the value of the branding of Zork and other titles. Activision began to sell bundles of the Infocom games that year, packaged as themed collections (usually by genre, such as the Science Fiction collection); in 1991, they published The Lost Treasures of Infocom, followed in 1992 by The Lost Treasures of Infocom II. These compilations featured nearly every game produced by Infocom before 1988. (Leather Goddesses of Phobos was not included in either bundle, but could be ordered via a coupon included with Lost Treasures II.) The compilations lacked the "feelies" that came with each game, but in some cases included photographs of them. In 1996, the first bundles were followed by Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces of Infocom, a single CD-ROM which contained the works of both collections. This release, however, was missing The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Shogun because the licenses from Douglas Adams' and James Clavell's estates had expired. Under Kotick's leadership, Activision also developed Return to Zork, published under its Infocom label.
Eventually, Activision abandoned the "Infocom" name. The brand name was registered by Oliver Klaeffling of Germany in 2007, then was abandoned the following year. The Infocom trademark was then held by Pete Hottelet's Omni Consumer Products, who registered the name around the same time as Klaeffling in 2007. As of March 2017, the trademark is owned by infocom.xyz, according to Bob Bates.
With the exception of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Shogun, the copyrights to the Infocom games are believed to be still held by Activision. Dungeon, the mainframe precursor to the commercial Zork trilogy, is believed to be free for non-commercial use. but prohibited for commercial use. It was this copy that the popular Fortran mainframe version was based on. The C version was based on the Fortran version. and is available from The Interactive Fiction Archive as original FORTRAN source code, a Z-machine story file and as various native source ports. Many Infocom titles can be downloaded via the Internet, but only in violation of the copyright. Activision did at one point release the original trilogy for free-of-charge download as a promotion but prohibited redistribution and have since discontinued this. There are currently at least four Infocom sampler and demos available from the IF Archive as Z-machine story files which require a Z-machine interpreter to play. Interpreters are available for most computer platforms, the most widely used being the Frotz, Zip, and Nitfol interpreters.
Five games (Zork I, Planetfall, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Wishbringer and Leather Goddesses of Phobos) were re-released in Solid Gold format. The Solid Gold versions of those games include a built-in InvisiClues hint system.
In 2012, Activision released Lost Treasures of Infocom for iOS devices. In-app purchases provide access for 27 of the titles. It also lacks Shogun and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as well as Beyond Zork, Zork Zero and Nord and Bert.
Efforts have been made to make the Infocom games source code available for preservation. In 2008, Jason Scott, a video game preservationist contributing towards the Internet Archive, received the so-called "Infocom Drive", a large archive of the entire contents of Infocom's main server made during the last few days before the company was relocated to California; besides source code for all of Infocom's games (including unreleased ones), it also contained the software manuals, design documents and other essential content alongside Infocom's business documentation. Scott later published all of the source files in their original Z-engine format to GitHub in 2019.
Zork made a cameo appearance as an easter egg in Activision and Treyarch's Call of Duty: Black Ops. It can be accessed from the main menu. | [
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"text": "Infocom was an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced a business application, a relational database called Cornerstone.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Infocom was founded on June 22, 1979, by staff and students of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and lasted as an independent company until 1986, when it was bought by Activision. Activision shut down the Infocom division in 1989, although they released some titles in the 1990s under the Infocom Zork brand. Activision abandoned the Infocom trademark in 2002.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Infocom games are text adventures where users direct the action by entering short strings of words to give commands when prompted. Generally the program will respond by describing the results of the action, often the contents of a room if the player has moved within the virtual world. The user reads this information, decides what to do, and enters another short series of words. Examples include \"go west\" or \"take flashlight\".",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Infocom games were written using a programming language called ZIL (Zork Implementation Language), itself derived directly from MDL, that compiled into a bytecode able to run on a standardized virtual machine called the Z-machine. As the games were text based and used variants of the same Z-machine interpreter, the interpreter had to be ported to new computer architectures only once per architecture, rather than once per game. Each game file included a sophisticated parser which allowed the user to type complex instructions to the game. Unlike earlier works of interactive fiction which only understood commands of the form 'verb noun', Infocom's parser could understand a wider variety of sentences. For instance one might type \"open the large door, then go west\", or \"go to festeron\".",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "With the Z-machine, Infocom was able to release most of their games for most popular home computers simultaneously: Apple II, Atari 8-bit family, IBM PC compatibles, Amstrad CPC/PCW (one disc worked on both machines), Commodore 64, Commodore Plus/4, Commodore 128, Kaypro CP/M, TI-99/4A, Macintosh, Atari ST, Amiga, TRS-80, and TRS-80 Color Computer.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Infocom began as a collaboration between Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) faculty and alumni, some of whom had previously worked a text-based adventure game called Zork. Development of Zork began in 1977 at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, with an initial team including Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, and Dave Lebling, as well as Bruce Daniels. Inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure, the developers aspired to improve on the formula with a more robust text parser and more logical puzzles. They did not announce their game while it was in development, but a lack of security on the MIT systems meant that anyone who could access the PDP-10 computer over the ARPANET could see what programs were being run. As a result, a small community of people discovered the new \"Zork\" adventure game and spread word of it under that name. This community interacted with the developers as they created the game, playtesting additions and submitting bug reports.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Infocom was officially founded as a software company on June 22, 1979, with founding members Tim Anderson, Joel Berez, Marc Blank, Mike Broos, Scott Cutler, Stu Galley, Dave Lebling, J. C. R. Licklider, Chris Reeve, and Al Vezza. By the end of the year, the core Zork game was complete, and Berez was elected the company's president. The studio began seeking a professional publisher with store and distributor connections. After Microsoft passed on the project due to competition with their own Microsoft Adventure (1979), Infocom negotiated a publishing agreement with Personal Software, one of the first professional software publishing companies. However, Infocom grew wary of the publisher's lack of advertising for Zork I, and lack of enthusiasm for additional episodes and games. The developer decided to self-publish their games from that moment forward, buying out Personal Software's remaining inventory of Zork games.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Following its 1980 release, Zork I became a bestseller from 1983 through 1985. By 1986, the game had sold 380,000 copies, with 680,000 sales for the trilogy overall, comprising one-third of Infocom's two million game sales. Reviewers hailed Zork as the best adventure game to date, with later critics regarding it as one of the greatest games of all time. Historians noted the game as a foundation for the adventure game genre, as well as influencing the MUD and massively multiplayer online role-playing game genres.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Lebling and Blank each authored several more games, and additional game writers (or \"Implementers\") were hired, notably including Steve Meretzky. Other popular and inventive titles included a number of sequels and spinoff games in the Zork series, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, and A Mind Forever Voyaging.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In its first few years of operation, text adventures proved to be a huge revenue stream for the company. Whereas most computer games of the era would achieve initial success and then suffer a significant drop-off in sales, Infocom titles continued to sell for years and years. Employee Tim Anderson said of their situation, \"It was phenomenal – we had a basement that just printed money.\" By 1983 Infocom was perhaps the dominant computer-game company; for example, all ten of its games were on the Softsel top 40 list of best-selling computer games for the week of December 12, 1983, with Zork in first place and two others in the top ten. In late 1984, management declined an offer by publisher Simon & Schuster to acquire Infocom for $28 million, far more than the board of directors's valuation of $10–12 million. In 1993, Computer Gaming World described this era as the \"Cambridge Camelot, where the Great Underground Empire was formed\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Infocom games were popular, InfoWorld said, in part because \"in offices all over America (more than anyone realizes) executives and managers are playing games on their computers\". An estimated 25% had a computer game \"hidden somewhere in their drawers\", Inc. reported, and they preferred Infocom adventures to arcade games. The company stated that year that 75% of players were over 25 years old and that 80% were men; more women played its games than other companies', especially the mysteries. Most players enjoyed reading books; in 1987 president Joel Berez stated, \"[Infocom's] audience tends to be composed of heavy readers. We sell to the minority that does read\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "A 1996 article in Next Generation said Infocom's \"games were noted for having more depth than any other adventure games, before or since.\" Three components proved key to Infocom's success: marketing strategy, rich storytelling and feelies. Whereas most game developers sold their games mainly in software stores, Infocom also distributed their games via bookstores. Infocom's products appealed more to those with expensive computers, such as the Apple Macintosh, IBM PC, and Commodore Amiga. Berez stated that \"there is no noticeable correlation between graphics machines and our penetration. There is a high correlation between the price of the machine and our sales ... people who are putting more money into their machines tend to buy more of our software\". Since their games were text-based, patrons of bookstores were drawn to the Infocom games as they were already interested in reading. Unlike most computer software, Infocom titles were distributed under a no-returns policy, which allowed them to make money from a single game for a longer period of time.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Next, Infocom titles featured strong storytelling and rich descriptions, eschewing the inherent restrictions of graphic displays and allowing users to use their own imaginations for the lavish and exotic locations the games described. Infocom's puzzles were unique in that they were usually tightly integrated into the storyline, and rarely did gamers feel like they were being made to jump through one arbitrary hoop after another, as was the case in many of the competitors' games. The puzzles were generally logical but also required close attention to the clues and hints given in the story, causing many gamers to keep copious notes as they went along.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Sometimes, though, Infocom threw in puzzles just for the humor of it—if the user never ran into these, they could still finish the game. But discovering these early Easter Eggs was satisfying for some fans of the games. For example, one popular Easter egg was in the Enchanter game, which involves collecting magic spells to use in accomplishing the quest. One of these is a summoning spell, which the player needs to use to summon certain characters at different parts of the game. At one point the game mentions the \"Implementers\" who were responsible for creating the land of Zork. If the player tries to summon the Implementers, the game produces a vision of Dave Lebling and Marc Blank at their computers, surprised at this \"bug\" in the game and working feverishly to fix it.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Third, the inclusion of \"feelies\"—imaginative props and extras tied to the game's theme—provided copy protection against copyright infringement. Some games were unsolvable without the extra content provided with the boxed game. And because of the cleverness and uniqueness of the feelies, users rarely felt like they were an intrusion or inconvenience, as was the case with most of the other copy-protection schemes of the time. Feelies also provided the player with a physical aspect to the gameplay of their text adventures, giving another dimension of strategy to what would other-wise just be a text parser.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Although Infocom started out with Zork, and although the Zork world was the centerpiece of their product line throughout the Zork and Enchanter series, the company quickly branched out into a wide variety of story lines: fantasy, science-fiction, mystery, horror, historical adventure, children's stories, and others that defied easy categorization. In an attempt to reach out to female customers, Infocom also produced Plundered Hearts, which cast the gamer in the role of the heroine of a swashbuckling adventure on the high seas, and which required the heroine to use more feminine tactics to win the game, since hacking-and-slashing was not a very ladylike way to behave. Infocom also came out with Leather Goddesses of Phobos in 1986, which featured \"tame\", \"suggestive\", and \"lewd\" playing modes. It included among its \"feelies\" a \"scratch-and-sniff\" card with six odors that corresponded to cues given to the player during the game.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Originally, hints for the game were provided as a \"pay-per-hint\" service created by Mike Dornbrook, called the Zork Users Group (ZUG). Dornbrook also started Infocom's customer newsletter, called The New Zork Times, to discuss game hints and preview and showcase new products.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The pay-per-hint service eventually led to the development of InvisiClues: books with hints, maps, clues, and solutions for puzzles in the games. The answers to the puzzles were printed in invisible ink that only became visible when rubbed with a special marker that was provided with each book. Usually, two or more answers were given for each question that a gamer might have. The first answer would provide a subtle hint, the second a less subtle hint, and so forth until the last one gave an explicit walkthrough. Gamers could thus reveal only the hints that they needed to have to play the game. To prevent the mere questions (printed in normal ink) from giving away too much information about the game, a certain number of misleading fake questions were included in every InvisiClues book. Answers to these questions would start by giving misleading or impossible to carry out answers, before the final answer revealed that the question was a fake (and usually admonishing the player that revealing random clues from the book would spoil their enjoyment of the game). The InvisiClues books were regularly ranked in near the top of best seller lists for computer books.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In the Solid Gold line of re-releases, InvisiClues were integrated into the game. By typing \"HINT\" twice the player would open up a screen of possible topics where they could then reveal one hint at a time for each puzzle, just like the books.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Infocom also released a small number of \"interactive fiction paperbacks\" (gamebooks), which were based on the games and featured the ability to choose a different path through the story. Similar to the Choose Your Own Adventure series, every couple of pages the book would give the reader the chance to make a choice, such as which direction they wanted to go or how they wanted to respond to another character. The reader would then choose one of the given answers and turn to the appropriate page. These books, however, never did sell particularly well, and quickly disappeared from the bookshelves.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Despite their success with computer games, Vezza and other company founders hoped to produce successful business programs like Lotus Development, also founded by people from MIT and located in the same building as Infocom. Lotus released its first product, 1-2-3, in January 1983; within a year it had earned $53 million, compared to Infocom's $6 million. In 1982 Infocom started putting resources into a new division to produce business products. In 1985 they released a database product, Cornerstone, aimed at capturing the then booming database market for small business. Though this application was hailed upon its release for ease of use, it sold only 10,000 copies; not enough to cover the development expenses.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The program failed for a number of reasons. Although it was packaged in a slick hard plastic carrying case and was a very good database for personal and home use, it was originally priced at USD$495 per copy and used copy-protected disks. Another serious miscalculation was that the program did not include any kind of scripting language, so it was not promoted by any of the database consultants that small businesses typically hired to create and maintain their DB applications. Reviewers were also consistently disappointed that Infocom—noted for the natural language syntax of their games—did not include a natural language query ability, which had been the most anticipated feature for this database application. In a final disappointment, Cornerstone was available only for IBM PCs; while Cornerstone had been programmed with its own virtual machine for maximum portability, it was not ported to any of the other platforms that Infocom supported for their games, so that feature had become essentially irrelevant. And because Cornerstone used this virtual machine for its processing, it suffered from slow, lackluster performance.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Infocom's games' sales benefited significantly from the portability offered by running on top of a virtual machine. InfoWorld wrote in 1984 that \"the company always sells games for computers you don't normally think of as game machines, such as the DEC Rainbow or the Texas Instruments Professional Computer. This is one of the key reasons for the continued success of old titles such as Zork.\" Dornbrook estimated that year that of the 1.8 million home computers in America, one half million homes had Infocom games (\"all, if you count the pirated games\"). Computer companies sent prototypes of new systems to encourage Infocom to port Z-machine to them; the virtual machine supported more than 20 different systems, including orphaned computers for which Infocom games were among the only commercial products. The company produced the only third-party games available for the Macintosh at launch, and Berlyn promised that all 13 of its games would be available for the Atari ST within one month of its release.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The virtual machine significantly slowed Cornerstone's execution speed, however. Businesses were moving en masse to the IBM PC platform by that time, so portability was no longer a significant differentiator. Infocom had sunk much of the money from games sales into Cornerstone; this, in addition to a slump in computer game sales, left the company in a very precarious financial position. By the time Infocom removed the copy-protection and reduced the price to less than $100, it was too late, and the market had moved on to other database solutions.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "By 1982 the market was moving to graphic adventures. Infocom was interested in producing them, that year proposing to Penguin Software that Antonio Antiochia, author of its Transylvania, provide artwork. Within Infocom the game designers tended to oppose graphics, while marketing and business employees supported using them for the company to remain competitive. The partnership negotiations failed, in part because of the difficulty of adding graphics to the Z-machine, and Infocom instead began a series of advertisements mocking graphical games as \"graffiti\" compared to the human imagination. The marketing campaign was very successful, and Infocom's success led to other companies like Broderbund and Electronic Arts also releasing their own text games.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "After Cornerstone's failure, Infocom laid off half of its 100 employees, and Activision acquired the company on June 13, 1986, for $7.5 million. The merger was pushed by Activision's CEO Jim Levy, who was a fan of Infocom games and felt their two companies were in similar situations. Berez stated that although the two companies' headquarters and product lines would remain separate, \"One of the effects of the merger will be for both of us to broaden our horizons\". He said that \"We're looking at graphics a lot\", while Activision was reportedly interested in using Infocom's parser.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "While relations were cordial between the two companies at first, Activision's ousting of Levy with new CEO Bruce Davis created problems in the working relationship with Infocom. Davis believed that his company had paid too much for Infocom and initiated a lawsuit against them to recoup some of the cost, along with changing the way Infocom was run. For example:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "By 1988, rumors spread of disputes between Activision and Infocom. Infocom employees reportedly believed that Activision gave poorer-quality games to Infocom, such as Tom Snyder Productions' unsuccessful Infocomics. Activision moved Infocom development to California in 1989, and the company was now just a publishing label. Rising costs and falling profits, exacerbated by the lack of new products in 1988 and technical issues with its DOS products, caused Activision to close Infocom in 1989, after which some of the remaining Infocom designers such as Steve Meretzky moved to the company Legend Entertainment, founded by Bob Bates and Mike Verdu, to continue creating games in the Infocom tradition.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Activision itself was struggling in the marketplace following Davis' promotion to CEO. Activision had rebranded itself as Mediagenic and tried to produce business productivity software, but became significantly in debt. In 1991, Mediagenic was purchased by Bobby Kotick, who put into measures immediately to try to turn the company around, which included returning to its Activision name, and putting to use its past IP properties. This included the Infocom games; Kotick recognized the value of the branding of Zork and other titles. Activision began to sell bundles of the Infocom games that year, packaged as themed collections (usually by genre, such as the Science Fiction collection); in 1991, they published The Lost Treasures of Infocom, followed in 1992 by The Lost Treasures of Infocom II. These compilations featured nearly every game produced by Infocom before 1988. (Leather Goddesses of Phobos was not included in either bundle, but could be ordered via a coupon included with Lost Treasures II.) The compilations lacked the \"feelies\" that came with each game, but in some cases included photographs of them. In 1996, the first bundles were followed by Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces of Infocom, a single CD-ROM which contained the works of both collections. This release, however, was missing The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Shogun because the licenses from Douglas Adams' and James Clavell's estates had expired. Under Kotick's leadership, Activision also developed Return to Zork, published under its Infocom label.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Eventually, Activision abandoned the \"Infocom\" name. The brand name was registered by Oliver Klaeffling of Germany in 2007, then was abandoned the following year. The Infocom trademark was then held by Pete Hottelet's Omni Consumer Products, who registered the name around the same time as Klaeffling in 2007. As of March 2017, the trademark is owned by infocom.xyz, according to Bob Bates.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "With the exception of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Shogun, the copyrights to the Infocom games are believed to be still held by Activision. Dungeon, the mainframe precursor to the commercial Zork trilogy, is believed to be free for non-commercial use. but prohibited for commercial use. It was this copy that the popular Fortran mainframe version was based on. The C version was based on the Fortran version. and is available from The Interactive Fiction Archive as original FORTRAN source code, a Z-machine story file and as various native source ports. Many Infocom titles can be downloaded via the Internet, but only in violation of the copyright. Activision did at one point release the original trilogy for free-of-charge download as a promotion but prohibited redistribution and have since discontinued this. There are currently at least four Infocom sampler and demos available from the IF Archive as Z-machine story files which require a Z-machine interpreter to play. Interpreters are available for most computer platforms, the most widely used being the Frotz, Zip, and Nitfol interpreters.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Five games (Zork I, Planetfall, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Wishbringer and Leather Goddesses of Phobos) were re-released in Solid Gold format. The Solid Gold versions of those games include a built-in InvisiClues hint system.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In 2012, Activision released Lost Treasures of Infocom for iOS devices. In-app purchases provide access for 27 of the titles. It also lacks Shogun and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as well as Beyond Zork, Zork Zero and Nord and Bert.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Efforts have been made to make the Infocom games source code available for preservation. In 2008, Jason Scott, a video game preservationist contributing towards the Internet Archive, received the so-called \"Infocom Drive\", a large archive of the entire contents of Infocom's main server made during the last few days before the company was relocated to California; besides source code for all of Infocom's games (including unreleased ones), it also contained the software manuals, design documents and other essential content alongside Infocom's business documentation. Scott later published all of the source files in their original Z-engine format to GitHub in 2019.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Zork made a cameo appearance as an easter egg in Activision and Treyarch's Call of Duty: Black Ops. It can be accessed from the main menu.",
"title": "Legacy"
}
]
| Infocom was an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced a business application, a relational database called Cornerstone. Infocom was founded on June 22, 1979, by staff and students of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and lasted as an independent company until 1986, when it was bought by Activision. Activision shut down the Infocom division in 1989, although they released some titles in the 1990s under the Infocom Zork brand. Activision abandoned the Infocom trademark in 2002. | 2001-09-26T02:35:42Z | 2023-12-29T03:25:08Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infocom |
14,789 | Interactive fiction | Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of interactive narratives or interactive narrations. These works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be "text-only", however, graphic text adventures still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", that focuses on narrative, and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles.
Due to their text-only nature, they sidestepped the problem of writing for widely divergent graphics architectures. This feature meant that interactive fiction games were easily ported across all the popular platforms at the time, including CP/M (not known for gaming or strong graphics capabilities). The number of interactive fiction works is increasing steadily as new ones are produced by an online community, using freely available development systems.
The term can also be used to refer to analogue versions of literary works that are not read in a linear fashion, known as gamebooks, where the reader is instead given choices at different points in the text; these decisions determine the flow and outcome of the story. The most famous example of this form of printed fiction is the Choose Your Own Adventure book series, and the collaborative "addventure" format has also been described as a form of interactive fiction. The term "interactive fiction" is sometimes used also to refer to visual novels, a type of interactive narrative software popular in Japan.
Text adventures are one of the oldest types of computer games and form a subset of the adventure genre. The player uses text input to control the game, and the game state is relayed to the player via text output. Interactive fiction usually relies on reading from a screen and on typing input, although text-to-speech synthesizers allow blind and visually impaired users to play interactive fiction titles as audio games.
Input is usually provided by the player in the form of simple sentences such as "get key" or "go east", which are interpreted by a text parser. Parsers may vary in sophistication; the first text adventure parsers could only handle two-word sentences in the form of verb-noun pairs. Later parsers, such as those built on ZIL (Zork Implementation Language), could understand complete sentences. Later parsers could handle increasing levels of complexity parsing sentences such as "open the red box with the green key then go north". This level of complexity is the standard for works of interactive fiction today.
Despite their lack of graphics, text adventures include a physical dimension where players move between rooms. Many text adventure games boasted their total number of rooms to indicate how much gameplay they offered. These games are unique in that they may create an illogical space, where going north from area A takes you to area B, but going south from area B did not take you back to area A. This can create mazes that do not behave as players expect, and thus players must maintain their own map. These illogical spaces are much more rare in today's era of 3D gaming, and the Interactive Fiction community in general decries the use of mazes entirely, claiming that mazes have become arbitrary 'puzzles for the sake of puzzles' and that they can, in the hands of inexperienced designers, become immensely frustrating for players to navigate.
Interactive fiction shares much in common with Multi-User Dungeons ('MUDs'). MUDs, which became popular in the mid-1980s, rely on a textual exchange and accept similar commands from players as do works of IF; however, since interactive fiction is single player, and MUDs, by definition, have multiple players, they differ enormously in gameplay styles. MUDs often focus gameplay on activities that involve communities of players, simulated political systems, in-game trading, and other gameplay mechanics that are not possible in a single player environment.
Interactive fiction features two distinct modes of writing: the player input and the game output. As described above, player input is expected to be in simple command form (imperative sentences). A typical command may be:
> PULL Lever
The responses from the game are usually written from a second-person point of view, in present tense. This is because, unlike in most works of fiction, the main character is closely associated with the player, and the events are seen to be happening as the player plays. While older text adventures often identified the protagonist with the player directly, newer games tend to have specific, well-defined protagonists with separate identities from the player. The classic essay "Crimes Against Mimesis" discusses, among other IF issues, the nature of "You" in interactive fiction. A typical response might look something like this, the response to "look in tea chest" at the start of Curses:
That was the first place you tried, hours and hours ago now, and there's nothing there but that boring old book. You pick it up anyway, bored as you are.
Many text adventures, particularly those designed for humour (such as Zork, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Leather Goddesses of Phobos), address the player with an informal tone, sometimes including sarcastic remarks (see the transcript from Curses, above, for an example). The late Douglas Adams, in designing the IF version of his 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy', created a unique solution to the final puzzle of the game: the game requires the one solitary item that the player did not choose at the outset of play.
Some IF works dispense with second-person narrative entirely, opting for a first-person perspective ('I') or even placing the player in the position of an observer, rather than a direct participant. In some 'experimental' IF, the concept of self-identification is eliminated entirely, and the player instead takes the role of an inanimate object, a force of nature, or an abstract concept; experimental IF usually pushes the limits of the concept and challenges many assumptions about the medium.
Though neither program was developed as a narrative work, the software programs ELIZA (1964–1966) and SHRDLU (1968–1970) can formally be considered early examples of interactive fiction, as both programs used natural language processing to take input from their user and respond in a virtual and conversational manner. ELIZA simulated a psychotherapist that appeared to provide human-like responses to the user's input, while SHRDLU employed an artificial intelligence that could move virtual objects around an environment and respond to questions asked about the environment's shape. The development of effective natural language processing would become an essential part of interactive fiction development.
Around 1975, Will Crowther, a programmer and an amateur caver, wrote the first text adventure game, Adventure (originally called ADVENT because a filename could only be six characters long in the operating system he was using, and later named Colossal Cave Adventure). Having just gone through a divorce, he was looking for a way to connect with his two young children. Over the course of a few weekends, he wrote a text based cave exploration game that featured a sort of guide/narrator who talked in full sentences and who understood simple two-word commands that came close to natural English. Adventure was programmed in Fortran for the PDP-10. Crowther's original version was an accurate simulation of part of the real Colossal Cave, but also included fantasy elements (such as axe-wielding dwarves and a magic bridge).
Stanford University graduate student Don Woods discovered Adventure while working at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and in 1977 obtained and expanded Crowther's source code (with Crowther's permission). Woods's changes were reminiscent of the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien, and included a troll, elves, and a volcano some claim is based on Mount Doom, but Woods says was not.
In early 1977, Adventure spread across ARPANET, and has survived on the Internet to this day. The game has since been ported to many other operating systems, and was included with the floppy-disk distribution of Microsoft's MS-DOS 1.0 OS. Adventure is a cornerstone of the online IF community; there currently exist dozens of different independently programmed versions, with additional elements, such as new rooms or puzzles, and various scoring systems.
The popularity of Adventure led to the wide success of interactive fiction during the late 1970s, when home computers had little, if any, graphics capability. Many elements of the original game have survived into the present, such as the command "xyzzy", which is now included as an Easter Egg in modern games, such as Microsoft Minesweeper.
Adventure was also directly responsible for the founding of Sierra Online (later Sierra Entertainment); Ken and Roberta Williams played the game and decided to design one of their own, but with graphics.
Adventure International was founded by Scott Adams (not to be confused with the creator of Dilbert). In 1978, Adams wrote Adventureland, which was loosely patterned after (the original) Colossal Cave Adventure. He took out a small ad in a computer magazine in order to promote and sell Adventureland, thus creating the first commercial adventure game. In 1979 he founded Adventure International, the first commercial publisher of interactive fiction. That same year, Dog Star Adventure was published in source code form in SoftSide, spawning legions of similar games in BASIC.
The largest company producing works of interactive fiction was Infocom, which created the Zork series and many other titles, among them Trinity, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and A Mind Forever Voyaging.
In June 1977, Marc Blank, Bruce K. Daniels, Tim Anderson, and Dave Lebling began writing the mainframe version of Zork (also known as Dungeon), at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, directly inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure. The game was programmed in a computer language called MDL, a variant of LISP. The term Implementer was the self-given name of the creators of the text adventure series Zork. It is for this reason that game designers and programmers can be referred to as an implementer, often shortened to Imp, rather than a writer. In early 1979, the game was completed. Ten members of the MIT Dynamics Modelling Group went on to join Infocom when it was incorporated later that year. In order to make its games as portable as possible, Infocom developed the Z-machine, a custom virtual machine that could be implemented on a large number of platforms, and took standardized "story files" as input. In a non-technical sense, Infocom was responsible for developing the interactive style that would be emulated by many later interpreters. The Infocom parser was widely regarded as the best of its era. It accepted complex, complete sentence commands like "put the blue book on the writing desk" at a time when most of its competitors parsers were restricted to simple two-word verb-noun combinations such as "put book". The parser was actively upgraded with new features like undo and error correction, and later games would 'understand' multiple sentence input: 'pick up the gem and put it in my bag. take the newspaper clipping out of my bag then burn it with the book of matches'.
Infocom and other companies offered optional commercial feelies (physical props associated with a game). The tradition of 'feelies' (and the term itself) is believed to have originated with Deadline (1982), the third Infocom title after Zork I and II. When writing this game, it was not possible to include all of the information in the limited (80KB) disk space, so Infocom created the first feelies for this game; extra items that gave more information than could be included within the digital game itself. These included police interviews, the coroner's findings, letters, crime scene evidence and photos of the murder scene.
These materials were very difficult for others to copy or otherwise reproduce, and many included information that was essential to completing the game. Seeing the potential benefits of both aiding game-play immersion and providing a measure of creative copy-protection, in addition to acting as a deterrent to software piracy, Infocom and later other companies began creating feelies for numerous titles. In 1987, Infocom released a special version of the first three Zork titles together with plot-specific coins and other trinkets. This concept would be expanded as time went on, such that later game feelies would contain passwords, coded instructions, page numbers, or other information that would be required to successfully complete the game.
Interactive fiction became a standard product for many software companies. By 1982 Softline wrote that "the demands of the market are weighted heavily toward hi-res graphics" in games like Sierra's The Wizard and the Princess and its imitators. Such graphic adventures became the dominant form of the genre on computers with graphics, like the Apple II. By 1982 Adventure International began releasing versions of its games with graphics. The company went bankrupt in 1985. Synapse Software and Acornsoft were also closed in 1985. Leaving Infocom as the leading company producing text-only adventure games on the Apple II with sophisticated parsers and writing, and still advertising its lack of graphics as a virtue. The company was bought by Activision in 1986 after the failure of Cornerstone, Infocom's database software program, and stopped producing text adventures a few years later. Soon after Telaium/Trillium also closed.
Probably the first commercial work of interactive fiction produced outside the U.S. was the dungeon crawl game of Acheton, produced in Cambridge, England, and first commercially released by Acornsoft (later expanded and reissued by Topologika). Other leading companies in the UK were Magnetic Scrolls and Level 9 Computing. Also worthy of mention are Delta 4, Melbourne House, and the homebrew company Zenobi.
In the early 1980s, Edu-Ware also produced interactive fiction for the Apple II as designated by the "if" graphic that was displayed on startup. Their titles included the Prisoner and Empire series (Empire I: World Builders, Empire II: Interstellar Sharks, Empire III: Armageddon).
In 1981, CE Software published SwordThrust as a commercial successor to the Eamon gaming system for the Apple II. SwordThrust and Eamon were simple two-word parser games with many role-playing elements not available in other interactive fiction. While SwordThrust published seven different titles, it was vastly overshadowed by the non-commercial Eamon system which allowed private authors to publish their own titles in the series. By March 1984, there were 48 titles published for the Eamon system (and over 270 titles in total as of March 2013).
In Italy, interactive fiction games were mainly published and distributed through various magazines in included tapes. The largest number of games were published in the two magazines Viking and Explorer, with versions for the main 8-bit home computers (ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and MSX). The software house producing those games was Brainstorm Enterprise, and the most prolific IF author was Bonaventura Di Bello, who produced 70 games in the Italian language. The wave of interactive fiction in Italy lasted for a couple of years thanks to the various magazines promoting the genre, then faded and remains still today a topic of interest for a small group of fans and less known developers, celebrated on Web sites and in related newsgroups.
In Spain, interactive fiction was considered a minority genre, and was not very successful. The first Spanish interactive fiction commercially released was Yenght in 1983, by Dinamic Software, for the ZX Spectrum. Later on, in 1987, the same company produced an interactive fiction about Don Quijote. After several other attempts, the company Aventuras AD, emerged from Dinamic, became the main interactive fiction publisher in Spain, including titles like a Spanish adaptation of Colossal Cave Adventure, an adaptation of the Spanish comic El Jabato, and mainly the Ci-U-Than trilogy, composed by La diosa de Cozumel (1990), Los templos sagrados (1991) and Chichen Itzá (1992). During this period, the Club de Aventuras AD (CAAD), the main Spanish speaking community around interactive fiction in the world, was founded, and after the end of Aventuras AD in 1992, the CAAD continued on its own, first with their own magazine, and then with the advent of Internet, with the launch of an active internet community that still produces interactive non-commercial fiction nowadays.
Legend Entertainment was founded by Bob Bates and Mike Verdu in 1989. It started out from the ashes of Infocom. The text adventures produced by Legend Entertainment used (high-resolution) graphics as well as sound. Some of their titles include Eric the Unready, the Spellcasting series and Gateway (based on Frederik Pohl's novels).
The last text adventure created by Legend Entertainment was Gateway II (1992), while the last game ever created by Legend was Unreal II: The Awakening (2003) – a well-known first-person shooter action game using the Unreal Engine for both impressive graphics and realistic physics. In 2004, Legend Entertainment was acquired by Atari, who published Unreal II and released for both Microsoft Windows and Microsoft's Xbox.
Many other companies such as Level 9 Computing, Magnetic Scrolls and Delta 4 had closed by 1992.
In 1991 and 1992, Activision released The Lost Treasures of Infocom in two volumes, a collection containing most of Infocom's games, followed in 1996 by Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces of Infocom.
After the decline of the commercial interactive fiction market in the 1990s, an online community eventually formed around the medium. In 1987, the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction was created, and was soon followed by rec.games.int-fiction. By custom, the topic of rec.arts.int-fiction is interactive fiction authorship and programming, while rec.games.int-fiction encompasses topics related to playing interactive fiction games, such as hint requests and game reviews. As of late 2011, discussions between writers have mostly moved from rec.arts.int-fiction to the Interactive Fiction Community Forum.
One of the most important early developments was the reverse-engineering of Infocom's Z-Code format and Z-Machine virtual machine in 1987 by a group of enthusiasts called the InfoTaskForce and the subsequent development of an interpreter for Z-Code story files. As a result, it became possible to play Infocom's work on modern computers.
For years, amateurs with the IF community produced interactive fiction works of relatively limited scope using the Adventure Game Toolkit and similar tools.
The breakthrough that allowed the interactive fiction community to truly prosper, however, was the creation and distribution of two sophisticated development systems. In 1987, Michael J. Roberts released TADS, a programming language designed to produce works of interactive fiction. In 1993, Graham Nelson released Inform, a programming language and set of libraries which compiled to a Z-Code story file. Each of these systems allowed anyone with sufficient time and dedication to create a game, and caused a growth boom in the online interactive fiction community.
Despite the lack of commercial support, the availability of high quality tools allowed enthusiasts of the genre to develop new high quality games. Competitions such as the annual Interactive Fiction Competition for short works, the Spring Thing for longer works, and the XYZZY Awards, further helped to improve the quality and complexity of the games. Modern games go much further than the original "Adventure" style, improving upon Infocom games, which relied extensively on puzzle solving, and to a lesser extent on communication with non-player characters, to include experimentation with writing and story-telling techniques.
While the majority of modern interactive fiction that is developed is distributed for free, there are some commercial endeavors. In 1998, Michael Berlyn, a former Implementor at Infocom, started a new game company, Cascade Mountain Publishing, whose goals were to publish interactive fiction. Despite the Interactive Fiction community providing social and financial backing Cascade Mountain Publishing went out of business in 2000.
Other commercial endeavours include Peter Nepstad's 1893: A World's Fair Mystery, several games by Howard Sherman published as Malinche Entertainment, The General Coffee Company's Future Boy!, Cypher, a graphically enhanced cyberpunk game and various titles by Textfyre. Emily Short was commissioned to develop the game City of Secrets but the project fell through and she ended up releasing it herself.
The increased effectiveness of natural-language-generation in artificial intelligence (AI) has led to instances of interactive fiction which use AI to dynamically generate new, open-ended content, instead of being constrained to pre-written material. The most notable example of this is AI Dungeon, released in 2019, which generates content using the GPT-3 (previously GPT-2) natural-language-generating neural network, created by OpenAI.
The original interactive fiction Colossal Cave Adventure was programmed in Fortran, originally developed by IBM. Adventure's parsers could only handle two-word sentences in the form of verb-noun pairs.
Infocom's games of 1979–88, such as Zork, were written using a LISP-like programming language called ZIL (Zork Implementation Language or Zork Interactive Language, it was referred to as both) that compiled into a byte code able to run on a standardized virtual machine called the Z-machine. As the games were text based and used variants of the same Z-machine interpreter, the interpreter only had to be ported to a computer once, rather than once each game. Each game file included a sophisticated parser which allowed the user to type complex instructions to the game. Unlike earlier works of interactive fiction which only understood commands of the form 'verb noun', Infocom's parser could understand a wider variety of sentences. For instance one might type "open the large door, then go west", or "go to the hall". With the Z-machine, Infocom was able to release most of their games for most popular home computers of the time simultaneously, including Apple II, Atari 8-bit family, IBM PC compatibles, Amstrad CPC/PCW (one disc worked on both machines), Commodore 64, Commodore Plus/4, Commodore 128, Kaypro CP/M, TI-99/4A, Macintosh, Atari ST, the Amiga and the Radio Shack TRS-80. Infocom was also known for shipping creative props, or "feelies" (and even "smellies"), with its games.
During the 1990s, Interactive fiction was mainly written with C-like languages, such as TADS 2 and Inform 6. A number of systems for writing interactive fiction now exist. The most popular remain Inform, TADS, or ADRIFT, but they diverged in their approach to IF-writing during the 2000s, giving today's IF writers an objective choice. By 2006, IFComp, most games were written for Inform, with a strong minority of games for TADS and ADRIFT, followed by a small number of games for other systems.
While familiarity with a programming language leads many new authors to attempt to produce their own complete IF application, most established IF authors recommend use of a specialised IF language, arguing that such systems allow authors to avoid the technicalities of producing a full featured parser, while allowing broad community support. The choice of authoring system usually depends on the author's desired balance of ease of use versus power, and the portability of the final product.
Other development systems include:
Interpreters are the software used to play the works of interactive fiction created with a development system. Since they need to interact with the player, the "story files" created by development systems are programs in their own right. Rather than running directly on any one computer, they are programs run by Interpreters, or virtual machines, which are designed specially for IF. They may be part of the development system, or can be compiled together with the work of fiction as a standalone executable file.
The Z-machine was designed by the founders of Infocom, in 1979. They were influenced by the then-new idea of a virtual Pascal computer, but replaced P with Z for Zork, the celebrated adventure game of 1977–79. The Z-machine evolved during the 1980s but over 30 years later, it remains in use essentially unchanged. Glulx was designed by Andrew Plotkin in the late 1990s as a new-generation IF virtual machine. It overcomes the technical constraint on the Z-machine by being a 32-bit rather than 16-bit processor. Frotz is a modern Z-machine interpreter originally written in C (programming language) by Stefan Jokisch in 1995 for DOS. Over time it was ported to other platforms, such as Unix, RISC OS, Mac OS and most recently iOS. Modern Glulx interpreters are based on "Glulxe", by Andrew Plotkin, and "Git", by Iain Merrick. Other interpreters include Zoom for Mac OS X, or for Unix or Linux, maintained by Andrew Hunter, and Spatterlight for Mac OS X, maintained by Tor Andersson.
In addition to commercial distribution venues and individual websites, many works of free interactive fiction are distributed through community websites. These include the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDb), The Interactive Fiction Reviews Organization (IFRO), a game catalog and recommendation engine, and the Interactive Fiction Archive.
Works may be distributed for playing with in a separate interpreter. In which case they are often made available in the Blorb package format that many interpreters support. A filename ending .zblorb is a story file intended for a Z-machine in a Blorb wrapper, while a filename ending .gblorb is a story file intended for a Glulx in a Blorb wrapper. It is not common but IF files are sometimes also seen without a Blorb wrapping, though this usually means cover art, help files, and so forth are missing, like a book with the covers torn off. Z-machine story files usually have names ending .z5 or .z8, the number being a version number, and Glulx story files usually end .ulx.
Alternatively, works may be distributed for playing in a web browser. For example, the 'Parchment' project is for web browser-based IF Interpreter, for both Z-machine and Glulx files.
Some software such as Twine publishes directly to HTML, the standard language used to create web pages, reducing the requirement for an Interpreter or virtual machine. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of interactive narratives or interactive narrations. These works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be \"text-only\", however, graphic text adventures still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as \"Puzzle-free\", that focuses on narrative, and \"text adventures\" that focus on puzzles.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Due to their text-only nature, they sidestepped the problem of writing for widely divergent graphics architectures. This feature meant that interactive fiction games were easily ported across all the popular platforms at the time, including CP/M (not known for gaming or strong graphics capabilities). The number of interactive fiction works is increasing steadily as new ones are produced by an online community, using freely available development systems.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The term can also be used to refer to analogue versions of literary works that are not read in a linear fashion, known as gamebooks, where the reader is instead given choices at different points in the text; these decisions determine the flow and outcome of the story. The most famous example of this form of printed fiction is the Choose Your Own Adventure book series, and the collaborative \"addventure\" format has also been described as a form of interactive fiction. The term \"interactive fiction\" is sometimes used also to refer to visual novels, a type of interactive narrative software popular in Japan.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Text adventures are one of the oldest types of computer games and form a subset of the adventure genre. The player uses text input to control the game, and the game state is relayed to the player via text output. Interactive fiction usually relies on reading from a screen and on typing input, although text-to-speech synthesizers allow blind and visually impaired users to play interactive fiction titles as audio games.",
"title": "Medium"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Input is usually provided by the player in the form of simple sentences such as \"get key\" or \"go east\", which are interpreted by a text parser. Parsers may vary in sophistication; the first text adventure parsers could only handle two-word sentences in the form of verb-noun pairs. Later parsers, such as those built on ZIL (Zork Implementation Language), could understand complete sentences. Later parsers could handle increasing levels of complexity parsing sentences such as \"open the red box with the green key then go north\". This level of complexity is the standard for works of interactive fiction today.",
"title": "Medium"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Despite their lack of graphics, text adventures include a physical dimension where players move between rooms. Many text adventure games boasted their total number of rooms to indicate how much gameplay they offered. These games are unique in that they may create an illogical space, where going north from area A takes you to area B, but going south from area B did not take you back to area A. This can create mazes that do not behave as players expect, and thus players must maintain their own map. These illogical spaces are much more rare in today's era of 3D gaming, and the Interactive Fiction community in general decries the use of mazes entirely, claiming that mazes have become arbitrary 'puzzles for the sake of puzzles' and that they can, in the hands of inexperienced designers, become immensely frustrating for players to navigate.",
"title": "Medium"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Interactive fiction shares much in common with Multi-User Dungeons ('MUDs'). MUDs, which became popular in the mid-1980s, rely on a textual exchange and accept similar commands from players as do works of IF; however, since interactive fiction is single player, and MUDs, by definition, have multiple players, they differ enormously in gameplay styles. MUDs often focus gameplay on activities that involve communities of players, simulated political systems, in-game trading, and other gameplay mechanics that are not possible in a single player environment.",
"title": "Medium"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Interactive fiction features two distinct modes of writing: the player input and the game output. As described above, player input is expected to be in simple command form (imperative sentences). A typical command may be:",
"title": "Medium"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "> PULL Lever",
"title": "Medium"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The responses from the game are usually written from a second-person point of view, in present tense. This is because, unlike in most works of fiction, the main character is closely associated with the player, and the events are seen to be happening as the player plays. While older text adventures often identified the protagonist with the player directly, newer games tend to have specific, well-defined protagonists with separate identities from the player. The classic essay \"Crimes Against Mimesis\" discusses, among other IF issues, the nature of \"You\" in interactive fiction. A typical response might look something like this, the response to \"look in tea chest\" at the start of Curses:",
"title": "Medium"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "That was the first place you tried, hours and hours ago now, and there's nothing there but that boring old book. You pick it up anyway, bored as you are.",
"title": "Medium"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Many text adventures, particularly those designed for humour (such as Zork, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Leather Goddesses of Phobos), address the player with an informal tone, sometimes including sarcastic remarks (see the transcript from Curses, above, for an example). The late Douglas Adams, in designing the IF version of his 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy', created a unique solution to the final puzzle of the game: the game requires the one solitary item that the player did not choose at the outset of play.",
"title": "Medium"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Some IF works dispense with second-person narrative entirely, opting for a first-person perspective ('I') or even placing the player in the position of an observer, rather than a direct participant. In some 'experimental' IF, the concept of self-identification is eliminated entirely, and the player instead takes the role of an inanimate object, a force of nature, or an abstract concept; experimental IF usually pushes the limits of the concept and challenges many assumptions about the medium.",
"title": "Medium"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Though neither program was developed as a narrative work, the software programs ELIZA (1964–1966) and SHRDLU (1968–1970) can formally be considered early examples of interactive fiction, as both programs used natural language processing to take input from their user and respond in a virtual and conversational manner. ELIZA simulated a psychotherapist that appeared to provide human-like responses to the user's input, while SHRDLU employed an artificial intelligence that could move virtual objects around an environment and respond to questions asked about the environment's shape. The development of effective natural language processing would become an essential part of interactive fiction development.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Around 1975, Will Crowther, a programmer and an amateur caver, wrote the first text adventure game, Adventure (originally called ADVENT because a filename could only be six characters long in the operating system he was using, and later named Colossal Cave Adventure). Having just gone through a divorce, he was looking for a way to connect with his two young children. Over the course of a few weekends, he wrote a text based cave exploration game that featured a sort of guide/narrator who talked in full sentences and who understood simple two-word commands that came close to natural English. Adventure was programmed in Fortran for the PDP-10. Crowther's original version was an accurate simulation of part of the real Colossal Cave, but also included fantasy elements (such as axe-wielding dwarves and a magic bridge).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Stanford University graduate student Don Woods discovered Adventure while working at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and in 1977 obtained and expanded Crowther's source code (with Crowther's permission). Woods's changes were reminiscent of the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien, and included a troll, elves, and a volcano some claim is based on Mount Doom, but Woods says was not.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In early 1977, Adventure spread across ARPANET, and has survived on the Internet to this day. The game has since been ported to many other operating systems, and was included with the floppy-disk distribution of Microsoft's MS-DOS 1.0 OS. Adventure is a cornerstone of the online IF community; there currently exist dozens of different independently programmed versions, with additional elements, such as new rooms or puzzles, and various scoring systems.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The popularity of Adventure led to the wide success of interactive fiction during the late 1970s, when home computers had little, if any, graphics capability. Many elements of the original game have survived into the present, such as the command \"xyzzy\", which is now included as an Easter Egg in modern games, such as Microsoft Minesweeper.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Adventure was also directly responsible for the founding of Sierra Online (later Sierra Entertainment); Ken and Roberta Williams played the game and decided to design one of their own, but with graphics.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Adventure International was founded by Scott Adams (not to be confused with the creator of Dilbert). In 1978, Adams wrote Adventureland, which was loosely patterned after (the original) Colossal Cave Adventure. He took out a small ad in a computer magazine in order to promote and sell Adventureland, thus creating the first commercial adventure game. In 1979 he founded Adventure International, the first commercial publisher of interactive fiction. That same year, Dog Star Adventure was published in source code form in SoftSide, spawning legions of similar games in BASIC.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The largest company producing works of interactive fiction was Infocom, which created the Zork series and many other titles, among them Trinity, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and A Mind Forever Voyaging.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In June 1977, Marc Blank, Bruce K. Daniels, Tim Anderson, and Dave Lebling began writing the mainframe version of Zork (also known as Dungeon), at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, directly inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure. The game was programmed in a computer language called MDL, a variant of LISP. The term Implementer was the self-given name of the creators of the text adventure series Zork. It is for this reason that game designers and programmers can be referred to as an implementer, often shortened to Imp, rather than a writer. In early 1979, the game was completed. Ten members of the MIT Dynamics Modelling Group went on to join Infocom when it was incorporated later that year. In order to make its games as portable as possible, Infocom developed the Z-machine, a custom virtual machine that could be implemented on a large number of platforms, and took standardized \"story files\" as input. In a non-technical sense, Infocom was responsible for developing the interactive style that would be emulated by many later interpreters. The Infocom parser was widely regarded as the best of its era. It accepted complex, complete sentence commands like \"put the blue book on the writing desk\" at a time when most of its competitors parsers were restricted to simple two-word verb-noun combinations such as \"put book\". The parser was actively upgraded with new features like undo and error correction, and later games would 'understand' multiple sentence input: 'pick up the gem and put it in my bag. take the newspaper clipping out of my bag then burn it with the book of matches'.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Infocom and other companies offered optional commercial feelies (physical props associated with a game). The tradition of 'feelies' (and the term itself) is believed to have originated with Deadline (1982), the third Infocom title after Zork I and II. When writing this game, it was not possible to include all of the information in the limited (80KB) disk space, so Infocom created the first feelies for this game; extra items that gave more information than could be included within the digital game itself. These included police interviews, the coroner's findings, letters, crime scene evidence and photos of the murder scene.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "These materials were very difficult for others to copy or otherwise reproduce, and many included information that was essential to completing the game. Seeing the potential benefits of both aiding game-play immersion and providing a measure of creative copy-protection, in addition to acting as a deterrent to software piracy, Infocom and later other companies began creating feelies for numerous titles. In 1987, Infocom released a special version of the first three Zork titles together with plot-specific coins and other trinkets. This concept would be expanded as time went on, such that later game feelies would contain passwords, coded instructions, page numbers, or other information that would be required to successfully complete the game.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Interactive fiction became a standard product for many software companies. By 1982 Softline wrote that \"the demands of the market are weighted heavily toward hi-res graphics\" in games like Sierra's The Wizard and the Princess and its imitators. Such graphic adventures became the dominant form of the genre on computers with graphics, like the Apple II. By 1982 Adventure International began releasing versions of its games with graphics. The company went bankrupt in 1985. Synapse Software and Acornsoft were also closed in 1985. Leaving Infocom as the leading company producing text-only adventure games on the Apple II with sophisticated parsers and writing, and still advertising its lack of graphics as a virtue. The company was bought by Activision in 1986 after the failure of Cornerstone, Infocom's database software program, and stopped producing text adventures a few years later. Soon after Telaium/Trillium also closed.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Probably the first commercial work of interactive fiction produced outside the U.S. was the dungeon crawl game of Acheton, produced in Cambridge, England, and first commercially released by Acornsoft (later expanded and reissued by Topologika). Other leading companies in the UK were Magnetic Scrolls and Level 9 Computing. Also worthy of mention are Delta 4, Melbourne House, and the homebrew company Zenobi.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In the early 1980s, Edu-Ware also produced interactive fiction for the Apple II as designated by the \"if\" graphic that was displayed on startup. Their titles included the Prisoner and Empire series (Empire I: World Builders, Empire II: Interstellar Sharks, Empire III: Armageddon).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In 1981, CE Software published SwordThrust as a commercial successor to the Eamon gaming system for the Apple II. SwordThrust and Eamon were simple two-word parser games with many role-playing elements not available in other interactive fiction. While SwordThrust published seven different titles, it was vastly overshadowed by the non-commercial Eamon system which allowed private authors to publish their own titles in the series. By March 1984, there were 48 titles published for the Eamon system (and over 270 titles in total as of March 2013).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In Italy, interactive fiction games were mainly published and distributed through various magazines in included tapes. The largest number of games were published in the two magazines Viking and Explorer, with versions for the main 8-bit home computers (ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and MSX). The software house producing those games was Brainstorm Enterprise, and the most prolific IF author was Bonaventura Di Bello, who produced 70 games in the Italian language. The wave of interactive fiction in Italy lasted for a couple of years thanks to the various magazines promoting the genre, then faded and remains still today a topic of interest for a small group of fans and less known developers, celebrated on Web sites and in related newsgroups.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In Spain, interactive fiction was considered a minority genre, and was not very successful. The first Spanish interactive fiction commercially released was Yenght in 1983, by Dinamic Software, for the ZX Spectrum. Later on, in 1987, the same company produced an interactive fiction about Don Quijote. After several other attempts, the company Aventuras AD, emerged from Dinamic, became the main interactive fiction publisher in Spain, including titles like a Spanish adaptation of Colossal Cave Adventure, an adaptation of the Spanish comic El Jabato, and mainly the Ci-U-Than trilogy, composed by La diosa de Cozumel (1990), Los templos sagrados (1991) and Chichen Itzá (1992). During this period, the Club de Aventuras AD (CAAD), the main Spanish speaking community around interactive fiction in the world, was founded, and after the end of Aventuras AD in 1992, the CAAD continued on its own, first with their own magazine, and then with the advent of Internet, with the launch of an active internet community that still produces interactive non-commercial fiction nowadays.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Legend Entertainment was founded by Bob Bates and Mike Verdu in 1989. It started out from the ashes of Infocom. The text adventures produced by Legend Entertainment used (high-resolution) graphics as well as sound. Some of their titles include Eric the Unready, the Spellcasting series and Gateway (based on Frederik Pohl's novels).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The last text adventure created by Legend Entertainment was Gateway II (1992), while the last game ever created by Legend was Unreal II: The Awakening (2003) – a well-known first-person shooter action game using the Unreal Engine for both impressive graphics and realistic physics. In 2004, Legend Entertainment was acquired by Atari, who published Unreal II and released for both Microsoft Windows and Microsoft's Xbox.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Many other companies such as Level 9 Computing, Magnetic Scrolls and Delta 4 had closed by 1992.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In 1991 and 1992, Activision released The Lost Treasures of Infocom in two volumes, a collection containing most of Infocom's games, followed in 1996 by Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces of Infocom.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "After the decline of the commercial interactive fiction market in the 1990s, an online community eventually formed around the medium. In 1987, the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction was created, and was soon followed by rec.games.int-fiction. By custom, the topic of rec.arts.int-fiction is interactive fiction authorship and programming, while rec.games.int-fiction encompasses topics related to playing interactive fiction games, such as hint requests and game reviews. As of late 2011, discussions between writers have mostly moved from rec.arts.int-fiction to the Interactive Fiction Community Forum.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "One of the most important early developments was the reverse-engineering of Infocom's Z-Code format and Z-Machine virtual machine in 1987 by a group of enthusiasts called the InfoTaskForce and the subsequent development of an interpreter for Z-Code story files. As a result, it became possible to play Infocom's work on modern computers.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "For years, amateurs with the IF community produced interactive fiction works of relatively limited scope using the Adventure Game Toolkit and similar tools.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The breakthrough that allowed the interactive fiction community to truly prosper, however, was the creation and distribution of two sophisticated development systems. In 1987, Michael J. Roberts released TADS, a programming language designed to produce works of interactive fiction. In 1993, Graham Nelson released Inform, a programming language and set of libraries which compiled to a Z-Code story file. Each of these systems allowed anyone with sufficient time and dedication to create a game, and caused a growth boom in the online interactive fiction community.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Despite the lack of commercial support, the availability of high quality tools allowed enthusiasts of the genre to develop new high quality games. Competitions such as the annual Interactive Fiction Competition for short works, the Spring Thing for longer works, and the XYZZY Awards, further helped to improve the quality and complexity of the games. Modern games go much further than the original \"Adventure\" style, improving upon Infocom games, which relied extensively on puzzle solving, and to a lesser extent on communication with non-player characters, to include experimentation with writing and story-telling techniques.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "While the majority of modern interactive fiction that is developed is distributed for free, there are some commercial endeavors. In 1998, Michael Berlyn, a former Implementor at Infocom, started a new game company, Cascade Mountain Publishing, whose goals were to publish interactive fiction. Despite the Interactive Fiction community providing social and financial backing Cascade Mountain Publishing went out of business in 2000.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Other commercial endeavours include Peter Nepstad's 1893: A World's Fair Mystery, several games by Howard Sherman published as Malinche Entertainment, The General Coffee Company's Future Boy!, Cypher, a graphically enhanced cyberpunk game and various titles by Textfyre. Emily Short was commissioned to develop the game City of Secrets but the project fell through and she ended up releasing it herself.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The increased effectiveness of natural-language-generation in artificial intelligence (AI) has led to instances of interactive fiction which use AI to dynamically generate new, open-ended content, instead of being constrained to pre-written material. The most notable example of this is AI Dungeon, released in 2019, which generates content using the GPT-3 (previously GPT-2) natural-language-generating neural network, created by OpenAI.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The original interactive fiction Colossal Cave Adventure was programmed in Fortran, originally developed by IBM. Adventure's parsers could only handle two-word sentences in the form of verb-noun pairs.",
"title": "Software"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Infocom's games of 1979–88, such as Zork, were written using a LISP-like programming language called ZIL (Zork Implementation Language or Zork Interactive Language, it was referred to as both) that compiled into a byte code able to run on a standardized virtual machine called the Z-machine. As the games were text based and used variants of the same Z-machine interpreter, the interpreter only had to be ported to a computer once, rather than once each game. Each game file included a sophisticated parser which allowed the user to type complex instructions to the game. Unlike earlier works of interactive fiction which only understood commands of the form 'verb noun', Infocom's parser could understand a wider variety of sentences. For instance one might type \"open the large door, then go west\", or \"go to the hall\". With the Z-machine, Infocom was able to release most of their games for most popular home computers of the time simultaneously, including Apple II, Atari 8-bit family, IBM PC compatibles, Amstrad CPC/PCW (one disc worked on both machines), Commodore 64, Commodore Plus/4, Commodore 128, Kaypro CP/M, TI-99/4A, Macintosh, Atari ST, the Amiga and the Radio Shack TRS-80. Infocom was also known for shipping creative props, or \"feelies\" (and even \"smellies\"), with its games.",
"title": "Software"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "During the 1990s, Interactive fiction was mainly written with C-like languages, such as TADS 2 and Inform 6. A number of systems for writing interactive fiction now exist. The most popular remain Inform, TADS, or ADRIFT, but they diverged in their approach to IF-writing during the 2000s, giving today's IF writers an objective choice. By 2006, IFComp, most games were written for Inform, with a strong minority of games for TADS and ADRIFT, followed by a small number of games for other systems.",
"title": "Software"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "While familiarity with a programming language leads many new authors to attempt to produce their own complete IF application, most established IF authors recommend use of a specialised IF language, arguing that such systems allow authors to avoid the technicalities of producing a full featured parser, while allowing broad community support. The choice of authoring system usually depends on the author's desired balance of ease of use versus power, and the portability of the final product.",
"title": "Software"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Other development systems include:",
"title": "Software"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Interpreters are the software used to play the works of interactive fiction created with a development system. Since they need to interact with the player, the \"story files\" created by development systems are programs in their own right. Rather than running directly on any one computer, they are programs run by Interpreters, or virtual machines, which are designed specially for IF. They may be part of the development system, or can be compiled together with the work of fiction as a standalone executable file.",
"title": "Software"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The Z-machine was designed by the founders of Infocom, in 1979. They were influenced by the then-new idea of a virtual Pascal computer, but replaced P with Z for Zork, the celebrated adventure game of 1977–79. The Z-machine evolved during the 1980s but over 30 years later, it remains in use essentially unchanged. Glulx was designed by Andrew Plotkin in the late 1990s as a new-generation IF virtual machine. It overcomes the technical constraint on the Z-machine by being a 32-bit rather than 16-bit processor. Frotz is a modern Z-machine interpreter originally written in C (programming language) by Stefan Jokisch in 1995 for DOS. Over time it was ported to other platforms, such as Unix, RISC OS, Mac OS and most recently iOS. Modern Glulx interpreters are based on \"Glulxe\", by Andrew Plotkin, and \"Git\", by Iain Merrick. Other interpreters include Zoom for Mac OS X, or for Unix or Linux, maintained by Andrew Hunter, and Spatterlight for Mac OS X, maintained by Tor Andersson.",
"title": "Software"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In addition to commercial distribution venues and individual websites, many works of free interactive fiction are distributed through community websites. These include the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDb), The Interactive Fiction Reviews Organization (IFRO), a game catalog and recommendation engine, and the Interactive Fiction Archive.",
"title": "Software"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Works may be distributed for playing with in a separate interpreter. In which case they are often made available in the Blorb package format that many interpreters support. A filename ending .zblorb is a story file intended for a Z-machine in a Blorb wrapper, while a filename ending .gblorb is a story file intended for a Glulx in a Blorb wrapper. It is not common but IF files are sometimes also seen without a Blorb wrapping, though this usually means cover art, help files, and so forth are missing, like a book with the covers torn off. Z-machine story files usually have names ending .z5 or .z8, the number being a version number, and Glulx story files usually end .ulx.",
"title": "Software"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Alternatively, works may be distributed for playing in a web browser. For example, the 'Parchment' project is for web browser-based IF Interpreter, for both Z-machine and Glulx files.",
"title": "Software"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Some software such as Twine publishes directly to HTML, the standard language used to create web pages, reducing the requirement for an Interpreter or virtual machine.",
"title": "Software"
}
]
| Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of interactive narratives or interactive narrations. These works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be "text-only", however, graphic text adventures still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", that focuses on narrative, and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles. Due to their text-only nature, they sidestepped the problem of writing for widely divergent graphics architectures. This feature meant that interactive fiction games were easily ported across all the popular platforms at the time, including CP/M. The number of interactive fiction works is increasing steadily as new ones are produced by an online community, using freely available development systems. The term can also be used to refer to analogue versions of literary works that are not read in a linear fashion, known as gamebooks, where the reader is instead given choices at different points in the text; these decisions determine the flow and outcome of the story. The most famous example of this form of printed fiction is the Choose Your Own Adventure book series, and the collaborative "addventure" format has also been described as a form of interactive fiction. The term "interactive fiction" is sometimes used also to refer to visual novels, a type of interactive narrative software popular in Japan. | 2001-09-26T02:36:16Z | 2023-12-04T16:38:07Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction |
14,790 | Ice hockey | Ice hockey (or simply hockey) is a team sport played on ice skates, usually on an ice skating rink with lines and markings specific to the sport. It belongs to a family of sports called hockey. In ice hockey, two opposing teams use ice hockey sticks to control, advance, and shoot a closed, vulcanized, rubber disc called a "puck" into the other team's goal. Each goal is worth one point. The team which scores the most goals is declared the winner. In a formal game, each team has six skaters on the ice at a time, barring any penalties, one of whom is the goaltender. Ice hockey is a full contact sport, and is considered to be one of the more physically demanding team sports. It is distinct from field hockey, in which players move a ball around a non-frozen pitch using field hockey sticks.
The modern sport of ice hockey was developed in Canada, most notably in Montreal, where the first indoor game was played on March 3, 1875. Some characteristics of that game, such as the length of the ice rink and the use of a puck, have been retained to this day. Amateur ice hockey leagues began in the 1880s, and professional ice hockey originated around 1900. The Stanley Cup, emblematic of ice hockey club supremacy, was initially commissioned in 1892 as the "Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup" and was first awarded in 1893 to recognize the Canadian amateur champion and later became the championship trophy of the National Hockey League (NHL). In the early 1900s, the Canadian rules were adopted by the Ligue Internationale de Hockey sur Glace, in Paris, France, the precursor of the IIHF. The sport was played for the first time at the Olympics during the 1920 Summer Olympics. In 1994 ice hockey was officially recognized as Canada's national winter sport.
While women also played during the game's early formative years, it was not until organizers began to officially remove body checking from female ice hockey beginning in the mid-1980s that it began to gain greater popularity, which by then had spread to Europe and a variety of other countries. The first IIHF Women's World Championship was held in 1990, and women's play was introduced into the Olympics in 1998.
Ice hockey is one of the sports featured in the Winter Olympics, while its premiere international competition, the IIHF World Championships, are governed by the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) for both men's and women's competitions.
Ice hockey is believed to have evolved from simple stick and ball games played in the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain, Ireland, and elsewhere, primarily bandy, hurling, and shinty. The North American sport of lacrosse was also influential. These games were brought to North America and several similar winter games using informal rules developed, such as shinny and ice polo, but would later be absorbed into a new organized game with codified rules which today is ice hockey.
While the general characteristics of the game remain constant, the exact rules depend on the particular code of play being used. The two most important codes are those of the IIHF and the NHL. Both of these codes, and others, originated from Canadian rules of ice hockey of the early 20th century.
Ice hockey is played on a hockey rink. During normal play, there are six players on ice skates on the ice per side, one of them being the goaltender. The objective of the game is to score goals by shooting a hard vulcanized rubber disc, the puck, into the opponent's goal net at the opposite end of the rink. The players use their sticks to pass or shoot the puck.
With certain restrictions, players may redirect the puck with any part of their body. Players may not hold the puck in their hand and are prohibited from using their hands to pass the puck to their teammates unless they are in the defensive zone. Players however can knock a puck out of the air with their hand to themself. Players are prohibited from kicking the puck into the opponent's goal, though unintentional redirections off the skate are permitted. Players may not intentionally bat the puck into the net with their hands.
Hockey is an off-side game, meaning that forward passes are allowed, unlike in rugby. Before the 1930s, hockey was an on-side game, meaning that only backward passes were allowed. Those rules emphasized individual stick-handling to drive the puck forward. With the arrival of offside rules, the forward pass transformed hockey into a true team sport, where individual performance diminished in importance relative to team play, which could now be coordinated over the entire surface of the ice as opposed to merely rearward players.
The six players on each team are typically divided into three forwards, two defencemen, and one goaltender. The term skaters typically applies to all players except goaltenders. The forward positions consist of a centre and two wingers: a left wing and a right wing. Forwards often play together as units or lines, with the same three forwards always playing together. The defencemen usually stay together as a pair generally divided between left and right. Left and right side wingers or defencemen are generally positioned on the side on which they carry their stick. A substitution of an entire unit at once is called a line change. Teams typically employ alternate sets of forward lines and defensive pairings when short-handed or on a power play. The goaltender stands in a, usually blue, semi-circle called the crease in the defensive zone keeping pucks out of the goal. Substitutions are permitted at any time during the game, although during a stoppage of play the home team is permitted the final change. When players are substituted during play, it is called changing on the fly. An NHL rule added in the 2005–06 season prevents a team from changing their line after they ice the puck.
The boards surrounding the ice help keep the puck in play and they can also be used as tools to play the puck. Players are permitted to bodycheck opponents into the boards to stop progress. The referees, linesmen and the outsides of the goal are "in play" and do not stop the game when the puck or players either bounce into or collide with them. Play can be stopped if the goal is knocked out of position. Play often proceeds for minutes without interruption. After a stoppage, play is restarted with a faceoff. Two players face each other and an official drops the puck to the ice, where the two players attempt to gain control of the puck. Markings (circles) on the ice indicate the locations for the faceoff and guide the positioning of players.
Three major rules of play in ice hockey limit the movement of the puck: offside, icing, and the puck going out of play.
Under IIHF rules, each team may carry a maximum of 20 players and two goaltenders on their roster. NHL rules restrict the total number of players per game to 18, plus two goaltenders. In the NHL, the players are usually divided into four lines of three forwards, and into three pairs of defencemen. On occasion, teams may elect to substitute an extra defenceman for a forward. The seventh defenceman may play as a substitute defenceman, spend the game on the bench, or if a team chooses to play four lines then this seventh defenceman may see ice-time on the fourth line as a forward.
A professional ice hockey game consists of three periods of twenty minutes, the clock running only when the puck is in play. The teams change ends after each period of play, including overtime. Recreational leagues and children's leagues often play shorter games, generally with three shorter periods of play.
If a tie occurs in tournament play, as well as in the NHL playoffs, North Americans favour sudden death overtime, in which the teams continue to play twenty-minute periods until a goal is scored. Up until the 1999–2000 season, regular-season NHL games were settled with a single five-minute sudden death period with five players (plus a goalie) per side, with both teams awarded one point in the standings in the event of a tie. With a goal, the winning team would be awarded two points and the losing team none (just as if they had lost in regulation). The total elapsed time from when the puck first drops, is about 2 hours and 20 minutes for a 60-minute game.
From the 1999–2000 until the 2003–04 seasons, the National Hockey League decided ties by playing a single five-minute sudden-death overtime period with each team having four skaters per side (plus the goalie). In the event of a tie, each team would still receive one point in the standings but in the event of a victory the winning team would be awarded two points in the standings and the losing team one point. The idea was to discourage teams from playing for a tie, since previously some teams might have preferred a tie and 1 point to risking a loss and zero points. The exception to this rule is if a team opts to pull their goalie in exchange for an extra skater during overtime and is subsequently scored upon (an empty net goal), in which case the losing team receives no points for the overtime loss. Since the 2015–16 season, the single five-minute sudden-death overtime session involves three skaters on each side. Since three skaters must always be on the ice in an NHL game, the consequences of penalties are slightly different from those during regulation play; any penalty during overtime that would result in a team losing a skater during regulation instead causes the other side to add a skater. Once the penalized team's penalty ends, the penalized skater exits the penalty box and the teams continue at 4-on-4 until the next stoppage of play, at which point the teams return to three skaters per side.
International play and several North American professional leagues, including the NHL (in the regular season), now use an overtime period identical to that from 1999–2000 to 2003–04 followed by a penalty shootout. If the score remains tied after an extra overtime period, the subsequent shootout consists of three players from each team taking penalty shots. After these six total shots, the team with the most goals is awarded the victory. If the score is still tied, the shootout then proceeds to sudden death. Regardless of the number of goals scored by either team during the shootout, the final score recorded will award the winning team one more goal than the score at the end of regulation time. In the NHL if a game is decided in overtime or by a shootout the winning team is awarded two points in the standings and the losing team is awarded one point. Ties no longer occur in the NHL.
Overtime in the NHL playoffs differs from the regular season. In the playoffs there are no shootouts. If a game is tied after regulation, then a 20-minute period of 5-on-5 sudden-death overtime will be added. If the game is still tied after the overtime, another period is added until a team scores, which wins the match. Since 2019, the IIHF World Championships and the gold medal game in the Olympics use the same format, but in a 3-on-3 format.
In ice hockey, infractions of the rules lead to a play stoppage whereby the play is restarted at a faceoff. Some infractions result in a penalty on a player or team. In the simplest case, the offending player is sent to the penalty box and their team must play with one less player on the ice for a designated time. Minor penalties last for two minutes, major penalties last for five minutes, and a double minor penalty is two consecutive penalties of two minutes duration. A single minor penalty may be extended by two minutes for causing visible injury to the victimized player. This is usually when blood is drawn during high sticking. Players may be also assessed personal extended penalties or game expulsions for misconduct in addition to the penalty or penalties their team must serve. The team that has been given a penalty is said to be playing short-handed while the opposing team is on a power play.
A two-minute minor penalty is often charged for lesser infractions such as tripping, elbowing, roughing, high-sticking, delay of the game, too many players on the ice, boarding, illegal equipment, charging (leaping into an opponent or body-checking him after taking more than two strides), holding, holding the stick (grabbing an opponent's stick), interference, hooking, slashing, kneeing, unsportsmanlike conduct (arguing a penalty call with referee, extremely vulgar or inappropriate verbal comments), "butt-ending" (striking an opponent with the knob of the stick), "spearing" (jabbing an opponent with the blade of the stick), or cross-checking. As of the 2005–2006 season, a minor penalty is also assessed for diving, where a player embellishes or simulates an offence. More egregious fouls may be penalized by a four-minute double-minor penalty, particularly those that injure the victimized player. These penalties end either when the time runs out or when the other team scores during the power play. In the case of a goal scored during the first two minutes of a double-minor, the penalty clock is set down to two minutes upon a score, effectively expiring the first minor penalty.
Five-minute major penalties are called for especially violent instances of most minor infractions that result in intentional injury to an opponent, or when a minor penalty results in visible injury (such as bleeding), as well as for fighting. Major penalties are always served in full; they do not terminate on a goal scored by the other team. Major penalties assessed for fighting are typically offsetting, meaning neither team is short-handed and the players exit the penalty box upon a stoppage of play following the expiration of their respective penalties. The foul of boarding (defined as "check[ing] an opponent in such a manner that causes the opponent to be thrown violently in the boards") is penalized either by a minor or major penalty at the discretion of the referee, based on the violent state of the hit. A minor or major penalty for boarding is often assessed when a player checks an opponent from behind and into the boards.
Some varieties of penalty do not require the offending team to play a man short. Concurrent five-minute major penalties in the NHL usually result from fighting. In the case of two players being assessed five-minute fighting majors, both the players serve five minutes without their team incurring a loss of player (both teams still have a full complement of players on the ice). This differs with two players from opposing sides getting minor penalties, at the same time or at any intersecting moment, resulting from more common infractions. In this case, both teams will have only four skating players (not counting the goaltender) until one or both penalties expire (if one penalty expires before the other, the opposing team gets a power play for the remainder of the time); this applies regardless of current pending penalties. However, in the NHL, a team always has at least three skaters on the ice. Thus, ten-minute misconduct penalties are served in full by the penalized player, but his team may immediately substitute another player on the ice unless a minor or major penalty is assessed in conjunction with the misconduct (a two-and-ten or five-and-ten). In this case, the team designates another player to serve the minor or major; both players go to the penalty box, but only the designee may not be replaced, and he is released upon the expiration of the two or five minutes, at which point the ten-minute misconduct begins. In addition, game misconducts are assessed for deliberate intent to inflict severe injury on an opponent (at the officials' discretion), or for a major penalty for a stick infraction or repeated major penalties. The offending player is ejected from the game and must immediately leave the playing surface (he does not sit in the penalty box); meanwhile, if an additional minor or major penalty is assessed, a designated player must serve out of that segment of the penalty in the box (similar to the above-mentioned "two-and-ten"). In some rare cases, a player may receive up to nineteen minutes in penalties for one string of plays. This could involve receiving a four-minute double-minor penalty, getting in a fight with an opposing player who retaliates, and then receiving a game misconduct after the fight. In this case, the player is ejected and two teammates must serve the double-minor and major penalties.
A penalty shot is awarded to a player when the illegal actions of another player stop a clear scoring opportunity, most commonly when the player is on a breakaway. A penalty shot allows the obstructed player to pick up the puck on the centre red-line and attempt to score on the goalie with no other players on the ice, to compensate for the earlier missed scoring opportunity. A penalty shot is also awarded for a defender other than the goaltender covering the puck in the goal crease, a goaltender intentionally displacing his own goal posts during a breakaway to avoid a goal, a defender intentionally displacing his own goal posts when there is less than two minutes to play in regulation time or at any point during overtime, or a player or coach intentionally throwing a stick or other object at the puck or the puck carrier and the throwing action disrupts a shot or pass play.
Officials also stop play for puck movement violations, such as using one's hands to pass the puck in the offensive end, but no players are penalized for these offences. The sole exceptions are deliberately falling on or gathering the puck to the body, carrying the puck in the hand, and shooting the puck out of play in one's defensive zone (all penalized two minutes for delay of game).
In the NHL, a unique penalty applies to the goalies. The goalies now are forbidden to play the puck in the "corners" of the rink near their own net. This will result in a two-minute penalty against the goalie's team. Only in the area in front of the goal line and immediately behind the net (marked by two red lines on either side of the net) can the goalie play the puck.
An additional rule that has never been a penalty, but was an infraction in the NHL before recent rules changes, is the two-line offside pass. Prior to the 2005–06 NHL season, play was stopped when a pass from inside a team's defending zone crossed the centre line, with a face-off held in the defending zone of the offending team. Now, the centre line is no longer used in the NHL to determine a two-line pass infraction, a change that the IIHF had adopted in 1998. Players are now able to pass to teammates who are more than the blue and centre ice red line away.
The NHL has taken steps to speed up the game of hockey and create a game of finesse, by reducing the number of illegal hits, fights, and "clutching and grabbing" that occurred in the past. Rules are now more strictly enforced, resulting in more penalties, which provides more protection to the players and facilitates more goals being scored. The governing body for United States' amateur hockey has implemented many new rules to reduce the number of stick-on-body occurrences, as well as other detrimental and illegal facets of the game ("zero tolerance").
In men's hockey, but not in women's, a player may use his hip or shoulder to hit another player if the player has the puck or is the last to have touched it. This use of the hip and shoulder is called body checking. Not all physical contact is legal—in particular, hits from behind, hits to the head and most types of forceful stick-on-body contact are illegal.
A delayed penalty call occurs when an offence is committed by the team that does not have possession of the puck. In this circumstance the team with possession of the puck is allowed to complete the play; that is, play continues until a goal is scored, a player on the opposing team gains control of the puck, or the team in possession commits an infraction or penalty of their own. Because the team on which the penalty was called cannot control the puck without stopping play, it is impossible for them to score a goal. In these cases, the team in possession of the puck can pull the goalie for an extra attacker without fear of being scored on. However, it is possible for the controlling team to mishandle the puck into their own net. If a delayed penalty is signalled and the team in possession scores, the penalty is still assessed to the offending player, but not served. In 2012, this rule was changed by the United States' National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) for college level hockey. In college games, the penalty is still enforced even if the team in possession scores.
A typical game of hockey is governed by two to four officials on the ice, charged with enforcing the rules of the game. There are typically two linesmen who are mainly responsible for calling "offside" and "icing" violations, breaking up fights, and conducting faceoffs, and one or two referees, who call goals and all other penalties. Linesmen can, however, report to the referee(s) that a penalty should be assessed against an offending player in some situations. The restrictions on this practice vary depending on the governing rules. On-ice officials are assisted by off-ice officials who act as goal judges, time keepers, and official scorers.
The most widespread system is the "three-man system", which uses one referee and two linesmen. A less commonly used system is the two referee and one linesman system. This system is close to the regular three-man system except for a few procedure changes. Beginning with the National Hockey League, a number of leagues have implemented the "four-official system", where an additional referee is added to aid in the calling of penalties normally difficult to assess by one referee. The system is used in every NHL game since 2001, at IIHF World Championships, the Olympics and in many professional and high-level amateur leagues in North America and Europe.
Officials are selected by the league they work for. Amateur hockey leagues use guidelines established by national organizing bodies as a basis for choosing their officiating staffs. In North America, the national organizing bodies Hockey Canada and USA Hockey approve officials according to their experience level as well as their ability to pass rules knowledge and skating ability tests. Hockey Canada has officiating levels I through VI. USA Hockey has officiating levels 1 through 4.
Since men's ice hockey is a full-contact sport, body checks are allowed so injuries are a common occurrence. Protective equipment is mandatory and is enforced in all competitive situations. This includes a helmet with either a visor or a full face mask, shoulder pads, elbow pads, mouth guard, protective gloves, heavily padded shorts (also known as hockey pants) or a girdle, athletic cup (also known as a jock, for males; and jill, for females), shin pads, skates, and (optionally) a neck protector.
Goaltenders use different equipment. With hockey pucks approaching them at speeds of up to 100 mph (160 km/h) they must wear equipment with more protection. Goaltenders wear specialized goalie skates (these skates are built more for movement side to side rather than forwards and backwards), a jock or jill, large leg pads (there are size restrictions in certain leagues), blocking glove, catching glove, a chest protector, a goalie mask, and a large jersey. Goaltenders' equipment has continually become larger and larger, leading to fewer goals in each game and many official rule changes.
Ice hockey skates are optimized for physical acceleration, speed and manoeuvrability. This includes rapid starts, stops, turns, and changes in skating direction. In addition, they must be rigid and tough to protect the skater's feet from contact with other skaters, sticks, pucks, the boards, and the ice itself. Rigidity also improves the overall manoeuvrability of the skate. Blade length, thickness (width), and curvature (rocker/radius) (front to back) and radius of hollow (across the blade width) are quite different from speed or figure skates. Hockey players usually adjust these parameters based on their skill level, position, and body type. The blade width of most skates are about 1⁄8 inch (3.2 mm) thick.
Each player other than the goaltender carries a stick consisting of a long, relatively wide, and slightly curved flat blade, attached to a shaft. The curve itself has a big impact on its performance. A deep curve allows for lifting the puck easier while a shallow curve allows for easier backhand shots. The flex of the stick also impacts the performance. Typically, a less flexible stick is meant for a stronger player since the player is looking for the right balanced flex that allows the stick to flex easily while still having a strong "whip-back" which sends the puck flying at high speeds. It is quite distinct from sticks in other sports games and most suited to hitting and controlling the flat puck. Its unique shape contributed to the early development of the game.
The goaltender carries a stick of a different design, with a larger blade and a wide, flat shaft. This stick is primarily intended to block shots, but the goaltender may use it to play the puck as well.
Ice hockey is a full-contact sport and carries a high risk of injury. Players are moving at speeds around approximately 20–30 mph (30–50 km/h) and much of the game revolves around the physical contact between the players. Skate blades, hockey sticks, shoulder contact, hip contact, and hockey pucks can all potentially cause injuries. Lace bite, an irritation felt on the front of the foot or ankle, is a common ice hockey injury.
Compared to athletes who play other sports, ice hockey players are at higher risk of overuse injuries and injuries caused by early sports specialization by teenagers.
According to the Hughston Health Alert, "Lacerations to the head, scalp, and face are the most frequent types of injury [in hockey]."
One of the leading causes of head injury is body checking from behind. Due to the danger of delivering a check from behind, many leagues – including the NHL – have made this a major and game misconduct penalty. Another type of check that accounts for many of the player-to-player contact concussions is a check to the head resulting in a misconduct penalty (called "head contact"). In recent years, the NHL has implemented new rules which penalize and suspend players for illegal checks to the heads, as well as checks to unsuspecting players. Studies show that ice hockey causes 44.3% of all sports-related traumatic brain injuries among Canadian children.
Some teams in the Swiss National League are testing out systems that combine helmet-integrated sensors and analysis software to reveal a player's ongoing brain injury risk during a game. These sensors provide players and coaches with real-time data on head impact strength, frequency, and severity. Furthermore, if the app determines that a particular impact has the potential to cause brain injury, it will alert the coach who can in turn seek medical attention for the individual.
Defensive ice hockey tactics vary from more active to more conservative styles of play. One distinction is between man-to-man oriented defensive systems, and zonal oriented defensive systems, though a lot of teams use a combination between the two. Defensive skills involve pass interception, shot blocking, and stick checking (in which an attempt to take away the puck or cut off the puck lane is initiated by the stick of the defensive player). Tactical points of emphasis in ice hockey defensive play are concepts like "managing gaps" (gap control), "boxing out"' (not letting the offensive team go on the inside), and "staying on the right side" (of the puck). Another popular concept in ice hockey defensive tactics is that of playing a 200-foot game.
An important defensive tactic is checking—attempting to take the puck from an opponent or to remove the opponent from play. Stick checking, sweep checking, and poke checking are legal uses of the stick to obtain possession of the puck. The neutral zone trap is designed to isolate the puck carrier in the neutral zone preventing him from entering the offensive zone. Body checking is using one's shoulder or hip to strike an opponent who has the puck or who is the last to have touched it (the last person to have touched the puck is still legally "in possession" of it, although a penalty is generally called if he is checked more than two seconds after his last touch). Body checking is also a penalty in certain leagues in order to reduce the chance of injury to players. Often the term checking is used to refer to body checking, with its true definition generally only propagated among fans of the game.
One of the most important strategies for a team is their forecheck. Forechecking is the act of attacking the opposition in their defensive zone. Forechecking is an important part of the dump and chase strategy (i.e. shooting the puck into the offensive zone and then chasing after it). Each team uses their own unique system but the main ones are: 2–1–2, 1–2–2, and 1–4. The 2–1–2 is the most basic forecheck system where two forwards go in deep and pressure the opposition's defencemen, the third forward stays high and the two defencemen stay at the blueline. The 1–2–2 is a bit more conservative system where one forward pressures the puck carrier and the other two forwards cover the oppositions' wingers, with the two defencemen staying at the blueline. The 1–4 is the most defensive forecheck system, referred to as the neutral zone trap, where one forward applies pressure to the puck carrier around the oppositions' blueline and the other four players stand basically in a line by their blueline in hopes the opposition will skate into one of them. Another strategy is the left wing lock, which has two forwards pressure the puck and the left wing and the two defencemen stay at the blueline.
Offensive tactics include improving a team's position on the ice by advancing the puck out of one's zone towards the opponent's zone, progressively by gaining lines, first your own blue line, then the red line and finally the opponent's blue line. NHL rules instated for the 2006 season redefined the offside rule to make the two-line pass legal; a player may pass the puck from behind his own blue line, past both that blue line and the centre red line, to a player on the near side of the opponents' blue line. Offensive tactics are designed ultimately to score a goal by taking a shot. When a player purposely directs the puck towards the opponent's goal, he or she is said to "shoot" the puck.
A deflection is a shot that redirects a shot or a pass towards the goal from another player, by allowing the puck to strike the stick and carom towards the goal. A one-timer is a shot struck directly off a pass, without receiving the pass and shooting in two separate actions. Headmanning the puck, also known as breaking out, is the tactic of rapidly passing to the player farthest down the ice. Loafing, also known as cherry-picking, is when a player, usually a forward, skates behind an attacking team, instead of playing defence, in an attempt to create an easy scoring chance.
A team that is losing by one or two goals in the last few minutes of play will often elect to pull the goalie; that is, remove the goaltender and replace him or her with an extra attacker on the ice in the hope of gaining enough advantage to score a goal. However, it is an act of desperation, as it sometimes leads to the opposing team extending their lead by scoring a goal in the empty net.
There are many other little tactics used in the game of hockey. Cycling moves the puck along the boards in the offensive zone to create a scoring chance by making defenders tired or moving them out of position. Pinching is when a defenceman pressures the opposition's winger in the offensive zone when they are breaking out, attempting to stop their attack and keep the puck in the offensive zone. A saucer pass is a pass used when an opposition's stick or body is in the passing lane. It is the act of raising the puck over the obstruction and having it land on a teammate's stick.
A deke, short for "decoy", is a feint with the body or stick to fool a defender or the goalie. Many modern players, such as Pavel Datsyuk, Sidney Crosby and Patrick Kane, have picked up the skill of "dangling", which is fancier deking and requires more stick handling skills.
Although fighting is officially prohibited in the rules, it is not an uncommon occurrence at the professional level, and its prevalence has been both a target of criticism and a considerable draw for the sport. At the professional level in North America fights are unofficially condoned. Enforcers and other players fight to demoralize the opposing players while exciting their own, as well as settling personal scores. A fight will also break out if one of the team's skilled players gets hit hard or someone receives what the team perceives as a dirty hit. The amateur game penalizes fisticuffs more harshly, as a player who receives a fighting major is also assessed at least a 10-minute misconduct penalty (NCAA and some Junior leagues) or a game misconduct penalty and suspension (high school and younger, as well as some casual adult leagues).
The International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) holds the IIHF World Women's Championships tournaments in several divisions; championships are held annually, except that the top flight does not play in Olympic years.
Body checking has been prohibited in women's ice hockey since the mid-1980s in Canada, and spreading from there internationally. Canada's Rhonda Leeman Taylor was responsible for banning body contact from all national women's ice hockey tournaments in Canada in 1983. Body checking in some of the women's hockey leagues in Canada were completely removed in 1986 resulting in a substantial increase in female participation in ice hockey in Canada.
Prior to this point, bodychecking had been a part of the women's game in most cases, including in Europe. It was not until after the 1990 Women's World Championship (sanctioned by the International Ice Hockey Federation) that body checking was eliminated from the women's ice hockey format internationally. In addition, until the mid 2000s, obstruction and interference were allowed, including pushing players around in front of the net, minor hooking, and "setting picks". When the National Hockey League in North America removed obstruction and interference in the mid 2000s, minor hockey leagues and female leagues followed suit.
In women's IIHF ice hockey today, body checking is considered an "illegal hit" and is punishable by a minor penalty, major penalty and game misconduct, or match penalty. In current IIHF women's competition, body checking is either a minor or major penalty, decided at the referee's discretion.
The idea of reintroducing bodychecking to the female game after its removal in the 1990s remains controversial. Some of those opposed to the idea of its reintroduction maintain it would lead to a loss of female participants, as once stated by Arto Sieppi, Finland's director of women's hockey. Sieppi made the statement in response to claims made by the then head coach of Sweden's women's national ice hockey team, Peter Elander, who had claimed its absence was due to patriarchal sexism.
Peter is a good friend of mine, but I totally disagree...First of all, it's a women's sport, and if bodychecking would be allowed, the number of young girls entering the game would decrease rapidly.
The Svenska damhockeyligan (SDHL), known as the Swedish Women's Hockey League in English, announced in 2022 that it would include body checking during its 2022–23 season, but would maintain a prohibition on the, "..."north-south" open-ice hit". The new program will also be extended to the Damettan, Sweden's second-tier women's league.
Players in women's competition are required to wear protective full-face masks. At all levels, players must wear a pelvic protector, essentially the female equivalent of a jockstrap, known colloquially as a "jill" or "jillstrap". Other protective equipment for girls and women in ice hockey is sometimes specifically designed for the female body, such as shoulder pads designed to protect a women's breast area without reducing mobility.
Women began playing the game of ice hockey in the late 19th century. Several games were recorded in the 1890s in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The women of Lord Stanley's family were known to participate in the game of ice hockey on the outdoor ice rink at Rideau Hall, the residence of Canada's Governor-General.
The earliest available records of women's ice hockey were in the late 19th-century in Canada. Much like the men's game, women had previously been playing a conglomeration of stick-and-ball ice games. As with men's hockey, the women's game developed at first without an organizing body. A tournament in 1902 between Montreal and Trois-Rivières was billed as the first women's ice hockey championship tournament. Several tournaments, such as at the Banff Winter Carnival, were held in the early 20th century with numerous women's teams such as the Seattle Vamps and Vancouver Amazons. Organizations started to develop in the 1920s, such as the Ladies Ontario Hockey Association in Canada, and later, the Dominion Women's Amateur Hockey Association.
Starting in Canada in 1961, the women's game spread to more universities after the Fitness and Amateur Sport Act came into force in whereby the Canadian Government of Canada made an official commitment to "encourage, promote and develop fitness and amateur sport in Canada."
Today, the women's game is played from youth through adult leagues, and the university level in North America and internationally. There are major professional women's hockey leagues: the Professional Women's Hockey League, (formerly the Premier Hockey Federation) with teams in the United States, Canada, and the Zhenskaya Hockey League with teams in Russia and China. In 2019, the Professional Women's Hockey Players Association was formed by over 150 players with the goal of creating a sustainable professional league for women's ice hockey in North America.
Between 1995 and 2005 the number of participants increased by 400 percent. In 2011, Canada had 85,827 women players, United States had 65,609, Finland 4,760, Sweden 3,075 and Switzerland 1,172.
Women's ice hockey was added as a medal sport eight years after the first world women's ice hockey championship in 1990 at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan.
Prior to the professionalization of women's ice hockey in the 21st century, almost all professional women hockey players who played against men were goaltenders. No woman has ever played a full season in top tier men's professional ice hockey. The United States Hockey League (USHL) welcomed the first female professional ice hockey player in 1969–70, when the Marquette Iron Rangers signed 18-year-old Karen Koch, a goaltender. Only one woman has ever played in the National Hockey League (NHL), goaltender Manon Rhéaume. Rhéaume played in NHL pre-season games as a goaltender for the Tampa Bay Lightning against the St. Louis Blues and the Boston Bruins. In 2003, Hayley Wickenheiser played with the Kirkkonummi Salamat in the Finnish men's Suomi-sarja league.
Women have occasionally competed in North American minor leagues: among them Rhéaume, and fellow goaltenders Kelly Dyer and Erin Whitten. Defenceman Angela Ruggiero became the first woman to actively play in a regular season professional hockey game in North America at a position other than goalie, playing in a single game for the Tulsa Oilers of the Central Hockey League.
The 1989 IIHF European Women Championships in West Germany was the first European Championship held in women's ice hockey and preceded the eventual International Ice Hockey Federation-sanctioned Women's World Championship for ice hockey. The first world ice hockey championship for women was the 1990 IIHF World Women's Championship.
The following is a list of professional ice hockey leagues by attendance:
The NHL is the best attended and most popular ice hockey league in the world, and is among the major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada. The league's history began after Canada's National Hockey Association decided to disband in 1917; the result was the creation of the National Hockey League with four teams. The league expanded to the United States beginning in 1924 and had as many as 10 teams before contracting to six teams by 1942–43. In 1967, the NHL doubled in size to 12 teams, undertaking one of the greatest expansions in professional sports history. A few years later, in 1972, a new 12-team league, the World Hockey Association (WHA) was formed and due to its ensuing rivalry with the NHL, it caused an escalation in players' salaries. In 1979, the 17-team NHL merged with the WHA creating a 21-team league. By 2017, the NHL had expanded to 31 teams, and after a realignment in 2013, these teams were divided into two conferences and four divisions. The league expanded to 32 teams in 2021.
The American Hockey League (AHL) is the primary developmental professional league for players aspiring to enter the NHL. It comprises 31 teams from the United States and Canada. It is run as a farm league to the NHL, with the vast majority of AHL players under contract to an NHL team. The ECHL (called the East Coast Hockey League before the 2003–04 season) is a mid-level minor league in the United States with a few players under contract to NHL or AHL teams.
As of 2019, there are three minor professional leagues with no NHL affiliations: the Federal Prospects Hockey League (FPHL), Ligue Nord-Américaine de Hockey (LNAH), and the Southern Professional Hockey League (SPHL).
U Sports ice hockey is the highest level of play at the Canadian university level under the auspices of U Sports, Canada's governing body for university sports. As these players compete at the university level, they are obligated to follow the rule of standard eligibility of five years. In the United States especially, college hockey is popular and the best university teams compete in the annual NCAA Men's Ice Hockey Championship. The American Collegiate Hockey Association is composed of college teams at the club level.
In Canada, the Canadian Hockey League is an umbrella organization comprising three major junior leagues: the Ontario Hockey League, the Western Hockey League, and the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. It attracts players from Canada, the United States and Europe. The major junior players are considered amateurs as they are under 21-years-old and not paid a salary, however, they do get a stipend and play a schedule similar to a professional league. Typically, the NHL drafts many players directly from the major junior leagues.
In the United States, the United States Hockey League (USHL) is the highest junior league. Players in this league are also amateur with players required to be under 21-years old, but do not get a stipend, which allows players to retain their eligibility for participation in NCAA ice hockey.
The Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) is the largest and most popular ice hockey league in Eurasia. The league is the direct successor to the Russian Super League, which in turn was the successor to the Soviet League, the history of which dates back to the Soviet adoption of ice hockey in the 1940s. The KHL was launched in 2008 with clubs predominantly from Russia, but featuring teams from other post-Soviet states. The league expanded beyond the former Soviet countries beginning in the 2011–12 season, with clubs in Croatia and Slovakia. The KHL currently comprises member clubs based in Belarus (1), China (1), Kazakhstan (1) and Russia (19) for a total of 22.
The second division of hockey in Eurasia is the Supreme Hockey League (VHL). This league features 24 teams from Russia and 2 from Kazakhstan. This league is currently being converted to a farm league for the KHL, similarly to the AHL's function in relation to the NHL. The third division is the Russian Hockey League, which features only teams from Russia. The Asia League, an international ice hockey league featuring clubs from China, Japan, South Korea, and the Russian Far East, is the successor to the Japan Ice Hockey League.
The highest junior league in Eurasia is the Junior Hockey League (MHL). It features 32 teams from post-Soviet states, predominantly Russia. The second tier to this league is the Junior Hockey League Championships (MHL-B).
Several countries in Europe have their own top professional senior leagues. Many future KHL and NHL players start or end their professional careers in these leagues. The National League A in Switzerland, Swedish Hockey League in Sweden, SM-liiga in Finland, and Czech Extraliga in the Czech Republic are all very popular in their respective countries.
Beginning in the 2014–15 season, the Champions Hockey League was launched, a league consisting of first-tier teams from several European countries, running parallel to the teams' domestic leagues. The competition is meant to serve as a Europe-wide ice hockey club championship. The competition is a direct successor to the European Trophy and is related to the 2008–09 tournament of the same name.
There are also several annual tournaments for clubs, held outside of league play. Pre-season tournaments include the European Trophy, Tampere Cup and the Pajulahti Cup. One of the oldest international ice hockey competition for clubs is the Spengler Cup, held every year in Davos, Switzerland, between Christmas and New Year's Day. It was first awarded in 1923 to the Oxford University Ice Hockey Club. The Memorial Cup, a competition for junior-level (age 20 and under) clubs is held annually from a pool of junior championship teams in Canada and the United States.
International club competitions organized by the IIHF include the Continental Cup, the Victoria Cup and the European Women's Champions Cup. The World Junior Club Cup is an annual tournament of junior ice hockey clubs representing each of the top junior leagues.
The Australian Ice Hockey League and New Zealand Ice Hockey League are represented by nine and five teams respectively. As of 2012, the two top teams of the previous season from each league compete in the Trans-Tasman Champions League.
Ice hockey in Africa is a small but growing sport; while no African ice hockey playing nation has a domestic national league, there are several regional leagues in South Africa.
Ice hockey has been played at the Winter Olympics since 1924 (and was played at the summer games in 1920). Hockey is Canada's national winter sport, and Canadians are extremely passionate about the game. The nation has traditionally done very well at the Olympic Games, winning six of the first seven gold medals. However, by 1956, its amateur club teams and national teams could not compete with the teams of government-supported players from the Soviet Union. The USSR won all but two gold medals from 1956 to 1988. The United States won its first gold medal in 1960. On the way to winning the gold medal at the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics, amateur US college players defeated the heavily favoured Soviet squad—an event known as the "Miracle on Ice" in the United States. Restrictions on professional players were fully dropped at the 1988 games in Calgary. NHL agreed to participate ten years later. The 1998 Games saw the full participation of players from the NHL, which suspended operations during the Games and has done so in subsequent Games up until 2018. The 2010 games in Vancouver were the first played in an NHL city since the inclusion of NHL players. The 2010 games were the first played on NHL-sized ice rinks, which are narrower than the IIHF standard.
National teams representing the member federations of the IIHF compete annually in the IIHF Ice Hockey World Championships. Teams are selected from the available players by the individual federations, without restriction on amateur or professional status. Since it is held in the spring, the tournament coincides with the annual NHL Stanley Cup playoffs and many of the top players are hence not available to participate in the tournament. Many of the NHL players who do play in the IIHF tournament come from teams eliminated before the playoffs or in the first round, and federations often hold open spots until the tournament to allow for players to join the tournament after their club team is eliminated. For many years, the tournament was an amateur-only tournament, but this restriction was removed, beginning in 1977.
The 1972 Summit Series and 1974 Summit Series, two series pitting the best Canadian and Soviet players without IIHF restrictions were major successes, and established a rivalry between Canada and the USSR. In the spirit of best-versus-best without restrictions on amateur or professional status, the series were followed by five Canada Cup tournaments, played in North America. Two NHL versus USSR series were also held: the 1979 Challenge Cup and Rendez-vous '87. The Canada Cup tournament later became the World Cup of Hockey, played in 1996, 2004 and 2016. The United States won in 1996 and Canada won in 2004 and 2016.
Since the initial women's world championships in 1990, there have been fifteen tournaments. Women's hockey has been played at the Olympics since 1998. The only finals in the women's world championship or Olympics that did not involve both Canada and the United States were the 2006 Winter Olympic final between Canada and Sweden and 2019 World Championship final between the US and Finland.
Other ice hockey tournaments featuring national teams include the World Junior Championship, the World U18 Championships, the World U-17 Hockey Challenge, the World Junior A Challenge, the Ivan Hlinka Memorial Tournament, the World Women's U18 Championships and the 4 Nations Cup. The annual Euro Hockey Tour, an unofficial European championship between the national men's teams of the Czech Republic, Finland, Russia and Sweden have been played since 1996–97.
The attendance record for an ice hockey game was set on December 11, 2010, when the University of Michigan's men's ice hockey team faced cross-state rival Michigan State in an event billed as "The Big Chill at the Big House". The game was played at Michigan's (American) football venue, Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, with a capacity of 109,901 as of the 2010 football season. When UM stopped sales to the public on May 6, 2010, with plans to reserve remaining tickets for students, over 100,000 tickets had been sold for the event. Ultimately, a crowd announced by UM as 113,411, the largest in the stadium's history (including football), saw the homestanding Wolverines win 5–0. Guinness World Records, using a count of ticketed fans who actually entered the stadium instead of UM's figure of tickets sold, announced a final figure of 104,173.
The record was approached but not broken at the 2014 NHL Winter Classic, which also held at Michigan Stadium, with the Detroit Red Wings as the home team and the Toronto Maple Leafs as the opposing team with an announced crowd of 105,491. The record for an NHL Stanley Cup playoff game is 28,183, set on April 23, 1996, at the Thunderdome during a Tampa Bay Lightning – Philadelphia Flyers game.
Ice hockey is most popular in Canada, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Northern Europe, and the United States. Ice hockey is the official national winter sport of Canada. In addition, ice hockey is the most popular winter sport in Belarus, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Latvia, Russia, Slovakia, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland. North America's National Hockey League (NHL) is the highest level for men's ice hockey and the strongest professional ice hockey league in the world. The Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) is the highest league in Russia and much of Eastern Europe. The International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) is the formal governing body for international ice hockey, with the IIHF managing international tournaments and maintaining the IIHF World Ranking. Worldwide, the International Ice Hockey Federation has 83 member national associations, comprising 60 full members, 22 associate members, and one affiliate member.
In international competitions, the national teams of six countries (the Big Six) predominate: Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, Russia, Sweden and the United States. Of the 69 medals awarded all-time in men's competition at the Olympics, only seven medals were not awarded to one of those countries (or two of their precursors, the Soviet Union for Russia, and Czechoslovakia for the Czech Republic). In the annual Ice Hockey World Championships, 177 of 201 medals have been awarded to the six nations; Canada has won the most gold medals. Teams outside the Big Six have won only nine medals in either competition since 1953. The World Cup of Hockey is organized by the National Hockey League and the National Hockey League Players' Association (NHLPA), unlike the annual World Championships and quadrennial Olympic tournament, both run by the International Ice Hockey Federation. World Cup games are played under NHL rules and not those of the IIHF, and the tournament occurs prior to the NHL pre-season, allowing for all NHL players to be available, unlike the World Championships, which overlaps with the NHL's Stanley Cup playoffs. Furthermore, all 12 Women's Olympic and 36 IIHF World Women's Championship medals were awarded to one of the Big Six. The Canadian national team or the United States national team have between them won every gold medal of either series.
Number of registered hockey players, including male, female and junior, provided by the respective countries' federations. This list only includes the 36 of 83 IIHF member countries with more than 1,000 registered players as of November 2022.
Pond hockey is a form of ice hockey played generally as pick-up hockey on lakes, ponds and artificial outdoor rinks during the winter. Pond hockey is commonly referred to in hockey circles as shinny. Its rules differ from traditional hockey because there is no hitting and very little shooting, placing a greater emphasis on skating, stickhandling and passing abilities. Since 2002, the World Pond Hockey Championship has been played on Roulston Lake in Tobique Valley, New Brunswick, Canada. Since 2006, the US Pond Hockey Championships have been played in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Canadian National Pond Hockey Championships have been played in Huntsville, Ontario.
Sledge hockey is an adaption of ice hockey designed for players who have a physical disability. Players are seated in sleds and use a specialized hockey stick that also helps the player navigate on the ice. The sport was created in Sweden in the early 1960s and is played under similar rules to ice hockey.
Ice hockey is the official winter sport of Canada. Ice hockey, partially because of its popularity as a major professional sport, has been a source of inspiration for numerous films, television episodes and songs in Canadian and American popular culture. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Ice hockey (or simply hockey) is a team sport played on ice skates, usually on an ice skating rink with lines and markings specific to the sport. It belongs to a family of sports called hockey. In ice hockey, two opposing teams use ice hockey sticks to control, advance, and shoot a closed, vulcanized, rubber disc called a \"puck\" into the other team's goal. Each goal is worth one point. The team which scores the most goals is declared the winner. In a formal game, each team has six skaters on the ice at a time, barring any penalties, one of whom is the goaltender. Ice hockey is a full contact sport, and is considered to be one of the more physically demanding team sports. It is distinct from field hockey, in which players move a ball around a non-frozen pitch using field hockey sticks.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The modern sport of ice hockey was developed in Canada, most notably in Montreal, where the first indoor game was played on March 3, 1875. Some characteristics of that game, such as the length of the ice rink and the use of a puck, have been retained to this day. Amateur ice hockey leagues began in the 1880s, and professional ice hockey originated around 1900. The Stanley Cup, emblematic of ice hockey club supremacy, was initially commissioned in 1892 as the \"Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup\" and was first awarded in 1893 to recognize the Canadian amateur champion and later became the championship trophy of the National Hockey League (NHL). In the early 1900s, the Canadian rules were adopted by the Ligue Internationale de Hockey sur Glace, in Paris, France, the precursor of the IIHF. The sport was played for the first time at the Olympics during the 1920 Summer Olympics. In 1994 ice hockey was officially recognized as Canada's national winter sport.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "While women also played during the game's early formative years, it was not until organizers began to officially remove body checking from female ice hockey beginning in the mid-1980s that it began to gain greater popularity, which by then had spread to Europe and a variety of other countries. The first IIHF Women's World Championship was held in 1990, and women's play was introduced into the Olympics in 1998.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Ice hockey is one of the sports featured in the Winter Olympics, while its premiere international competition, the IIHF World Championships, are governed by the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) for both men's and women's competitions.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Ice hockey is believed to have evolved from simple stick and ball games played in the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain, Ireland, and elsewhere, primarily bandy, hurling, and shinty. The North American sport of lacrosse was also influential. These games were brought to North America and several similar winter games using informal rules developed, such as shinny and ice polo, but would later be absorbed into a new organized game with codified rules which today is ice hockey.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "While the general characteristics of the game remain constant, the exact rules depend on the particular code of play being used. The two most important codes are those of the IIHF and the NHL. Both of these codes, and others, originated from Canadian rules of ice hockey of the early 20th century.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Ice hockey is played on a hockey rink. During normal play, there are six players on ice skates on the ice per side, one of them being the goaltender. The objective of the game is to score goals by shooting a hard vulcanized rubber disc, the puck, into the opponent's goal net at the opposite end of the rink. The players use their sticks to pass or shoot the puck.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "With certain restrictions, players may redirect the puck with any part of their body. Players may not hold the puck in their hand and are prohibited from using their hands to pass the puck to their teammates unless they are in the defensive zone. Players however can knock a puck out of the air with their hand to themself. Players are prohibited from kicking the puck into the opponent's goal, though unintentional redirections off the skate are permitted. Players may not intentionally bat the puck into the net with their hands.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Hockey is an off-side game, meaning that forward passes are allowed, unlike in rugby. Before the 1930s, hockey was an on-side game, meaning that only backward passes were allowed. Those rules emphasized individual stick-handling to drive the puck forward. With the arrival of offside rules, the forward pass transformed hockey into a true team sport, where individual performance diminished in importance relative to team play, which could now be coordinated over the entire surface of the ice as opposed to merely rearward players.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The six players on each team are typically divided into three forwards, two defencemen, and one goaltender. The term skaters typically applies to all players except goaltenders. The forward positions consist of a centre and two wingers: a left wing and a right wing. Forwards often play together as units or lines, with the same three forwards always playing together. The defencemen usually stay together as a pair generally divided between left and right. Left and right side wingers or defencemen are generally positioned on the side on which they carry their stick. A substitution of an entire unit at once is called a line change. Teams typically employ alternate sets of forward lines and defensive pairings when short-handed or on a power play. The goaltender stands in a, usually blue, semi-circle called the crease in the defensive zone keeping pucks out of the goal. Substitutions are permitted at any time during the game, although during a stoppage of play the home team is permitted the final change. When players are substituted during play, it is called changing on the fly. An NHL rule added in the 2005–06 season prevents a team from changing their line after they ice the puck.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The boards surrounding the ice help keep the puck in play and they can also be used as tools to play the puck. Players are permitted to bodycheck opponents into the boards to stop progress. The referees, linesmen and the outsides of the goal are \"in play\" and do not stop the game when the puck or players either bounce into or collide with them. Play can be stopped if the goal is knocked out of position. Play often proceeds for minutes without interruption. After a stoppage, play is restarted with a faceoff. Two players face each other and an official drops the puck to the ice, where the two players attempt to gain control of the puck. Markings (circles) on the ice indicate the locations for the faceoff and guide the positioning of players.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Three major rules of play in ice hockey limit the movement of the puck: offside, icing, and the puck going out of play.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Under IIHF rules, each team may carry a maximum of 20 players and two goaltenders on their roster. NHL rules restrict the total number of players per game to 18, plus two goaltenders. In the NHL, the players are usually divided into four lines of three forwards, and into three pairs of defencemen. On occasion, teams may elect to substitute an extra defenceman for a forward. The seventh defenceman may play as a substitute defenceman, spend the game on the bench, or if a team chooses to play four lines then this seventh defenceman may see ice-time on the fourth line as a forward.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "A professional ice hockey game consists of three periods of twenty minutes, the clock running only when the puck is in play. The teams change ends after each period of play, including overtime. Recreational leagues and children's leagues often play shorter games, generally with three shorter periods of play.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "If a tie occurs in tournament play, as well as in the NHL playoffs, North Americans favour sudden death overtime, in which the teams continue to play twenty-minute periods until a goal is scored. Up until the 1999–2000 season, regular-season NHL games were settled with a single five-minute sudden death period with five players (plus a goalie) per side, with both teams awarded one point in the standings in the event of a tie. With a goal, the winning team would be awarded two points and the losing team none (just as if they had lost in regulation). The total elapsed time from when the puck first drops, is about 2 hours and 20 minutes for a 60-minute game.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "From the 1999–2000 until the 2003–04 seasons, the National Hockey League decided ties by playing a single five-minute sudden-death overtime period with each team having four skaters per side (plus the goalie). In the event of a tie, each team would still receive one point in the standings but in the event of a victory the winning team would be awarded two points in the standings and the losing team one point. The idea was to discourage teams from playing for a tie, since previously some teams might have preferred a tie and 1 point to risking a loss and zero points. The exception to this rule is if a team opts to pull their goalie in exchange for an extra skater during overtime and is subsequently scored upon (an empty net goal), in which case the losing team receives no points for the overtime loss. Since the 2015–16 season, the single five-minute sudden-death overtime session involves three skaters on each side. Since three skaters must always be on the ice in an NHL game, the consequences of penalties are slightly different from those during regulation play; any penalty during overtime that would result in a team losing a skater during regulation instead causes the other side to add a skater. Once the penalized team's penalty ends, the penalized skater exits the penalty box and the teams continue at 4-on-4 until the next stoppage of play, at which point the teams return to three skaters per side.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "International play and several North American professional leagues, including the NHL (in the regular season), now use an overtime period identical to that from 1999–2000 to 2003–04 followed by a penalty shootout. If the score remains tied after an extra overtime period, the subsequent shootout consists of three players from each team taking penalty shots. After these six total shots, the team with the most goals is awarded the victory. If the score is still tied, the shootout then proceeds to sudden death. Regardless of the number of goals scored by either team during the shootout, the final score recorded will award the winning team one more goal than the score at the end of regulation time. In the NHL if a game is decided in overtime or by a shootout the winning team is awarded two points in the standings and the losing team is awarded one point. Ties no longer occur in the NHL.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Overtime in the NHL playoffs differs from the regular season. In the playoffs there are no shootouts. If a game is tied after regulation, then a 20-minute period of 5-on-5 sudden-death overtime will be added. If the game is still tied after the overtime, another period is added until a team scores, which wins the match. Since 2019, the IIHF World Championships and the gold medal game in the Olympics use the same format, but in a 3-on-3 format.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In ice hockey, infractions of the rules lead to a play stoppage whereby the play is restarted at a faceoff. Some infractions result in a penalty on a player or team. In the simplest case, the offending player is sent to the penalty box and their team must play with one less player on the ice for a designated time. Minor penalties last for two minutes, major penalties last for five minutes, and a double minor penalty is two consecutive penalties of two minutes duration. A single minor penalty may be extended by two minutes for causing visible injury to the victimized player. This is usually when blood is drawn during high sticking. Players may be also assessed personal extended penalties or game expulsions for misconduct in addition to the penalty or penalties their team must serve. The team that has been given a penalty is said to be playing short-handed while the opposing team is on a power play.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "A two-minute minor penalty is often charged for lesser infractions such as tripping, elbowing, roughing, high-sticking, delay of the game, too many players on the ice, boarding, illegal equipment, charging (leaping into an opponent or body-checking him after taking more than two strides), holding, holding the stick (grabbing an opponent's stick), interference, hooking, slashing, kneeing, unsportsmanlike conduct (arguing a penalty call with referee, extremely vulgar or inappropriate verbal comments), \"butt-ending\" (striking an opponent with the knob of the stick), \"spearing\" (jabbing an opponent with the blade of the stick), or cross-checking. As of the 2005–2006 season, a minor penalty is also assessed for diving, where a player embellishes or simulates an offence. More egregious fouls may be penalized by a four-minute double-minor penalty, particularly those that injure the victimized player. These penalties end either when the time runs out or when the other team scores during the power play. In the case of a goal scored during the first two minutes of a double-minor, the penalty clock is set down to two minutes upon a score, effectively expiring the first minor penalty.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Five-minute major penalties are called for especially violent instances of most minor infractions that result in intentional injury to an opponent, or when a minor penalty results in visible injury (such as bleeding), as well as for fighting. Major penalties are always served in full; they do not terminate on a goal scored by the other team. Major penalties assessed for fighting are typically offsetting, meaning neither team is short-handed and the players exit the penalty box upon a stoppage of play following the expiration of their respective penalties. The foul of boarding (defined as \"check[ing] an opponent in such a manner that causes the opponent to be thrown violently in the boards\") is penalized either by a minor or major penalty at the discretion of the referee, based on the violent state of the hit. A minor or major penalty for boarding is often assessed when a player checks an opponent from behind and into the boards.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Some varieties of penalty do not require the offending team to play a man short. Concurrent five-minute major penalties in the NHL usually result from fighting. In the case of two players being assessed five-minute fighting majors, both the players serve five minutes without their team incurring a loss of player (both teams still have a full complement of players on the ice). This differs with two players from opposing sides getting minor penalties, at the same time or at any intersecting moment, resulting from more common infractions. In this case, both teams will have only four skating players (not counting the goaltender) until one or both penalties expire (if one penalty expires before the other, the opposing team gets a power play for the remainder of the time); this applies regardless of current pending penalties. However, in the NHL, a team always has at least three skaters on the ice. Thus, ten-minute misconduct penalties are served in full by the penalized player, but his team may immediately substitute another player on the ice unless a minor or major penalty is assessed in conjunction with the misconduct (a two-and-ten or five-and-ten). In this case, the team designates another player to serve the minor or major; both players go to the penalty box, but only the designee may not be replaced, and he is released upon the expiration of the two or five minutes, at which point the ten-minute misconduct begins. In addition, game misconducts are assessed for deliberate intent to inflict severe injury on an opponent (at the officials' discretion), or for a major penalty for a stick infraction or repeated major penalties. The offending player is ejected from the game and must immediately leave the playing surface (he does not sit in the penalty box); meanwhile, if an additional minor or major penalty is assessed, a designated player must serve out of that segment of the penalty in the box (similar to the above-mentioned \"two-and-ten\"). In some rare cases, a player may receive up to nineteen minutes in penalties for one string of plays. This could involve receiving a four-minute double-minor penalty, getting in a fight with an opposing player who retaliates, and then receiving a game misconduct after the fight. In this case, the player is ejected and two teammates must serve the double-minor and major penalties.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "A penalty shot is awarded to a player when the illegal actions of another player stop a clear scoring opportunity, most commonly when the player is on a breakaway. A penalty shot allows the obstructed player to pick up the puck on the centre red-line and attempt to score on the goalie with no other players on the ice, to compensate for the earlier missed scoring opportunity. A penalty shot is also awarded for a defender other than the goaltender covering the puck in the goal crease, a goaltender intentionally displacing his own goal posts during a breakaway to avoid a goal, a defender intentionally displacing his own goal posts when there is less than two minutes to play in regulation time or at any point during overtime, or a player or coach intentionally throwing a stick or other object at the puck or the puck carrier and the throwing action disrupts a shot or pass play.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Officials also stop play for puck movement violations, such as using one's hands to pass the puck in the offensive end, but no players are penalized for these offences. The sole exceptions are deliberately falling on or gathering the puck to the body, carrying the puck in the hand, and shooting the puck out of play in one's defensive zone (all penalized two minutes for delay of game).",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In the NHL, a unique penalty applies to the goalies. The goalies now are forbidden to play the puck in the \"corners\" of the rink near their own net. This will result in a two-minute penalty against the goalie's team. Only in the area in front of the goal line and immediately behind the net (marked by two red lines on either side of the net) can the goalie play the puck.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "An additional rule that has never been a penalty, but was an infraction in the NHL before recent rules changes, is the two-line offside pass. Prior to the 2005–06 NHL season, play was stopped when a pass from inside a team's defending zone crossed the centre line, with a face-off held in the defending zone of the offending team. Now, the centre line is no longer used in the NHL to determine a two-line pass infraction, a change that the IIHF had adopted in 1998. Players are now able to pass to teammates who are more than the blue and centre ice red line away.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The NHL has taken steps to speed up the game of hockey and create a game of finesse, by reducing the number of illegal hits, fights, and \"clutching and grabbing\" that occurred in the past. Rules are now more strictly enforced, resulting in more penalties, which provides more protection to the players and facilitates more goals being scored. The governing body for United States' amateur hockey has implemented many new rules to reduce the number of stick-on-body occurrences, as well as other detrimental and illegal facets of the game (\"zero tolerance\").",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In men's hockey, but not in women's, a player may use his hip or shoulder to hit another player if the player has the puck or is the last to have touched it. This use of the hip and shoulder is called body checking. Not all physical contact is legal—in particular, hits from behind, hits to the head and most types of forceful stick-on-body contact are illegal.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "A delayed penalty call occurs when an offence is committed by the team that does not have possession of the puck. In this circumstance the team with possession of the puck is allowed to complete the play; that is, play continues until a goal is scored, a player on the opposing team gains control of the puck, or the team in possession commits an infraction or penalty of their own. Because the team on which the penalty was called cannot control the puck without stopping play, it is impossible for them to score a goal. In these cases, the team in possession of the puck can pull the goalie for an extra attacker without fear of being scored on. However, it is possible for the controlling team to mishandle the puck into their own net. If a delayed penalty is signalled and the team in possession scores, the penalty is still assessed to the offending player, but not served. In 2012, this rule was changed by the United States' National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) for college level hockey. In college games, the penalty is still enforced even if the team in possession scores.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "A typical game of hockey is governed by two to four officials on the ice, charged with enforcing the rules of the game. There are typically two linesmen who are mainly responsible for calling \"offside\" and \"icing\" violations, breaking up fights, and conducting faceoffs, and one or two referees, who call goals and all other penalties. Linesmen can, however, report to the referee(s) that a penalty should be assessed against an offending player in some situations. The restrictions on this practice vary depending on the governing rules. On-ice officials are assisted by off-ice officials who act as goal judges, time keepers, and official scorers.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The most widespread system is the \"three-man system\", which uses one referee and two linesmen. A less commonly used system is the two referee and one linesman system. This system is close to the regular three-man system except for a few procedure changes. Beginning with the National Hockey League, a number of leagues have implemented the \"four-official system\", where an additional referee is added to aid in the calling of penalties normally difficult to assess by one referee. The system is used in every NHL game since 2001, at IIHF World Championships, the Olympics and in many professional and high-level amateur leagues in North America and Europe.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Officials are selected by the league they work for. Amateur hockey leagues use guidelines established by national organizing bodies as a basis for choosing their officiating staffs. In North America, the national organizing bodies Hockey Canada and USA Hockey approve officials according to their experience level as well as their ability to pass rules knowledge and skating ability tests. Hockey Canada has officiating levels I through VI. USA Hockey has officiating levels 1 through 4.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Since men's ice hockey is a full-contact sport, body checks are allowed so injuries are a common occurrence. Protective equipment is mandatory and is enforced in all competitive situations. This includes a helmet with either a visor or a full face mask, shoulder pads, elbow pads, mouth guard, protective gloves, heavily padded shorts (also known as hockey pants) or a girdle, athletic cup (also known as a jock, for males; and jill, for females), shin pads, skates, and (optionally) a neck protector.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Goaltenders use different equipment. With hockey pucks approaching them at speeds of up to 100 mph (160 km/h) they must wear equipment with more protection. Goaltenders wear specialized goalie skates (these skates are built more for movement side to side rather than forwards and backwards), a jock or jill, large leg pads (there are size restrictions in certain leagues), blocking glove, catching glove, a chest protector, a goalie mask, and a large jersey. Goaltenders' equipment has continually become larger and larger, leading to fewer goals in each game and many official rule changes.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Ice hockey skates are optimized for physical acceleration, speed and manoeuvrability. This includes rapid starts, stops, turns, and changes in skating direction. In addition, they must be rigid and tough to protect the skater's feet from contact with other skaters, sticks, pucks, the boards, and the ice itself. Rigidity also improves the overall manoeuvrability of the skate. Blade length, thickness (width), and curvature (rocker/radius) (front to back) and radius of hollow (across the blade width) are quite different from speed or figure skates. Hockey players usually adjust these parameters based on their skill level, position, and body type. The blade width of most skates are about 1⁄8 inch (3.2 mm) thick.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Each player other than the goaltender carries a stick consisting of a long, relatively wide, and slightly curved flat blade, attached to a shaft. The curve itself has a big impact on its performance. A deep curve allows for lifting the puck easier while a shallow curve allows for easier backhand shots. The flex of the stick also impacts the performance. Typically, a less flexible stick is meant for a stronger player since the player is looking for the right balanced flex that allows the stick to flex easily while still having a strong \"whip-back\" which sends the puck flying at high speeds. It is quite distinct from sticks in other sports games and most suited to hitting and controlling the flat puck. Its unique shape contributed to the early development of the game.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The goaltender carries a stick of a different design, with a larger blade and a wide, flat shaft. This stick is primarily intended to block shots, but the goaltender may use it to play the puck as well.",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "",
"title": "Game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Ice hockey is a full-contact sport and carries a high risk of injury. Players are moving at speeds around approximately 20–30 mph (30–50 km/h) and much of the game revolves around the physical contact between the players. Skate blades, hockey sticks, shoulder contact, hip contact, and hockey pucks can all potentially cause injuries. Lace bite, an irritation felt on the front of the foot or ankle, is a common ice hockey injury.",
"title": "Injury"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Compared to athletes who play other sports, ice hockey players are at higher risk of overuse injuries and injuries caused by early sports specialization by teenagers.",
"title": "Injury"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "According to the Hughston Health Alert, \"Lacerations to the head, scalp, and face are the most frequent types of injury [in hockey].\"",
"title": "Injury"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "One of the leading causes of head injury is body checking from behind. Due to the danger of delivering a check from behind, many leagues – including the NHL – have made this a major and game misconduct penalty. Another type of check that accounts for many of the player-to-player contact concussions is a check to the head resulting in a misconduct penalty (called \"head contact\"). In recent years, the NHL has implemented new rules which penalize and suspend players for illegal checks to the heads, as well as checks to unsuspecting players. Studies show that ice hockey causes 44.3% of all sports-related traumatic brain injuries among Canadian children.",
"title": "Injury"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Some teams in the Swiss National League are testing out systems that combine helmet-integrated sensors and analysis software to reveal a player's ongoing brain injury risk during a game. These sensors provide players and coaches with real-time data on head impact strength, frequency, and severity. Furthermore, if the app determines that a particular impact has the potential to cause brain injury, it will alert the coach who can in turn seek medical attention for the individual.",
"title": "Injury"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Defensive ice hockey tactics vary from more active to more conservative styles of play. One distinction is between man-to-man oriented defensive systems, and zonal oriented defensive systems, though a lot of teams use a combination between the two. Defensive skills involve pass interception, shot blocking, and stick checking (in which an attempt to take away the puck or cut off the puck lane is initiated by the stick of the defensive player). Tactical points of emphasis in ice hockey defensive play are concepts like \"managing gaps\" (gap control), \"boxing out\"' (not letting the offensive team go on the inside), and \"staying on the right side\" (of the puck). Another popular concept in ice hockey defensive tactics is that of playing a 200-foot game.",
"title": "Tactics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "An important defensive tactic is checking—attempting to take the puck from an opponent or to remove the opponent from play. Stick checking, sweep checking, and poke checking are legal uses of the stick to obtain possession of the puck. The neutral zone trap is designed to isolate the puck carrier in the neutral zone preventing him from entering the offensive zone. Body checking is using one's shoulder or hip to strike an opponent who has the puck or who is the last to have touched it (the last person to have touched the puck is still legally \"in possession\" of it, although a penalty is generally called if he is checked more than two seconds after his last touch). Body checking is also a penalty in certain leagues in order to reduce the chance of injury to players. Often the term checking is used to refer to body checking, with its true definition generally only propagated among fans of the game.",
"title": "Tactics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "One of the most important strategies for a team is their forecheck. Forechecking is the act of attacking the opposition in their defensive zone. Forechecking is an important part of the dump and chase strategy (i.e. shooting the puck into the offensive zone and then chasing after it). Each team uses their own unique system but the main ones are: 2–1–2, 1–2–2, and 1–4. The 2–1–2 is the most basic forecheck system where two forwards go in deep and pressure the opposition's defencemen, the third forward stays high and the two defencemen stay at the blueline. The 1–2–2 is a bit more conservative system where one forward pressures the puck carrier and the other two forwards cover the oppositions' wingers, with the two defencemen staying at the blueline. The 1–4 is the most defensive forecheck system, referred to as the neutral zone trap, where one forward applies pressure to the puck carrier around the oppositions' blueline and the other four players stand basically in a line by their blueline in hopes the opposition will skate into one of them. Another strategy is the left wing lock, which has two forwards pressure the puck and the left wing and the two defencemen stay at the blueline.",
"title": "Tactics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Offensive tactics include improving a team's position on the ice by advancing the puck out of one's zone towards the opponent's zone, progressively by gaining lines, first your own blue line, then the red line and finally the opponent's blue line. NHL rules instated for the 2006 season redefined the offside rule to make the two-line pass legal; a player may pass the puck from behind his own blue line, past both that blue line and the centre red line, to a player on the near side of the opponents' blue line. Offensive tactics are designed ultimately to score a goal by taking a shot. When a player purposely directs the puck towards the opponent's goal, he or she is said to \"shoot\" the puck.",
"title": "Tactics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "A deflection is a shot that redirects a shot or a pass towards the goal from another player, by allowing the puck to strike the stick and carom towards the goal. A one-timer is a shot struck directly off a pass, without receiving the pass and shooting in two separate actions. Headmanning the puck, also known as breaking out, is the tactic of rapidly passing to the player farthest down the ice. Loafing, also known as cherry-picking, is when a player, usually a forward, skates behind an attacking team, instead of playing defence, in an attempt to create an easy scoring chance.",
"title": "Tactics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "A team that is losing by one or two goals in the last few minutes of play will often elect to pull the goalie; that is, remove the goaltender and replace him or her with an extra attacker on the ice in the hope of gaining enough advantage to score a goal. However, it is an act of desperation, as it sometimes leads to the opposing team extending their lead by scoring a goal in the empty net.",
"title": "Tactics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "There are many other little tactics used in the game of hockey. Cycling moves the puck along the boards in the offensive zone to create a scoring chance by making defenders tired or moving them out of position. Pinching is when a defenceman pressures the opposition's winger in the offensive zone when they are breaking out, attempting to stop their attack and keep the puck in the offensive zone. A saucer pass is a pass used when an opposition's stick or body is in the passing lane. It is the act of raising the puck over the obstruction and having it land on a teammate's stick.",
"title": "Tactics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "A deke, short for \"decoy\", is a feint with the body or stick to fool a defender or the goalie. Many modern players, such as Pavel Datsyuk, Sidney Crosby and Patrick Kane, have picked up the skill of \"dangling\", which is fancier deking and requires more stick handling skills.",
"title": "Tactics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Although fighting is officially prohibited in the rules, it is not an uncommon occurrence at the professional level, and its prevalence has been both a target of criticism and a considerable draw for the sport. At the professional level in North America fights are unofficially condoned. Enforcers and other players fight to demoralize the opposing players while exciting their own, as well as settling personal scores. A fight will also break out if one of the team's skilled players gets hit hard or someone receives what the team perceives as a dirty hit. The amateur game penalizes fisticuffs more harshly, as a player who receives a fighting major is also assessed at least a 10-minute misconduct penalty (NCAA and some Junior leagues) or a game misconduct penalty and suspension (high school and younger, as well as some casual adult leagues).",
"title": "Tactics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "",
"title": "Tactics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) holds the IIHF World Women's Championships tournaments in several divisions; championships are held annually, except that the top flight does not play in Olympic years.",
"title": "Women's ice hockey"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Body checking has been prohibited in women's ice hockey since the mid-1980s in Canada, and spreading from there internationally. Canada's Rhonda Leeman Taylor was responsible for banning body contact from all national women's ice hockey tournaments in Canada in 1983. Body checking in some of the women's hockey leagues in Canada were completely removed in 1986 resulting in a substantial increase in female participation in ice hockey in Canada.",
"title": "Women's ice hockey"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Prior to this point, bodychecking had been a part of the women's game in most cases, including in Europe. It was not until after the 1990 Women's World Championship (sanctioned by the International Ice Hockey Federation) that body checking was eliminated from the women's ice hockey format internationally. In addition, until the mid 2000s, obstruction and interference were allowed, including pushing players around in front of the net, minor hooking, and \"setting picks\". When the National Hockey League in North America removed obstruction and interference in the mid 2000s, minor hockey leagues and female leagues followed suit.",
"title": "Women's ice hockey"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "In women's IIHF ice hockey today, body checking is considered an \"illegal hit\" and is punishable by a minor penalty, major penalty and game misconduct, or match penalty. In current IIHF women's competition, body checking is either a minor or major penalty, decided at the referee's discretion.",
"title": "Women's ice hockey"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "The idea of reintroducing bodychecking to the female game after its removal in the 1990s remains controversial. Some of those opposed to the idea of its reintroduction maintain it would lead to a loss of female participants, as once stated by Arto Sieppi, Finland's director of women's hockey. Sieppi made the statement in response to claims made by the then head coach of Sweden's women's national ice hockey team, Peter Elander, who had claimed its absence was due to patriarchal sexism.",
"title": "Women's ice hockey"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Peter is a good friend of mine, but I totally disagree...First of all, it's a women's sport, and if bodychecking would be allowed, the number of young girls entering the game would decrease rapidly.",
"title": "Women's ice hockey"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The Svenska damhockeyligan (SDHL), known as the Swedish Women's Hockey League in English, announced in 2022 that it would include body checking during its 2022–23 season, but would maintain a prohibition on the, \"...\"north-south\" open-ice hit\". The new program will also be extended to the Damettan, Sweden's second-tier women's league.",
"title": "Women's ice hockey"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Players in women's competition are required to wear protective full-face masks. At all levels, players must wear a pelvic protector, essentially the female equivalent of a jockstrap, known colloquially as a \"jill\" or \"jillstrap\". Other protective equipment for girls and women in ice hockey is sometimes specifically designed for the female body, such as shoulder pads designed to protect a women's breast area without reducing mobility.",
"title": "Women's ice hockey"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Women began playing the game of ice hockey in the late 19th century. Several games were recorded in the 1890s in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The women of Lord Stanley's family were known to participate in the game of ice hockey on the outdoor ice rink at Rideau Hall, the residence of Canada's Governor-General.",
"title": "Women's ice hockey"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "The earliest available records of women's ice hockey were in the late 19th-century in Canada. Much like the men's game, women had previously been playing a conglomeration of stick-and-ball ice games. As with men's hockey, the women's game developed at first without an organizing body. A tournament in 1902 between Montreal and Trois-Rivières was billed as the first women's ice hockey championship tournament. Several tournaments, such as at the Banff Winter Carnival, were held in the early 20th century with numerous women's teams such as the Seattle Vamps and Vancouver Amazons. Organizations started to develop in the 1920s, such as the Ladies Ontario Hockey Association in Canada, and later, the Dominion Women's Amateur Hockey Association.",
"title": "Women's ice hockey"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Starting in Canada in 1961, the women's game spread to more universities after the Fitness and Amateur Sport Act came into force in whereby the Canadian Government of Canada made an official commitment to \"encourage, promote and develop fitness and amateur sport in Canada.\"",
"title": "Women's ice hockey"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Today, the women's game is played from youth through adult leagues, and the university level in North America and internationally. There are major professional women's hockey leagues: the Professional Women's Hockey League, (formerly the Premier Hockey Federation) with teams in the United States, Canada, and the Zhenskaya Hockey League with teams in Russia and China. In 2019, the Professional Women's Hockey Players Association was formed by over 150 players with the goal of creating a sustainable professional league for women's ice hockey in North America.",
"title": "Women's ice hockey"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Between 1995 and 2005 the number of participants increased by 400 percent. In 2011, Canada had 85,827 women players, United States had 65,609, Finland 4,760, Sweden 3,075 and Switzerland 1,172.",
"title": "Women's ice hockey"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Women's ice hockey was added as a medal sport eight years after the first world women's ice hockey championship in 1990 at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan.",
"title": "Women's ice hockey"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Prior to the professionalization of women's ice hockey in the 21st century, almost all professional women hockey players who played against men were goaltenders. No woman has ever played a full season in top tier men's professional ice hockey. The United States Hockey League (USHL) welcomed the first female professional ice hockey player in 1969–70, when the Marquette Iron Rangers signed 18-year-old Karen Koch, a goaltender. Only one woman has ever played in the National Hockey League (NHL), goaltender Manon Rhéaume. Rhéaume played in NHL pre-season games as a goaltender for the Tampa Bay Lightning against the St. Louis Blues and the Boston Bruins. In 2003, Hayley Wickenheiser played with the Kirkkonummi Salamat in the Finnish men's Suomi-sarja league.",
"title": "Women's ice hockey"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Women have occasionally competed in North American minor leagues: among them Rhéaume, and fellow goaltenders Kelly Dyer and Erin Whitten. Defenceman Angela Ruggiero became the first woman to actively play in a regular season professional hockey game in North America at a position other than goalie, playing in a single game for the Tulsa Oilers of the Central Hockey League.",
"title": "Women's ice hockey"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "The 1989 IIHF European Women Championships in West Germany was the first European Championship held in women's ice hockey and preceded the eventual International Ice Hockey Federation-sanctioned Women's World Championship for ice hockey. The first world ice hockey championship for women was the 1990 IIHF World Women's Championship.",
"title": "Women's ice hockey"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "The following is a list of professional ice hockey leagues by attendance:",
"title": "Leagues and championships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "The NHL is the best attended and most popular ice hockey league in the world, and is among the major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada. The league's history began after Canada's National Hockey Association decided to disband in 1917; the result was the creation of the National Hockey League with four teams. The league expanded to the United States beginning in 1924 and had as many as 10 teams before contracting to six teams by 1942–43. In 1967, the NHL doubled in size to 12 teams, undertaking one of the greatest expansions in professional sports history. A few years later, in 1972, a new 12-team league, the World Hockey Association (WHA) was formed and due to its ensuing rivalry with the NHL, it caused an escalation in players' salaries. In 1979, the 17-team NHL merged with the WHA creating a 21-team league. By 2017, the NHL had expanded to 31 teams, and after a realignment in 2013, these teams were divided into two conferences and four divisions. The league expanded to 32 teams in 2021.",
"title": "Leagues and championships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "The American Hockey League (AHL) is the primary developmental professional league for players aspiring to enter the NHL. It comprises 31 teams from the United States and Canada. It is run as a farm league to the NHL, with the vast majority of AHL players under contract to an NHL team. The ECHL (called the East Coast Hockey League before the 2003–04 season) is a mid-level minor league in the United States with a few players under contract to NHL or AHL teams.",
"title": "Leagues and championships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "As of 2019, there are three minor professional leagues with no NHL affiliations: the Federal Prospects Hockey League (FPHL), Ligue Nord-Américaine de Hockey (LNAH), and the Southern Professional Hockey League (SPHL).",
"title": "Leagues and championships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "U Sports ice hockey is the highest level of play at the Canadian university level under the auspices of U Sports, Canada's governing body for university sports. As these players compete at the university level, they are obligated to follow the rule of standard eligibility of five years. In the United States especially, college hockey is popular and the best university teams compete in the annual NCAA Men's Ice Hockey Championship. The American Collegiate Hockey Association is composed of college teams at the club level.",
"title": "Leagues and championships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "In Canada, the Canadian Hockey League is an umbrella organization comprising three major junior leagues: the Ontario Hockey League, the Western Hockey League, and the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. It attracts players from Canada, the United States and Europe. The major junior players are considered amateurs as they are under 21-years-old and not paid a salary, however, they do get a stipend and play a schedule similar to a professional league. Typically, the NHL drafts many players directly from the major junior leagues.",
"title": "Leagues and championships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "In the United States, the United States Hockey League (USHL) is the highest junior league. Players in this league are also amateur with players required to be under 21-years old, but do not get a stipend, which allows players to retain their eligibility for participation in NCAA ice hockey.",
"title": "Leagues and championships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "The Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) is the largest and most popular ice hockey league in Eurasia. The league is the direct successor to the Russian Super League, which in turn was the successor to the Soviet League, the history of which dates back to the Soviet adoption of ice hockey in the 1940s. The KHL was launched in 2008 with clubs predominantly from Russia, but featuring teams from other post-Soviet states. The league expanded beyond the former Soviet countries beginning in the 2011–12 season, with clubs in Croatia and Slovakia. The KHL currently comprises member clubs based in Belarus (1), China (1), Kazakhstan (1) and Russia (19) for a total of 22.",
"title": "Leagues and championships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "The second division of hockey in Eurasia is the Supreme Hockey League (VHL). This league features 24 teams from Russia and 2 from Kazakhstan. This league is currently being converted to a farm league for the KHL, similarly to the AHL's function in relation to the NHL. The third division is the Russian Hockey League, which features only teams from Russia. The Asia League, an international ice hockey league featuring clubs from China, Japan, South Korea, and the Russian Far East, is the successor to the Japan Ice Hockey League.",
"title": "Leagues and championships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "The highest junior league in Eurasia is the Junior Hockey League (MHL). It features 32 teams from post-Soviet states, predominantly Russia. The second tier to this league is the Junior Hockey League Championships (MHL-B).",
"title": "Leagues and championships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Several countries in Europe have their own top professional senior leagues. Many future KHL and NHL players start or end their professional careers in these leagues. The National League A in Switzerland, Swedish Hockey League in Sweden, SM-liiga in Finland, and Czech Extraliga in the Czech Republic are all very popular in their respective countries.",
"title": "Leagues and championships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Beginning in the 2014–15 season, the Champions Hockey League was launched, a league consisting of first-tier teams from several European countries, running parallel to the teams' domestic leagues. The competition is meant to serve as a Europe-wide ice hockey club championship. The competition is a direct successor to the European Trophy and is related to the 2008–09 tournament of the same name.",
"title": "Leagues and championships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "There are also several annual tournaments for clubs, held outside of league play. Pre-season tournaments include the European Trophy, Tampere Cup and the Pajulahti Cup. One of the oldest international ice hockey competition for clubs is the Spengler Cup, held every year in Davos, Switzerland, between Christmas and New Year's Day. It was first awarded in 1923 to the Oxford University Ice Hockey Club. The Memorial Cup, a competition for junior-level (age 20 and under) clubs is held annually from a pool of junior championship teams in Canada and the United States.",
"title": "Leagues and championships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "International club competitions organized by the IIHF include the Continental Cup, the Victoria Cup and the European Women's Champions Cup. The World Junior Club Cup is an annual tournament of junior ice hockey clubs representing each of the top junior leagues.",
"title": "Leagues and championships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "The Australian Ice Hockey League and New Zealand Ice Hockey League are represented by nine and five teams respectively. As of 2012, the two top teams of the previous season from each league compete in the Trans-Tasman Champions League.",
"title": "Leagues and championships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Ice hockey in Africa is a small but growing sport; while no African ice hockey playing nation has a domestic national league, there are several regional leagues in South Africa.",
"title": "Leagues and championships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Ice hockey has been played at the Winter Olympics since 1924 (and was played at the summer games in 1920). Hockey is Canada's national winter sport, and Canadians are extremely passionate about the game. The nation has traditionally done very well at the Olympic Games, winning six of the first seven gold medals. However, by 1956, its amateur club teams and national teams could not compete with the teams of government-supported players from the Soviet Union. The USSR won all but two gold medals from 1956 to 1988. The United States won its first gold medal in 1960. On the way to winning the gold medal at the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics, amateur US college players defeated the heavily favoured Soviet squad—an event known as the \"Miracle on Ice\" in the United States. Restrictions on professional players were fully dropped at the 1988 games in Calgary. NHL agreed to participate ten years later. The 1998 Games saw the full participation of players from the NHL, which suspended operations during the Games and has done so in subsequent Games up until 2018. The 2010 games in Vancouver were the first played in an NHL city since the inclusion of NHL players. The 2010 games were the first played on NHL-sized ice rinks, which are narrower than the IIHF standard.",
"title": "Leagues and championships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "National teams representing the member federations of the IIHF compete annually in the IIHF Ice Hockey World Championships. Teams are selected from the available players by the individual federations, without restriction on amateur or professional status. Since it is held in the spring, the tournament coincides with the annual NHL Stanley Cup playoffs and many of the top players are hence not available to participate in the tournament. Many of the NHL players who do play in the IIHF tournament come from teams eliminated before the playoffs or in the first round, and federations often hold open spots until the tournament to allow for players to join the tournament after their club team is eliminated. For many years, the tournament was an amateur-only tournament, but this restriction was removed, beginning in 1977.",
"title": "Leagues and championships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "The 1972 Summit Series and 1974 Summit Series, two series pitting the best Canadian and Soviet players without IIHF restrictions were major successes, and established a rivalry between Canada and the USSR. In the spirit of best-versus-best without restrictions on amateur or professional status, the series were followed by five Canada Cup tournaments, played in North America. Two NHL versus USSR series were also held: the 1979 Challenge Cup and Rendez-vous '87. The Canada Cup tournament later became the World Cup of Hockey, played in 1996, 2004 and 2016. The United States won in 1996 and Canada won in 2004 and 2016.",
"title": "Leagues and championships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Since the initial women's world championships in 1990, there have been fifteen tournaments. Women's hockey has been played at the Olympics since 1998. The only finals in the women's world championship or Olympics that did not involve both Canada and the United States were the 2006 Winter Olympic final between Canada and Sweden and 2019 World Championship final between the US and Finland.",
"title": "Leagues and championships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Other ice hockey tournaments featuring national teams include the World Junior Championship, the World U18 Championships, the World U-17 Hockey Challenge, the World Junior A Challenge, the Ivan Hlinka Memorial Tournament, the World Women's U18 Championships and the 4 Nations Cup. The annual Euro Hockey Tour, an unofficial European championship between the national men's teams of the Czech Republic, Finland, Russia and Sweden have been played since 1996–97.",
"title": "Leagues and championships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "The attendance record for an ice hockey game was set on December 11, 2010, when the University of Michigan's men's ice hockey team faced cross-state rival Michigan State in an event billed as \"The Big Chill at the Big House\". The game was played at Michigan's (American) football venue, Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, with a capacity of 109,901 as of the 2010 football season. When UM stopped sales to the public on May 6, 2010, with plans to reserve remaining tickets for students, over 100,000 tickets had been sold for the event. Ultimately, a crowd announced by UM as 113,411, the largest in the stadium's history (including football), saw the homestanding Wolverines win 5–0. Guinness World Records, using a count of ticketed fans who actually entered the stadium instead of UM's figure of tickets sold, announced a final figure of 104,173.",
"title": "Leagues and championships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "The record was approached but not broken at the 2014 NHL Winter Classic, which also held at Michigan Stadium, with the Detroit Red Wings as the home team and the Toronto Maple Leafs as the opposing team with an announced crowd of 105,491. The record for an NHL Stanley Cup playoff game is 28,183, set on April 23, 1996, at the Thunderdome during a Tampa Bay Lightning – Philadelphia Flyers game.",
"title": "Leagues and championships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Ice hockey is most popular in Canada, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Northern Europe, and the United States. Ice hockey is the official national winter sport of Canada. In addition, ice hockey is the most popular winter sport in Belarus, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Latvia, Russia, Slovakia, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland. North America's National Hockey League (NHL) is the highest level for men's ice hockey and the strongest professional ice hockey league in the world. The Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) is the highest league in Russia and much of Eastern Europe. The International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) is the formal governing body for international ice hockey, with the IIHF managing international tournaments and maintaining the IIHF World Ranking. Worldwide, the International Ice Hockey Federation has 83 member national associations, comprising 60 full members, 22 associate members, and one affiliate member.",
"title": "International status"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "In international competitions, the national teams of six countries (the Big Six) predominate: Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, Russia, Sweden and the United States. Of the 69 medals awarded all-time in men's competition at the Olympics, only seven medals were not awarded to one of those countries (or two of their precursors, the Soviet Union for Russia, and Czechoslovakia for the Czech Republic). In the annual Ice Hockey World Championships, 177 of 201 medals have been awarded to the six nations; Canada has won the most gold medals. Teams outside the Big Six have won only nine medals in either competition since 1953. The World Cup of Hockey is organized by the National Hockey League and the National Hockey League Players' Association (NHLPA), unlike the annual World Championships and quadrennial Olympic tournament, both run by the International Ice Hockey Federation. World Cup games are played under NHL rules and not those of the IIHF, and the tournament occurs prior to the NHL pre-season, allowing for all NHL players to be available, unlike the World Championships, which overlaps with the NHL's Stanley Cup playoffs. Furthermore, all 12 Women's Olympic and 36 IIHF World Women's Championship medals were awarded to one of the Big Six. The Canadian national team or the United States national team have between them won every gold medal of either series.",
"title": "International status"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Number of registered hockey players, including male, female and junior, provided by the respective countries' federations. This list only includes the 36 of 83 IIHF member countries with more than 1,000 registered players as of November 2022.",
"title": "International status"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "Pond hockey is a form of ice hockey played generally as pick-up hockey on lakes, ponds and artificial outdoor rinks during the winter. Pond hockey is commonly referred to in hockey circles as shinny. Its rules differ from traditional hockey because there is no hitting and very little shooting, placing a greater emphasis on skating, stickhandling and passing abilities. Since 2002, the World Pond Hockey Championship has been played on Roulston Lake in Tobique Valley, New Brunswick, Canada. Since 2006, the US Pond Hockey Championships have been played in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Canadian National Pond Hockey Championships have been played in Huntsville, Ontario.",
"title": "Variants"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "Sledge hockey is an adaption of ice hockey designed for players who have a physical disability. Players are seated in sleds and use a specialized hockey stick that also helps the player navigate on the ice. The sport was created in Sweden in the early 1960s and is played under similar rules to ice hockey.",
"title": "Variants"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "Ice hockey is the official winter sport of Canada. Ice hockey, partially because of its popularity as a major professional sport, has been a source of inspiration for numerous films, television episodes and songs in Canadian and American popular culture.",
"title": "In popular culture"
}
]
| Ice hockey is a team sport played on ice skates, usually on an ice skating rink with lines and markings specific to the sport. It belongs to a family of sports called hockey. In ice hockey, two opposing teams use ice hockey sticks to control, advance, and shoot a closed, vulcanized, rubber disc called a "puck" into the other team's goal. Each goal is worth one point. The team which scores the most goals is declared the winner. In a formal game, each team has six skaters on the ice at a time, barring any penalties, one of whom is the goaltender. Ice hockey is a full contact sport, and is considered to be one of the more physically demanding team sports. It is distinct from field hockey, in which players move a ball around a non-frozen pitch using field hockey sticks. The modern sport of ice hockey was developed in Canada, most notably in Montreal, where the first indoor game was played on March 3, 1875. Some characteristics of that game, such as the length of the ice rink and the use of a puck, have been retained to this day. Amateur ice hockey leagues began in the 1880s, and professional ice hockey originated around 1900. The Stanley Cup, emblematic of ice hockey club supremacy, was initially commissioned in 1892 as the "Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup" and was first awarded in 1893 to recognize the Canadian amateur champion and later became the championship trophy of the National Hockey League (NHL). In the early 1900s, the Canadian rules were adopted by the Ligue Internationale de Hockey sur Glace, in Paris, France, the precursor of the IIHF. The sport was played for the first time at the Olympics during the 1920 Summer Olympics. In 1994 ice hockey was officially recognized as Canada's national winter sport. While women also played during the game's early formative years, it was not until organizers began to officially remove body checking from female ice hockey beginning in the mid-1980s that it began to gain greater popularity, which by then had spread to Europe and a variety of other countries. The first IIHF Women's World Championship was held in 1990, and women's play was introduced into the Olympics in 1998. Ice hockey is one of the sports featured in the Winter Olympics, while its premiere international competition, the IIHF World Championships, are governed by the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) for both men's and women's competitions. | 2001-10-02T13:57:58Z | 2023-12-27T19:03:39Z | [
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14,791 | IEEE 802.3 | IEEE 802.3 is a working group and a collection of standards defining the physical layer and data link layer's media access control (MAC) of wired Ethernet. The standards are produced by the working group of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). This is generally a local area network (LAN) technology with some wide area network (WAN) applications. Physical connections are made between nodes and/or infrastructure devices (hubs, switches, routers) by various types of copper or fiber cable.
802.3 is a technology that supports the IEEE 802.1 network architecture.
802.3 also defines LAN access method using CSMA/CD. | [
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"text": "IEEE 802.3 is a working group and a collection of standards defining the physical layer and data link layer's media access control (MAC) of wired Ethernet. The standards are produced by the working group of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). This is generally a local area network (LAN) technology with some wide area network (WAN) applications. Physical connections are made between nodes and/or infrastructure devices (hubs, switches, routers) by various types of copper or fiber cable.",
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| IEEE 802.3 is a working group and a collection of standards defining the physical layer and data link layer's media access control (MAC) of wired Ethernet. The standards are produced by the working group of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). This is generally a local area network (LAN) technology with some wide area network (WAN) applications. Physical connections are made between nodes and/or infrastructure devices by various types of copper or fiber cable. 802.3 is a technology that supports the IEEE 802.1 network architecture. 802.3 also defines LAN access method using CSMA/CD. | 2001-11-05T16:58:05Z | 2023-09-30T11:57:08Z | [
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14,794 | Integer (computer science) | In computer science, an integer is a datum of integral data type, a data type that represents some range of mathematical integers. Integral data types may be of different sizes and may or may not be allowed to contain negative values. Integers are commonly represented in a computer as a group of binary digits (bits). The size of the grouping varies so the set of integer sizes available varies between different types of computers. Computer hardware nearly always provides a way to represent a processor register or memory address as an integer.
The value of an item with an integral type is the mathematical integer that it corresponds to. Integral types may be unsigned (capable of representing only non-negative integers) or signed (capable of representing negative integers as well).
An integer value is typically specified in the source code of a program as a sequence of digits optionally prefixed with + or −. Some programming languages allow other notations, such as hexadecimal (base 16) or octal (base 8). Some programming languages also permit digit group separators.
The internal representation of this datum is the way the value is stored in the computer's memory. Unlike mathematical integers, a typical datum in a computer has some minimal and maximum possible value.
The most common representation of a positive integer is a string of bits, using the binary numeral system. The order of the memory bytes storing the bits varies; see endianness. The width or precision of an integral type is the number of bits in its representation. An integral type with n bits can encode 2 numbers; for example an unsigned type typically represents the non-negative values 0 through 2−1. Other encodings of integer values to bit patterns are sometimes used, for example binary-coded decimal or Gray code, or as printed character codes such as ASCII.
There are four well-known ways to represent signed numbers in a binary computing system. The most common is two's complement, which allows a signed integral type with n bits to represent numbers from −2 through 2−1. Two's complement arithmetic is convenient because there is a perfect one-to-one correspondence between representations and values (in particular, no separate +0 and −0), and because addition, subtraction and multiplication do not need to distinguish between signed and unsigned types. Other possibilities include offset binary, sign-magnitude, and ones' complement.
Some computer languages define integer sizes in a machine-independent way; others have varying definitions depending on the underlying processor word size. Not all language implementations define variables of all integer sizes, and defined sizes may not even be distinct in a particular implementation. An integer in one programming language may be a different size in a different language or on a different processor.
Some older computer architectures used decimal representations of integers, stored in binary-coded decimal (BCD) or other format. These values generally require data sizes of 4 bits per decimal digit (sometimes called a nibble), usually with additional bits for a sign. Many modern CPUs provide limited support for decimal integers as an extended datatype, providing instructions for converting such values to and from binary values. Depending on the architecture, decimal integers may have fixed sizes (e.g., 7 decimal digits plus a sign fit into a 32-bit word), or may be variable-length (up to some maximum digit size), typically occupying two digits per byte (octet).
Different CPUs support different integral data types. Typically, hardware will support both signed and unsigned types, but only a small, fixed set of widths.
The table above lists integral type widths that are supported in hardware by common processors. High level programming languages provide more possibilities. It is common to have a 'double width' integral type that has twice as many bits as the biggest hardware-supported type. Many languages also have bit-field types (a specified number of bits, usually constrained to be less than the maximum hardware-supported width) and range types (that can represent only the integers in a specified range).
Some languages, such as Lisp, Smalltalk, REXX, Haskell, Python, and Raku, support arbitrary precision integers (also known as infinite precision integers or bignums). Other languages that do not support this concept as a top-level construct may have libraries available to represent very large numbers using arrays of smaller variables, such as Java's BigInteger class or Perl's "bigint" package. These use as much of the computer's memory as is necessary to store the numbers; however, a computer has only a finite amount of storage, so they, too, can only represent a finite subset of the mathematical integers. These schemes support very large numbers; for example one kilobyte of memory could be used to store numbers up to 2466 decimal digits long.
A Boolean or Flag type is a type that can represent only two values: 0 and 1, usually identified with false and true respectively. This type can be stored in memory using a single bit, but is often given a full byte for convenience of addressing and speed of access.
A four-bit quantity is known as a nibble (when eating, being smaller than a bite) or nybble (being a pun on the form of the word byte). One nibble corresponds to one digit in hexadecimal and holds one digit or a sign code in binary-coded decimal.
The term byte initially meant 'the smallest addressable unit of memory'. In the past, 5-, 6-, 7-, 8-, and 9-bit bytes have all been used. There have also been computers that could address individual bits ('bit-addressed machine'), or that could only address 16- or 32-bit quantities ('word-addressed machine'). The term byte was usually not used at all in connection with bit- and word-addressed machines.
The term octet always refers to an 8-bit quantity. It is mostly used in the field of computer networking, where computers with different byte widths might have to communicate.
In modern usage byte almost invariably means eight bits, since all other sizes have fallen into disuse; thus byte has come to be synonymous with octet.
The term 'word' is used for a small group of bits that are handled simultaneously by processors of a particular architecture. The size of a word is thus CPU-specific. Many different word sizes have been used, including 6-, 8-, 12-, 16-, 18-, 24-, 32-, 36-, 39-, 40-, 48-, 60-, and 64-bit. Since it is architectural, the size of a word is usually set by the first CPU in a family, rather than the characteristics of a later compatible CPU. The meanings of terms derived from word, such as longword, doubleword, quadword, and halfword, also vary with the CPU and OS.
Practically all new desktop processors are capable of using 64-bit words, though embedded processors with 8- and 16-bit word size are still common. The 36-bit word length was common in the early days of computers.
One important cause of non-portability of software is the incorrect assumption that all computers have the same word size as the computer used by the programmer. For example, if a programmer using the C language incorrectly declares as int a variable that will be used to store values greater than 2−1, the program will fail on computers with 16-bit integers. That variable should have been declared as long, which has at least 32 bits on any computer. Programmers may also incorrectly assume that a pointer can be converted to an integer without loss of information, which may work on (some) 32-bit computers, but fail on 64-bit computers with 64-bit pointers and 32-bit integers. This issue is resolved by C99 in stdint.h in the form of intptr_t.
A short integer can represent a whole number that may take less storage, while having a smaller range, compared with a standard integer on the same machine.
In C, it is denoted by short. It is required to be at least 16 bits, and is often smaller than a standard integer, but this is not required. A conforming program can assume that it can safely store values between −(2−1) and 2−1, but it may not assume that the range is not larger. In Java, a short is always a 16-bit integer. In the Windows API, the datatype SHORT is defined as a 16-bit signed integer on all machines.
A long integer can represent a whole integer whose range is greater than or equal to that of a standard integer on the same machine.
In C, it is denoted by long. It is required to be at least 32 bits, and may or may not be larger than a standard integer. A conforming program can assume that it can safely store values between −(2−1) and 2−1, but it may not assume that the range is not larger.
In the C99 version of the C programming language and the C++11 version of C++, a long long type is supported that has double the minimum capacity of the standard long. This type is not supported by compilers that require C code to be compliant with the previous C++ standard, C++03, because the long long type did not exist in C++03. For an ANSI/ISO compliant compiler, the minimum requirements for the specified ranges, that is, −(2−1) to 2−1 for signed and 0 to 2−1 for unsigned, must be fulfilled; however, extending this range is permitted. This can be an issue when exchanging code and data between platforms, or doing direct hardware access. Thus, there are several sets of headers providing platform independent exact width types. The C standard library provides stdint.h; this was introduced in C99 and C++11.
Literals for integers can be written as regular Arabic numerals, consisting of a sequence of digits and with negation indicated by a minus sign before the value. However, most programming languages disallow use of commas or spaces for digit grouping. Examples of integer literals are:
There are several alternate methods for writing integer literals in many programming languages: | [
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{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The table above lists integral type widths that are supported in hardware by common processors. High level programming languages provide more possibilities. It is common to have a 'double width' integral type that has twice as many bits as the biggest hardware-supported type. Many languages also have bit-field types (a specified number of bits, usually constrained to be less than the maximum hardware-supported width) and range types (that can represent only the integers in a specified range).",
"title": "Common integral data types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Some languages, such as Lisp, Smalltalk, REXX, Haskell, Python, and Raku, support arbitrary precision integers (also known as infinite precision integers or bignums). Other languages that do not support this concept as a top-level construct may have libraries available to represent very large numbers using arrays of smaller variables, such as Java's BigInteger class or Perl's \"bigint\" package. These use as much of the computer's memory as is necessary to store the numbers; however, a computer has only a finite amount of storage, so they, too, can only represent a finite subset of the mathematical integers. These schemes support very large numbers; for example one kilobyte of memory could be used to store numbers up to 2466 decimal digits long.",
"title": "Common integral data types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "A Boolean or Flag type is a type that can represent only two values: 0 and 1, usually identified with false and true respectively. This type can be stored in memory using a single bit, but is often given a full byte for convenience of addressing and speed of access.",
"title": "Common integral data types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "A four-bit quantity is known as a nibble (when eating, being smaller than a bite) or nybble (being a pun on the form of the word byte). One nibble corresponds to one digit in hexadecimal and holds one digit or a sign code in binary-coded decimal.",
"title": "Common integral data types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The term byte initially meant 'the smallest addressable unit of memory'. In the past, 5-, 6-, 7-, 8-, and 9-bit bytes have all been used. There have also been computers that could address individual bits ('bit-addressed machine'), or that could only address 16- or 32-bit quantities ('word-addressed machine'). The term byte was usually not used at all in connection with bit- and word-addressed machines.",
"title": "Common integral data types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The term octet always refers to an 8-bit quantity. It is mostly used in the field of computer networking, where computers with different byte widths might have to communicate.",
"title": "Common integral data types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In modern usage byte almost invariably means eight bits, since all other sizes have fallen into disuse; thus byte has come to be synonymous with octet.",
"title": "Common integral data types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The term 'word' is used for a small group of bits that are handled simultaneously by processors of a particular architecture. The size of a word is thus CPU-specific. Many different word sizes have been used, including 6-, 8-, 12-, 16-, 18-, 24-, 32-, 36-, 39-, 40-, 48-, 60-, and 64-bit. Since it is architectural, the size of a word is usually set by the first CPU in a family, rather than the characteristics of a later compatible CPU. The meanings of terms derived from word, such as longword, doubleword, quadword, and halfword, also vary with the CPU and OS.",
"title": "Common integral data types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Practically all new desktop processors are capable of using 64-bit words, though embedded processors with 8- and 16-bit word size are still common. The 36-bit word length was common in the early days of computers.",
"title": "Common integral data types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "One important cause of non-portability of software is the incorrect assumption that all computers have the same word size as the computer used by the programmer. For example, if a programmer using the C language incorrectly declares as int a variable that will be used to store values greater than 2−1, the program will fail on computers with 16-bit integers. That variable should have been declared as long, which has at least 32 bits on any computer. Programmers may also incorrectly assume that a pointer can be converted to an integer without loss of information, which may work on (some) 32-bit computers, but fail on 64-bit computers with 64-bit pointers and 32-bit integers. This issue is resolved by C99 in stdint.h in the form of intptr_t.",
"title": "Common integral data types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "A short integer can represent a whole number that may take less storage, while having a smaller range, compared with a standard integer on the same machine.",
"title": "Common integral data types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In C, it is denoted by short. It is required to be at least 16 bits, and is often smaller than a standard integer, but this is not required. A conforming program can assume that it can safely store values between −(2−1) and 2−1, but it may not assume that the range is not larger. In Java, a short is always a 16-bit integer. In the Windows API, the datatype SHORT is defined as a 16-bit signed integer on all machines.",
"title": "Common integral data types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "A long integer can represent a whole integer whose range is greater than or equal to that of a standard integer on the same machine.",
"title": "Common integral data types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In C, it is denoted by long. It is required to be at least 32 bits, and may or may not be larger than a standard integer. A conforming program can assume that it can safely store values between −(2−1) and 2−1, but it may not assume that the range is not larger.",
"title": "Common integral data types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In the C99 version of the C programming language and the C++11 version of C++, a long long type is supported that has double the minimum capacity of the standard long. This type is not supported by compilers that require C code to be compliant with the previous C++ standard, C++03, because the long long type did not exist in C++03. For an ANSI/ISO compliant compiler, the minimum requirements for the specified ranges, that is, −(2−1) to 2−1 for signed and 0 to 2−1 for unsigned, must be fulfilled; however, extending this range is permitted. This can be an issue when exchanging code and data between platforms, or doing direct hardware access. Thus, there are several sets of headers providing platform independent exact width types. The C standard library provides stdint.h; this was introduced in C99 and C++11.",
"title": "Common integral data types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Literals for integers can be written as regular Arabic numerals, consisting of a sequence of digits and with negation indicated by a minus sign before the value. However, most programming languages disallow use of commas or spaces for digit grouping. Examples of integer literals are:",
"title": "Syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "There are several alternate methods for writing integer literals in many programming languages:",
"title": "Syntax"
}
]
| In computer science, an integer is a datum of integral data type, a data type that represents some range of mathematical integers. Integral data types may be of different sizes and may or may not be allowed to contain negative values. Integers are commonly represented in a computer as a group of binary digits (bits). The size of the grouping varies so the set of integer sizes available varies between different types of computers. Computer hardware nearly always provides a way to represent a processor register or memory address as an integer. | 2001-09-15T21:54:28Z | 2023-12-22T04:46:31Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_(computer_science) |
14,800 | Icon | An icon (from Ancient Greek εἰκών (eikṓn) 'image, resemblance') is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, in the cultures of the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Catholic churches. They are not simply artworks; "an icon is a sacred image used in religious devotion". The most common subjects include Christ, Mary, saints and angels. Although especially associated with portrait-style images concentrating on one or two main figures, the term also covers most of the religious images in a variety of artistic media produced by Eastern Christianity, including narrative scenes, usually from the Bible or the lives of saints.
Icons are most commonly painted on wood panels with egg tempera, but they may also be cast in metal or carved in stone or embroidered on cloth or done in mosaic or fresco work or printed on paper or metal, etc. Comparable images from Western Christianity may be classified as "icons", although "iconic" may also be used to describe the static style of a devotional image. In the Greek language, the term for icon painting uses the same word as for "writing", and Orthodox sources often translate it into English as icon writing.
Eastern Orthodox tradition holds that the production of Christian images dates back to the very early days of Christianity, and that it has been a continuous tradition since then. Modern academic art history considers that, while images may have existed earlier, the tradition can be traced back only as far as the 3rd century, and that the images which survive from Early Christian art often differ greatly from later ones. The icons of later centuries can be linked, often closely, to images from the 5th century onwards, though very few of these survive. Widespread destruction of images occurred during the Byzantine Iconoclasm of 726–842, although this did settle permanently the question of the appropriateness of images. Since then, icons have had a great continuity of style and subject, far greater than in the icons of the Western church. At the same time there have been change and development.
Pre-Christian religions had produced and used art works. Statues and paintings of various gods and deities were regularly worshiped and venerated. It is unclear when Christians took up such activities. Christian tradition dating from the 8th century identifies Luke the Evangelist as the first icon painter, but this might not reflect historical facts. A general assumption that early Christianity was generally aniconic, opposed to religious imagery in both theory and practice until about 200, has been challenged by Paul Corby Finney's analysis of early Christian writing and material remains (1994). His assumption distinguishes three different sources of attitudes affecting early Christians on the issue: "first that humans could have a direct vision of God; second that they could not; and, third, that although humans could see God they were best advised not to look, and were strictly forbidden to represent what they had seen".
These derived respectively from Greek and Near Eastern pagan religions, from Ancient Greek philosophy, and from the Jewish tradition and the Old Testament. Of the three, Finney concludes that "overall, Israel's aversion to sacred images influenced early Christianity considerably less than the Greek philosophical tradition of invisible deity apophatically defined", so placing less emphasis on the Jewish background of most of the first Christians than most traditional accounts.
Finney suggests that "the reasons for the non-appearance of Christian art before 200 have nothing to do with principled aversion to art, with other-worldliness, or with anti-materialism. The truth is simple and mundane: Christians lacked land and capital. Art requires both. As soon as they began to acquire land and capital, Christians began to experiment with their own distinctive forms of art".
Aside from the legend that Pilate had made an image of Christ, the 4th-century Eusebius of Caesarea, in his Church History, provides a more substantial reference to a "first" icon of Jesus. He relates that King Abgar of Edessa (died c. 50 CE) sent a letter to Jesus at Jerusalem, asking Jesus to come and heal him of an illness. This version of the Abgar story does not mention an image. A later account found in the Syriac Doctrine of Addai (c. 400?) mentions a painted image of Jesus in the story. Even later, in the 6th-century account given by Evagrius Scholasticus, the painted image transforms into an image that miraculously appeared on a towel when Christ pressed the cloth to his wet face. Further legends relate that the cloth remained in Edessa until the 10th century, when it was taken by General John Kourkouas to Constantinople. It went missing in 1204 when Crusaders sacked Constantinople, but by then numerous copies had firmly established its iconic type.
The 4th-century Christian Aelius Lampridius produced the earliest known written records of Christian images treated like icons (in a pagan or Gnostic context) in his Life of Alexander Severus (xxix) that formed part of the Augustan History. According to Lampridius, the emperor Alexander Severus (r. 222–235), himself not a Christian, had kept a domestic chapel for the veneration of images of deified emperors, of portraits of his ancestors, and of Christ, Apollonius, Orpheus and Abraham. Saint Irenaeus, (c. 130–202) in his Against Heresies (1:25;6) says scornfully of the Gnostic Carpocratians:
They also possess images, some of them painted, and others formed from different kinds of material; while they maintain that a likeness of Christ was made by Pilate at that time when Jesus lived among them. They crown these images, and set them up along with the images of the philosophers of the world that is to say, with the images of Pythagoras, and Plato, and Aristotle, and the rest. They have also other modes of honouring these images, after the same manner of the Gentiles [pagans].
On the other hand, Irenaeus does not speak critically of icons or portraits in a general sense—only of certain gnostic sectarians' use of icons.
Another criticism of image veneration appears in the non-canonical 2nd-century Acts of John (generally considered a gnostic work), in which the Apostle John discovers that one of his followers has had a portrait made of him, and is venerating it:
[H]e [John] went into the bedchamber, and saw the portrait of an old man crowned with garlands, and lamps and altars set before it. And he called him and said: Lycomedes, what do you mean by this matter of the portrait? Can it be one of thy gods that is painted here? For I see that you are still living in heathen fashion.
Later in the passage John says, "But this that you have now done is childish and imperfect: you have drawn a dead likeness of the dead."
At least some of the hierarchy of the Christian churches still strictly opposed icons in the early 4th century. At the Spanish non-ecumenical Synod of Elvira (c. 305) bishops concluded, "Pictures are not to be placed in churches, so that they do not become objects of worship and adoration".
Bishop Epiphanius of Salamis, wrote his letter 51 to John, Bishop of Jerusalem (c. 394) in which he recounted how he tore down an image in a church and admonished the other bishop that such images are "opposed [...] to our religion".
Elsewhere in his Church History, Eusebius reports seeing what he took to be portraits of Jesus, Peter and Paul, and also mentions a bronze statue at Banias / Paneas under Mount Hermon, of which he wrote, "They say that this statue is an image of Jesus". Further, he relates that locals regarded the image as a memorial of the healing of the woman with an issue of blood by Jesus (Luke 8:43–48), because it depicted a standing man wearing a double cloak and with arm outstretched, and a woman kneeling before him with arms reaching out as if in supplication.
John Francis Wilson suggests the possibility that this refers to a pagan bronze statue whose true identity had been forgotten. Some have thought it to represent Aesculapius, the Greek god of healing, but the description of the standing figure and the woman kneeling in supplication precisely matches images found on coins depicting the bearded emperor Hadrian (r. 117–138) reaching out to a female figure—symbolizing a province—kneeling before him.
When asked by Constantia (Emperor Constantine's half-sister) for an image of Jesus, Eusebius denied the request, replying: "To depict purely the human form of Christ before its transformation, on the other hand, is to break the commandment of God and to fall into pagan error." Hence Jaroslav Pelikan calls Eusebius "the father of iconoclasm".
After the emperor Constantine I extended official toleration of Christianity within the Roman Empire in 313, huge numbers of pagans became converts. This period of the Historiography of Christianization of the Roman Empire probably saw the use of Christian images become very widespread among the faithful, though with great differences from pagan habits. Robin Lane Fox states "By the early fifth century, we know of the ownership of private icons of saints; by c. 480–500, we can be sure that the inside of a saint's shrine would be adorned with images and votive portraits, a practice which had probably begun earlier."
When Constantine himself (r. 306–337) apparently converted to Christianity, the majority of his subjects remained pagans. The Roman Imperial cult of the divinity of the emperor, expressed through the traditional burning of candles and the offering of incense to the emperor's image, was tolerated for a period because it would have been politically dangerous to attempt to suppress it. In the 5th century the courts of justice and municipal buildings of the empire still honoured the portrait of the reigning emperor in this way.
In 425 Philostorgius, an allegedly Arian Christian, charged the Orthodox Christians in Constantinople with idolatry because they still honored the image of the emperor Constantine the Great in this way. Dix notes that this occurred more than a century before the first extant reference to a similar honouring of the image of Christ or of his apostles or saints known today, but that it would seem a natural progression for the image of Christ, the King of Heaven and Earth, to be paid similar veneration as that given to the earthly Roman emperor. However, the Orthodox, Eastern Catholics, and other groups insist on explicitly distinguishing the veneration of icons from the worship of idols by pagans.(See further below on the doctrine of veneration as opposed to worship.)
After adoption of Christianity as the only permissible Roman state religion under Theodosius I, Christian art began to change not only in quality and sophistication, but also in nature. This was in no small part due to Christians being free for the first time to express their faith openly without persecution from the state, in addition to the faith spreading to the non-poor segments of society. Paintings of martyrs and their feats began to appear, and early writers commented on their lifelike effect, one of the elements a few Christian writers criticized in pagan art—the ability to imitate life. The writers mostly criticized pagan works of art for pointing to false gods, thus encouraging idolatry. Statues in the round were avoided as being too close to the principal artistic focus of pagan cult practices, as they have continued to be (with some small-scale exceptions) throughout the history of Eastern Christianity.
Nilus of Sinai (d. c. 430), in his Letter to Heliodorus Silentiarius, records a miracle in which St. Plato of Ankyra appeared to a Christian in a dream. The Saint was recognized because the young man had often seen his portrait. This recognition of a religious apparition from likeness to an image was also a characteristic of pagan pious accounts of appearances of gods to humans, and was a regular topos in hagiography. One critical recipient of a vision from Saint Demetrius of Thessaloniki apparently specified that the saint resembled the "more ancient" images of him—presumably the 7th-century mosaics still in Hagios Demetrios. Another, an African bishop, had been rescued from Arab slavery by a young soldier called Demetrios, who told him to go to his house in Thessaloniki. Having discovered that most young soldiers in the city seemed to be called Demetrios, he gave up and went to the largest church in the city, to find his rescuer on the wall.
During this period the church began to discourage all non-religious human images—the Emperor and donor figures counting as religious. This became largely effective, so that most of the population would only ever see religious images and those of the ruling class. The word icon referred to any and all images, not just religious ones, but there was barely a need for a separate word for these.
It is in a context attributed to the 5th century that the first mention of an image of Mary painted from life appears, though earlier paintings on catacomb walls bear resemblance to modern icons of Mary. Theodorus Lector, in his 6th-century History of the Church 1:1 stated that Eudokia (wife of emperor Theodosius II, d. 460) sent an image of the "Mother of God" named Icon of the Hodegetria from Jerusalem to Pulcheria, daughter of Arcadius, the former emperor and father of Theodosius II. The image was specified to have been "painted by the Apostle Luke."
Margherita Guarducci relates a tradition that the original icon of Mary attributed to Luke, sent by Eudokia to Pulcheria from Palestine, was a large circular icon only of her head. When the icon arrived in Constantinople it was fitted in as the head into a very large rectangular icon of her holding the Christ child and it is this composite icon that became the one historically known as the Hodegetria. She further states another tradition that when the last Latin Emperor of Constantinople, Baldwin II, fled Constantinople in 1261 he took this original circular portion of the icon with him.
This remained in the possession of the Angevin dynasty who had it inserted into a much larger image of Mary and the Christ child, which is presently enshrined above the high altar of the Benedictine Abbey church of Montevergine. This icon was subjected to repeated repainting over the subsequent centuries, so that it is difficult to determine what the original image of Mary's face would have looked like. Guarducci states that in 1950 an ancient image of Mary at the Church of Santa Francesca Romana was determined to be a very exact, but reverse mirror image of the original circular icon that was made in the 5th century and brought to Rome, where it has remained until the present.
In later tradition the number of icons of Mary attributed to Luke greatly multiplied. The Salus Populi Romani, the Theotokos of Vladimir, the Theotokos Iverskaya of Mount Athos, the Theotokos of Tikhvin, the Theotokos of Smolensk and the Black Madonna of Częstochowa are examples, and another is in the cathedral on St Thomas Mount, which is believed to be one of the seven painted by St. Luke the Evangelist and brought to India by St. Thomas. Ethiopia has at least seven more. Bissera V. Pentcheva concludes, "The myth [of Luke painting an icon] was invented in order to support the legitimacy of icon veneration during the Iconoclastic controversy" [8th and 9th centuries, much later than most art historians put it]. According to Reformed Baptist pastor John Carpenter, by claiming the existence of a portrait of the Theotokos painted during her lifetime by the evangelist Luke, the iconodules "fabricated evidence for the apostolic origins and divine approval of images."
In the period before and during the Iconoclastic Controversy, stories attributing the creation of icons to the New Testament period greatly increased, with several apostles and even Mary herself believed to have acted as the artist or commissioner of images (also embroidered in the case of Mary).
There was a continuing opposition to images and their misuse within Christianity from very early times. "Whenever images threatened to gain undue influence within the church, theologians have sought to strip them of their power". Further, "there is no century between the fourth and the eighth in which there is not some evidence of opposition to images even within the Church". Nonetheless, popular favor for icons guaranteed their continued existence, while no systematic apologia for or against icons, or doctrinal authorization or condemnation of icons yet existed.
The use of icons was seriously challenged by Byzantine Imperial authority in the 8th century. Though by this time opposition to images was strongly entrenched in Judaism and Islam, attribution of the impetus toward an iconoclastic movement in Eastern Orthodoxy to Muslims or Jews "seems to have been highly exaggerated, both by contemporaries and by modern scholars".
Though significant in the history of religious doctrine, the Byzantine controversy over images is not seen as of primary importance in Byzantine history; "[f]ew historians still hold it to have been the greatest issue of the period".
The Iconoclastic Period began when images were banned by Emperor Leo III the Isaurian sometime between 726 and 730. Under his son Constantine V, a council forbidding image veneration was held at Hieria near Constantinople in 754. Image veneration was later reinstated by the Empress Regent Irene, under whom another council was held reversing the decisions of the previous iconoclast council and taking its title as Seventh Ecumenical Council. The council anathemized all who hold to iconoclasm, i.e. those who held that veneration of images constitutes idolatry. Then the ban was enforced again by Leo V in 815. Finally, icon veneration was decisively restored by Empress Regent Theodora in 843 at the Council of Constantinople.
From then on all Byzantine coins had a religious image or symbol on the reverse, usually an image of Christ for larger denominations, with the head of the Emperor on the obverse, reinforcing the bond of the state and the divine order.
The tradition of acheiropoieta (ἀχειροποίητα, literally "not-made-by-hand") accrued to icons that are alleged to have come into existence miraculously, not by a human painter. Such images functioned as powerful relics as well as icons, and their images were naturally seen as authoritative as to the true appearance of the subject: naturally and especially because of the reluctance to accept mere human productions as embodying anything of the divine, a commonplace of Christian deprecation of man-made "idols". Like icons believed to be painted directly from the live subject, they therefore acted as important references for other images in the tradition. Beside the developed legend of the mandylion or Image of Edessa was the tale of the Veil of Veronica, whose very name signifies "true icon" or "true image", the fear of a "false image" remaining strong.
Although there are earlier records of their use, no panel icons earlier than the few from the 6th century preserved at the Greek Orthodox Saint Catherine's Monastery in Egypt survive, as the other examples in Rome have all been drastically over-painted. The surviving evidence for the earliest depictions of Christ, Mary and saints therefore comes from wall-paintings, mosaics and some carvings. They are realistic in appearance, in contrast to the later stylization. They are broadly similar in style, though often much superior in quality, to the mummy portraits done in wax (encaustic) and found at Fayyum in Egypt.
As can be judged from such items, the first depictions of Jesus were generic, rather than portrait images, generally representing him as a beardless young man. It was some time before the earliest examples of the long-haired, bearded face that was later to become standardized as the image of Jesus appeared. When they did begin to appear there was still variation. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) said that no one knew the appearance of Jesus or that of Mary. However, Augustine was not a resident of the Holy Land and therefore was not familiar with the local populations and their oral traditions. Gradually, paintings of Jesus took on characteristics of portrait images.
At this time the manner of depicting Jesus was not yet uniform, and there was some controversy over which of the two most common icons was to be favored. The first or "Semitic" form showed Jesus with short and "frizzy" hair; the second showed a bearded Jesus with hair parted in the middle, the manner in which the god Zeus was depicted. Theodorus Lector remarked that of the two, the one with short and frizzy hair was "more authentic". To support his assertion, he relates a story (excerpted by John of Damascus) that a pagan commissioned to paint an image of Jesus used the "Zeus" form instead of the "Semitic" form, and that as punishment his hands withered.
Though their development was gradual, it is possible to date the full-blown appearance and general ecclesiastical (as opposed to simply popular or local) acceptance of Christian images as venerated and miracle-working objects to the 6th century, when, as Hans Belting writes, "we first hear of the church's use of religious images". "As we reach the second half of the sixth century, we find that images are attracting direct veneration and some of them are credited with the performance of miracles". Cyril Mango writes, "In the post-Justinianic period the icon assumes an ever increasing role in popular devotion, and there is a proliferation of miracle stories connected with icons, some of them rather shocking to our eyes". However, the earlier references by Eusebius and Irenaeus indicate veneration of images and reported miracles associated with them as early as the 2nd century.
In the icons of Eastern Orthodoxy, and of the Early Medieval West, very little room is made for artistic license. Almost everything within the image has a symbolic aspect. Christ, the saints, and the angels all have halos. Angels (and often John the Baptist) have wings because they are messengers. Figures have consistent facial appearances, hold attributes personal to them, and use a few conventional poses. Archangels bear a thin staff and sometimes a mirror.
Colour plays an important role as well. Gold represents the radiance of Heaven; red, divine life. Blue is the colour of human life, white is the Uncreated Light of God, only used for resurrection and transfiguration of Christ. In icons of Jesus and Mary, Jesus wears red undergarment with a blue outer garment (representing God becoming human) and Mary wears a blue undergarment with a red overgarment (representing a human who was granted gifts by God), and thus the doctrine of deification is conveyed by icons. Letters are symbols too. Most icons incorporate some calligraphic text naming the person or event depicted. Even this is often presented in a stylized manner.
The historical tradition of icons used for purposes other than visual depiction are the Palladium (protective image), the Palladium (classical antiquity), the Acheiropoieta, and various "folk" traditions associated with folk religion. Of these various forms the oldest tradition dates back to before the Christian era among the ancient Greeks. The various "folk" traditions are more poorly documented and often are associated with local folk narratives of uncertain origin.
In English, since around 1600, the word "palladium" has been used figuratively to mean anything believed to provide protection or safety, and in particular in Christian contexts a sacred relic or icon believed to have a protective role in military contexts for a whole city, people or nation. Such beliefs first become prominent in the Eastern Churches in the period after the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, and later spread to the Western church. Palladia were processed around the walls of besieged cities and sometimes carried into battle.
The Eastern Orthodox view of the origin of icons is generally quite different from that of most secular scholars and from some in contemporary Roman Catholic circles: "The Orthodox Church maintains and teaches that the sacred image has existed from the beginning of Christianity", Léonid Ouspensky has written. Accounts that some non-Orthodox writers consider legendary are accepted as history within Eastern Orthodoxy, because they are a part of church tradition. Thus accounts such as that of the miraculous "image not made by hands", and the weeping and moving "Mother of God of the Sign" of Novgorod are accepted as fact: "Church Tradition tells us, for example, of the existence of an Icon of the Savior during His lifetime (the 'Icon-Made-Without-Hands') and of Icons of the Most-Holy Theotokos [Mary] immediately after Him."
Eastern Orthodoxy further teaches that "a clear understanding of the importance of Icons" was part of the church from its very beginning, and has never changed, although explanations of their importance may have developed over time. This is because icon painting is rooted in the theology of the Incarnation (Christ being the eikon of God) which did not change, though its subsequent clarification within the Church occurred over the period of the first seven Ecumenical Councils. Icons also served as tools of edification for the illiterate faithful during most of the history of Christendom. Thus, icons are words in painting; they refer to the history of salvation and to its manifestation in concrete persons. In the Orthodox Church, "icons have always been understood as a visible gospel, as a testimony to the great things given man by God the incarnate Logos". In the Council of 860 it was stated that "all that is uttered in words written in syllables is also proclaimed in the language of colors".
Eastern Orthodox find the first instance of an image or icon in the Bible when God made man in his own image (Septuagint Greek eikona), in Genesis 1:26–27. In Exodus, God commanded that the Israelites not make any graven image; soon afterwards, however, he commanded that they make graven images of cherubim and other like things, both as statues and woven on tapestries. Later, Solomon included still more such imagery when he built the first temple. Eastern Orthodox believe these qualify as icons, in that they were visible images depicting heavenly beings and, in the case of the cherubim, used to indirectly indicate God's presence above the Ark.
In the Book of Numbers it is written that God told Moses to make a bronze serpent, Nehushtan, and hold it up, so that anyone looking at the snake would be healed of their snake bites. In John 3, Jesus refers to the same serpent, saying that he must be lifted up in the same way that the serpent was. John of Damascus also regarded the brazen serpent as an icon. Further, Jesus Christ himself is called the "image of the invisible God" in Colossians 1:15, and is therefore in one sense an icon. As people are also made in God's images, people are also considered to be living icons, and are therefore "censed" along with painted icons during Orthodox prayer services.
According to John of Damascus, anyone who tries to destroy icons "is the enemy of Christ, the Holy Mother of God and the saints, and is the defender of the Devil and his demons". This is because the theology behind icons is closely tied to the Incarnational theology of the humanity and divinity of Jesus, so that attacks on icons typically have the effect of undermining or attacking the Incarnation of Jesus himself as elucidated in the Ecumenical Councils.
Basil of Caesarea, in his writing On the Holy Spirit, says: "The honor paid to the image passes to the prototype". He also illustrates the concept by saying, "If I point to a statue of Caesar and ask you 'Who is that?', your answer would properly be, 'It is Caesar.' When you say such you do not mean that the stone itself is Caesar, but rather, the name and honor you ascribe to the statue passes over to the original, the archetype, Caesar himself." This is thus the approach to icons; to kiss an icon of Jesus, in the Eastern Orthodox view, is to show love towards Jesus himself, not mere wood and paint making up the physical substance of the icon. Worship of the icon as somehow entirely separate from its prototype is expressly forbidden by the Seventh Ecumenical Council.
Icons are often illuminated with a candle or jar of oil with a wick. (Beeswax for candles and olive oil for oil lamps are preferred because they burn very cleanly, although other materials are sometimes used.) The illumination of religious images with lamps or candles is an ancient practice pre-dating Christianity.
Of the icon painting tradition that developed in Byzantium, with Constantinople as the chief city, we have only a few icons from the 11th century and none preceding them, in part because of the Iconoclastic reforms during which many were destroyed or lost, and also because of plundering by the Republic of Venice in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, and finally the Fall of Constantinople in 1453.
It was only in the Komnenian period (1081–1185) that the cult of the icon became widespread in the Byzantine world, partly on account of the dearth of richer materials (such as mosaics, ivory, and vitreous enamels), but also because an iconostasis a special screen for icons was introduced then in ecclesiastical practice. The style of the time was severe, hieratic and distant.
In the late Comnenian period this severity softened, and emotion, formerly avoided, entered icon painting. Major monuments for this change include the murals at Daphni Monastery (c. 1100) and the Church of St. Panteleimon near Skopje (1164). The Theotokos of Vladimir (c. 1115) is probably the most representative example of the new trend towards spirituality and emotion.
The tendency toward emotionalism in icons continued in the Paleologan period, which began in 1261. Palaiologan art reached its pinnacle in mosaics such as those of Chora Church. In the last half of the 14th century, Palaiologan saints were painted in an exaggerated manner, very slim and in contorted positions – a style known as the Palaiologan Mannerism, of which Ochrid's Annunciation is a superb example.
After 1453, the Byzantine tradition was carried on in regions previously influenced by its religion and culture—in the Balkans, Russia, and other Slavic countries, Georgia and Armenia in the Caucasus, and among Eastern Orthodox minorities in the Islamic world. In the Greek-speaking world Crete, ruled by Venice until the mid-17th century, was an important centre of painted icons, as home of the Cretan School, exporting many to Europe.
Crete was under Venetian control from 1204 and became a thriving center of art with eventually a Scuola di San Luca, or organized painter's guild, the Guild of Saint Luke, on Western lines. Cretan painting was heavily patronized both by Catholics of Venetian territories and by Eastern Orthodox. For ease of transport, Cretan painters specialized in panel paintings, and developed the ability to work in many styles to fit the taste of various patrons. El Greco, who moved to Venice after establishing his reputation in Crete, is the most famous artist of the school, who continued to use many Byzantine conventions in his works. In 1669 the city of Heraklion, on Crete, which at one time boasted at least 120 painters, fell to the Turks. From that time Greek icon painting went into a decline, with a revival attempted in the 20th century by art reformers such as Photis Kontoglou, who emphasized a return to earlier styles.
Russian icons are typically paintings on wood, often small, though some in churches and monasteries may be as large as a table top. Many religious homes in Russia have icons hanging on the wall in the krasny ugol—the "red" corner (see Icon corner). There is a rich history and elaborate religious symbolism associated with icons. In Russian churches, the nave is typically separated from the sanctuary by an iconostasis, a wall of icons.
The use and making of icons entered Kievan Rus' following its conversion to Orthodox Christianity from the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire in 988 AD. As a general rule, these icons strictly followed models and formulas hallowed by usage, some of which had originated in Constantinople. As time passed, the Russians—notably Andrei Rublev and Dionisius—widened the vocabulary of iconic types and styles far beyond anything found elsewhere. The personal, improvisatory and creative traditions of Western European religious art are largely lacking in Russia before the 17th century, when Simon Ushakov's painting became strongly influenced by religious paintings and engravings from Protestant as well as Catholic Europe.
In the mid-17th century, changes in liturgy and practice instituted by Patriarch Nikon of Moscow resulted in a split in the Russian Orthodox Church. The traditionalists, the persecuted "Old Ritualists" or "Old Believers", continued the traditional stylization of icons, while the State Church modified its practice. From that time icons began to be painted not only in the traditional stylized and nonrealistic mode, but also in a mixture of Russian stylization and Western European realism, and in a Western European manner very much like that of Catholic religious art of the time. The Stroganov School and the icons from Nevyansk rank among the last important schools of Russian icon-painting.
In Romania, icons painted as reversed images behind glass and set in frames were common in the 19th century and are still made. The process is known as reverse glass painting. "In the Transylvanian countryside, the expensive icons on panels imported from Moldavia, Wallachia, and Mt. Athos were gradually replaced by small, locally produced icons on glass, which were much less expensive and thus accessible to the Transylvanian peasants".
The earliest historical records about icons in Serbia dates back to the period of Nemanjić dynasty. One of the notable schools of Serb icons was active in the Bay of Kotor from the 17th century to the 19th century.
Trojeručica meaning "Three-handed Theotokos" is the most important icon of the Serbian Orthodox Church and main icon of Mount Athos.
The Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria and Oriental Orthodoxy also have distinctive, living icon painting traditions. Coptic icons have their origin in the Hellenistic art of Egyptian Late Antiquity, as exemplified by the Fayum mummy portraits. Beginning in the 4th century, churches painted their walls and made icons to reflect an authentic expression of their faith.
The Aleppo School was a school of icon-painting, founded by the priest Yusuf al-Musawwir (also known as Joseph the Painter) and active in Aleppo, which was then a part of the Ottoman Empire, between at least 1645 and 1777.
Although the word "icon" is not generally used in Western Christianity, there are religious works of art which were largely patterned on Byzantine works, and equally conventional in composition and depiction. Until the 13th century, icon-like depictions of sacred figures followed Eastern patterns—although very few survive from this early period. Italian examples are in a style known as Italo-Byzantine.
From the 13th century, the Western tradition came slowly to allow the artist far more flexibility, and a more realist approach to the figures. If only because there was a much smaller number of skilled artists, the quantity of works of art, in the sense of panel paintings, was much smaller in the West, and in most Western settings a single diptych as an altarpiece, or in a domestic room, probably stood in place of the larger collections typical of Orthodox "icon corners".
Only in the 15th century did production of painted works of art begin to approach Eastern levels, supplemented by mass-produced imports from the Cretan School. In this century, the use of icon-like portraits in the West was enormously increased by the introduction of old master prints on paper, mostly woodcuts which were produced in vast numbers (although hardly any survive). They were mostly sold, hand-coloured, by churches, and the smallest sizes (often only an inch high) were affordable even by peasants, who glued or pinned them straight onto a wall.
With the Reformation, after an initial uncertainty among early Lutherans, who painted a few icon-like depictions of leading Reformers, and continued to paint scenes from Scripture, Protestants came down firmly against icon-like portraits, especially larger ones, even of Christ. Many Protestants found these idolatrous.
The Catholic Church accepted the decrees of the iconodule Seventh Ecumenical Council regarding images. There is some minor difference, however, in the Catholic attitude to images from that of the Orthodox. Following Gregory the Great, Catholics emphasize the role of images as the Biblia Pauperum, the "Bible of the Poor", from which those who could not read could nonetheless learn.
Catholics also, however, share the same viewpoint with the Orthodox when it comes to image veneration, believing that whenever approached, sacred images are to be shown reverence. Though using both flat wooden panel and stretched canvas paintings, Catholics traditionally have also favored images in the form of three-dimensional statuary, whereas in the East, statuary is much less widely employed.
A joint Lutheran–Orthodox statement made in the 7th Plenary of the Lutheran–Orthodox Joint Commission, in July 1993 in Helsinki, reaffirmed the ecumenical council decisions on the nature of Christ and the veneration of images:
7. As Lutherans and Orthodox we affirm that the teachings of the ecumenical councils are authoritative for our churches. The ecumenical councils maintain the integrity of the teaching of the undivided Church concerning the saving, illuminating/justifying and glorifying acts of God and reject heresies which subvert the saving work of God in Christ. Orthodox and Lutherans, however, have different histories. Lutherans have received the Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan Creed with the addition of the filioque. The Seventh Ecumenical Council, the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, which rejected iconoclasm and restored the veneration of icons in the churches, was not part of the tradition received by the Reformation. Lutherans, however, rejected the iconoclasm of the 16th century, and affirmed the distinction between adoration due to the Triune God alone and all other forms of veneration (CA 21). Through historical research this council has become better known. Nevertheless it does not have the same significance for Lutherans as it does for the Orthodox. Yet, Lutherans and Orthodox are in agreement that the Second Council of Nicaea confirms the christological teaching of the earlier councils and in setting forth the role of images (icons) in the lives of the faithful reaffirms the reality of the incarnation of the eternal Word of God, when it states: "The more frequently, Christ, Mary, the mother of God, and the saints are seen, the more are those who see them drawn to remember and long for those who serve as models, and to pay these icons the tribute of salutation and respectful veneration. Certainly this is not the full adoration in accordance with our faith, which is properly paid only to the divine nature, but it resembles that given to the figure of the honored and life-giving cross, and also to the holy books of the gospels and to other sacred objects" (Definition of the Second Council of Nicaea). | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "An icon (from Ancient Greek εἰκών (eikṓn) 'image, resemblance') is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, in the cultures of the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Catholic churches. They are not simply artworks; \"an icon is a sacred image used in religious devotion\". The most common subjects include Christ, Mary, saints and angels. Although especially associated with portrait-style images concentrating on one or two main figures, the term also covers most of the religious images in a variety of artistic media produced by Eastern Christianity, including narrative scenes, usually from the Bible or the lives of saints.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Icons are most commonly painted on wood panels with egg tempera, but they may also be cast in metal or carved in stone or embroidered on cloth or done in mosaic or fresco work or printed on paper or metal, etc. Comparable images from Western Christianity may be classified as \"icons\", although \"iconic\" may also be used to describe the static style of a devotional image. In the Greek language, the term for icon painting uses the same word as for \"writing\", and Orthodox sources often translate it into English as icon writing.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Eastern Orthodox tradition holds that the production of Christian images dates back to the very early days of Christianity, and that it has been a continuous tradition since then. Modern academic art history considers that, while images may have existed earlier, the tradition can be traced back only as far as the 3rd century, and that the images which survive from Early Christian art often differ greatly from later ones. The icons of later centuries can be linked, often closely, to images from the 5th century onwards, though very few of these survive. Widespread destruction of images occurred during the Byzantine Iconoclasm of 726–842, although this did settle permanently the question of the appropriateness of images. Since then, icons have had a great continuity of style and subject, far greater than in the icons of the Western church. At the same time there have been change and development.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Pre-Christian religions had produced and used art works. Statues and paintings of various gods and deities were regularly worshiped and venerated. It is unclear when Christians took up such activities. Christian tradition dating from the 8th century identifies Luke the Evangelist as the first icon painter, but this might not reflect historical facts. A general assumption that early Christianity was generally aniconic, opposed to religious imagery in both theory and practice until about 200, has been challenged by Paul Corby Finney's analysis of early Christian writing and material remains (1994). His assumption distinguishes three different sources of attitudes affecting early Christians on the issue: \"first that humans could have a direct vision of God; second that they could not; and, third, that although humans could see God they were best advised not to look, and were strictly forbidden to represent what they had seen\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "These derived respectively from Greek and Near Eastern pagan religions, from Ancient Greek philosophy, and from the Jewish tradition and the Old Testament. Of the three, Finney concludes that \"overall, Israel's aversion to sacred images influenced early Christianity considerably less than the Greek philosophical tradition of invisible deity apophatically defined\", so placing less emphasis on the Jewish background of most of the first Christians than most traditional accounts.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Finney suggests that \"the reasons for the non-appearance of Christian art before 200 have nothing to do with principled aversion to art, with other-worldliness, or with anti-materialism. The truth is simple and mundane: Christians lacked land and capital. Art requires both. As soon as they began to acquire land and capital, Christians began to experiment with their own distinctive forms of art\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Aside from the legend that Pilate had made an image of Christ, the 4th-century Eusebius of Caesarea, in his Church History, provides a more substantial reference to a \"first\" icon of Jesus. He relates that King Abgar of Edessa (died c. 50 CE) sent a letter to Jesus at Jerusalem, asking Jesus to come and heal him of an illness. This version of the Abgar story does not mention an image. A later account found in the Syriac Doctrine of Addai (c. 400?) mentions a painted image of Jesus in the story. Even later, in the 6th-century account given by Evagrius Scholasticus, the painted image transforms into an image that miraculously appeared on a towel when Christ pressed the cloth to his wet face. Further legends relate that the cloth remained in Edessa until the 10th century, when it was taken by General John Kourkouas to Constantinople. It went missing in 1204 when Crusaders sacked Constantinople, but by then numerous copies had firmly established its iconic type.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The 4th-century Christian Aelius Lampridius produced the earliest known written records of Christian images treated like icons (in a pagan or Gnostic context) in his Life of Alexander Severus (xxix) that formed part of the Augustan History. According to Lampridius, the emperor Alexander Severus (r. 222–235), himself not a Christian, had kept a domestic chapel for the veneration of images of deified emperors, of portraits of his ancestors, and of Christ, Apollonius, Orpheus and Abraham. Saint Irenaeus, (c. 130–202) in his Against Heresies (1:25;6) says scornfully of the Gnostic Carpocratians:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "They also possess images, some of them painted, and others formed from different kinds of material; while they maintain that a likeness of Christ was made by Pilate at that time when Jesus lived among them. They crown these images, and set them up along with the images of the philosophers of the world that is to say, with the images of Pythagoras, and Plato, and Aristotle, and the rest. They have also other modes of honouring these images, after the same manner of the Gentiles [pagans].",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "On the other hand, Irenaeus does not speak critically of icons or portraits in a general sense—only of certain gnostic sectarians' use of icons.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Another criticism of image veneration appears in the non-canonical 2nd-century Acts of John (generally considered a gnostic work), in which the Apostle John discovers that one of his followers has had a portrait made of him, and is venerating it:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "[H]e [John] went into the bedchamber, and saw the portrait of an old man crowned with garlands, and lamps and altars set before it. And he called him and said: Lycomedes, what do you mean by this matter of the portrait? Can it be one of thy gods that is painted here? For I see that you are still living in heathen fashion.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Later in the passage John says, \"But this that you have now done is childish and imperfect: you have drawn a dead likeness of the dead.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "At least some of the hierarchy of the Christian churches still strictly opposed icons in the early 4th century. At the Spanish non-ecumenical Synod of Elvira (c. 305) bishops concluded, \"Pictures are not to be placed in churches, so that they do not become objects of worship and adoration\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Bishop Epiphanius of Salamis, wrote his letter 51 to John, Bishop of Jerusalem (c. 394) in which he recounted how he tore down an image in a church and admonished the other bishop that such images are \"opposed [...] to our religion\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Elsewhere in his Church History, Eusebius reports seeing what he took to be portraits of Jesus, Peter and Paul, and also mentions a bronze statue at Banias / Paneas under Mount Hermon, of which he wrote, \"They say that this statue is an image of Jesus\". Further, he relates that locals regarded the image as a memorial of the healing of the woman with an issue of blood by Jesus (Luke 8:43–48), because it depicted a standing man wearing a double cloak and with arm outstretched, and a woman kneeling before him with arms reaching out as if in supplication.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "John Francis Wilson suggests the possibility that this refers to a pagan bronze statue whose true identity had been forgotten. Some have thought it to represent Aesculapius, the Greek god of healing, but the description of the standing figure and the woman kneeling in supplication precisely matches images found on coins depicting the bearded emperor Hadrian (r. 117–138) reaching out to a female figure—symbolizing a province—kneeling before him.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "When asked by Constantia (Emperor Constantine's half-sister) for an image of Jesus, Eusebius denied the request, replying: \"To depict purely the human form of Christ before its transformation, on the other hand, is to break the commandment of God and to fall into pagan error.\" Hence Jaroslav Pelikan calls Eusebius \"the father of iconoclasm\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "After the emperor Constantine I extended official toleration of Christianity within the Roman Empire in 313, huge numbers of pagans became converts. This period of the Historiography of Christianization of the Roman Empire probably saw the use of Christian images become very widespread among the faithful, though with great differences from pagan habits. Robin Lane Fox states \"By the early fifth century, we know of the ownership of private icons of saints; by c. 480–500, we can be sure that the inside of a saint's shrine would be adorned with images and votive portraits, a practice which had probably begun earlier.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "When Constantine himself (r. 306–337) apparently converted to Christianity, the majority of his subjects remained pagans. The Roman Imperial cult of the divinity of the emperor, expressed through the traditional burning of candles and the offering of incense to the emperor's image, was tolerated for a period because it would have been politically dangerous to attempt to suppress it. In the 5th century the courts of justice and municipal buildings of the empire still honoured the portrait of the reigning emperor in this way.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In 425 Philostorgius, an allegedly Arian Christian, charged the Orthodox Christians in Constantinople with idolatry because they still honored the image of the emperor Constantine the Great in this way. Dix notes that this occurred more than a century before the first extant reference to a similar honouring of the image of Christ or of his apostles or saints known today, but that it would seem a natural progression for the image of Christ, the King of Heaven and Earth, to be paid similar veneration as that given to the earthly Roman emperor. However, the Orthodox, Eastern Catholics, and other groups insist on explicitly distinguishing the veneration of icons from the worship of idols by pagans.(See further below on the doctrine of veneration as opposed to worship.)",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "After adoption of Christianity as the only permissible Roman state religion under Theodosius I, Christian art began to change not only in quality and sophistication, but also in nature. This was in no small part due to Christians being free for the first time to express their faith openly without persecution from the state, in addition to the faith spreading to the non-poor segments of society. Paintings of martyrs and their feats began to appear, and early writers commented on their lifelike effect, one of the elements a few Christian writers criticized in pagan art—the ability to imitate life. The writers mostly criticized pagan works of art for pointing to false gods, thus encouraging idolatry. Statues in the round were avoided as being too close to the principal artistic focus of pagan cult practices, as they have continued to be (with some small-scale exceptions) throughout the history of Eastern Christianity.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Nilus of Sinai (d. c. 430), in his Letter to Heliodorus Silentiarius, records a miracle in which St. Plato of Ankyra appeared to a Christian in a dream. The Saint was recognized because the young man had often seen his portrait. This recognition of a religious apparition from likeness to an image was also a characteristic of pagan pious accounts of appearances of gods to humans, and was a regular topos in hagiography. One critical recipient of a vision from Saint Demetrius of Thessaloniki apparently specified that the saint resembled the \"more ancient\" images of him—presumably the 7th-century mosaics still in Hagios Demetrios. Another, an African bishop, had been rescued from Arab slavery by a young soldier called Demetrios, who told him to go to his house in Thessaloniki. Having discovered that most young soldiers in the city seemed to be called Demetrios, he gave up and went to the largest church in the city, to find his rescuer on the wall.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "During this period the church began to discourage all non-religious human images—the Emperor and donor figures counting as religious. This became largely effective, so that most of the population would only ever see religious images and those of the ruling class. The word icon referred to any and all images, not just religious ones, but there was barely a need for a separate word for these.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "It is in a context attributed to the 5th century that the first mention of an image of Mary painted from life appears, though earlier paintings on catacomb walls bear resemblance to modern icons of Mary. Theodorus Lector, in his 6th-century History of the Church 1:1 stated that Eudokia (wife of emperor Theodosius II, d. 460) sent an image of the \"Mother of God\" named Icon of the Hodegetria from Jerusalem to Pulcheria, daughter of Arcadius, the former emperor and father of Theodosius II. The image was specified to have been \"painted by the Apostle Luke.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Margherita Guarducci relates a tradition that the original icon of Mary attributed to Luke, sent by Eudokia to Pulcheria from Palestine, was a large circular icon only of her head. When the icon arrived in Constantinople it was fitted in as the head into a very large rectangular icon of her holding the Christ child and it is this composite icon that became the one historically known as the Hodegetria. She further states another tradition that when the last Latin Emperor of Constantinople, Baldwin II, fled Constantinople in 1261 he took this original circular portion of the icon with him.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "This remained in the possession of the Angevin dynasty who had it inserted into a much larger image of Mary and the Christ child, which is presently enshrined above the high altar of the Benedictine Abbey church of Montevergine. This icon was subjected to repeated repainting over the subsequent centuries, so that it is difficult to determine what the original image of Mary's face would have looked like. Guarducci states that in 1950 an ancient image of Mary at the Church of Santa Francesca Romana was determined to be a very exact, but reverse mirror image of the original circular icon that was made in the 5th century and brought to Rome, where it has remained until the present.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In later tradition the number of icons of Mary attributed to Luke greatly multiplied. The Salus Populi Romani, the Theotokos of Vladimir, the Theotokos Iverskaya of Mount Athos, the Theotokos of Tikhvin, the Theotokos of Smolensk and the Black Madonna of Częstochowa are examples, and another is in the cathedral on St Thomas Mount, which is believed to be one of the seven painted by St. Luke the Evangelist and brought to India by St. Thomas. Ethiopia has at least seven more. Bissera V. Pentcheva concludes, \"The myth [of Luke painting an icon] was invented in order to support the legitimacy of icon veneration during the Iconoclastic controversy\" [8th and 9th centuries, much later than most art historians put it]. According to Reformed Baptist pastor John Carpenter, by claiming the existence of a portrait of the Theotokos painted during her lifetime by the evangelist Luke, the iconodules \"fabricated evidence for the apostolic origins and divine approval of images.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In the period before and during the Iconoclastic Controversy, stories attributing the creation of icons to the New Testament period greatly increased, with several apostles and even Mary herself believed to have acted as the artist or commissioner of images (also embroidered in the case of Mary).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "There was a continuing opposition to images and their misuse within Christianity from very early times. \"Whenever images threatened to gain undue influence within the church, theologians have sought to strip them of their power\". Further, \"there is no century between the fourth and the eighth in which there is not some evidence of opposition to images even within the Church\". Nonetheless, popular favor for icons guaranteed their continued existence, while no systematic apologia for or against icons, or doctrinal authorization or condemnation of icons yet existed.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The use of icons was seriously challenged by Byzantine Imperial authority in the 8th century. Though by this time opposition to images was strongly entrenched in Judaism and Islam, attribution of the impetus toward an iconoclastic movement in Eastern Orthodoxy to Muslims or Jews \"seems to have been highly exaggerated, both by contemporaries and by modern scholars\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Though significant in the history of religious doctrine, the Byzantine controversy over images is not seen as of primary importance in Byzantine history; \"[f]ew historians still hold it to have been the greatest issue of the period\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The Iconoclastic Period began when images were banned by Emperor Leo III the Isaurian sometime between 726 and 730. Under his son Constantine V, a council forbidding image veneration was held at Hieria near Constantinople in 754. Image veneration was later reinstated by the Empress Regent Irene, under whom another council was held reversing the decisions of the previous iconoclast council and taking its title as Seventh Ecumenical Council. The council anathemized all who hold to iconoclasm, i.e. those who held that veneration of images constitutes idolatry. Then the ban was enforced again by Leo V in 815. Finally, icon veneration was decisively restored by Empress Regent Theodora in 843 at the Council of Constantinople.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "From then on all Byzantine coins had a religious image or symbol on the reverse, usually an image of Christ for larger denominations, with the head of the Emperor on the obverse, reinforcing the bond of the state and the divine order.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The tradition of acheiropoieta (ἀχειροποίητα, literally \"not-made-by-hand\") accrued to icons that are alleged to have come into existence miraculously, not by a human painter. Such images functioned as powerful relics as well as icons, and their images were naturally seen as authoritative as to the true appearance of the subject: naturally and especially because of the reluctance to accept mere human productions as embodying anything of the divine, a commonplace of Christian deprecation of man-made \"idols\". Like icons believed to be painted directly from the live subject, they therefore acted as important references for other images in the tradition. Beside the developed legend of the mandylion or Image of Edessa was the tale of the Veil of Veronica, whose very name signifies \"true icon\" or \"true image\", the fear of a \"false image\" remaining strong.",
"title": "Acheiropoieta"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Although there are earlier records of their use, no panel icons earlier than the few from the 6th century preserved at the Greek Orthodox Saint Catherine's Monastery in Egypt survive, as the other examples in Rome have all been drastically over-painted. The surviving evidence for the earliest depictions of Christ, Mary and saints therefore comes from wall-paintings, mosaics and some carvings. They are realistic in appearance, in contrast to the later stylization. They are broadly similar in style, though often much superior in quality, to the mummy portraits done in wax (encaustic) and found at Fayyum in Egypt.",
"title": "Stylistic developments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "As can be judged from such items, the first depictions of Jesus were generic, rather than portrait images, generally representing him as a beardless young man. It was some time before the earliest examples of the long-haired, bearded face that was later to become standardized as the image of Jesus appeared. When they did begin to appear there was still variation. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) said that no one knew the appearance of Jesus or that of Mary. However, Augustine was not a resident of the Holy Land and therefore was not familiar with the local populations and their oral traditions. Gradually, paintings of Jesus took on characteristics of portrait images.",
"title": "Stylistic developments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "At this time the manner of depicting Jesus was not yet uniform, and there was some controversy over which of the two most common icons was to be favored. The first or \"Semitic\" form showed Jesus with short and \"frizzy\" hair; the second showed a bearded Jesus with hair parted in the middle, the manner in which the god Zeus was depicted. Theodorus Lector remarked that of the two, the one with short and frizzy hair was \"more authentic\". To support his assertion, he relates a story (excerpted by John of Damascus) that a pagan commissioned to paint an image of Jesus used the \"Zeus\" form instead of the \"Semitic\" form, and that as punishment his hands withered.",
"title": "Stylistic developments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Though their development was gradual, it is possible to date the full-blown appearance and general ecclesiastical (as opposed to simply popular or local) acceptance of Christian images as venerated and miracle-working objects to the 6th century, when, as Hans Belting writes, \"we first hear of the church's use of religious images\". \"As we reach the second half of the sixth century, we find that images are attracting direct veneration and some of them are credited with the performance of miracles\". Cyril Mango writes, \"In the post-Justinianic period the icon assumes an ever increasing role in popular devotion, and there is a proliferation of miracle stories connected with icons, some of them rather shocking to our eyes\". However, the earlier references by Eusebius and Irenaeus indicate veneration of images and reported miracles associated with them as early as the 2nd century.",
"title": "Stylistic developments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In the icons of Eastern Orthodoxy, and of the Early Medieval West, very little room is made for artistic license. Almost everything within the image has a symbolic aspect. Christ, the saints, and the angels all have halos. Angels (and often John the Baptist) have wings because they are messengers. Figures have consistent facial appearances, hold attributes personal to them, and use a few conventional poses. Archangels bear a thin staff and sometimes a mirror.",
"title": "Symbolism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Colour plays an important role as well. Gold represents the radiance of Heaven; red, divine life. Blue is the colour of human life, white is the Uncreated Light of God, only used for resurrection and transfiguration of Christ. In icons of Jesus and Mary, Jesus wears red undergarment with a blue outer garment (representing God becoming human) and Mary wears a blue undergarment with a red overgarment (representing a human who was granted gifts by God), and thus the doctrine of deification is conveyed by icons. Letters are symbols too. Most icons incorporate some calligraphic text naming the person or event depicted. Even this is often presented in a stylized manner.",
"title": "Symbolism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The historical tradition of icons used for purposes other than visual depiction are the Palladium (protective image), the Palladium (classical antiquity), the Acheiropoieta, and various \"folk\" traditions associated with folk religion. Of these various forms the oldest tradition dates back to before the Christian era among the ancient Greeks. The various \"folk\" traditions are more poorly documented and often are associated with local folk narratives of uncertain origin.",
"title": "Palladium and Miracles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In English, since around 1600, the word \"palladium\" has been used figuratively to mean anything believed to provide protection or safety, and in particular in Christian contexts a sacred relic or icon believed to have a protective role in military contexts for a whole city, people or nation. Such beliefs first become prominent in the Eastern Churches in the period after the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, and later spread to the Western church. Palladia were processed around the walls of besieged cities and sometimes carried into battle.",
"title": "Palladium and Miracles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The Eastern Orthodox view of the origin of icons is generally quite different from that of most secular scholars and from some in contemporary Roman Catholic circles: \"The Orthodox Church maintains and teaches that the sacred image has existed from the beginning of Christianity\", Léonid Ouspensky has written. Accounts that some non-Orthodox writers consider legendary are accepted as history within Eastern Orthodoxy, because they are a part of church tradition. Thus accounts such as that of the miraculous \"image not made by hands\", and the weeping and moving \"Mother of God of the Sign\" of Novgorod are accepted as fact: \"Church Tradition tells us, for example, of the existence of an Icon of the Savior during His lifetime (the 'Icon-Made-Without-Hands') and of Icons of the Most-Holy Theotokos [Mary] immediately after Him.\"",
"title": "Eastern Orthodox teaching"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Eastern Orthodoxy further teaches that \"a clear understanding of the importance of Icons\" was part of the church from its very beginning, and has never changed, although explanations of their importance may have developed over time. This is because icon painting is rooted in the theology of the Incarnation (Christ being the eikon of God) which did not change, though its subsequent clarification within the Church occurred over the period of the first seven Ecumenical Councils. Icons also served as tools of edification for the illiterate faithful during most of the history of Christendom. Thus, icons are words in painting; they refer to the history of salvation and to its manifestation in concrete persons. In the Orthodox Church, \"icons have always been understood as a visible gospel, as a testimony to the great things given man by God the incarnate Logos\". In the Council of 860 it was stated that \"all that is uttered in words written in syllables is also proclaimed in the language of colors\".",
"title": "Eastern Orthodox teaching"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Eastern Orthodox find the first instance of an image or icon in the Bible when God made man in his own image (Septuagint Greek eikona), in Genesis 1:26–27. In Exodus, God commanded that the Israelites not make any graven image; soon afterwards, however, he commanded that they make graven images of cherubim and other like things, both as statues and woven on tapestries. Later, Solomon included still more such imagery when he built the first temple. Eastern Orthodox believe these qualify as icons, in that they were visible images depicting heavenly beings and, in the case of the cherubim, used to indirectly indicate God's presence above the Ark.",
"title": "Eastern Orthodox teaching"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "In the Book of Numbers it is written that God told Moses to make a bronze serpent, Nehushtan, and hold it up, so that anyone looking at the snake would be healed of their snake bites. In John 3, Jesus refers to the same serpent, saying that he must be lifted up in the same way that the serpent was. John of Damascus also regarded the brazen serpent as an icon. Further, Jesus Christ himself is called the \"image of the invisible God\" in Colossians 1:15, and is therefore in one sense an icon. As people are also made in God's images, people are also considered to be living icons, and are therefore \"censed\" along with painted icons during Orthodox prayer services.",
"title": "Eastern Orthodox teaching"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "According to John of Damascus, anyone who tries to destroy icons \"is the enemy of Christ, the Holy Mother of God and the saints, and is the defender of the Devil and his demons\". This is because the theology behind icons is closely tied to the Incarnational theology of the humanity and divinity of Jesus, so that attacks on icons typically have the effect of undermining or attacking the Incarnation of Jesus himself as elucidated in the Ecumenical Councils.",
"title": "Eastern Orthodox teaching"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Basil of Caesarea, in his writing On the Holy Spirit, says: \"The honor paid to the image passes to the prototype\". He also illustrates the concept by saying, \"If I point to a statue of Caesar and ask you 'Who is that?', your answer would properly be, 'It is Caesar.' When you say such you do not mean that the stone itself is Caesar, but rather, the name and honor you ascribe to the statue passes over to the original, the archetype, Caesar himself.\" This is thus the approach to icons; to kiss an icon of Jesus, in the Eastern Orthodox view, is to show love towards Jesus himself, not mere wood and paint making up the physical substance of the icon. Worship of the icon as somehow entirely separate from its prototype is expressly forbidden by the Seventh Ecumenical Council.",
"title": "Eastern Orthodox teaching"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Icons are often illuminated with a candle or jar of oil with a wick. (Beeswax for candles and olive oil for oil lamps are preferred because they burn very cleanly, although other materials are sometimes used.) The illumination of religious images with lamps or candles is an ancient practice pre-dating Christianity.",
"title": "Eastern Orthodox teaching"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Of the icon painting tradition that developed in Byzantium, with Constantinople as the chief city, we have only a few icons from the 11th century and none preceding them, in part because of the Iconoclastic reforms during which many were destroyed or lost, and also because of plundering by the Republic of Venice in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, and finally the Fall of Constantinople in 1453.",
"title": "Icon painting tradition by region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "It was only in the Komnenian period (1081–1185) that the cult of the icon became widespread in the Byzantine world, partly on account of the dearth of richer materials (such as mosaics, ivory, and vitreous enamels), but also because an iconostasis a special screen for icons was introduced then in ecclesiastical practice. The style of the time was severe, hieratic and distant.",
"title": "Icon painting tradition by region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "In the late Comnenian period this severity softened, and emotion, formerly avoided, entered icon painting. Major monuments for this change include the murals at Daphni Monastery (c. 1100) and the Church of St. Panteleimon near Skopje (1164). The Theotokos of Vladimir (c. 1115) is probably the most representative example of the new trend towards spirituality and emotion.",
"title": "Icon painting tradition by region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The tendency toward emotionalism in icons continued in the Paleologan period, which began in 1261. Palaiologan art reached its pinnacle in mosaics such as those of Chora Church. In the last half of the 14th century, Palaiologan saints were painted in an exaggerated manner, very slim and in contorted positions – a style known as the Palaiologan Mannerism, of which Ochrid's Annunciation is a superb example.",
"title": "Icon painting tradition by region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "After 1453, the Byzantine tradition was carried on in regions previously influenced by its religion and culture—in the Balkans, Russia, and other Slavic countries, Georgia and Armenia in the Caucasus, and among Eastern Orthodox minorities in the Islamic world. In the Greek-speaking world Crete, ruled by Venice until the mid-17th century, was an important centre of painted icons, as home of the Cretan School, exporting many to Europe.",
"title": "Icon painting tradition by region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Crete was under Venetian control from 1204 and became a thriving center of art with eventually a Scuola di San Luca, or organized painter's guild, the Guild of Saint Luke, on Western lines. Cretan painting was heavily patronized both by Catholics of Venetian territories and by Eastern Orthodox. For ease of transport, Cretan painters specialized in panel paintings, and developed the ability to work in many styles to fit the taste of various patrons. El Greco, who moved to Venice after establishing his reputation in Crete, is the most famous artist of the school, who continued to use many Byzantine conventions in his works. In 1669 the city of Heraklion, on Crete, which at one time boasted at least 120 painters, fell to the Turks. From that time Greek icon painting went into a decline, with a revival attempted in the 20th century by art reformers such as Photis Kontoglou, who emphasized a return to earlier styles.",
"title": "Icon painting tradition by region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Russian icons are typically paintings on wood, often small, though some in churches and monasteries may be as large as a table top. Many religious homes in Russia have icons hanging on the wall in the krasny ugol—the \"red\" corner (see Icon corner). There is a rich history and elaborate religious symbolism associated with icons. In Russian churches, the nave is typically separated from the sanctuary by an iconostasis, a wall of icons.",
"title": "Icon painting tradition by region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "The use and making of icons entered Kievan Rus' following its conversion to Orthodox Christianity from the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire in 988 AD. As a general rule, these icons strictly followed models and formulas hallowed by usage, some of which had originated in Constantinople. As time passed, the Russians—notably Andrei Rublev and Dionisius—widened the vocabulary of iconic types and styles far beyond anything found elsewhere. The personal, improvisatory and creative traditions of Western European religious art are largely lacking in Russia before the 17th century, when Simon Ushakov's painting became strongly influenced by religious paintings and engravings from Protestant as well as Catholic Europe.",
"title": "Icon painting tradition by region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "In the mid-17th century, changes in liturgy and practice instituted by Patriarch Nikon of Moscow resulted in a split in the Russian Orthodox Church. The traditionalists, the persecuted \"Old Ritualists\" or \"Old Believers\", continued the traditional stylization of icons, while the State Church modified its practice. From that time icons began to be painted not only in the traditional stylized and nonrealistic mode, but also in a mixture of Russian stylization and Western European realism, and in a Western European manner very much like that of Catholic religious art of the time. The Stroganov School and the icons from Nevyansk rank among the last important schools of Russian icon-painting.",
"title": "Icon painting tradition by region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "In Romania, icons painted as reversed images behind glass and set in frames were common in the 19th century and are still made. The process is known as reverse glass painting. \"In the Transylvanian countryside, the expensive icons on panels imported from Moldavia, Wallachia, and Mt. Athos were gradually replaced by small, locally produced icons on glass, which were much less expensive and thus accessible to the Transylvanian peasants\".",
"title": "Icon painting tradition by region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The earliest historical records about icons in Serbia dates back to the period of Nemanjić dynasty. One of the notable schools of Serb icons was active in the Bay of Kotor from the 17th century to the 19th century.",
"title": "Icon painting tradition by region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Trojeručica meaning \"Three-handed Theotokos\" is the most important icon of the Serbian Orthodox Church and main icon of Mount Athos.",
"title": "Icon painting tradition by region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "The Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria and Oriental Orthodoxy also have distinctive, living icon painting traditions. Coptic icons have their origin in the Hellenistic art of Egyptian Late Antiquity, as exemplified by the Fayum mummy portraits. Beginning in the 4th century, churches painted their walls and made icons to reflect an authentic expression of their faith.",
"title": "Icon painting tradition by region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "The Aleppo School was a school of icon-painting, founded by the priest Yusuf al-Musawwir (also known as Joseph the Painter) and active in Aleppo, which was then a part of the Ottoman Empire, between at least 1645 and 1777.",
"title": "Icon painting tradition by region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Although the word \"icon\" is not generally used in Western Christianity, there are religious works of art which were largely patterned on Byzantine works, and equally conventional in composition and depiction. Until the 13th century, icon-like depictions of sacred figures followed Eastern patterns—although very few survive from this early period. Italian examples are in a style known as Italo-Byzantine.",
"title": "Western Christianity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "From the 13th century, the Western tradition came slowly to allow the artist far more flexibility, and a more realist approach to the figures. If only because there was a much smaller number of skilled artists, the quantity of works of art, in the sense of panel paintings, was much smaller in the West, and in most Western settings a single diptych as an altarpiece, or in a domestic room, probably stood in place of the larger collections typical of Orthodox \"icon corners\".",
"title": "Western Christianity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Only in the 15th century did production of painted works of art begin to approach Eastern levels, supplemented by mass-produced imports from the Cretan School. In this century, the use of icon-like portraits in the West was enormously increased by the introduction of old master prints on paper, mostly woodcuts which were produced in vast numbers (although hardly any survive). They were mostly sold, hand-coloured, by churches, and the smallest sizes (often only an inch high) were affordable even by peasants, who glued or pinned them straight onto a wall.",
"title": "Western Christianity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "With the Reformation, after an initial uncertainty among early Lutherans, who painted a few icon-like depictions of leading Reformers, and continued to paint scenes from Scripture, Protestants came down firmly against icon-like portraits, especially larger ones, even of Christ. Many Protestants found these idolatrous.",
"title": "Western Christianity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "The Catholic Church accepted the decrees of the iconodule Seventh Ecumenical Council regarding images. There is some minor difference, however, in the Catholic attitude to images from that of the Orthodox. Following Gregory the Great, Catholics emphasize the role of images as the Biblia Pauperum, the \"Bible of the Poor\", from which those who could not read could nonetheless learn.",
"title": "Western Christianity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Catholics also, however, share the same viewpoint with the Orthodox when it comes to image veneration, believing that whenever approached, sacred images are to be shown reverence. Though using both flat wooden panel and stretched canvas paintings, Catholics traditionally have also favored images in the form of three-dimensional statuary, whereas in the East, statuary is much less widely employed.",
"title": "Western Christianity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "A joint Lutheran–Orthodox statement made in the 7th Plenary of the Lutheran–Orthodox Joint Commission, in July 1993 in Helsinki, reaffirmed the ecumenical council decisions on the nature of Christ and the veneration of images:",
"title": "Western Christianity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "7. As Lutherans and Orthodox we affirm that the teachings of the ecumenical councils are authoritative for our churches. The ecumenical councils maintain the integrity of the teaching of the undivided Church concerning the saving, illuminating/justifying and glorifying acts of God and reject heresies which subvert the saving work of God in Christ. Orthodox and Lutherans, however, have different histories. Lutherans have received the Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan Creed with the addition of the filioque. The Seventh Ecumenical Council, the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, which rejected iconoclasm and restored the veneration of icons in the churches, was not part of the tradition received by the Reformation. Lutherans, however, rejected the iconoclasm of the 16th century, and affirmed the distinction between adoration due to the Triune God alone and all other forms of veneration (CA 21). Through historical research this council has become better known. Nevertheless it does not have the same significance for Lutherans as it does for the Orthodox. Yet, Lutherans and Orthodox are in agreement that the Second Council of Nicaea confirms the christological teaching of the earlier councils and in setting forth the role of images (icons) in the lives of the faithful reaffirms the reality of the incarnation of the eternal Word of God, when it states: \"The more frequently, Christ, Mary, the mother of God, and the saints are seen, the more are those who see them drawn to remember and long for those who serve as models, and to pay these icons the tribute of salutation and respectful veneration. Certainly this is not the full adoration in accordance with our faith, which is properly paid only to the divine nature, but it resembles that given to the figure of the honored and life-giving cross, and also to the holy books of the gospels and to other sacred objects\" (Definition of the Second Council of Nicaea).",
"title": "Western Christianity"
}
]
| An icon is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, in the cultures of the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Catholic churches. They are not simply artworks; "an icon is a sacred image used in religious devotion". The most common subjects include Christ, Mary, saints and angels. Although especially associated with portrait-style images concentrating on one or two main figures, the term also covers most of the religious images in a variety of artistic media produced by Eastern Christianity, including narrative scenes, usually from the Bible or the lives of saints. Icons are most commonly painted on wood panels with egg tempera, but they may also be cast in metal or carved in stone or embroidered on cloth or done in mosaic or fresco work or printed on paper or metal, etc. Comparable images from Western Christianity may be classified as "icons", although "iconic" may also be used to describe the static style of a devotional image. In the Greek language, the term for icon painting uses the same word as for "writing", and Orthodox sources often translate it into English as icon writing. Eastern Orthodox tradition holds that the production of Christian images dates back to the very early days of Christianity, and that it has been a continuous tradition since then. Modern academic art history considers that, while images may have existed earlier, the tradition can be traced back only as far as the 3rd century, and that the images which survive from Early Christian art often differ greatly from later ones. The icons of later centuries can be linked, often closely, to images from the 5th century onwards, though very few of these survive. Widespread destruction of images occurred during the Byzantine Iconoclasm of 726–842, although this did settle permanently the question of the appropriateness of images. Since then, icons have had a great continuity of style and subject, far greater than in the icons of the Western church. At the same time there have been change and development. | 2001-09-12T14:32:49Z | 2023-11-16T23:20:48Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icon |
14,801 | Icon (programming language) | Icon is a very high-level programming language based on the concept of "goal-directed execution" in which code returns a "success" along with valid values, or a "failure", indicating that there is no valid data to return. The success and failure of a given block of code is used to direct further processing, whereas conventional languages would typically use boolean logic written by the programmer to achieve the same ends. Because the logic for basic control structures is often implicit in Icon, common tasks can be completed with less explicit code.
Icon was designed by Ralph Griswold after leaving Bell Labs where he was a major contributor to the SNOBOL language. SNOBOL was a string-processing language with what would be considered dated syntax by the standards of the early 1970s. After moving to the University of Arizona, he further developed the underlying SNOBOL concepts in SL5, but considered the result to be a failure. This led to the significantly updated Icon, which blends the short but conceptually dense code of SNOBOL-like languages with the more familiar syntax of ALGOL-inspired languages like C or Pascal.
Like the languages that inspired it, the primary area of use of Icon is managing strings and textual patterns. String operations often fail, for instance, finding "the" in "world". In most languages, this requires testing and branching to avoid using a non-valid result. In Icon most of these sorts of tests are simply not required, reducing the amount of code written by the programmer. Complex pattern handling can be accomplished in a few lines of terse code, similar to more dedicated languages like Perl but retaining a more function-oriented syntax familiar to users of other ALGOL-like languages.
Icon is not object-oriented, but an object-oriented extension called Idol was developed in 1996 which eventually became Unicon. It also inspired other languages, with its simple generators being especially influential; Icon's generators were a major inspiration for the Python programming language.
The original SNOBOL effort, retroactively known as SNOBOL1, launched in the fall of 1962 at the Bell Labs Programming Research Studies Department. The effort was a reaction to the frustrations of attempting to use the SCL language for polynomial formula manipulation, symbolic integration and studying Markov chains. SCL, written by the department head Chester Lee, was both slow and had a low-level syntax that resulting in volumes of code for even simple projects. After briefly considering the COMIT language, Ivan Polonsky, Ralph Griswold and David Farber, all members of the six-person department, decided to write their own language to solve these problems.
The first versions were running on the IBM 7090 in early 1963, and by the summer had been built out and was being used across Bell. This led almost immediately to SNOBOL2, which added a number of built-in functions, and the ability to link to external assembly language code. It was released in April 1964 and mostly used within Bell, but also saw some use at Project MAC. The introduction of system functions served mostly to indicate the need for user functions, which was the major feature of SNOBOL3, released in July 1964.
SNOBOL3's introduction corresponded with major changes within the Bell Labs computing department, including the addition of the new GE 645 mainframe which would require a rewrite of SNOBOL. Instead, the team suggested writing a new version that would run on a virtual machine, named SIL for SNOBOL Intermediate Language, allowing it to be easily ported to any sufficiently powerful platform. This proposal was accepted as SNOBOL4 in September 1965. By this time, plans for a significantly improved version of the language emerged in August 1966. Further work on the language continued throughout the rest of the 1960s, notably adding the associative array type in later version, which they referred to as a table.
Griswold left Bell Labs to become a professor at the University of Arizona in August 1971. He introduced SNOBOL4 as a research tool at that time. He received grants from the National Science Foundation to continue supporting and evolving SNOBOL.
As a language originally developed in the early 1960s, SNOBOL's syntax bears the marks of other early programming languages like FORTRAN and COBOL. In particular, the language is column-dependant, as many of these languages were entered on punch cards where column layout is natural. Additionally, control structures were almost entirely based on branching around code rather than the use of blocks, which were becoming a must-have feature after the introduction of ALGOL 60. By the time he moved to Arizona, the syntax of SNOBOL4 was hopelessly outdated.
Griswold began the effort of implementing SNOBOL's underlying success/failure concept with traditional flow control structures like if/then. This became SL5, short for "SNOBOL Language 5", but the result was unsatisfying. In 1977, he returned to the language to consider a new version. He abandoned the very powerful function system introduced in SL5 with a simpler concept of suspend/resume and developed a new concept for the natural successor to SNOBOL4 with the following principles;
The new language was initially known as SNOBOL5, but as it was significantly different from SNOBOL in all but the underlying concept, a new name was ultimately desired. After considering "s" as a sort of homage to "C", but this was ultimately abandoned due to the problems with typesetting documents using that name. A series of new names were proposed and abandoned; Irving, bard, and "TL" for "The Language". It was at this time that Xerox PARC began publishing about their work on graphical user interfaces and the term "icon" began to enter the computer lexicon. The decision was made to change the name initially to "icon" before finally choosing "Icon".
The Icon language is derived from the ALGOL-class of structured programming languages, and thus has syntax similar to C or Pascal. Icon is most similar to Pascal, using := syntax for assignments, the procedure keyword and similar syntax. On the other hand, Icon uses C-style braces for structuring execution groups, and programs start by running a procedure called main.
In many ways Icon also shares features with most scripting languages (as well as SNOBOL and SL5, from which they were taken): variables do not have to be declared, types are cast automatically, and numbers can be converted to strings and back automatically. Another feature common to many scripting languages, but not all, is the lack of a line-ending character; in Icon, lines that do not end with a semicolon get ended by an implied semicolon if it makes sense.
Procedures are the basic building blocks of Icon programs. Although they use Pascal naming, they work more like C functions and can return values; there is no function keyword in Icon.
One of the key concepts in SNOBOL was that its functions returned the "success" or "failure" as primitives of the language rather than using magic numbers or other techniques. For instance, a function that returns the position of a substring within another string is a common routine found in most language runtime systems; in JavaScript one might want to find the position of the word "World" within "Hello, World!", which would be accomplished with position = "Hello, World".indexOf("World"), which would return 7. If one instead asks for the position = "Hello, World".indexOf("Goodbye") the code will "fail", as the search term does not appear in the string. In JavaScript, as in most languages, this will be indicated by returning a magic number, in this case -1.
In SNOBOL a failure of this sort returns a special value, fail. SNOBOL's syntax operates directly on the success or failure of the operation, jumping to labelled sections of the code without having to write a separate test. For instance, the following code prints "Hello, world!" five times:
To perform the loop, the less-than-or-equal operator, LE, is called on the index variable I, and if it Succeeds, meaning I is less than 5, it branches to the named label LOOP and continues.
Icon retained the concept of flow control based on success or failure but developed the language further. One change was the replacement of the labelled GOTO-like branching with block-oriented structures in keeping with the structured programming style that was sweeping the computer industry in the late 1960s. The second was to allow "failure" to be passed along the call chain so that entire blocks will succeed or fail as a whole. This is a key concept of the Icon language. Whereas in traditional languages one would have to include code to test the success or failure based on boolean logic and then branch based on the outcome, such tests and branches are inherent to Icon code and do not have to be explicitly written.
For instance, consider this bit of code written in the Java programming language. It calls the function read() to read a character from a (previously opened) file, assigns the result to the variable a, and then writes the value of a to another file. The result is to copy one file to another. read will eventually run out of characters to read from the file, potentially on its very first call, which would leave a in an undetermined state and potentially cause write to cause a null pointer exception. To avoid this, read returns the special value EOF (end-of-file) in this situation, which requires an explicit test to avoid writeing it:
In contrast, in Icon the read() function returns a line of text or &fail. &fail is not simply an analog of EOF, as it is explicitly understood by the language to mean "stop processing" or "do the fail case" depending on the context. The equivalent code in Icon is:
This means, "as long as read does not fail, call write, otherwise stop". There is no need to specify a test against the magic number as in the Java example, this is implicit, and the resulting code is simplified. Because success and failure are passed up through the call chain, one can embed functions within others and they stop when the nested function fails. For instance, the code above can be reduced to:
In this version, if read fails, write fails, and the while stops. Icon's branching and looping constructs are all based on the success or failure of the code inside them, not on an arbitrary boolean test provided by the programmer. if performs the then block if its "test" returns a value, and the else block or moves to the next line if it returns &fail. Likewise, while continues calling its block until it receives a fail. Icon refers to this concept as goal-directed execution.
It is important to contrast the concept of success and failure with the concept of an exception; exceptions are unusual situations, not expected outcomes. Fails in Icon are expected outcomes; reaching the end of a file is an expected situation and not an exception. Icon does not have exception handling in the traditional sense, although fail is often used in exception-like situations. For instance, if the file being read does not exist, read fails without a special situation being indicated. In traditional language, these "other conditions" have no natural way of being indicated; additional magic numbers may be used, but more typically exception handling is used to "throw" a value. For instance, to handle a missing file in the Java code, one might see:
This case needs two comparisons: one for EOF and another for all other errors. Since Java does not allow exceptions to be compared as logic elements, as under Icon, the lengthy try/catch syntax must be used instead. Try blocks also impose a performance penalty even if no exception is thrown, a distributed cost that Icon normally avoids.
Icon uses this same goal-directed mechanism to perform traditional boolean tests, although with subtle differences. A simple comparison like if a < b then write("a is smaller than b") does not mean, "if the conditional expression evaluation results in or returns a true value" as they would under most languages; instead, it means something more like, "if the conditional expression, here < operation, succeeds and does not fail". In this case, the < operator succeeds if the comparison is true. The if calls its then clause if the expression succeeds, or the else or the next line if it fails. The result is similar to the traditional if/then seen in other languages, the if performs then if a is less than b. The subtlety is that the same comparison expression can be placed anywhere, for instance:
Another difference is that the < operator returns its second argument if it succeeds, which in this example will result in the value of b being written if it is larger than a, otherwise nothing is written. As this is not a test per se, but an operator that returns a value, they can be strung together allowing things like if a < b < c, a common type of comparison that in most languages must be written as a conjunction of two inequalities like if (a < b) && (b < c).
A key aspect of goal-directed execution is that the program may have to rewind to an earlier state if a procedure fails, a task known as backtracking. For instance, consider code that sets a variable to a starting location and then performs operations that may change the value - this is common in string scanning operations for instance, which will advance a cursor through the string as it scans. If the procedure fails, it is important that any subsequent reads of that variable return the original state, not the state as it was being internally manipulated. For this task, Icon has the reversible assignment operator, <-, and the reversible exchange, <->. For instance, consider some code that is attempting to find a pattern string within a larger string:
This code begins by moving i to 10, the starting location for the search. However, if the find fails, the block will fail as a whole, which results in the value of i being left at 10 as an undesirable side effect. Replacing i := 10 with i <- 10 indicates that i should be reset to its previous value if the block fails. This provides an analog of atomicity in the execution.
Expressions in Icon may return a single value, for instance, 5 > x will evaluate and return x if the value of x is less than 5, or else fail. However, Icon also includes the concept of procedures that do not immediately return success or failure, and instead return new values every time they are called. These are known as generators, and are a key part of the Icon language. Within the parlance of Icon, the evaluation of an expression or function produces a result sequence. A result sequence contains all the possible values that can be generated by the expression or function. When the result sequence is exhausted, the expression or function fails.
Icon allows any procedure to return a single value or multiple values, controlled using the fail, return and suspend keywords. A procedure that lacks any of these keywords returns &fail, which occurs whenever execution runs to the end of a procedure. For instance:
Calling f(5) will return 1, but calling f(-1) will return &fail. This can lead to non-obvious behavior, for instance, write(f(-1)) will output nothing because f fails and suspends operation of write.
Converting a procedure to be a generator uses the suspend keyword, which means "return this value, and when called again, start execution at this point". In this respect it is something like a combination of the static concept in C and return. For instance:
creates a generator that returns a series of numbers starting at i and ending a j, and then returns &fail after that. The suspend i stops execution and returns the value of i without reseting any of the state. When another call is made to the same function, execution picks up at that point with the previous values. In this case, that causes it to perform i +:= 1, loop back to the start of the while block, and then return the next value and suspend again. This continues until i <= j fails, at which point it exits the block and calls fail. This allows iterators to be constructed with ease.
Another type of generator-builder is the alternator, which looks and operates like the boolean or operator. For instance:
This appears to say "if y is smaller than x or 5 then...", but is actually a short-form for a generator that returns values until it falls off the end of the list. The values of the list are "injected" into the operations, in this case, <. So in this example, the system first tests y < x, if x is indeed larger than y it returns the value of x, the test passes, and the value of y is written out in the then clause. However, if x is not larger than y it fails, and the alternator continues, performing y < 5. If that test passes, y is written. If y is smaller than neither x or 5, the alternator runs out of tests and fails, the if fails, and the write is not performed. Thus, the value of y will appear on the console if it is smaller than x or 5, thereby fulfilling the purpose of a boolean or. Functions will not be called unless evaluating their parameters succeeds, so this example can be shortened to:
Internally, the alternator is not simply an or and one can also use it to construct arbitrary lists of values. This can be used to iterate over arbitrary values, like:
As lists of integers are commonly found in many programming contexts, Icon also includes the to keyword to construct ad hoc integer generators:
which can be shortened:
Icon is not strongly typed, so the alternator lists can contain different types of items:
This writes 1, "hello" and maybe 5 depending on the value of x.
Likewise the conjunction operator, &, is used in a fashion similar to a boolean and operator:
This code calls ItoJ and returns an initial value of 0 which is assigned to x. It then performs the right-hand side of the conjunction, and since x % 2 does equal 0, it writes out the value. It then calls the ItoJ generator again which assigns 1 to x, which fails the right-hand-side and prints nothing. The result is a list of every even integer from 0 to 10.
The concept of generators is particularly useful and powerful when used with string operations, and is a major underlying basis for Icon's overall design. Consider the indexOf operation found in many languages; this function looks for one string within another and returns an index of its location, or a magic number if it is not found. For instance:
This will scan the string s, find the first occurrence of "the", and return that index, in this case 4. The string, however, contains two instances of the string "the", so to return the second example an alternate syntax is used:
This tells it to scan starting at location 5, so it will not match the first instance we found previously. However, there may not be a second instance of "the" -there may not be a first one either- so the return value from indexOf has to be checked against the magic number -1 which is used to indicate no matches. A complete routine that prints out the location of every instance is:
In Icon, the equivalent find is a generator, so the same results can be created with a single line:
Of course there are times where one does want to find a string after some point in input, for instance, if scanning a text file that contains a line number in the first four columns, a space, and then a line of text. Goal-directed execution can be used to skip over the line numbers:
The position will only be returned if "the" appears after position 5; the comparison will fail otherwise, pass the fail to write, and the write will not occur.
The every operator is similar to while, looping through every item returned by a generator and exiting on failure:
There is a key difference between every and while; while re-evaluates the first result until it fails, whereas every fetches the next value from a generator. every actually injects values into the function in a fashion similar to blocks under Smalltalk. For instance, the above loop can be re-written this way:
In this case, the values from i to j will be injected into someFunction and (potentially) write multiple lines of output.
Icon includes several collection types including lists that can also be used as stacks and queues, tables (also known as maps or dictionaries in other languages), sets and others. Icon refers to these as structures. Collections are inherent generators and can be easily called using the bang syntax. For instance:
Using the fail propagation as seen in earlier examples, we can combine the tests and the loops:
Because the list collection is a generator, this can be further simplified with the bang syntax:
In this case, the bang in write causes Icon to return a line of text one by one from the array and finally fail at the end. &input is a generator-based analog of read that reads a line from standard input, so !&input continues reading lines until the file ends.
As Icon is typeless, lists can contain any different types of values:
The items can included other structures. To build larger lists, Icon includes the list generator; i := list(10, "word") generates a list containing 10 copies of "word". Like arrays in other languages, Icon allows items to be looked up by position, e.g., weight := aCat[4]. Array slicing is included, allowing new lists to be created out of the elements of other lists, for instance, aCat := Cats[2:4] produces a new list called aCat that contains "tabby" and 2002.
Tables are essentially lists with arbitrary index keys rather than integers:
This code creates a table that will use zero as the default value of any unknown key. It then adds two items into the table, with the keys "there" and "here", and values 1 and 2.
Sets are also similar to lists but contain only a single member of any given value. Icon includes the ++ to produce the union of two sets, ** the intersection, and -- the difference. Icon includes a number of pre-defined "Cset"s, a set containing various characters. There are four standard Csets in Icon, &ucase, &lcase, &letters, and &digits. New Csets can be made by enclosing a string in single quotes, for instance, vowel := 'aeiou'.
In Icon, strings are lists of characters. As a list, they are generators and can thus be iterated over using the bang syntax:
Will print out each character of the string on a separate line.
Substrings can be extracted from a string by using a range specification within brackets. A range specification can return a point to a single character, or a slice of the string. Strings can be indexed from either the right or the left. Positions within a string are defined to be between the characters 1A2B3C4 and can be specified from the right −3A−2B−1C0
For example,
Where the last example shows using a length instead of an ending position
The subscripting specification can be used as a lvalue within an expression. This can be used to insert strings into another string or delete parts of a string. For example:
A further simplification for handling strings is the scanning system, invoked with ?, which calls functions on a string:
Icon refers to the left-hand-side of the ? as the subject, and passes it into string functions. Recall the find takes two parameters, the search text as parameter one and the string to search in parameter two. Using ? the second parameter is implicit and does not have to be specified by the programmer. In the common cases when multiple functions are being called on a single string in sequence, this style can significantly reduce the length of the resulting code and improve clarity. Icon function signatures identify the subject parameter in their definitions so the parameter can be hoisted in this fashion.
The ? is not simply a form of syntactic sugar, it also sets up a "string scanning environment" for any following string operations. This is based on two internal variables, &subject and &pos; &subject is simply a pointer to the original string, while &pos is the current position within it, or cursor. Icon's various string manipulation procedures use these two variables so they do not have to be explicitly supplied by the programmer. For example:
would produce:
Built-in and user-defined functions can be used to move around within the string being scanned. All of the built-in functions will default to &subject and &pos to allow the scanning syntax to be used. The following code will write all blank-delimited "words" in a string:
There are a number of new functions introduced in this example. pos returns the current value of &pos. It may not be immediately obvious why one would need this function and not simply use the value of &pos directly; the reason is that &pos is a variable and thus cannot take on the value &fail, which the procedure pos can. Thus pos provides a lightweight wrapper on &pos that allows Icon's goal-directed flow control to be easily used without having to provide hand-written boolean tests against &pos. In this case, the test is "is &pos zero", which, in the odd numbering of Icon's string locations, is the end of the line. If it is not zero, pos returns &fail, which is inverted with the not and the loop continues.
many finds one or more examples of the provided Cset parameter starting at the current &pos. In this case, it is looking for space characters, so the result of this function is the location of the first non-space character after &pos. tab moves &pos to that location, again with a potential &fail in case, for instance, many falls off the end of the string. upto is essentially the reverse of many; it returns the location immediately prior to its provided Cset, which the example then sets the &pos to with another tab. Alternation is used to also stop at the end of a line.
This example can be made more robust through the use of a more appropriate "word breaking" Cset which might include periods, commas and other punctuation, as well as other whitespace characters like tab and non-breaking spaces. That Cset can then be used in many and upto.
A more complex example demonstrates the integration of generators and string scanning within the language.
Laurence Tratt wrote a paper on Icon examining its real-world applications and pointing out a number of areas of concern. Among these were a number of practical decisions that derive from their origins in string processing but do not make as much sense in other areas. Among them:
The decision to fail by default at the end of procedures makes sense in the context of generators, but less so in the case of general procedures. Returning to the example noted above, write(f(-1)) will not output which may be expected. However:
will result in 10 being printed. This sort of issue is not at all obvious as even in an interactive debugger all the code is invoked yet x never picks up the expected value. This could be dismissed as one of those "gotchas" that programmers have to be aware of in any language, but Tratt examined a variety of Icon programs and found that the vast majority of procedures are not generators. This means that Icon's default behaviour is only used by a tiny minority of its constructs, yet represents a major source of potential errors in all the others.
Another issue is the lack of a boolean data type and conventional boolean logic. While the success/fail system works in most cases where the ultimate goal is to check a value, this can still lead to some odd behaviour in seemingly simple code:
This program will print "taken". The reason is that the test, c, does return a value; that value is &null, the default value for all otherwise uninitiated variables. &null is a valid value, so if c succeeds. To test this, one needs to make the test explicit, c === &null. Tratt supposed that it detracts from the self-documenting code, having supposed erroneously that it is testing "is c zero" or "does c exist". | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Icon is a very high-level programming language based on the concept of \"goal-directed execution\" in which code returns a \"success\" along with valid values, or a \"failure\", indicating that there is no valid data to return. The success and failure of a given block of code is used to direct further processing, whereas conventional languages would typically use boolean logic written by the programmer to achieve the same ends. Because the logic for basic control structures is often implicit in Icon, common tasks can be completed with less explicit code.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Icon was designed by Ralph Griswold after leaving Bell Labs where he was a major contributor to the SNOBOL language. SNOBOL was a string-processing language with what would be considered dated syntax by the standards of the early 1970s. After moving to the University of Arizona, he further developed the underlying SNOBOL concepts in SL5, but considered the result to be a failure. This led to the significantly updated Icon, which blends the short but conceptually dense code of SNOBOL-like languages with the more familiar syntax of ALGOL-inspired languages like C or Pascal.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Like the languages that inspired it, the primary area of use of Icon is managing strings and textual patterns. String operations often fail, for instance, finding \"the\" in \"world\". In most languages, this requires testing and branching to avoid using a non-valid result. In Icon most of these sorts of tests are simply not required, reducing the amount of code written by the programmer. Complex pattern handling can be accomplished in a few lines of terse code, similar to more dedicated languages like Perl but retaining a more function-oriented syntax familiar to users of other ALGOL-like languages.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Icon is not object-oriented, but an object-oriented extension called Idol was developed in 1996 which eventually became Unicon. It also inspired other languages, with its simple generators being especially influential; Icon's generators were a major inspiration for the Python programming language.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The original SNOBOL effort, retroactively known as SNOBOL1, launched in the fall of 1962 at the Bell Labs Programming Research Studies Department. The effort was a reaction to the frustrations of attempting to use the SCL language for polynomial formula manipulation, symbolic integration and studying Markov chains. SCL, written by the department head Chester Lee, was both slow and had a low-level syntax that resulting in volumes of code for even simple projects. After briefly considering the COMIT language, Ivan Polonsky, Ralph Griswold and David Farber, all members of the six-person department, decided to write their own language to solve these problems.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The first versions were running on the IBM 7090 in early 1963, and by the summer had been built out and was being used across Bell. This led almost immediately to SNOBOL2, which added a number of built-in functions, and the ability to link to external assembly language code. It was released in April 1964 and mostly used within Bell, but also saw some use at Project MAC. The introduction of system functions served mostly to indicate the need for user functions, which was the major feature of SNOBOL3, released in July 1964.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "SNOBOL3's introduction corresponded with major changes within the Bell Labs computing department, including the addition of the new GE 645 mainframe which would require a rewrite of SNOBOL. Instead, the team suggested writing a new version that would run on a virtual machine, named SIL for SNOBOL Intermediate Language, allowing it to be easily ported to any sufficiently powerful platform. This proposal was accepted as SNOBOL4 in September 1965. By this time, plans for a significantly improved version of the language emerged in August 1966. Further work on the language continued throughout the rest of the 1960s, notably adding the associative array type in later version, which they referred to as a table.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Griswold left Bell Labs to become a professor at the University of Arizona in August 1971. He introduced SNOBOL4 as a research tool at that time. He received grants from the National Science Foundation to continue supporting and evolving SNOBOL.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "As a language originally developed in the early 1960s, SNOBOL's syntax bears the marks of other early programming languages like FORTRAN and COBOL. In particular, the language is column-dependant, as many of these languages were entered on punch cards where column layout is natural. Additionally, control structures were almost entirely based on branching around code rather than the use of blocks, which were becoming a must-have feature after the introduction of ALGOL 60. By the time he moved to Arizona, the syntax of SNOBOL4 was hopelessly outdated.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Griswold began the effort of implementing SNOBOL's underlying success/failure concept with traditional flow control structures like if/then. This became SL5, short for \"SNOBOL Language 5\", but the result was unsatisfying. In 1977, he returned to the language to consider a new version. He abandoned the very powerful function system introduced in SL5 with a simpler concept of suspend/resume and developed a new concept for the natural successor to SNOBOL4 with the following principles;",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The new language was initially known as SNOBOL5, but as it was significantly different from SNOBOL in all but the underlying concept, a new name was ultimately desired. After considering \"s\" as a sort of homage to \"C\", but this was ultimately abandoned due to the problems with typesetting documents using that name. A series of new names were proposed and abandoned; Irving, bard, and \"TL\" for \"The Language\". It was at this time that Xerox PARC began publishing about their work on graphical user interfaces and the term \"icon\" began to enter the computer lexicon. The decision was made to change the name initially to \"icon\" before finally choosing \"Icon\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The Icon language is derived from the ALGOL-class of structured programming languages, and thus has syntax similar to C or Pascal. Icon is most similar to Pascal, using := syntax for assignments, the procedure keyword and similar syntax. On the other hand, Icon uses C-style braces for structuring execution groups, and programs start by running a procedure called main.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In many ways Icon also shares features with most scripting languages (as well as SNOBOL and SL5, from which they were taken): variables do not have to be declared, types are cast automatically, and numbers can be converted to strings and back automatically. Another feature common to many scripting languages, but not all, is the lack of a line-ending character; in Icon, lines that do not end with a semicolon get ended by an implied semicolon if it makes sense.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Procedures are the basic building blocks of Icon programs. Although they use Pascal naming, they work more like C functions and can return values; there is no function keyword in Icon.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "One of the key concepts in SNOBOL was that its functions returned the \"success\" or \"failure\" as primitives of the language rather than using magic numbers or other techniques. For instance, a function that returns the position of a substring within another string is a common routine found in most language runtime systems; in JavaScript one might want to find the position of the word \"World\" within \"Hello, World!\", which would be accomplished with position = \"Hello, World\".indexOf(\"World\"), which would return 7. If one instead asks for the position = \"Hello, World\".indexOf(\"Goodbye\") the code will \"fail\", as the search term does not appear in the string. In JavaScript, as in most languages, this will be indicated by returning a magic number, in this case -1.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In SNOBOL a failure of this sort returns a special value, fail. SNOBOL's syntax operates directly on the success or failure of the operation, jumping to labelled sections of the code without having to write a separate test. For instance, the following code prints \"Hello, world!\" five times:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "To perform the loop, the less-than-or-equal operator, LE, is called on the index variable I, and if it Succeeds, meaning I is less than 5, it branches to the named label LOOP and continues.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Icon retained the concept of flow control based on success or failure but developed the language further. One change was the replacement of the labelled GOTO-like branching with block-oriented structures in keeping with the structured programming style that was sweeping the computer industry in the late 1960s. The second was to allow \"failure\" to be passed along the call chain so that entire blocks will succeed or fail as a whole. This is a key concept of the Icon language. Whereas in traditional languages one would have to include code to test the success or failure based on boolean logic and then branch based on the outcome, such tests and branches are inherent to Icon code and do not have to be explicitly written.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "For instance, consider this bit of code written in the Java programming language. It calls the function read() to read a character from a (previously opened) file, assigns the result to the variable a, and then writes the value of a to another file. The result is to copy one file to another. read will eventually run out of characters to read from the file, potentially on its very first call, which would leave a in an undetermined state and potentially cause write to cause a null pointer exception. To avoid this, read returns the special value EOF (end-of-file) in this situation, which requires an explicit test to avoid writeing it:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In contrast, in Icon the read() function returns a line of text or &fail. &fail is not simply an analog of EOF, as it is explicitly understood by the language to mean \"stop processing\" or \"do the fail case\" depending on the context. The equivalent code in Icon is:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "This means, \"as long as read does not fail, call write, otherwise stop\". There is no need to specify a test against the magic number as in the Java example, this is implicit, and the resulting code is simplified. Because success and failure are passed up through the call chain, one can embed functions within others and they stop when the nested function fails. For instance, the code above can be reduced to:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In this version, if read fails, write fails, and the while stops. Icon's branching and looping constructs are all based on the success or failure of the code inside them, not on an arbitrary boolean test provided by the programmer. if performs the then block if its \"test\" returns a value, and the else block or moves to the next line if it returns &fail. Likewise, while continues calling its block until it receives a fail. Icon refers to this concept as goal-directed execution.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "It is important to contrast the concept of success and failure with the concept of an exception; exceptions are unusual situations, not expected outcomes. Fails in Icon are expected outcomes; reaching the end of a file is an expected situation and not an exception. Icon does not have exception handling in the traditional sense, although fail is often used in exception-like situations. For instance, if the file being read does not exist, read fails without a special situation being indicated. In traditional language, these \"other conditions\" have no natural way of being indicated; additional magic numbers may be used, but more typically exception handling is used to \"throw\" a value. For instance, to handle a missing file in the Java code, one might see:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "This case needs two comparisons: one for EOF and another for all other errors. Since Java does not allow exceptions to be compared as logic elements, as under Icon, the lengthy try/catch syntax must be used instead. Try blocks also impose a performance penalty even if no exception is thrown, a distributed cost that Icon normally avoids.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Icon uses this same goal-directed mechanism to perform traditional boolean tests, although with subtle differences. A simple comparison like if a < b then write(\"a is smaller than b\") does not mean, \"if the conditional expression evaluation results in or returns a true value\" as they would under most languages; instead, it means something more like, \"if the conditional expression, here < operation, succeeds and does not fail\". In this case, the < operator succeeds if the comparison is true. The if calls its then clause if the expression succeeds, or the else or the next line if it fails. The result is similar to the traditional if/then seen in other languages, the if performs then if a is less than b. The subtlety is that the same comparison expression can be placed anywhere, for instance:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Another difference is that the < operator returns its second argument if it succeeds, which in this example will result in the value of b being written if it is larger than a, otherwise nothing is written. As this is not a test per se, but an operator that returns a value, they can be strung together allowing things like if a < b < c, a common type of comparison that in most languages must be written as a conjunction of two inequalities like if (a < b) && (b < c).",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "A key aspect of goal-directed execution is that the program may have to rewind to an earlier state if a procedure fails, a task known as backtracking. For instance, consider code that sets a variable to a starting location and then performs operations that may change the value - this is common in string scanning operations for instance, which will advance a cursor through the string as it scans. If the procedure fails, it is important that any subsequent reads of that variable return the original state, not the state as it was being internally manipulated. For this task, Icon has the reversible assignment operator, <-, and the reversible exchange, <->. For instance, consider some code that is attempting to find a pattern string within a larger string:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "This code begins by moving i to 10, the starting location for the search. However, if the find fails, the block will fail as a whole, which results in the value of i being left at 10 as an undesirable side effect. Replacing i := 10 with i <- 10 indicates that i should be reset to its previous value if the block fails. This provides an analog of atomicity in the execution.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Expressions in Icon may return a single value, for instance, 5 > x will evaluate and return x if the value of x is less than 5, or else fail. However, Icon also includes the concept of procedures that do not immediately return success or failure, and instead return new values every time they are called. These are known as generators, and are a key part of the Icon language. Within the parlance of Icon, the evaluation of an expression or function produces a result sequence. A result sequence contains all the possible values that can be generated by the expression or function. When the result sequence is exhausted, the expression or function fails.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Icon allows any procedure to return a single value or multiple values, controlled using the fail, return and suspend keywords. A procedure that lacks any of these keywords returns &fail, which occurs whenever execution runs to the end of a procedure. For instance:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Calling f(5) will return 1, but calling f(-1) will return &fail. This can lead to non-obvious behavior, for instance, write(f(-1)) will output nothing because f fails and suspends operation of write.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Converting a procedure to be a generator uses the suspend keyword, which means \"return this value, and when called again, start execution at this point\". In this respect it is something like a combination of the static concept in C and return. For instance:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "creates a generator that returns a series of numbers starting at i and ending a j, and then returns &fail after that. The suspend i stops execution and returns the value of i without reseting any of the state. When another call is made to the same function, execution picks up at that point with the previous values. In this case, that causes it to perform i +:= 1, loop back to the start of the while block, and then return the next value and suspend again. This continues until i <= j fails, at which point it exits the block and calls fail. This allows iterators to be constructed with ease.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Another type of generator-builder is the alternator, which looks and operates like the boolean or operator. For instance:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "This appears to say \"if y is smaller than x or 5 then...\", but is actually a short-form for a generator that returns values until it falls off the end of the list. The values of the list are \"injected\" into the operations, in this case, <. So in this example, the system first tests y < x, if x is indeed larger than y it returns the value of x, the test passes, and the value of y is written out in the then clause. However, if x is not larger than y it fails, and the alternator continues, performing y < 5. If that test passes, y is written. If y is smaller than neither x or 5, the alternator runs out of tests and fails, the if fails, and the write is not performed. Thus, the value of y will appear on the console if it is smaller than x or 5, thereby fulfilling the purpose of a boolean or. Functions will not be called unless evaluating their parameters succeeds, so this example can be shortened to:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Internally, the alternator is not simply an or and one can also use it to construct arbitrary lists of values. This can be used to iterate over arbitrary values, like:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "As lists of integers are commonly found in many programming contexts, Icon also includes the to keyword to construct ad hoc integer generators:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "which can be shortened:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Icon is not strongly typed, so the alternator lists can contain different types of items:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "This writes 1, \"hello\" and maybe 5 depending on the value of x.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Likewise the conjunction operator, &, is used in a fashion similar to a boolean and operator:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "This code calls ItoJ and returns an initial value of 0 which is assigned to x. It then performs the right-hand side of the conjunction, and since x % 2 does equal 0, it writes out the value. It then calls the ItoJ generator again which assigns 1 to x, which fails the right-hand-side and prints nothing. The result is a list of every even integer from 0 to 10.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The concept of generators is particularly useful and powerful when used with string operations, and is a major underlying basis for Icon's overall design. Consider the indexOf operation found in many languages; this function looks for one string within another and returns an index of its location, or a magic number if it is not found. For instance:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "This will scan the string s, find the first occurrence of \"the\", and return that index, in this case 4. The string, however, contains two instances of the string \"the\", so to return the second example an alternate syntax is used:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "This tells it to scan starting at location 5, so it will not match the first instance we found previously. However, there may not be a second instance of \"the\" -there may not be a first one either- so the return value from indexOf has to be checked against the magic number -1 which is used to indicate no matches. A complete routine that prints out the location of every instance is:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "In Icon, the equivalent find is a generator, so the same results can be created with a single line:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Of course there are times where one does want to find a string after some point in input, for instance, if scanning a text file that contains a line number in the first four columns, a space, and then a line of text. Goal-directed execution can be used to skip over the line numbers:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The position will only be returned if \"the\" appears after position 5; the comparison will fail otherwise, pass the fail to write, and the write will not occur.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The every operator is similar to while, looping through every item returned by a generator and exiting on failure:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "There is a key difference between every and while; while re-evaluates the first result until it fails, whereas every fetches the next value from a generator. every actually injects values into the function in a fashion similar to blocks under Smalltalk. For instance, the above loop can be re-written this way:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "In this case, the values from i to j will be injected into someFunction and (potentially) write multiple lines of output.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Icon includes several collection types including lists that can also be used as stacks and queues, tables (also known as maps or dictionaries in other languages), sets and others. Icon refers to these as structures. Collections are inherent generators and can be easily called using the bang syntax. For instance:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Using the fail propagation as seen in earlier examples, we can combine the tests and the loops:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Because the list collection is a generator, this can be further simplified with the bang syntax:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "In this case, the bang in write causes Icon to return a line of text one by one from the array and finally fail at the end. &input is a generator-based analog of read that reads a line from standard input, so !&input continues reading lines until the file ends.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "As Icon is typeless, lists can contain any different types of values:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The items can included other structures. To build larger lists, Icon includes the list generator; i := list(10, \"word\") generates a list containing 10 copies of \"word\". Like arrays in other languages, Icon allows items to be looked up by position, e.g., weight := aCat[4]. Array slicing is included, allowing new lists to be created out of the elements of other lists, for instance, aCat := Cats[2:4] produces a new list called aCat that contains \"tabby\" and 2002.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Tables are essentially lists with arbitrary index keys rather than integers:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "This code creates a table that will use zero as the default value of any unknown key. It then adds two items into the table, with the keys \"there\" and \"here\", and values 1 and 2.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Sets are also similar to lists but contain only a single member of any given value. Icon includes the ++ to produce the union of two sets, ** the intersection, and -- the difference. Icon includes a number of pre-defined \"Cset\"s, a set containing various characters. There are four standard Csets in Icon, &ucase, &lcase, &letters, and &digits. New Csets can be made by enclosing a string in single quotes, for instance, vowel := 'aeiou'.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "In Icon, strings are lists of characters. As a list, they are generators and can thus be iterated over using the bang syntax:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Will print out each character of the string on a separate line.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Substrings can be extracted from a string by using a range specification within brackets. A range specification can return a point to a single character, or a slice of the string. Strings can be indexed from either the right or the left. Positions within a string are defined to be between the characters 1A2B3C4 and can be specified from the right −3A−2B−1C0",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "For example,",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Where the last example shows using a length instead of an ending position",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "The subscripting specification can be used as a lvalue within an expression. This can be used to insert strings into another string or delete parts of a string. For example:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "A further simplification for handling strings is the scanning system, invoked with ?, which calls functions on a string:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Icon refers to the left-hand-side of the ? as the subject, and passes it into string functions. Recall the find takes two parameters, the search text as parameter one and the string to search in parameter two. Using ? the second parameter is implicit and does not have to be specified by the programmer. In the common cases when multiple functions are being called on a single string in sequence, this style can significantly reduce the length of the resulting code and improve clarity. Icon function signatures identify the subject parameter in their definitions so the parameter can be hoisted in this fashion.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "The ? is not simply a form of syntactic sugar, it also sets up a \"string scanning environment\" for any following string operations. This is based on two internal variables, &subject and &pos; &subject is simply a pointer to the original string, while &pos is the current position within it, or cursor. Icon's various string manipulation procedures use these two variables so they do not have to be explicitly supplied by the programmer. For example:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "would produce:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Built-in and user-defined functions can be used to move around within the string being scanned. All of the built-in functions will default to &subject and &pos to allow the scanning syntax to be used. The following code will write all blank-delimited \"words\" in a string:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "There are a number of new functions introduced in this example. pos returns the current value of &pos. It may not be immediately obvious why one would need this function and not simply use the value of &pos directly; the reason is that &pos is a variable and thus cannot take on the value &fail, which the procedure pos can. Thus pos provides a lightweight wrapper on &pos that allows Icon's goal-directed flow control to be easily used without having to provide hand-written boolean tests against &pos. In this case, the test is \"is &pos zero\", which, in the odd numbering of Icon's string locations, is the end of the line. If it is not zero, pos returns &fail, which is inverted with the not and the loop continues.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "many finds one or more examples of the provided Cset parameter starting at the current &pos. In this case, it is looking for space characters, so the result of this function is the location of the first non-space character after &pos. tab moves &pos to that location, again with a potential &fail in case, for instance, many falls off the end of the string. upto is essentially the reverse of many; it returns the location immediately prior to its provided Cset, which the example then sets the &pos to with another tab. Alternation is used to also stop at the end of a line.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "This example can be made more robust through the use of a more appropriate \"word breaking\" Cset which might include periods, commas and other punctuation, as well as other whitespace characters like tab and non-breaking spaces. That Cset can then be used in many and upto.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "A more complex example demonstrates the integration of generators and string scanning within the language.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Laurence Tratt wrote a paper on Icon examining its real-world applications and pointing out a number of areas of concern. Among these were a number of practical decisions that derive from their origins in string processing but do not make as much sense in other areas. Among them:",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "The decision to fail by default at the end of procedures makes sense in the context of generators, but less so in the case of general procedures. Returning to the example noted above, write(f(-1)) will not output which may be expected. However:",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "will result in 10 being printed. This sort of issue is not at all obvious as even in an interactive debugger all the code is invoked yet x never picks up the expected value. This could be dismissed as one of those \"gotchas\" that programmers have to be aware of in any language, but Tratt examined a variety of Icon programs and found that the vast majority of procedures are not generators. This means that Icon's default behaviour is only used by a tiny minority of its constructs, yet represents a major source of potential errors in all the others.",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Another issue is the lack of a boolean data type and conventional boolean logic. While the success/fail system works in most cases where the ultimate goal is to check a value, this can still lead to some odd behaviour in seemingly simple code:",
"title": "Criticisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "This program will print \"taken\". The reason is that the test, c, does return a value; that value is &null, the default value for all otherwise uninitiated variables. &null is a valid value, so if c succeeds. To test this, one needs to make the test explicit, c === &null. Tratt supposed that it detracts from the self-documenting code, having supposed erroneously that it is testing \"is c zero\" or \"does c exist\".",
"title": "Criticisms"
}
]
| Icon is a very high-level programming language based on the concept of "goal-directed execution" in which code returns a "success" along with valid values, or a "failure", indicating that there is no valid data to return. The success and failure of a given block of code is used to direct further processing, whereas conventional languages would typically use boolean logic written by the programmer to achieve the same ends. Because the logic for basic control structures is often implicit in Icon, common tasks can be completed with less explicit code. Icon was designed by Ralph Griswold after leaving Bell Labs where he was a major contributor to the SNOBOL language. SNOBOL was a string-processing language with what would be considered dated syntax by the standards of the early 1970s. After moving to the University of Arizona, he further developed the underlying SNOBOL concepts in SL5, but considered the result to be a failure. This led to the significantly updated Icon, which blends the short but conceptually dense code of SNOBOL-like languages with the more familiar syntax of ALGOL-inspired languages like C or Pascal. Like the languages that inspired it, the primary area of use of Icon is managing strings and textual patterns. String operations often fail, for instance, finding "the" in "world". In most languages, this requires testing and branching to avoid using a non-valid result. In Icon most of these sorts of tests are simply not required, reducing the amount of code written by the programmer. Complex pattern handling can be accomplished in a few lines of terse code, similar to more dedicated languages like Perl but retaining a more function-oriented syntax familiar to users of other ALGOL-like languages. Icon is not object-oriented, but an object-oriented extension called Idol was developed in 1996 which eventually became Unicon. It also inspired other languages, with its simple generators being especially influential; Icon's generators were a major inspiration for the Python programming language. | 2001-06-14T13:41:48Z | 2023-10-23T23:05:20Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icon_(programming_language) |
14,802 | Iconology | Iconology is a method of interpretation in cultural history and the history of the visual arts used by Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky and their followers that uncovers the cultural, social, and historical background of themes and subjects in the visual arts. Though Panofsky differentiated between iconology and iconography, the distinction is not very widely followed, "and they have never been given definitions accepted by all iconographers and iconologists". Few 21st-century authors continue to use the term "iconology" consistently, and instead use iconography to cover both areas of scholarship.
To those who use the term, iconology is derived from synthesis rather than scattered analysis and examines symbolic meaning on more than its face value by reconciling it with its historical context and with the artist's body of work – in contrast to the widely descriptive iconography, which, as described by Panofsky, is an approach to studying the content and meaning of works of art that is primarily focused on classifying, establishing dates, provenance and other necessary fundamental knowledge concerning the subject matter of an artwork that is needed for further interpretation.
Panofsky's "use of iconology as the principle tool of art analysis brought him critics." For instance, in 1946, Jan Gerrit Van Gelder "criticized Panofsky's iconology as putting too much emphasis on the symbolic content of the work of art, neglecting its formal aspects and the work as a unity of form and content." Furthermore, iconology is mostly avoided by social historians who do not accept the theoretical dogmaticism in the work of Panofsky.
Erwin Panofsky defines iconography as "a known principle in the known world", while iconology is "an iconography turned interpretive". According to his view, iconology tries to reveal the underlying principles that form the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical perspective, which is modulated by one personality and condensed into one work. According to Roelof van Straten, iconology "can explain why an artist or patron chose a particular subject at a specific location and time and represented it in a certain way. An iconological investigation should concentrate on the social-historical, not art-historical, influences and values that the artist might not have consciously brought into play but are nevertheless present. The artwork is primarily seen as a document of its time."
Warburg used the term "iconography" in his early research, replacing it in 1908 with "iconology" in his particular method of visual interpretation called "critical iconology", which focused on the tracing of motifs through different cultures and visual forms. In 1932, Panofsky published a seminal article, introducing a three-step method of visual interpretation dealing with (1) primary or natural subject matter; (2) secondary or conventional subject matter, i.e. iconography; (3) tertiary or intrinsic meaning or content, i.e. iconology. Whereas iconography analyses the world of images, stories and allegories and requires knowledge of literary sources, an understanding of the history of types and how themes and concepts were expressed by objects and events under different historical conditions, iconology interprets intrinsic meaning or content and the world of symbolical values by using "synthetic intuition". The interpreter is aware of the essential tendencies of the human mind as conditioned by psychology and world view; he analyses the history of cultural symptoms or symbols, or how tendencies of the human mind were expressed by specific themes due to different historical conditions. Moreover, when understanding the work of art as a document of a specific civilization, or of a certain religious attitude therein, the work of art becomes a symptom of something else, which expresses itself in a variety of other symptoms. Interpreting these symbolical values, which can be unknown to, or different from, the artist's intention, is the object of iconology. Panofsky emphasized that "iconology can be done when there are no originals to look at and nothing but artificial light to work in."
According to Ernst Gombrich, "the emerging discipline of iconology ... must ultimately do for the image what linguistics has done for the word." However, Michael Camille is of the opinion that "though Panofsky's concept of iconology has been very influential in the humanities and is quite effective when applied to Renaissance art, it is still problematic when applied to art from periods before and after."
In 1952, Creighton Gilbert added another suggestion for a useful meaning of the word "iconology". According to his view, iconology was not the actual investigation of the work of art but rather the result of this investigation. The Austrian art historian Hans Sedlmayr differentiated between "sachliche" and "methodische" iconology. "Sachliche" iconology refers to the "general meaning of an individual painting or of an artistic complex (church, palace, monument) as seen and explained with reference to the ideas which take shape in them." In contrast, "methodische" iconology is the "integral iconography which accounts for the changes and development in the representations". In Iconology: Images, Text, Ideology (1986), W.J.T. Mitchell writes that iconology is a study of "what to say about images", concerned with the description and interpretation of visual art, and also a study of "what images say" – the ways in which they seem to speak for themselves by persuading, telling stories, or describing. He pleads for a postlinguistic, postsemiotic "iconic turn", emphasizing the role of "non-linguistic symbol systems". Instead of just pointing out the difference between the material (pictorial or artistic) images, "he pays attention to the dialectic relationship between material images and mental images". According to Dennise Bartelo and Robert Morton, the term "iconology" can also be used for characterizing "a movement toward seeing connections across all the language processes" and the idea about "multiple levels and forms used to communicate meaning" in order to get "the total picture” of learning. "Being both literate in the traditional sense and visually literate are the true mark of a well-educated human."
For several years, new approaches to iconology have developed in the theory of images. This is the case of what Jean-Michel Durafour, French philosopher and theorist of cinema, proposed to call "econology", a biological approach to images as forms of life, crossing iconology, ecology and sciences of nature. In an econological regime, the image (eikon) self-speciates, that is to say, it self-iconicizes with others and eco-iconicizes with them its iconic habitat (oikos). The iconology, mainly Warburghian iconology, is thus merged with a conception of the relations between the beings of the nature inherited, among others (Arne Næss, etc.) from the writings of Kinji Imanishi. For Imanishi, living beings are subjects. Or, more precisely, the environment and the living being are just one. One of the main consequences is that the "specity", the living individual, "self-eco-speciates its place of life" (Freedom in Evolution). As far as the images are concerned: "If the living species self-specify, the images self-iconicize. This is not a tautology. The images update some of their iconic virtualities. They live in the midst of other images, past or present, but also future (those are only human classifications), which they have relations with. They self-iconicize in an iconic environment which they interact with, and which in particular makes them the images they are. Or more precisely, insofar as images have an active part: the images self-eco-iconicize their iconic environment."
Studies in Iconology is the title of a book by Erwin Panofsky on humanistic themes in the art of the Renaissance, which was first published in 1939. It is also the name of a peer-reviewed series of books started in 2014 under the editorship of Barbara Baert and published by Peeters international academic publishers, Leuven, Belgium, addressing the deeper meaning of the visual medium throughout human history in the fields of philosophy, art history, theology and cultural anthropology. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Iconology is a method of interpretation in cultural history and the history of the visual arts used by Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky and their followers that uncovers the cultural, social, and historical background of themes and subjects in the visual arts. Though Panofsky differentiated between iconology and iconography, the distinction is not very widely followed, \"and they have never been given definitions accepted by all iconographers and iconologists\". Few 21st-century authors continue to use the term \"iconology\" consistently, and instead use iconography to cover both areas of scholarship.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "To those who use the term, iconology is derived from synthesis rather than scattered analysis and examines symbolic meaning on more than its face value by reconciling it with its historical context and with the artist's body of work – in contrast to the widely descriptive iconography, which, as described by Panofsky, is an approach to studying the content and meaning of works of art that is primarily focused on classifying, establishing dates, provenance and other necessary fundamental knowledge concerning the subject matter of an artwork that is needed for further interpretation.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Panofsky's \"use of iconology as the principle tool of art analysis brought him critics.\" For instance, in 1946, Jan Gerrit Van Gelder \"criticized Panofsky's iconology as putting too much emphasis on the symbolic content of the work of art, neglecting its formal aspects and the work as a unity of form and content.\" Furthermore, iconology is mostly avoided by social historians who do not accept the theoretical dogmaticism in the work of Panofsky.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Erwin Panofsky defines iconography as \"a known principle in the known world\", while iconology is \"an iconography turned interpretive\". According to his view, iconology tries to reveal the underlying principles that form the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical perspective, which is modulated by one personality and condensed into one work. According to Roelof van Straten, iconology \"can explain why an artist or patron chose a particular subject at a specific location and time and represented it in a certain way. An iconological investigation should concentrate on the social-historical, not art-historical, influences and values that the artist might not have consciously brought into play but are nevertheless present. The artwork is primarily seen as a document of its time.\"",
"title": "In contrast to iconography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Warburg used the term \"iconography\" in his early research, replacing it in 1908 with \"iconology\" in his particular method of visual interpretation called \"critical iconology\", which focused on the tracing of motifs through different cultures and visual forms. In 1932, Panofsky published a seminal article, introducing a three-step method of visual interpretation dealing with (1) primary or natural subject matter; (2) secondary or conventional subject matter, i.e. iconography; (3) tertiary or intrinsic meaning or content, i.e. iconology. Whereas iconography analyses the world of images, stories and allegories and requires knowledge of literary sources, an understanding of the history of types and how themes and concepts were expressed by objects and events under different historical conditions, iconology interprets intrinsic meaning or content and the world of symbolical values by using \"synthetic intuition\". The interpreter is aware of the essential tendencies of the human mind as conditioned by psychology and world view; he analyses the history of cultural symptoms or symbols, or how tendencies of the human mind were expressed by specific themes due to different historical conditions. Moreover, when understanding the work of art as a document of a specific civilization, or of a certain religious attitude therein, the work of art becomes a symptom of something else, which expresses itself in a variety of other symptoms. Interpreting these symbolical values, which can be unknown to, or different from, the artist's intention, is the object of iconology. Panofsky emphasized that \"iconology can be done when there are no originals to look at and nothing but artificial light to work in.\"",
"title": "In contrast to iconography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "According to Ernst Gombrich, \"the emerging discipline of iconology ... must ultimately do for the image what linguistics has done for the word.\" However, Michael Camille is of the opinion that \"though Panofsky's concept of iconology has been very influential in the humanities and is quite effective when applied to Renaissance art, it is still problematic when applied to art from periods before and after.\"",
"title": "In contrast to iconography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 1952, Creighton Gilbert added another suggestion for a useful meaning of the word \"iconology\". According to his view, iconology was not the actual investigation of the work of art but rather the result of this investigation. The Austrian art historian Hans Sedlmayr differentiated between \"sachliche\" and \"methodische\" iconology. \"Sachliche\" iconology refers to the \"general meaning of an individual painting or of an artistic complex (church, palace, monument) as seen and explained with reference to the ideas which take shape in them.\" In contrast, \"methodische\" iconology is the \"integral iconography which accounts for the changes and development in the representations\". In Iconology: Images, Text, Ideology (1986), W.J.T. Mitchell writes that iconology is a study of \"what to say about images\", concerned with the description and interpretation of visual art, and also a study of \"what images say\" – the ways in which they seem to speak for themselves by persuading, telling stories, or describing. He pleads for a postlinguistic, postsemiotic \"iconic turn\", emphasizing the role of \"non-linguistic symbol systems\". Instead of just pointing out the difference between the material (pictorial or artistic) images, \"he pays attention to the dialectic relationship between material images and mental images\". According to Dennise Bartelo and Robert Morton, the term \"iconology\" can also be used for characterizing \"a movement toward seeing connections across all the language processes\" and the idea about \"multiple levels and forms used to communicate meaning\" in order to get \"the total picture” of learning. \"Being both literate in the traditional sense and visually literate are the true mark of a well-educated human.\"",
"title": "Nuances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "For several years, new approaches to iconology have developed in the theory of images. This is the case of what Jean-Michel Durafour, French philosopher and theorist of cinema, proposed to call \"econology\", a biological approach to images as forms of life, crossing iconology, ecology and sciences of nature. In an econological regime, the image (eikon) self-speciates, that is to say, it self-iconicizes with others and eco-iconicizes with them its iconic habitat (oikos). The iconology, mainly Warburghian iconology, is thus merged with a conception of the relations between the beings of the nature inherited, among others (Arne Næss, etc.) from the writings of Kinji Imanishi. For Imanishi, living beings are subjects. Or, more precisely, the environment and the living being are just one. One of the main consequences is that the \"specity\", the living individual, \"self-eco-speciates its place of life\" (Freedom in Evolution). As far as the images are concerned: \"If the living species self-specify, the images self-iconicize. This is not a tautology. The images update some of their iconic virtualities. They live in the midst of other images, past or present, but also future (those are only human classifications), which they have relations with. They self-iconicize in an iconic environment which they interact with, and which in particular makes them the images they are. Or more precisely, insofar as images have an active part: the images self-eco-iconicize their iconic environment.\"",
"title": "Nuances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Studies in Iconology is the title of a book by Erwin Panofsky on humanistic themes in the art of the Renaissance, which was first published in 1939. It is also the name of a peer-reviewed series of books started in 2014 under the editorship of Barbara Baert and published by Peeters international academic publishers, Leuven, Belgium, addressing the deeper meaning of the visual medium throughout human history in the fields of philosophy, art history, theology and cultural anthropology.",
"title": "Studies in iconology"
}
]
| Iconology is a method of interpretation in cultural history and the history of the visual arts used by Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky and their followers that uncovers the cultural, social, and historical background of themes and subjects in the visual arts. Though Panofsky differentiated between iconology and iconography, the distinction is not very widely followed, "and they have never been given definitions accepted by all iconographers and iconologists". Few 21st-century authors continue to use the term "iconology" consistently, and instead use iconography to cover both areas of scholarship. To those who use the term, iconology is derived from synthesis rather than scattered analysis and examines symbolic meaning on more than its face value by reconciling it with its historical context and with the artist's body of work – in contrast to the widely descriptive iconography, which, as described by Panofsky, is an approach to studying the content and meaning of works of art that is primarily focused on classifying, establishing dates, provenance and other necessary fundamental knowledge concerning the subject matter of an artwork that is needed for further interpretation. Panofsky's "use of iconology as the principle tool of art analysis brought him critics." For instance, in 1946, Jan Gerrit Van Gelder "criticized Panofsky's iconology as putting too much emphasis on the symbolic content of the work of art, neglecting its formal aspects and the work as a unity of form and content." Furthermore, iconology is mostly avoided by social historians who do not accept the theoretical dogmaticism in the work of Panofsky. | 2023-01-17T15:39:39Z | [
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|
14,804 | List of Indian massacres in North America | In the history of the European colonization of the Americas, an Indian massacre is any incident between European settlers and indigenous peoples wherein one group killed a significant number of the other group outside the confines of mutual combat in war.
"Indian massacre" is a phrase whose use and definition has evolved and expanded over time. The phrase was initially used by European colonists to describe attacks by indigenous Americans which resulted in mass colonial casualties. While similar attacks by colonists on Indian villages were called "raids" or "battles", successful Indian attacks on white settlements or military posts were routinely termed "massacres". Knowing very little about the native inhabitants of the American frontier, the colonists were deeply fearful, and often, European Americans who had rarely – or never – seen a Native American read Indian atrocity stories in popular literature and newspapers. Emphasis was placed on the depredations of "murderous savages" in their information about Indians, and as the migrants headed further west, they frequently feared the Indians they would encounter.
The phrase eventually became commonly used to also describe mass killings of American Indians. Killings described as "massacres" often had an element of indiscriminate targeting, barbarism, or genocidal intent.
According to historian Jeffrey Ostler, "Any discussion of genocide must, of course, eventually consider the so-called Indian Wars, the term commonly used for U.S. Army campaigns to subjugate Indian nations of the American West beginning in the 1860s. In an older historiography, key events in this history were narrated as battles. It is now more common for scholars to refer to these events as massacres. This is especially so of a Colorado territorial militia’s slaughter of Cheyennes at Sand Creek (1864) and the army’s slaughter of Shoshones at Bear River (1863), Blackfeet on the Marias River (1870), and Lakotas at Wounded Knee (1890). Some scholars have begun referring to these events as “genocidal massacres,” defined as the annihilation of a portion of a larger group, sometimes to provide a lesson to the larger group."
It is difficult to determine the total number of people who died as a result of "Indian massacres". In The Wild Frontier: Atrocities during the American-Indian War from Jamestown Colony to Wounded Knee, lawyer William M. Osborn compiled a list of alleged and actual atrocities in what would eventually become the continental United States, from first contact in 1511 until 1890. His parameters for inclusion included the intentional and indiscriminate murder, torture, or mutilation of civilians, the wounded, and prisoners. His list included 7,193 people who died from atrocities perpetrated by those of European descent, and 9,156 people who died from atrocities perpetrated by Native Americans.
In An American Genocide, The United States and the California Catastrophe, 1846–1873, historian Benjamin Madley recorded the numbers of killings of California Indians between 1846 and 1873. He found evidence that during this period, at least 9,400 to 16,000 California Indians were killed by non-Indians. Most of these killings occurred in what he said were more than 370 massacres (defined by him as the "intentional killing of five or more disarmed combatants or largely unarmed noncombatants, including women, children, and prisoners, whether in the context of a battle or otherwise").
This is a listing of some of the events reported then or referred to now as "Indian massacre". | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "In the history of the European colonization of the Americas, an Indian massacre is any incident between European settlers and indigenous peoples wherein one group killed a significant number of the other group outside the confines of mutual combat in war.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "\"Indian massacre\" is a phrase whose use and definition has evolved and expanded over time. The phrase was initially used by European colonists to describe attacks by indigenous Americans which resulted in mass colonial casualties. While similar attacks by colonists on Indian villages were called \"raids\" or \"battles\", successful Indian attacks on white settlements or military posts were routinely termed \"massacres\". Knowing very little about the native inhabitants of the American frontier, the colonists were deeply fearful, and often, European Americans who had rarely – or never – seen a Native American read Indian atrocity stories in popular literature and newspapers. Emphasis was placed on the depredations of \"murderous savages\" in their information about Indians, and as the migrants headed further west, they frequently feared the Indians they would encounter.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The phrase eventually became commonly used to also describe mass killings of American Indians. Killings described as \"massacres\" often had an element of indiscriminate targeting, barbarism, or genocidal intent.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "According to historian Jeffrey Ostler, \"Any discussion of genocide must, of course, eventually consider the so-called Indian Wars, the term commonly used for U.S. Army campaigns to subjugate Indian nations of the American West beginning in the 1860s. In an older historiography, key events in this history were narrated as battles. It is now more common for scholars to refer to these events as massacres. This is especially so of a Colorado territorial militia’s slaughter of Cheyennes at Sand Creek (1864) and the army’s slaughter of Shoshones at Bear River (1863), Blackfeet on the Marias River (1870), and Lakotas at Wounded Knee (1890). Some scholars have begun referring to these events as “genocidal massacres,” defined as the annihilation of a portion of a larger group, sometimes to provide a lesson to the larger group.\"",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "It is difficult to determine the total number of people who died as a result of \"Indian massacres\". In The Wild Frontier: Atrocities during the American-Indian War from Jamestown Colony to Wounded Knee, lawyer William M. Osborn compiled a list of alleged and actual atrocities in what would eventually become the continental United States, from first contact in 1511 until 1890. His parameters for inclusion included the intentional and indiscriminate murder, torture, or mutilation of civilians, the wounded, and prisoners. His list included 7,193 people who died from atrocities perpetrated by those of European descent, and 9,156 people who died from atrocities perpetrated by Native Americans.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In An American Genocide, The United States and the California Catastrophe, 1846–1873, historian Benjamin Madley recorded the numbers of killings of California Indians between 1846 and 1873. He found evidence that during this period, at least 9,400 to 16,000 California Indians were killed by non-Indians. Most of these killings occurred in what he said were more than 370 massacres (defined by him as the \"intentional killing of five or more disarmed combatants or largely unarmed noncombatants, including women, children, and prisoners, whether in the context of a battle or otherwise\").",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "This is a listing of some of the events reported then or referred to now as \"Indian massacre\".",
"title": "List of massacres"
}
]
| In the history of the European colonization of the Americas, an Indian massacre is any incident between European settlers and indigenous peoples wherein one group killed a significant number of the other group outside the confines of mutual combat in war. | 2001-09-28T18:13:19Z | 2023-12-31T03:32:37Z | [
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14,810 | Islamic calendar | The Hijri calendar (Arabic: ٱلتَّقْوِيم ٱلْهِجْرِيّ, romanized: al-taqwīm al-hijrī), also known in English as the Muslim calendar and Islamic calendar, is a lunar calendar consisting of 12 lunar months in a year of 354 or 355 days. It is used to determine the proper days of Islamic holidays and rituals, such as the annual fasting and the annual season for the great pilgrimage. In almost all countries where the predominant religion is Islam, the civil calendar is the Gregorian calendar, with Syriac month-names used in the Levant and Mesopotamia (Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine) but the religious calendar is the Hijri one.
This calendar enumerates the Hijri era, whose epoch was established as the Islamic New Year in 622 CE. During that year, Muhammad and his followers migrated from Mecca to Medina and established the first Muslim community (ummah), an event commemorated as the Hijrah. In the West, dates in this era are usually denoted AH (Latin: Anno Hegirae, "in the year of the Hijrah"). In Muslim countries, it is also sometimes denoted as H from its Arabic form (سَنَة هِجْرِيَّة, abbreviated ھ). In English, years prior to the Hijra are denoted as BH ("Before the Hijra").
Since 19 July 2023 CE, the current Islamic year is 1445 AH. In the Gregorian calendar reckoning, 1445 AH runs from 19 July 2023 to approximately 7 July 2024.
For central Arabia, especially Mecca, there is a lack of epigraphical evidence but details are found in the writings of Muslim authors of the Abbasid era. Inscriptions of the ancient South Arabian calendars reveal the use of a number of local calendars. At least some of these South Arabian calendars followed the lunisolar system. Both al-Biruni and al-Mas'udi suggest that the ancient Arabs used the same month names as the Muslims, though they also record other month names used by the pre-Islamic Arabs.
The Islamic tradition is unanimous in stating that Arabs of Tihamah, Hejaz, and Najd distinguished between two types of months, permitted (ḥalāl) and forbidden (ḥarām) months. The forbidden months were four months during which fighting is forbidden, listed as Rajab and the three months around the pilgrimage season, Dhu al-Qa‘dah, Dhu al-Hijjah, and Muharram. A similar if not identical concept to the forbidden months is also attested by Procopius, where he describes an armistice that the Eastern Arabs of the Lakhmid al-Mundhir respected for two months in the summer solstice of 541 CE. However, Muslim historians do not link these months to a particular season. The Qur'an links the four forbidden months with Nasī', a word that literally means "postponement". According to Muslim tradition, the decision of postponement was administered by the tribe of Kinanah, by a man known as the al-Qalammas of Kinanah and his descendants (pl. qalāmisa).
Different interpretations of the concept of Nasī' have been proposed. Some scholars, both Muslim and Western, maintain that the pre-Islamic calendar used in central Arabia was a purely lunar calendar similar to the modern Islamic calendar. According to this view, Nasī' is related to the pre-Islamic practices of the Meccan Arabs, where they would alter the distribution of the forbidden months within a given year without implying a calendar manipulation. This interpretation is supported by Arab historians and lexicographers, like Ibn Hisham, Ibn Manzur, and the corpus of Qur'anic exegesis.
This is corroborated by an early Sabaic inscription, where a religious ritual was "postponed" (ns'w) due to war. According to the context of this inscription, the verb ns'’ has nothing to do with intercalation, but only with moving religious events within the calendar itself. The similarity between the religious concept of this ancient inscription and the Qur'an suggests that non-calendaring postponement is also the Qur'anic meaning of Nasī'. The Encyclopaedia of Islam concludes "The Arabic system of [Nasī'] can only have been intended to move the Hajj and the fairs associated with it in the vicinity of Mecca to a suitable season of the year. It was not intended to establish a fixed calendar to be generally observed." The term "fixed calendar" is generally understood to refer to the non-intercalated calendar.
Others concur that it was originally a lunar calendar, but suggest that about 200 years before the Hijra it was transformed into a lunisolar calendar containing an intercalary month added from time to time to keep the pilgrimage within the season of the year when merchandise was most abundant. This interpretation was first proposed by the medieval Muslim astrologer and astronomer Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi, and later by al-Biruni, al-Mas'udi, and some western scholars. This interpretation considers Nasī' to be a synonym to the Arabic word for "intercalation" (kabīsa). The Arabs, according to one explanation mentioned by Abu Ma'shar, learned of this type of intercalation from the Jews. The Jewish Nasi was the official who decided when to intercalate the Jewish calendar. Some sources say that the Arabs followed the Jewish practice and intercalated seven months over nineteen years, or else that they intercalated nine months over 24 years; there is, however, no consensus among scholars on this issue.
Nasi' is interpreted to signify either the postponement of the pre-Islamic month of Hajj, or the (also pre-Islamic) practice of intercalation – periodic insertion of an additional month to reset the calendar into accordance with the seasons.
In the tenth year of the Hijra, as documented in the Qur'an (Surah At-Tawbah (9):36–37), Muslims believe God revealed the "prohibition of the Nasī'".
Indeed, the number of months ordained by Allah is twelve—in Allah's Record since the day He created the heavens and the earth—of which four are sacred. That is the Right Way. So do not wrong one another during these months. And together fight the polytheists as they fight against you together. And know that Allah is with those mindful ˹of Him˺. Reallocating the sanctity of ˹these˺ months is an increase in disbelief, by which the disbelievers are led ˹far˺ astray. They adjust the sanctity one year and uphold it in another, only to maintain the number of months sanctified by Allah, violating the very months Allah has made sacred. Their evil deeds have been made appealing to them. And Allah does not guide the disbelieving people.
The prohibition of Nasī' would presumably have been announced when the intercalated month had returned to its position just before the month of Nasi' began. If Nasī' meant intercalation, then the number and the position of the intercalary months between AH 1 and AH 10 are uncertain; western calendar dates commonly cited for key events in early Islam such as the Hijra, the Battle of Badr, the Battle of Uhud and the Battle of the Trench should be viewed with caution as they might be in error by one, two, three or even four lunar months. This prohibition was mentioned by Muhammad during the farewell sermon which was delivered on 9 Dhu al-Hijjah AH 10 (Julian date Friday 6 March 632 CE) on Mount Arafat during the farewell pilgrimage to Mecca.
Certainly the Nasi' is an impious addition, which has led the infidels into error. One year they authorise the Nasi', another year they forbid it. They observe the divine precept with respect to the number of the sacred months, but in fact they profane that which God has declared to be inviolable, and sanctify that which God has declared to be profane. Assuredly time, in its revolution, has returned to such as it was at the creation of the heavens and the earth. In the eyes of God the number of the months is twelve. Among these twelve months four are sacred, namely, Rajab, which stands alone, and three others which are consecutive.
The three successive sacred (forbidden) months mentioned by Prophet Muhammad (months in which battles are forbidden) are Dhu al-Qa'dah, Dhu al-Hijjah, and Muharram, months 11, 12, and 1 respectively. The single forbidden month is Rajab, month 7. These months were considered forbidden both within the new Islamic calendar and within the old pagan Meccan calendar.
Traditionally, the Islamic day begins at sunset and ends at the next sunset. Each Islamic day thus begins at nightfall and ends at the end of daylight.
The days in the seven-day week are, with the exception of the last two days, named after their ordinal place in the week.
On the sixth day of the week, the "gathering day" (Yawm al-Jumʿah), Muslims assemble for the Friday-prayer at a local mosque at noon. The "gathering day" is often regarded as the weekly day off. This is frequently made official, with many Muslim countries adopting Friday and Saturday (e.g., Egypt, Saudi Arabia) or Thursday and Friday as official weekends, during which offices are closed; other countries (e.g., Iran) choose to make Friday alone a day of rest. A few others (e.g., Turkey, Pakistan, Morocco, Nigeria, Malaysia) have adopted the Saturday-Sunday weekend while making Friday a working day with a long midday break to allow time off for worship.
Each month of the Islamic calendar commences on the birth of the new lunar cycle. Traditionally, this is based on actual observation of the moon's crescent (hilal) marking the end of the previous lunar cycle and hence the previous month, thereby beginning the new month. Consequently, each month can have 29 or 30 days depending on the visibility of the Moon, astronomical positioning of the Earth and weather conditions.
Four of the twelve Hijri months are considered sacred: Rajab (7), and the three consecutive months of Dhū al-Qa'dah (11), Dhu al-Ḥijjah (12) and Muḥarram (1).
The mean duration of a tropical year is 365.24219 days, while the long-term average duration of a synodic month is 29.530587981 days. Thus the average lunar year (twelve new moons) is 10.87513 days shorter than the average solar year (365.24219 − (12 × 29.530587981)), causing months of the Hijri calendar to advance about eleven days earlier each year, relative to the equinoxes. "As a result," says the Astronomical Almanac, "the cycle of twelve lunar months regresses through the seasons over a period of about 33 [solar] years".
In pre-Islamic Arabia, it was customary to identify a year after a major event which took place in it. Thus, according to Islamic tradition, Abraha, governor of Yemen, then a province of the Christian Kingdom of Aksum of Northeast Africa and South Arabia, attempted to destroy the Kaaba with an army which included several elephants. The raid was unsuccessful, but that year became known as the Year of the Elephant, during which Muhammad was born (surah al-Fil). Most equate this to the year 570 CE, but a minority use 571 CE.
The first ten years of the Hijra were not numbered, but were named after events in the life of Muhammad according to al-Biruni:
In c. 638 (17 AH), Abu Musa al-Ash'ari, one of the officials of the Rashid Caliph Umar (r. 634–644) in Basra, complained about the absence of any years on the correspondence he received from Umar, making it difficult for him to determine which instructions were most recent. This report convinced Umar of the need to introduce an era for Muslims. After debating the issue with his counsellors, he decided that the first year should be the year of Muhammad's arrival at Medina (known as Yathrib, before Muhammad's arrival). Uthman then suggested that the months begin with Muharram, in line with the established custom of the Arabs at that time. The years of the Islamic calendar thus began with the month of Muharram in the year of Muhammad's arrival at the city of Medina, even though the actual emigration took place in Safar and Rabi' I of the intercalated calendar, two months before the commencement of Muharram in the new fixed calendar. Because of the Hijra, the calendar was named the Hijri calendar.
F A Shamsi (1984) postulated that the Arabic calendar was never intercalated. According to him, the first day of the first month of the new fixed Islamic calendar (1 Muharram AH 1) was no different from what was observed at the time. The day the Prophet moved from Quba' to Medina was originally 26 Rabi' I on the pre-Islamic calendar. 1 Muharram of the new fixed calendar corresponded to Friday, 16 July 622 CE, the equivalent civil tabular date (same daylight period) in the Julian calendar. The Islamic day began at the preceding sunset on the evening of 15 July. This Julian date (16 July) was determined by medieval Muslim astronomers by projecting back in time their own tabular Islamic calendar, which had alternating 30- and 29-day months in each lunar year plus eleven leap days every 30 years. For example, al-Biruni mentioned this Julian date in the year 1000 CE. Although not used by either medieval Muslim astronomers or modern scholars to determine the Islamic epoch, the thin crescent moon would have also first become visible (assuming clouds did not obscure it) shortly after the preceding sunset on the evening of 15 July, 1.5 days after the associated dark moon (astronomical new moon) on the morning of 14 July.
Though Michael Cook and Patricia Crone in their book Hagarism cite a coin from AH 17, the first surviving attested use of a Hijri calendar date alongside a date in another calendar (Coptic) is on a papyrus from Egypt in AH 22, PERF 558.
Due to the Islamic calendar's reliance on certain variable methods of observation to determine its month-start-dates, these dates sometimes vary slightly from the month-start-dates of the astronomical lunar calendar, which are based directly on astronomical calculations. Still, the Islamic calendar seldom varies by more than three days from the astronomical-lunar-calendar system, and roughly approximates it. Both the Islamic calendar and the astronomical-lunar-calendar take no account of the solar year in their calculations, and thus both of these strictly lunar based calendar systems have no ability to reckon the timing of the four seasons of the year.
In the astronomical-lunar-calendar system, a year of 12 lunar months is 354.37 days long. In this calendar system, lunar months begin precisely at the time of the monthly "conjunction", when the Moon is located most directly between the Earth and the Sun. The month is defined as the average duration of a revolution of the Moon around the Earth (29.53 days). By convention, months of 30 days and 29 days succeed each other, adding up over two successive months to 59 full days. This leaves only a small monthly variation of 44 minutes to account for, which adds up to a total of 24 hours (i.e., the equivalent of one full day) in 2.73 years. To settle accounts, it is sufficient to add one day every three years to the lunar calendar, in the same way that one adds one day to the Gregorian calendar every four years. The technical details of the adjustment are described in Tabular Islamic calendar.
The Islamic calendar, however, is based on a different set of conventions being used for the determination of the month-start-dates. Each month still has either 29 or 30 days, but due to the variable method of observations employed, there is usually no discernible order in the sequencing of either 29 or 30-day month lengths. Traditionally, the first day of each month is the day (beginning at sunset) of the first sighting of the hilal (crescent moon) shortly after sunset. If the hilal is not observed immediately after the 29th day of a month (either because clouds block its view or because the western sky is still too bright when the moon sets), then the day that begins at that sunset is the 30th. Such a sighting has to be made by one or more trustworthy men testifying before a committee of Muslim leaders. Determining the most likely day that the hilal could be observed was a motivation for Muslim interest in astronomy, which put Islam in the forefront of that science for many centuries. Still, due to the fact that both lunar reckoning systems are ultimately based on the lunar cycle itself, both systems still do roughly correspond to one another, never being more than three days out of synchronisation with one another.
This traditional practice for the determination of the start-date of the month is still followed in the overwhelming majority of Muslim countries. For instance, Saudi Arabia uses the sighting method to determine the beginning of each month of the Hijri calendar. Since AH 1419 (1998/99), several official hilal sighting committees have been set up by the government to determine the first visual sighting of the lunar crescent at the beginning of each lunar month. Nevertheless, the religious authorities also allow the testimony of less experienced observers and thus often announce the sighting of the lunar crescent on a date when none of the official committees could see it.
Each Islamic state proceeds with its own monthly observation of the new moon (or, failing that, awaits the completion of 30 days) before declaring the beginning of a new month on its territory. However, the lunar crescent becomes visible only some 17 hours after the conjunction, and only subject to the existence of a number of favourable conditions relative to weather, time, geographic location, as well as various astronomical parameters. Given the fact that the moon sets progressively later than the sun as one goes west, with a corresponding increase in its "age" since conjunction, Western Muslim countries may, under favorable conditions, observe the new moon one day earlier than eastern Muslim countries. Due to the interplay of all these factors, the beginning of each month differs from one Muslim country to another, during the 48-hour period following the conjunction. The information provided by the calendar in any country does not extend beyond the current month.
A number of Muslim countries try to overcome some of these difficulties by applying different astronomy-related rules to determine the beginning of months. Thus, Malaysia, Indonesia, and a few others begin each month at sunset on the first day that the moon sets after the sun (moonset after sunset). In Egypt, the month begins at sunset on the first day that the moon sets at least five minutes after the sun. A detailed analysis of the available data shows, however, that there are major discrepancies between what countries say they do on this subject, and what they actually do. In some instances, what a country says it does is impossible.
Due to the somewhat variable nature of the Islamic calendar, in most Muslim countries, the Islamic calendar is used primarily for religious purposes, while the Solar-based Gregorian calendar is still used primarily for matters of commerce and agriculture.
If the Islamic calendar were prepared using astronomical calculations, Muslims throughout the Muslim world could use it to meet all their needs, the way they use the Gregorian calendar today. But, there are divergent views on whether it is licit to do so.
A majority of theologians oppose the use of calculations (beyond the constraint that each month must be not less than 29 nor more than 30 days) on the grounds that the latter would not conform with Muhammad's recommendation to observe the new moon of Ramadan and Shawal in order to determine the beginning of these months.
However, some Islamic jurists see no contradiction between Muhammad's teachings and the use of calculations to determine the beginnings of lunar months. They consider that Muhammad's recommendation was adapted to the culture of the times, and should not be confused with the acts of worship.
Thus the jurists Ahmad Muhammad Shakir and Yusuf al-Qaradawi both endorsed the use of calculations to determine the beginning of all months of the Islamic calendar, in 1939 and 2004 respectively. So did the Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA) in 2006 and the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR) in 2007.
The major Muslim associations of France also announced in 2012 that they would henceforth use a calendar based on astronomical calculations, taking into account the criteria of the possibility of crescent sighting in any place on Earth. But, shortly after the official adoption of this rule by the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) in 2013, the new leadership of the association decided, on the eve of Ramadan 2013, to follow the Saudi announcement rather than to apply the rule just adopted. This resulted in a division of the Muslim community of France, with some members following the new rule, and others following the Saudi announcement.
Isma'ili-Taiyebi Bohras having the institution of da'i al-mutlaq follow the tabular Islamic calendar (see section below) prepared on the basis of astronomical calculations from the days of Fatimid imams.
Turkish Muslims use an Islamic calendar which is calculated several years in advance by the Turkish Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı). From 1 Muharrem 1400 AH (21 November 1979) until 29 Zilhicce 1435 (24 October 2014) the computed Turkish lunar calendar was based on the following rule: "The lunar month is assumed to begin on the evening when, within some region of the terrestrial globe, the computed centre of the lunar crescent at local sunset is more than 5° above the local horizon and (geocentrically) more than 8° from the Sun." In the current rule the (computed) lunar crescent has to be above the local horizon of Ankara at sunset.
Saudi Arabia has traditionally used the Umm al-Qura calendar, which is based on astronomical calculations, for administrative purposes. The parameters used in the establishment of this calendar underwent significant changes during the decade to AH 1423.
Before AH 1420 (before 18 April 1999), if the moon's age at sunset in Riyadh was at least 12 hours, then the day ending at that sunset was the first day of the month. This often caused the Saudis to celebrate holy days one or even two days before other predominantly Muslim countries, including the dates for the Hajj, which can only be dated using Saudi dates because it is performed in Mecca.
From AH 1420–22, if moonset occurred after sunset at Mecca, then the day beginning at that sunset was the first day of a Saudi month, essentially the same rule used by Malaysia, Indonesia, and others (except for the location from which the hilal was observed).
Since the beginning of AH 1423 (16 March 2002), the rule has been clarified a little by requiring the geocentric conjunction of the sun and moon to occur before sunset, in addition to requiring moonset to occur after sunset at Mecca. This ensures that the moon has moved past the sun by sunset, even though the sky may still be too bright immediately before moonset to actually see the crescent.
In 2007, the Islamic Society of North America, the Fiqh Council of North America and the European Council for Fatwa and Research announced that they would henceforth use a calendar based on calculations using the same parameters as the Umm al-Qura calendar to determine (well in advance) the beginning of all lunar months (and therefore the days associated with all religious observances). This was intended as a first step on the way to unify, at some future time, Muslims' calendars throughout the world.
On 14 February 2016, Saudi Arabia adopted the Gregorian calendar for payment of the monthly salaries of government employees (as a cost cutting measure), while retaining the Islamic calendar for religious purposes.
The Solar Hijri calendar is a solar calendar used in Iran which counts its years from the Hijra or migration of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE.
The Tabular Islamic calendar is a rule-based variation of the Islamic calendar, in which months are worked out by arithmetic rules rather than by observation or astronomical calculation. It has a 30-year cycle with 11 leap years of 355 days and 19 years of 354 days. In the long term, it is accurate to one day in about 2,500 solar years or 2,570 lunar years. It also deviates up to about one or two days in the short term.
Microsoft uses the "Kuwaiti algorithm", a variant of the tabular Islamic calendar, to convert Gregorian dates to the Islamic ones. Microsoft claimed that the variant is based on a statistical analysis of historical data from Kuwait, however it matches a known tabular calendar.
Important dates in the Islamic (Hijri) year are:
Days considered important predominantly for Shia Muslims:
The Islamic calendar is now used primarily for religious purposes, and for official dating of public events and documents in Muslim countries. Because of its nature as a purely lunar calendar, it cannot be used for agricultural purposes and historically Islamic communities have used other calendars for this purpose: the Egyptian calendar was formerly widespread in Islamic countries, and the Iranian calendar and the 1789 Ottoman calendar (a modified Julian calendar) were also used for agriculture in their countries. In the Levant and Iraq the Aramaic names of the Babylonian calendar are still used for all secular matters. In the Maghreb, Berber farmers in the countryside still use the Julian calendar for agrarian purposes. These local solar calendars have receded in importance with the near-universal adoption of the Gregorian calendar for civil purposes. Saudi Arabia uses the lunar Islamic calendar. In Indonesia, the Javanese calendar combines elements of the Islamic and pre-Islamic Saka calendars.
British author Nicholas Hagger writes that after seizing control of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi "declared" on 1 December 1978 "that the Muslim calendar should start with the death of the prophet Mohammed in 632 rather than the hijra (Mohammed's 'emigration' from Mecca to Medina) in 622". This put the country ten solar years behind the standard Muslim calendar. However, according to the 2006 Encyclopedia of the Developing World, "More confusing still is Qaddafi's unique Libyan calendar, which counts the years from the Prophet's birth, or sometimes from his death. The months July and August, named after Julius and Augustus Caesar, are now Nasser and Hannibal respectively." Reflecting on a 2001 visit to the country, American reporter Neil MacFarquhar observed, "Life in Libya was so unpredictable that people weren't even sure what year it was. The year of my visit was officially 1369. But just two years earlier Libyans had been living through 1429. No one could quite name for me the day the count changed, especially since both remained in play. ... Event organizers threw up their hands and put the Western year in parentheses somewhere in their announcements." | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Hijri calendar (Arabic: ٱلتَّقْوِيم ٱلْهِجْرِيّ, romanized: al-taqwīm al-hijrī), also known in English as the Muslim calendar and Islamic calendar, is a lunar calendar consisting of 12 lunar months in a year of 354 or 355 days. It is used to determine the proper days of Islamic holidays and rituals, such as the annual fasting and the annual season for the great pilgrimage. In almost all countries where the predominant religion is Islam, the civil calendar is the Gregorian calendar, with Syriac month-names used in the Levant and Mesopotamia (Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine) but the religious calendar is the Hijri one.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "This calendar enumerates the Hijri era, whose epoch was established as the Islamic New Year in 622 CE. During that year, Muhammad and his followers migrated from Mecca to Medina and established the first Muslim community (ummah), an event commemorated as the Hijrah. In the West, dates in this era are usually denoted AH (Latin: Anno Hegirae, \"in the year of the Hijrah\"). In Muslim countries, it is also sometimes denoted as H from its Arabic form (سَنَة هِجْرِيَّة, abbreviated ھ). In English, years prior to the Hijra are denoted as BH (\"Before the Hijra\").",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Since 19 July 2023 CE, the current Islamic year is 1445 AH. In the Gregorian calendar reckoning, 1445 AH runs from 19 July 2023 to approximately 7 July 2024.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "For central Arabia, especially Mecca, there is a lack of epigraphical evidence but details are found in the writings of Muslim authors of the Abbasid era. Inscriptions of the ancient South Arabian calendars reveal the use of a number of local calendars. At least some of these South Arabian calendars followed the lunisolar system. Both al-Biruni and al-Mas'udi suggest that the ancient Arabs used the same month names as the Muslims, though they also record other month names used by the pre-Islamic Arabs.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Islamic tradition is unanimous in stating that Arabs of Tihamah, Hejaz, and Najd distinguished between two types of months, permitted (ḥalāl) and forbidden (ḥarām) months. The forbidden months were four months during which fighting is forbidden, listed as Rajab and the three months around the pilgrimage season, Dhu al-Qa‘dah, Dhu al-Hijjah, and Muharram. A similar if not identical concept to the forbidden months is also attested by Procopius, where he describes an armistice that the Eastern Arabs of the Lakhmid al-Mundhir respected for two months in the summer solstice of 541 CE. However, Muslim historians do not link these months to a particular season. The Qur'an links the four forbidden months with Nasī', a word that literally means \"postponement\". According to Muslim tradition, the decision of postponement was administered by the tribe of Kinanah, by a man known as the al-Qalammas of Kinanah and his descendants (pl. qalāmisa).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Different interpretations of the concept of Nasī' have been proposed. Some scholars, both Muslim and Western, maintain that the pre-Islamic calendar used in central Arabia was a purely lunar calendar similar to the modern Islamic calendar. According to this view, Nasī' is related to the pre-Islamic practices of the Meccan Arabs, where they would alter the distribution of the forbidden months within a given year without implying a calendar manipulation. This interpretation is supported by Arab historians and lexicographers, like Ibn Hisham, Ibn Manzur, and the corpus of Qur'anic exegesis.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "This is corroborated by an early Sabaic inscription, where a religious ritual was \"postponed\" (ns'w) due to war. According to the context of this inscription, the verb ns'’ has nothing to do with intercalation, but only with moving religious events within the calendar itself. The similarity between the religious concept of this ancient inscription and the Qur'an suggests that non-calendaring postponement is also the Qur'anic meaning of Nasī'. The Encyclopaedia of Islam concludes \"The Arabic system of [Nasī'] can only have been intended to move the Hajj and the fairs associated with it in the vicinity of Mecca to a suitable season of the year. It was not intended to establish a fixed calendar to be generally observed.\" The term \"fixed calendar\" is generally understood to refer to the non-intercalated calendar.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Others concur that it was originally a lunar calendar, but suggest that about 200 years before the Hijra it was transformed into a lunisolar calendar containing an intercalary month added from time to time to keep the pilgrimage within the season of the year when merchandise was most abundant. This interpretation was first proposed by the medieval Muslim astrologer and astronomer Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi, and later by al-Biruni, al-Mas'udi, and some western scholars. This interpretation considers Nasī' to be a synonym to the Arabic word for \"intercalation\" (kabīsa). The Arabs, according to one explanation mentioned by Abu Ma'shar, learned of this type of intercalation from the Jews. The Jewish Nasi was the official who decided when to intercalate the Jewish calendar. Some sources say that the Arabs followed the Jewish practice and intercalated seven months over nineteen years, or else that they intercalated nine months over 24 years; there is, however, no consensus among scholars on this issue.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Nasi' is interpreted to signify either the postponement of the pre-Islamic month of Hajj, or the (also pre-Islamic) practice of intercalation – periodic insertion of an additional month to reset the calendar into accordance with the seasons.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In the tenth year of the Hijra, as documented in the Qur'an (Surah At-Tawbah (9):36–37), Muslims believe God revealed the \"prohibition of the Nasī'\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Indeed, the number of months ordained by Allah is twelve—in Allah's Record since the day He created the heavens and the earth—of which four are sacred. That is the Right Way. So do not wrong one another during these months. And together fight the polytheists as they fight against you together. And know that Allah is with those mindful ˹of Him˺. Reallocating the sanctity of ˹these˺ months is an increase in disbelief, by which the disbelievers are led ˹far˺ astray. They adjust the sanctity one year and uphold it in another, only to maintain the number of months sanctified by Allah, violating the very months Allah has made sacred. Their evil deeds have been made appealing to them. And Allah does not guide the disbelieving people.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The prohibition of Nasī' would presumably have been announced when the intercalated month had returned to its position just before the month of Nasi' began. If Nasī' meant intercalation, then the number and the position of the intercalary months between AH 1 and AH 10 are uncertain; western calendar dates commonly cited for key events in early Islam such as the Hijra, the Battle of Badr, the Battle of Uhud and the Battle of the Trench should be viewed with caution as they might be in error by one, two, three or even four lunar months. This prohibition was mentioned by Muhammad during the farewell sermon which was delivered on 9 Dhu al-Hijjah AH 10 (Julian date Friday 6 March 632 CE) on Mount Arafat during the farewell pilgrimage to Mecca.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Certainly the Nasi' is an impious addition, which has led the infidels into error. One year they authorise the Nasi', another year they forbid it. They observe the divine precept with respect to the number of the sacred months, but in fact they profane that which God has declared to be inviolable, and sanctify that which God has declared to be profane. Assuredly time, in its revolution, has returned to such as it was at the creation of the heavens and the earth. In the eyes of God the number of the months is twelve. Among these twelve months four are sacred, namely, Rajab, which stands alone, and three others which are consecutive.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The three successive sacred (forbidden) months mentioned by Prophet Muhammad (months in which battles are forbidden) are Dhu al-Qa'dah, Dhu al-Hijjah, and Muharram, months 11, 12, and 1 respectively. The single forbidden month is Rajab, month 7. These months were considered forbidden both within the new Islamic calendar and within the old pagan Meccan calendar.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Traditionally, the Islamic day begins at sunset and ends at the next sunset. Each Islamic day thus begins at nightfall and ends at the end of daylight.",
"title": "Days of the week"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The days in the seven-day week are, with the exception of the last two days, named after their ordinal place in the week.",
"title": "Days of the week"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "On the sixth day of the week, the \"gathering day\" (Yawm al-Jumʿah), Muslims assemble for the Friday-prayer at a local mosque at noon. The \"gathering day\" is often regarded as the weekly day off. This is frequently made official, with many Muslim countries adopting Friday and Saturday (e.g., Egypt, Saudi Arabia) or Thursday and Friday as official weekends, during which offices are closed; other countries (e.g., Iran) choose to make Friday alone a day of rest. A few others (e.g., Turkey, Pakistan, Morocco, Nigeria, Malaysia) have adopted the Saturday-Sunday weekend while making Friday a working day with a long midday break to allow time off for worship.",
"title": "Days of the week"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Each month of the Islamic calendar commences on the birth of the new lunar cycle. Traditionally, this is based on actual observation of the moon's crescent (hilal) marking the end of the previous lunar cycle and hence the previous month, thereby beginning the new month. Consequently, each month can have 29 or 30 days depending on the visibility of the Moon, astronomical positioning of the Earth and weather conditions.",
"title": "Months "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Four of the twelve Hijri months are considered sacred: Rajab (7), and the three consecutive months of Dhū al-Qa'dah (11), Dhu al-Ḥijjah (12) and Muḥarram (1).",
"title": "Months "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The mean duration of a tropical year is 365.24219 days, while the long-term average duration of a synodic month is 29.530587981 days. Thus the average lunar year (twelve new moons) is 10.87513 days shorter than the average solar year (365.24219 − (12 × 29.530587981)), causing months of the Hijri calendar to advance about eleven days earlier each year, relative to the equinoxes. \"As a result,\" says the Astronomical Almanac, \"the cycle of twelve lunar months regresses through the seasons over a period of about 33 [solar] years\".",
"title": "Length of year"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In pre-Islamic Arabia, it was customary to identify a year after a major event which took place in it. Thus, according to Islamic tradition, Abraha, governor of Yemen, then a province of the Christian Kingdom of Aksum of Northeast Africa and South Arabia, attempted to destroy the Kaaba with an army which included several elephants. The raid was unsuccessful, but that year became known as the Year of the Elephant, during which Muhammad was born (surah al-Fil). Most equate this to the year 570 CE, but a minority use 571 CE.",
"title": "Year numbering"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The first ten years of the Hijra were not numbered, but were named after events in the life of Muhammad according to al-Biruni:",
"title": "Year numbering"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In c. 638 (17 AH), Abu Musa al-Ash'ari, one of the officials of the Rashid Caliph Umar (r. 634–644) in Basra, complained about the absence of any years on the correspondence he received from Umar, making it difficult for him to determine which instructions were most recent. This report convinced Umar of the need to introduce an era for Muslims. After debating the issue with his counsellors, he decided that the first year should be the year of Muhammad's arrival at Medina (known as Yathrib, before Muhammad's arrival). Uthman then suggested that the months begin with Muharram, in line with the established custom of the Arabs at that time. The years of the Islamic calendar thus began with the month of Muharram in the year of Muhammad's arrival at the city of Medina, even though the actual emigration took place in Safar and Rabi' I of the intercalated calendar, two months before the commencement of Muharram in the new fixed calendar. Because of the Hijra, the calendar was named the Hijri calendar.",
"title": "Year numbering"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "F A Shamsi (1984) postulated that the Arabic calendar was never intercalated. According to him, the first day of the first month of the new fixed Islamic calendar (1 Muharram AH 1) was no different from what was observed at the time. The day the Prophet moved from Quba' to Medina was originally 26 Rabi' I on the pre-Islamic calendar. 1 Muharram of the new fixed calendar corresponded to Friday, 16 July 622 CE, the equivalent civil tabular date (same daylight period) in the Julian calendar. The Islamic day began at the preceding sunset on the evening of 15 July. This Julian date (16 July) was determined by medieval Muslim astronomers by projecting back in time their own tabular Islamic calendar, which had alternating 30- and 29-day months in each lunar year plus eleven leap days every 30 years. For example, al-Biruni mentioned this Julian date in the year 1000 CE. Although not used by either medieval Muslim astronomers or modern scholars to determine the Islamic epoch, the thin crescent moon would have also first become visible (assuming clouds did not obscure it) shortly after the preceding sunset on the evening of 15 July, 1.5 days after the associated dark moon (astronomical new moon) on the morning of 14 July.",
"title": "Year numbering"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Though Michael Cook and Patricia Crone in their book Hagarism cite a coin from AH 17, the first surviving attested use of a Hijri calendar date alongside a date in another calendar (Coptic) is on a papyrus from Egypt in AH 22, PERF 558.",
"title": "Year numbering"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Due to the Islamic calendar's reliance on certain variable methods of observation to determine its month-start-dates, these dates sometimes vary slightly from the month-start-dates of the astronomical lunar calendar, which are based directly on astronomical calculations. Still, the Islamic calendar seldom varies by more than three days from the astronomical-lunar-calendar system, and roughly approximates it. Both the Islamic calendar and the astronomical-lunar-calendar take no account of the solar year in their calculations, and thus both of these strictly lunar based calendar systems have no ability to reckon the timing of the four seasons of the year.",
"title": "Astronomical considerations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In the astronomical-lunar-calendar system, a year of 12 lunar months is 354.37 days long. In this calendar system, lunar months begin precisely at the time of the monthly \"conjunction\", when the Moon is located most directly between the Earth and the Sun. The month is defined as the average duration of a revolution of the Moon around the Earth (29.53 days). By convention, months of 30 days and 29 days succeed each other, adding up over two successive months to 59 full days. This leaves only a small monthly variation of 44 minutes to account for, which adds up to a total of 24 hours (i.e., the equivalent of one full day) in 2.73 years. To settle accounts, it is sufficient to add one day every three years to the lunar calendar, in the same way that one adds one day to the Gregorian calendar every four years. The technical details of the adjustment are described in Tabular Islamic calendar.",
"title": "Astronomical considerations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The Islamic calendar, however, is based on a different set of conventions being used for the determination of the month-start-dates. Each month still has either 29 or 30 days, but due to the variable method of observations employed, there is usually no discernible order in the sequencing of either 29 or 30-day month lengths. Traditionally, the first day of each month is the day (beginning at sunset) of the first sighting of the hilal (crescent moon) shortly after sunset. If the hilal is not observed immediately after the 29th day of a month (either because clouds block its view or because the western sky is still too bright when the moon sets), then the day that begins at that sunset is the 30th. Such a sighting has to be made by one or more trustworthy men testifying before a committee of Muslim leaders. Determining the most likely day that the hilal could be observed was a motivation for Muslim interest in astronomy, which put Islam in the forefront of that science for many centuries. Still, due to the fact that both lunar reckoning systems are ultimately based on the lunar cycle itself, both systems still do roughly correspond to one another, never being more than three days out of synchronisation with one another.",
"title": "Astronomical considerations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "This traditional practice for the determination of the start-date of the month is still followed in the overwhelming majority of Muslim countries. For instance, Saudi Arabia uses the sighting method to determine the beginning of each month of the Hijri calendar. Since AH 1419 (1998/99), several official hilal sighting committees have been set up by the government to determine the first visual sighting of the lunar crescent at the beginning of each lunar month. Nevertheless, the religious authorities also allow the testimony of less experienced observers and thus often announce the sighting of the lunar crescent on a date when none of the official committees could see it.",
"title": "Astronomical considerations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Each Islamic state proceeds with its own monthly observation of the new moon (or, failing that, awaits the completion of 30 days) before declaring the beginning of a new month on its territory. However, the lunar crescent becomes visible only some 17 hours after the conjunction, and only subject to the existence of a number of favourable conditions relative to weather, time, geographic location, as well as various astronomical parameters. Given the fact that the moon sets progressively later than the sun as one goes west, with a corresponding increase in its \"age\" since conjunction, Western Muslim countries may, under favorable conditions, observe the new moon one day earlier than eastern Muslim countries. Due to the interplay of all these factors, the beginning of each month differs from one Muslim country to another, during the 48-hour period following the conjunction. The information provided by the calendar in any country does not extend beyond the current month.",
"title": "Astronomical considerations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "A number of Muslim countries try to overcome some of these difficulties by applying different astronomy-related rules to determine the beginning of months. Thus, Malaysia, Indonesia, and a few others begin each month at sunset on the first day that the moon sets after the sun (moonset after sunset). In Egypt, the month begins at sunset on the first day that the moon sets at least five minutes after the sun. A detailed analysis of the available data shows, however, that there are major discrepancies between what countries say they do on this subject, and what they actually do. In some instances, what a country says it does is impossible.",
"title": "Astronomical considerations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Due to the somewhat variable nature of the Islamic calendar, in most Muslim countries, the Islamic calendar is used primarily for religious purposes, while the Solar-based Gregorian calendar is still used primarily for matters of commerce and agriculture.",
"title": "Astronomical considerations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "If the Islamic calendar were prepared using astronomical calculations, Muslims throughout the Muslim world could use it to meet all their needs, the way they use the Gregorian calendar today. But, there are divergent views on whether it is licit to do so.",
"title": "Theological considerations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "A majority of theologians oppose the use of calculations (beyond the constraint that each month must be not less than 29 nor more than 30 days) on the grounds that the latter would not conform with Muhammad's recommendation to observe the new moon of Ramadan and Shawal in order to determine the beginning of these months.",
"title": "Theological considerations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "However, some Islamic jurists see no contradiction between Muhammad's teachings and the use of calculations to determine the beginnings of lunar months. They consider that Muhammad's recommendation was adapted to the culture of the times, and should not be confused with the acts of worship.",
"title": "Theological considerations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Thus the jurists Ahmad Muhammad Shakir and Yusuf al-Qaradawi both endorsed the use of calculations to determine the beginning of all months of the Islamic calendar, in 1939 and 2004 respectively. So did the Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA) in 2006 and the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR) in 2007.",
"title": "Theological considerations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The major Muslim associations of France also announced in 2012 that they would henceforth use a calendar based on astronomical calculations, taking into account the criteria of the possibility of crescent sighting in any place on Earth. But, shortly after the official adoption of this rule by the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) in 2013, the new leadership of the association decided, on the eve of Ramadan 2013, to follow the Saudi announcement rather than to apply the rule just adopted. This resulted in a division of the Muslim community of France, with some members following the new rule, and others following the Saudi announcement.",
"title": "Theological considerations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Isma'ili-Taiyebi Bohras having the institution of da'i al-mutlaq follow the tabular Islamic calendar (see section below) prepared on the basis of astronomical calculations from the days of Fatimid imams.",
"title": "Theological considerations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Turkish Muslims use an Islamic calendar which is calculated several years in advance by the Turkish Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı). From 1 Muharrem 1400 AH (21 November 1979) until 29 Zilhicce 1435 (24 October 2014) the computed Turkish lunar calendar was based on the following rule: \"The lunar month is assumed to begin on the evening when, within some region of the terrestrial globe, the computed centre of the lunar crescent at local sunset is more than 5° above the local horizon and (geocentrically) more than 8° from the Sun.\" In the current rule the (computed) lunar crescent has to be above the local horizon of Ankara at sunset.",
"title": "Calculated Islamic calendars"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Saudi Arabia has traditionally used the Umm al-Qura calendar, which is based on astronomical calculations, for administrative purposes. The parameters used in the establishment of this calendar underwent significant changes during the decade to AH 1423.",
"title": "Calculated Islamic calendars"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Before AH 1420 (before 18 April 1999), if the moon's age at sunset in Riyadh was at least 12 hours, then the day ending at that sunset was the first day of the month. This often caused the Saudis to celebrate holy days one or even two days before other predominantly Muslim countries, including the dates for the Hajj, which can only be dated using Saudi dates because it is performed in Mecca.",
"title": "Calculated Islamic calendars"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "From AH 1420–22, if moonset occurred after sunset at Mecca, then the day beginning at that sunset was the first day of a Saudi month, essentially the same rule used by Malaysia, Indonesia, and others (except for the location from which the hilal was observed).",
"title": "Calculated Islamic calendars"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Since the beginning of AH 1423 (16 March 2002), the rule has been clarified a little by requiring the geocentric conjunction of the sun and moon to occur before sunset, in addition to requiring moonset to occur after sunset at Mecca. This ensures that the moon has moved past the sun by sunset, even though the sky may still be too bright immediately before moonset to actually see the crescent.",
"title": "Calculated Islamic calendars"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "In 2007, the Islamic Society of North America, the Fiqh Council of North America and the European Council for Fatwa and Research announced that they would henceforth use a calendar based on calculations using the same parameters as the Umm al-Qura calendar to determine (well in advance) the beginning of all lunar months (and therefore the days associated with all religious observances). This was intended as a first step on the way to unify, at some future time, Muslims' calendars throughout the world.",
"title": "Calculated Islamic calendars"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "On 14 February 2016, Saudi Arabia adopted the Gregorian calendar for payment of the monthly salaries of government employees (as a cost cutting measure), while retaining the Islamic calendar for religious purposes.",
"title": "Calculated Islamic calendars"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The Solar Hijri calendar is a solar calendar used in Iran which counts its years from the Hijra or migration of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE.",
"title": "Other calendars using the Islamic era"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The Tabular Islamic calendar is a rule-based variation of the Islamic calendar, in which months are worked out by arithmetic rules rather than by observation or astronomical calculation. It has a 30-year cycle with 11 leap years of 355 days and 19 years of 354 days. In the long term, it is accurate to one day in about 2,500 solar years or 2,570 lunar years. It also deviates up to about one or two days in the short term.",
"title": "Tabular Islamic calendar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Microsoft uses the \"Kuwaiti algorithm\", a variant of the tabular Islamic calendar, to convert Gregorian dates to the Islamic ones. Microsoft claimed that the variant is based on a statistical analysis of historical data from Kuwait, however it matches a known tabular calendar.",
"title": "Tabular Islamic calendar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Important dates in the Islamic (Hijri) year are:",
"title": "Notable dates"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Days considered important predominantly for Shia Muslims:",
"title": "Notable dates"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The Islamic calendar is now used primarily for religious purposes, and for official dating of public events and documents in Muslim countries. Because of its nature as a purely lunar calendar, it cannot be used for agricultural purposes and historically Islamic communities have used other calendars for this purpose: the Egyptian calendar was formerly widespread in Islamic countries, and the Iranian calendar and the 1789 Ottoman calendar (a modified Julian calendar) were also used for agriculture in their countries. In the Levant and Iraq the Aramaic names of the Babylonian calendar are still used for all secular matters. In the Maghreb, Berber farmers in the countryside still use the Julian calendar for agrarian purposes. These local solar calendars have receded in importance with the near-universal adoption of the Gregorian calendar for civil purposes. Saudi Arabia uses the lunar Islamic calendar. In Indonesia, the Javanese calendar combines elements of the Islamic and pre-Islamic Saka calendars.",
"title": "Uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "British author Nicholas Hagger writes that after seizing control of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi \"declared\" on 1 December 1978 \"that the Muslim calendar should start with the death of the prophet Mohammed in 632 rather than the hijra (Mohammed's 'emigration' from Mecca to Medina) in 622\". This put the country ten solar years behind the standard Muslim calendar. However, according to the 2006 Encyclopedia of the Developing World, \"More confusing still is Qaddafi's unique Libyan calendar, which counts the years from the Prophet's birth, or sometimes from his death. The months July and August, named after Julius and Augustus Caesar, are now Nasser and Hannibal respectively.\" Reflecting on a 2001 visit to the country, American reporter Neil MacFarquhar observed, \"Life in Libya was so unpredictable that people weren't even sure what year it was. The year of my visit was officially 1369. But just two years earlier Libyans had been living through 1429. No one could quite name for me the day the count changed, especially since both remained in play. ... Event organizers threw up their hands and put the Western year in parentheses somewhere in their announcements.\"",
"title": "Uses"
}
]
| The Hijri calendar, also known in English as the Muslim calendar and Islamic calendar, is a lunar calendar consisting of 12 lunar months in a year of 354 or 355 days. It is used to determine the proper days of Islamic holidays and rituals, such as the annual fasting and the annual season for the great pilgrimage. In almost all countries where the predominant religion is Islam, the civil calendar is the Gregorian calendar, with Syriac month-names used in the Levant and Mesopotamia but the religious calendar is the Hijri one. This calendar enumerates the Hijri era, whose epoch was established as the Islamic New Year in 622 CE. During that year, Muhammad and his followers migrated from Mecca to Medina and established the first Muslim community (ummah), an event commemorated as the Hijrah. In the West, dates in this era are usually denoted AH. In Muslim countries, it is also sometimes denoted as H from its Arabic form. In English, years prior to the Hijra are denoted as BH. Since 19 July 2023 CE, the current Islamic year is 1445 AH. In the Gregorian calendar reckoning, 1445 AH runs from 19 July 2023 to approximately 7 July 2024. | 2001-11-08T05:20:12Z | 2023-12-13T05:29:46Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_calendar |
14,812 | Interquartile range | In descriptive statistics, the interquartile range (IQR) is a measure of statistical dispersion, which is the spread of the data. The IQR may also be called the midspread, middle 50%, fourth spread, or H‑spread. It is defined as the difference between the 75th and 25th percentiles of the data. To calculate the IQR, the data set is divided into quartiles, or four rank-ordered even parts via linear interpolation. These quartiles are denoted by Q1 (also called the lower quartile), Q2 (the median), and Q3 (also called the upper quartile). The lower quartile corresponds with the 25th percentile and the upper quartile corresponds with the 75th percentile, so IQR = Q3 − Q1.
The IQR is an example of a trimmed estimator, defined as the 25% trimmed range, which enhances the accuracy of dataset statistics by dropping lower contribution, outlying points. It is also used as a robust measure of scale It can be clearly visualized by the box on a box plot.
Unlike total range, the interquartile range has a breakdown point of 25% and is thus often preferred to the total range.
The IQR is used to build box plots, simple graphical representations of a probability distribution.
The IQR is used in businesses as a marker for their income rates.
For a symmetric distribution (where the median equals the midhinge, the average of the first and third quartiles), half the IQR equals the median absolute deviation (MAD).
The median is the corresponding measure of central tendency.
The IQR can be used to identify outliers (see below). The IQR also may indicate the skewness of the dataset.
The quartile deviation or semi-interquartile range is defined as half the IQR.
The IQR of a set of values is calculated as the difference between the upper and lower quartiles, Q3 and Q1. Each quartile is a median calculated as follows.
Given an even 2n or odd 2n+1 number of values
The second quartile Q2 is the same as the ordinary median.
The following table has 13 rows, and follows the rules for the odd number of entries.
For the data in this table the interquartile range is IQR = Q3 − Q1 = 119 - 31 = 88.
For the data set in this box plot:
This means the 1.5*IQR whiskers can be uneven in lengths. The median, minimum, maximum, and the first and third quartile constitute the Five-number summary.
The interquartile range of a continuous distribution can be calculated by integrating the probability density function (which yields the cumulative distribution function—any other means of calculating the CDF will also work). The lower quartile, Q1, is a number such that integral of the PDF from -∞ to Q1 equals 0.25, while the upper quartile, Q3, is such a number that the integral from -∞ to Q3 equals 0.75; in terms of the CDF, the quartiles can be defined as follows:
where CDF is the quantile function.
The interquartile range and median of some common distributions are shown below
The IQR, mean, and standard deviation of a population P can be used in a simple test of whether or not P is normally distributed, or Gaussian. If P is normally distributed, then the standard score of the first quartile, z1, is −0.67, and the standard score of the third quartile, z3, is +0.67. Given mean = P ¯ {\displaystyle {\bar {P}}} and standard deviation = σ for P, if P is normally distributed, the first quartile
and the third quartile
If the actual values of the first or third quartiles differ substantially from the calculated values, P is not normally distributed. However, a normal distribution can be trivially perturbed to maintain its Q1 and Q2 std. scores at 0.67 and −0.67 and not be normally distributed (so the above test would produce a false positive). A better test of normality, such as Q–Q plot would be indicated here.
The interquartile range is often used to find outliers in data. Outliers here are defined as observations that fall below Q1 − 1.5 IQR or above Q3 + 1.5 IQR. In a boxplot, the highest and lowest occurring value within this limit are indicated by whiskers of the box (frequently with an additional bar at the end of the whisker) and any outliers as individual points. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "In descriptive statistics, the interquartile range (IQR) is a measure of statistical dispersion, which is the spread of the data. The IQR may also be called the midspread, middle 50%, fourth spread, or H‑spread. It is defined as the difference between the 75th and 25th percentiles of the data. To calculate the IQR, the data set is divided into quartiles, or four rank-ordered even parts via linear interpolation. These quartiles are denoted by Q1 (also called the lower quartile), Q2 (the median), and Q3 (also called the upper quartile). The lower quartile corresponds with the 25th percentile and the upper quartile corresponds with the 75th percentile, so IQR = Q3 − Q1.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The IQR is an example of a trimmed estimator, defined as the 25% trimmed range, which enhances the accuracy of dataset statistics by dropping lower contribution, outlying points. It is also used as a robust measure of scale It can be clearly visualized by the box on a box plot.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Unlike total range, the interquartile range has a breakdown point of 25% and is thus often preferred to the total range.",
"title": "Use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The IQR is used to build box plots, simple graphical representations of a probability distribution.",
"title": "Use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The IQR is used in businesses as a marker for their income rates.",
"title": "Use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "For a symmetric distribution (where the median equals the midhinge, the average of the first and third quartiles), half the IQR equals the median absolute deviation (MAD).",
"title": "Use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The median is the corresponding measure of central tendency.",
"title": "Use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The IQR can be used to identify outliers (see below). The IQR also may indicate the skewness of the dataset.",
"title": "Use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The quartile deviation or semi-interquartile range is defined as half the IQR.",
"title": "Use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The IQR of a set of values is calculated as the difference between the upper and lower quartiles, Q3 and Q1. Each quartile is a median calculated as follows.",
"title": "Algorithm"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Given an even 2n or odd 2n+1 number of values",
"title": "Algorithm"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The second quartile Q2 is the same as the ordinary median.",
"title": "Algorithm"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The following table has 13 rows, and follows the rules for the odd number of entries.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "For the data in this table the interquartile range is IQR = Q3 − Q1 = 119 - 31 = 88.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "For the data set in this box plot:",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "This means the 1.5*IQR whiskers can be uneven in lengths. The median, minimum, maximum, and the first and third quartile constitute the Five-number summary.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The interquartile range of a continuous distribution can be calculated by integrating the probability density function (which yields the cumulative distribution function—any other means of calculating the CDF will also work). The lower quartile, Q1, is a number such that integral of the PDF from -∞ to Q1 equals 0.25, while the upper quartile, Q3, is such a number that the integral from -∞ to Q3 equals 0.75; in terms of the CDF, the quartiles can be defined as follows:",
"title": "Distributions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "where CDF is the quantile function.",
"title": "Distributions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The interquartile range and median of some common distributions are shown below",
"title": "Distributions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The IQR, mean, and standard deviation of a population P can be used in a simple test of whether or not P is normally distributed, or Gaussian. If P is normally distributed, then the standard score of the first quartile, z1, is −0.67, and the standard score of the third quartile, z3, is +0.67. Given mean = P ¯ {\\displaystyle {\\bar {P}}} and standard deviation = σ for P, if P is normally distributed, the first quartile",
"title": "Distributions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "and the third quartile",
"title": "Distributions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "If the actual values of the first or third quartiles differ substantially from the calculated values, P is not normally distributed. However, a normal distribution can be trivially perturbed to maintain its Q1 and Q2 std. scores at 0.67 and −0.67 and not be normally distributed (so the above test would produce a false positive). A better test of normality, such as Q–Q plot would be indicated here.",
"title": "Distributions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The interquartile range is often used to find outliers in data. Outliers here are defined as observations that fall below Q1 − 1.5 IQR or above Q3 + 1.5 IQR. In a boxplot, the highest and lowest occurring value within this limit are indicated by whiskers of the box (frequently with an additional bar at the end of the whisker) and any outliers as individual points.",
"title": "Outliers"
}
]
| In descriptive statistics, the interquartile range (IQR) is a measure of statistical dispersion, which is the spread of the data. The IQR may also be called the midspread, middle 50%, fourth spread, or H‑spread. It is defined as the difference between the 75th and 25th percentiles of the data. To calculate the IQR, the data set is divided into quartiles, or four rank-ordered even parts via linear interpolation. These quartiles are denoted by Q1 (also called the lower quartile), Q2 (the median), and Q3 (also called the upper quartile). The lower quartile corresponds with the 25th percentile and the upper quartile corresponds with the 75th percentile, so IQR = Q3 − Q1. The IQR is an example of a trimmed estimator, defined as the 25% trimmed range, which enhances the accuracy of dataset statistics by dropping lower contribution, outlying points. It is also used as a robust measure of scale It can be clearly visualized by the box on a box plot. | 2001-02-26T18:32:21Z | 2023-12-17T15:13:05Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interquartile_range |
14,814 | Indiana Jones (character) | Dr. Henry Walton "Indiana" Jones, Jr. is the title character and protagonist of the Indiana Jones franchise. George Lucas created the character in homage to the action heroes of 1930s film serials. The character first appeared in the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark, to be followed by Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 1984, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in 1989, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles from 1992 to 1996, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008, and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny in 2023. The character is also featured in novels, comics, video games, and other media. Jones is also the inspiration for several Disney theme park attractions, including Indiana Jones et le Temple du Péril, the Indiana Jones Adventure, and Epic Stunt Spectacular! attractions.
Jones is most famously portrayed by Harrison Ford and has also been portrayed by River Phoenix (as the young Jones in The Last Crusade), and by Corey Carrier, Sean Patrick Flanery, and George Hall in the television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Doug Lee has supplied the voice of Jones for two LucasArts video games, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, David Esch supplied his voice for Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb, and John Armstrong for Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings.
Jones is characterized by his iconic accoutrements (bullwhip, fedora, satchel, and leather jacket), wry, witty and sarcastic sense of humor, deep knowledge of ancient civilizations and languages, and fear of snakes.
Since his first appearance in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones has become one of cinema's most famous characters. In 2003, the American Film Institute ranked him the second-greatest film hero of all time. He was also named the greatest movie character by Empire magazine. Entertainment Weekly ranked Jones 2nd on their list of The All-Time Coolest Heroes in Pop Culture. Premiere magazine also placed Jones at number 7 on their list of The 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time.
A native of Princeton, New Jersey, Indiana Jones was introduced as a tenured professor of archaeology in the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark, set in 1936. The Joneses are a family of paternal Scottish descent. The character is an adventurer reminiscent of the 1930s film serial treasure hunters and pulp action heroes. His research is funded by Marshall College (a fictional school named after producer Frank Marshall), where he is a professor of archaeology. He studied under the Egyptologist and archaeologist Abner Ravenwood at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago.
In the first adventure, Raiders of the Lost Ark, set in 1936, Indiana Jones is pitted against Nazis commissioned by Hitler to recover artifacts of great power from the Old Testament (see Nazi archaeology). In consequence, Jones travels the world to prevent them from recovering the Ark of the Covenant (see also Biblical archaeology). He is aided by Marion Ravenwood and Sallah. The Nazis are led by Jones' archrival, a Nazi-sympathizing French archaeologist named René Belloq, and Arnold Toht, a sinister Gestapo agent.
In the 1984 prequel, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, set in 1935, Jones travels to India and attempts to free enslaved children and the three Sankara stones from the bloodthirsty Thuggee cult. He is aided by Wan "Short Round" Li, a boy played by Ke Huy Quan, and is accompanied by singer Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw). The prequel is not as centered on archaeology as Raiders of the Lost Ark and is considerably darker.
The third film, 1989's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, set in 1938, returned to the formula of the original, reintroducing characters such as Sallah and Marcus Brody, a scene from Professor Jones' classroom (he now teaches at Barnett College), the globe-trotting element of multiple locations, and the return of the infamous Nazi mystics, this time trying to find the Holy Grail. The film's introduction, set in 1912, provided some backstory to the character, specifically the origin of his fear of snakes, his use of a bullwhip, the scar on his chin, and his hat; the film's epilogue also reveals that "Indiana" is not Jones' first name, but a nickname he took from the family dog. The film was a buddy movie of sorts, teaming Indiana with his father, Henry Jones, Sr., often to comical effect. Although Lucas intended to make five Indiana Jones films, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was the last for over 18 years, as he could not think of a good plot element to drive the next installment.
From 1992 to 1996, Lucas wrote and executive-produced The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, a television series aimed mainly at teenagers and children, which showed many of the important events and historical figures of the early 20th century through the prism of Jones' life.
The show initially featured the formula of an elderly (93 to 94 years of age) Indiana Jones played by George Hall introducing a story from his youth by way of an anecdote: the main part of the episode then featured an adventure with either a young adult Indy (16 to 21 years of age) played by Sean Patrick Flanery or a child Indy (8 to 10 years) played by Corey Carrier. One episode, "Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues", is bookended by Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, rather than Hall. Later episodes and telemovies did not have this bookend format.
The bulk of the series centers around the young adult Indiana Jones and his activities during World War I as a 16- to 17-year-old soldier in the Belgian Army and then as an intelligence officer and spy seconded to French intelligence. The child Indiana episodes follow the boy's travels around the globe as he accompanies his parents on his father's worldwide lecture tour from 1908 to 1910.
The show provided some backstory for the films, as well as new information regarding the character. Indiana Jones was born July 1, 1899, and his middle name is Walton (Lucas's middle name). It is also mentioned that he had a sister called Suzie who died as an infant of fever, and that he eventually has a daughter and grandchildren who appear in some episode introductions and epilogues. His relationship with his father, first introduced in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, was further fleshed out with stories about his travels with his father as a young boy. Jones damages or loses his right eye sometime between the events in 1969 and the early 1990s, when the "Old Indy" segments take place, as the elderly Indiana Jones wears an eyepatch.
In 1999, Lucas removed the episode introductions and epilogues by George Hall for the VHS and DVD releases and re-edited the episodes into chronologically ordered feature-length stories. The series title was also changed to The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones.
The 2008 film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, is the fourth film in the series. Set in 1957, nineteen years after the third film, it pits an older, wiser Indiana Jones against Soviet KGB agents bent on harnessing the power of an extraterrestrial device discovered in South America. Jones is aided in his adventure by his former lover, Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), and her son—a young greaser named Henry "Mutt" Williams (Shia LaBeouf), later revealed to be Jones' unknown child. There were rumors that Harrison Ford would not return for any future installments and LaBeouf would take over the franchise. This film also reveals that Jones was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, attaining the rank of colonel in the United States Army, and that in 1947 he was forced to investigate the Roswell UFO incident, and the investigation saw that he was involved in affairs related to Hangar 51. He is tasked with conducting covert operations with MI6 agent George McHale against the Soviet Union.
The 2023 film, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, is the fifth and final film in the series. Set in 1969—twelve years after the fourth film and during the height of the Space Race—Jones has moved to New York City, teaching at Hunter College with plans to retire, after his marriage with Marion collapsed following Mutt's death in the Vietnam War. Once his estranged goddaughter Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) arrives asking for Archimedes' Dial, a relic Jones and her father Basil retrieved from the Nazis in 1944 during the Allied liberation of Europe in World War II, a Nazi-turned-NASA scientist Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) starts pursuing Jones, wanting to exploit the Dial's unusual properties to change the outcome of World War II.
Indiana Jones is featured at several Walt Disney theme park attractions. The Indiana Jones Adventure attractions at Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea ("Temple of the Forbidden Eye" and "Temple of the Crystal Skull," respectively) place Indy at the forefront of two similar archaeological discoveries. These two temples each contain a wrathful deity who threatens the guests who ride through World War II troop transports. The attractions, some of the most expensive of their kind at the time, opened in 1995 and 2001, respectively, with sole design credit attributed to Walt Disney Imagineering. Ford was approached to reprise his role as Indiana Jones, but ultimately negotiations to secure Ford's participation broke down in December 1994, for unknown reasons. Instead, Dave Temple provided the voice of Jones. Ford's physical likeness, however, has nonetheless been used in subsequent Audio-animatronic figures for the attractions.
Disneyland Paris also features an Indiana Jones-titled ride where people speed off through ancient ruins in a runaway mine wagon similar to that found in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Peril is a looping roller coaster engineered by Intamin, designed by Walt Disney Imagineering, and opened in 1993.
The Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular! is a live show that has been presented in the Disney's Hollywood Studios theme park of the Walt Disney World Resort with few changes since the park's 1989 opening, as Disney-MGM Studios. The 25-minute show presents various stunts framed in the context of a feature film production and recruits members of the audience to participate in the show. Stunt artists in the show re-create and ultimately reveal some of the secrets of the stunts of the Raiders of the Lost Ark films, including the well-known "running-from-the-boulder" scene. Stunt performer Anislav Varbanov was fatally injured in August 2009, while rehearsing the show. Also formerly at Disney's Hollywood Studios, an audio-animatronic Indiana Jones appeared in another attraction; during The Great Movie Ride's Raiders of the Lost Ark segment.
Indiana Jones has appeared in numerous comic books, from two different publishers. Marvel Comics initially held the comic book licensing rights, leading to adaptations of the films Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Following the Raiders of the Lost Ark adaptation, Marvel published The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones from 1983 to 1986. This ongoing monthly series ran for thirty-four issues and featured the character's first original adventures in comic book form.
After Marvel's licensing of the character ended, Dark Horse Comics acquired publishing rights and adapted the Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis video game. From 1992 to 1996, following the Fate of Atlantis adaptation, Dark Horse published seven limited series, as well comics based on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles television series. In 2004, Indiana Jones appeared in the non-canon story, "Into the Great Unknown", first published in Star Wars Tales #19. The story sees Indiana Jones and Short Round discover a crashed Millennium Falcon in the Pacific Northwest, along with Han Solo's skeleton and the realization that a rumored nearby Sasquatch is Chewbacca. With the franchise's revival in 2008, Dark Horse published an adaptation of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Dark Horse followed this with Indiana Jones Adventures, a short-lived series of digest-sized comics aimed at children. An additional limited series, titled Indiana Jones and the Tomb of the Gods, was also published from 2008 to 2009.
The first four Indiana Jones film scripts were novelized and published in the time frame of the films' initial releases. Raiders of the Lost Ark was novelized by Campbell Black based on the script by Lawrence Kasdan that was based on the story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman and published in April 1981 by Ballantine Books; Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was novelized by James Kahn and based on the script by Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz that was based on the story by George Lucas and published May 1984 by Ballantine Books; Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was novelized by Rob MacGregor based on the script by Jeffrey Boam that was based on a story by George Lucas and Menno Meyjes and published June 1989 by Ballantine Books.
Nearly 20 years later Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was novelized by James Rollins based on the script by David Koepp based on the story by George Lucas and Jeff Nathanson and published in May 2008 by Ballantine Books. In addition, in 2008 to accompany the release of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Scholastic Books published juvenile novelizations of the four scripts written, successively in the order above, by Ryder Windham, Suzanne Weyn, Ryder Windham, and James Luceno. All these books have been reprinted, with Raiders of the Lost Ark being retitled Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. While these are the principal titles and authors, there are numerous other volumes derived from the four film properties.
From February 1991 through February 1999, 12 original Indiana Jones-themed adult novels were licensed by Lucasfilm, Ltd. and written by three genre authors of the period. Ten years afterward, a 13th original novel was added, also written by a popular genre author. The first 12 were published by Bantam Books; the last by Ballantine Books in 2009. (See Indiana Jones (franchise) for broad descriptions of these original adult novels.) The novels are:
The character has appeared in several officially licensed games, beginning with adaptations of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, two adaptations of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (one with purely action mechanics, one with an adventure- and puzzle-based structure) and Indiana Jones' Greatest Adventures, which included the storylines from all three of the original films.
Following this, the games branched off into original storylines with Indiana Jones in the Lost Kingdom, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb and Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings. Emperor's Tomb sets up Jones' companion Wu Han and the search for Nurhaci's ashes seen at the beginning of Temple of Doom. The first two games were developed by Hal Barwood and starred Doug Lee as the voice of Indiana Jones; Emperor's Tomb had David Esch fill the role and Staff of Kings starred John Armstrong.
Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine was the first Indy-based game presented in three dimensions, as opposed to 8-bit graphics and side-scrolling games before.
There is also a small game from Lucas Arts Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures. A video game was made for young Indy called Young Indiana Jones and the Instruments of Chaos, as well as a video game version of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.
Two Lego Indiana Jones games have also been released. Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures was released in 2008 and follows the plots of the first three films. It was followed by Lego Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues in late 2009. The sequel includes an abbreviated reprise of the first three films, but focuses on the plot of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. However, before he got his own Lego games, he appeared as a secret character in Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga as a playable character. He also makes a brief appearance in a minigame in Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars during the level "Hostage Crisis", and also made a cameo alongside Henry Jones Sr. in the level "Legacy of Terror".
Social gaming company Zynga introduced Indiana Jones to their Adventure World game in late 2011.
Indiana Jones is parodied in the shooter game Broforce as a playable character known as Indiana Brones.
He is also parodied in an action-adventure sandbox game Terraria as a rare enemy known as Doctor Bones, which appears as a zombified version of himself.
Indiana Jones appears in Fortnite Battle Royale as part of the Chapter 3 Season 3 Battle pass.
The world building game Disney Magic Kingdoms includes Indiana Jones as a playable character to unlock for a limited time.
An original Indiana Jones game is currently in development by MachineGames and set to be published by Bethesda Softworks for Windows and Xbox Series X/S. It will feature a standalone narrative expected to take place in Italy during 1939, placing it between the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
"Indiana" Jones's full name is Dr. Henry Walton Jones, Jr., and his nickname is often shortened to "Indy".
In his role as a college professor of archaeology Jones is scholarly, wears a tweed suit, and lectures on ancient civilizations. At the opportunity to recover important artifacts, Dr. Jones transforms into "Indiana," a "non-superhero superhero" image he has concocted for himself. Producer Frank Marshall said, "Indy [is] a fallible character. He makes mistakes and gets hurt. ... That's the other thing people like: He's a real character, not a character with superpowers." Spielberg said there "was the willingness to allow our leading man to get hurt and to express his pain and to get his mad out and to take pratfalls and sometimes be the butt of his own jokes. I mean, Indiana Jones is not a perfect hero, and his imperfections, I think, make the audience feel that, with a little more exercise and a little more courage, they could be just like him." According to Spielberg biographer Douglas Brode, Indiana created his heroic figure so as to escape the dullness of teaching at a school. Both of Indiana's personas reject one another in philosophy, creating a duality. Harrison Ford said the fun of playing the character was that Indiana is both a romantic and a cynic, while scholars have analyzed Indiana as having traits of a lone wolf; a man on a quest; a noble treasure hunter; a hardboiled detective; a human superhero; and an American patriot.
Like many characters in his films, Jones has some autobiographical elements of Spielberg. Indiana lacks a proper father figure because of his strained relationship with his father, Henry Jones, Sr. His own contained anger is misdirected towards Professor Abner Ravenwood, his mentor at the University of Chicago, leading to a strained relationship with Marion Ravenwood. The teenage Indiana bases his own look on a figure from the prologue of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, after being given his hat. Marcus Brody acts as Indiana's positive role model at the college. Indiana's own insecurities are made worse by the absence of his mother. In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, he becomes the father figure to Short Round, to survive; he is rescued from Kali's evil by Short Round's dedication. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, he is wise enough to close his eyes in the presence of God in the Ark of the Covenant. By contrast, his rival Rene Belloq is killed for having the audacity to try to communicate directly with God.
In the prologue of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Jones is seen as a teenager, establishing his look when given a fedora hat. Indiana's intentions are revealed as prosocial, as he believes artifacts "belong in a museum." In the film's climax, Indiana undergoes "literal" tests of faith to retrieve the Grail and save his father's life. He also remembers Jesus as a historical figure—a humble carpenter—rather than an exalted figure when he recognizes the simple nature and tarnished appearance of the real Grail amongst a large assortment of much more ornately decorated ones. Henry Senior rescues his son from falling to his death when reaching for the fallen Grail, telling him to "let it go," overcoming his mercenary nature. The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles explains how Indiana becomes solitary and less idealistic following his service in World War I. In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Jones is older and wiser, whereas his sidekicks Mutt and Mac are youthfully arrogant, and greedy, respectively.
Indiana Jones is modeled after the strong-jawed heroes of the matinée serials and pulp magazines that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg enjoyed in their childhoods (such as the Republic Pictures serials, and the Doc Savage series). Sir H. Rider Haggard's safari guide/big game hunter Allan Quatermain of King Solomon's Mines is a notable template for Jones. The two friends first discussed the project in Hawaii around the time of the release of the first Star Wars film. Spielberg told Lucas how he wanted his next project to be something fun, like a James Bond film (this would later be referenced when they cast Sean Connery as Henry Jones, Sr.). According to sources, Lucas responded to the effect that he had something "even better", or that he'd "got that beat."
One of the possible bases for Indiana Jones is Professor Challenger, created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1912 for his novel, The Lost World. Challenger was based on Doyle's physiology professor, William Rutherford, an adventuring academic, albeit a zoologist/anthropologist.
Another important influence on the development of the character Indiana Jones is the Disney character Scrooge McDuck. Carl Barks created Scrooge in 1947 as a one-off relation for Donald Duck in the latter's self-titled comic book. Barks realized that the character had more potential, so a separate Uncle Scrooge comic book series full of exciting and strange adventures in the company of his duck nephews was developed. This Uncle Scrooge comic series strongly influenced George Lucas. This appreciation of Scrooge as an adventurer influenced the development of Jones, with the prologue of Raiders of the Lost Ark containing homage to Barks' Scrooge adventure "The Seven Cities of Cibola", published in Uncle Scrooge #7 from September 1954. This homage in the film takes the form of playfully mimicking the removal-of-the-statuette-from-its-pedestal and the falling-stone sequences of the comic book.
The character was originally named Indiana Smith, after an Alaskan Malamute called Indiana that Lucas owned in the 1970s and on which he based the Star Wars character Chewbacca. Spielberg disliked the name Smith, and Lucas casually suggested Jones as an alternative. The Last Crusade script references the name's origin, with Jones' father revealing his son's birth name to be Henry and explaining that "we named the dog Indiana", to his son's chagrin. Some have also posited that C.L. Moore's science fiction character Northwest Smith may have also influenced Lucas and Spielberg in their naming choice.
Lucas has said on various occasions that Sean Connery's portrayal of British secret agent James Bond was one of the primary inspirations for Jones, a reason Connery was chosen for the role of Indiana's father in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Spielberg earned the rank of Eagle Scout and Ford the Life Scout badge in their youth, which gave them the inspiration to portray Indiana Jones as a Life Scout at age 13 in The Last Crusade.
Many people are said to be the real-life inspiration of the Indiana Jones character—although none of the following have been confirmed as inspirations by Lucas or Spielberg. There are some suggestions listed here in alphabetical order by last name:
Upon requests by Spielberg and Lucas, the costume designer gave the character a distinctive silhouette through the styling of the hat; after examining many hats, the designers chose a tall-crowned, wide-brimmed fedora. As a documentary of Raiders pointed out, the hat served a practical purpose. Following the lead of the old "B"-movies that inspired the Indiana Jones series, the fedora hid the actor's face sufficiently to allow doubles to perform the more dangerous stunts seamlessly. Examples in Raiders include the wider-angle shot of Indy and Marion crashing a statue through a wall, and Indy sliding under a fast-moving vehicle from front to back. Thus it was necessary for the hat to stay in place much of the time.
The hat became so iconic that the filmmakers could only come up with very good reasons or jokes to remove it. If it ever fell off during a take, filming would have to stop to put it back on. In jest, Ford put a stapler against his head to stop his hat from falling off when a documentary crew visited during shooting of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. This created the urban legend that Ford stapled the hat to his head. Anytime Indy's hat accidentally came off as part of the storyline (blown off by the wind, knocked off, etc.) and seemed almost irretrievable, filmmakers would make sure Indy and his hat were always reunited, regardless of the implausibility of its return. Although other hats were also used throughout the films, the general style and profile remained the same. Elements of the outfit include:
The fedora and leather jacket from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade are on display at the Smithsonian Institution's American History Museum in Washington, D.C. The collecting of props and clothing from the films has become a thriving hobby for some aficionados of the franchise. Jones' whip was the third most popular film weapon, as shown by a 2008 poll held by 20th Century Fox, which surveyed approximately two thousand film fans.
Originally, Spielberg suggested Harrison Ford; Lucas resisted the idea, since he had already cast the actor in American Graffiti, Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, and did not want Ford to become known as his "Bobby De Niro" (in reference to the fact that fellow director Martin Scorsese regularly casts Robert De Niro in his films). During an intensive casting process, Lucas and Spielberg auditioned many actors, and finally cast actor Tom Selleck as Indiana Jones. Shortly afterward pre-production began in earnest on Raiders of the Lost Ark. CBS refused to release Selleck from his contractual commitment to Magnum, P.I., forcing him to turn down the role. Shooting for the film could have overlapped with the pilot for Magnum, P.I. but it later turned out that filming of the pilot episode was delayed and Selleck could have done both.
Subsequently, Peter Coyote and Tim Matheson both auditioned for the role. After Spielberg suggested Ford again, Lucas relented, and Ford was cast in the role less than three weeks before filming began.
The industry magazine Archaeology named eight past and present archaeologists who they felt "embodied [Jones's] spirit" as recipients of the Indy Spirit Awards in 2008. That same year Ford himself was elected to the board of directors for the Archaeological Institute of America. Commenting that "understanding the past can only help us in dealing with the present and the future," Ford was praised by the association's president for his character's "significant role in stimulating the public's interest in archaeological exploration."
He is perhaps the most influential character in films that explore archaeology. Since the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, the very idea of archaeology and archaeologists has fundamentally shifted. Prior to the film's release, the stereotypical image of an archaeologist was that of an older, lackluster professor type. In the early years of films involving archaeologists, they were portrayed as victims who would need to be rescued by a more masculine or heroic figure. Following 1981, the stereotypical archaeologist was thought of as an adventurer consistently engaged in fieldwork.
Archeologist Anne Pyburn described the influence of Indiana Jones as elitist and sexist, and argued that the film series had caused new discoveries in the field of archaeology to become oversimplified and overhyped in an attempt to gain public interest, which negatively influences archaeology as a whole. Eric Powell, an editor with the magazine Archaeology, said "O.K., fine, the movie romanticizes what we do", and that "Indy may be a horrible archeologist, but he's a great diplomat for archeology. I think we'll see a spike in kids who want to become archeologists". Kevin McGeough, associate professor of archaeology, describes the original archaeological criticism of the film as missing the point of the film: "dramatic interest is what is at issue, and it is unlikely that film will change in order to promote and foster better archaeological techniques".
While himself an homage to various prior adventurers, aspects of Indiana Jones also directly influenced some subsequent characterizations: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Dr. Henry Walton \"Indiana\" Jones, Jr. is the title character and protagonist of the Indiana Jones franchise. George Lucas created the character in homage to the action heroes of 1930s film serials. The character first appeared in the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark, to be followed by Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 1984, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in 1989, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles from 1992 to 1996, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008, and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny in 2023. The character is also featured in novels, comics, video games, and other media. Jones is also the inspiration for several Disney theme park attractions, including Indiana Jones et le Temple du Péril, the Indiana Jones Adventure, and Epic Stunt Spectacular! attractions.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Jones is most famously portrayed by Harrison Ford and has also been portrayed by River Phoenix (as the young Jones in The Last Crusade), and by Corey Carrier, Sean Patrick Flanery, and George Hall in the television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Doug Lee has supplied the voice of Jones for two LucasArts video games, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, David Esch supplied his voice for Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb, and John Armstrong for Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Jones is characterized by his iconic accoutrements (bullwhip, fedora, satchel, and leather jacket), wry, witty and sarcastic sense of humor, deep knowledge of ancient civilizations and languages, and fear of snakes.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Since his first appearance in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones has become one of cinema's most famous characters. In 2003, the American Film Institute ranked him the second-greatest film hero of all time. He was also named the greatest movie character by Empire magazine. Entertainment Weekly ranked Jones 2nd on their list of The All-Time Coolest Heroes in Pop Culture. Premiere magazine also placed Jones at number 7 on their list of The 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "A native of Princeton, New Jersey, Indiana Jones was introduced as a tenured professor of archaeology in the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark, set in 1936. The Joneses are a family of paternal Scottish descent. The character is an adventurer reminiscent of the 1930s film serial treasure hunters and pulp action heroes. His research is funded by Marshall College (a fictional school named after producer Frank Marshall), where he is a professor of archaeology. He studied under the Egyptologist and archaeologist Abner Ravenwood at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago.",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In the first adventure, Raiders of the Lost Ark, set in 1936, Indiana Jones is pitted against Nazis commissioned by Hitler to recover artifacts of great power from the Old Testament (see Nazi archaeology). In consequence, Jones travels the world to prevent them from recovering the Ark of the Covenant (see also Biblical archaeology). He is aided by Marion Ravenwood and Sallah. The Nazis are led by Jones' archrival, a Nazi-sympathizing French archaeologist named René Belloq, and Arnold Toht, a sinister Gestapo agent.",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In the 1984 prequel, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, set in 1935, Jones travels to India and attempts to free enslaved children and the three Sankara stones from the bloodthirsty Thuggee cult. He is aided by Wan \"Short Round\" Li, a boy played by Ke Huy Quan, and is accompanied by singer Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw). The prequel is not as centered on archaeology as Raiders of the Lost Ark and is considerably darker.",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The third film, 1989's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, set in 1938, returned to the formula of the original, reintroducing characters such as Sallah and Marcus Brody, a scene from Professor Jones' classroom (he now teaches at Barnett College), the globe-trotting element of multiple locations, and the return of the infamous Nazi mystics, this time trying to find the Holy Grail. The film's introduction, set in 1912, provided some backstory to the character, specifically the origin of his fear of snakes, his use of a bullwhip, the scar on his chin, and his hat; the film's epilogue also reveals that \"Indiana\" is not Jones' first name, but a nickname he took from the family dog. The film was a buddy movie of sorts, teaming Indiana with his father, Henry Jones, Sr., often to comical effect. Although Lucas intended to make five Indiana Jones films, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was the last for over 18 years, as he could not think of a good plot element to drive the next installment.",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "From 1992 to 1996, Lucas wrote and executive-produced The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, a television series aimed mainly at teenagers and children, which showed many of the important events and historical figures of the early 20th century through the prism of Jones' life.",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The show initially featured the formula of an elderly (93 to 94 years of age) Indiana Jones played by George Hall introducing a story from his youth by way of an anecdote: the main part of the episode then featured an adventure with either a young adult Indy (16 to 21 years of age) played by Sean Patrick Flanery or a child Indy (8 to 10 years) played by Corey Carrier. One episode, \"Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues\", is bookended by Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, rather than Hall. Later episodes and telemovies did not have this bookend format.",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The bulk of the series centers around the young adult Indiana Jones and his activities during World War I as a 16- to 17-year-old soldier in the Belgian Army and then as an intelligence officer and spy seconded to French intelligence. The child Indiana episodes follow the boy's travels around the globe as he accompanies his parents on his father's worldwide lecture tour from 1908 to 1910.",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The show provided some backstory for the films, as well as new information regarding the character. Indiana Jones was born July 1, 1899, and his middle name is Walton (Lucas's middle name). It is also mentioned that he had a sister called Suzie who died as an infant of fever, and that he eventually has a daughter and grandchildren who appear in some episode introductions and epilogues. His relationship with his father, first introduced in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, was further fleshed out with stories about his travels with his father as a young boy. Jones damages or loses his right eye sometime between the events in 1969 and the early 1990s, when the \"Old Indy\" segments take place, as the elderly Indiana Jones wears an eyepatch.",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In 1999, Lucas removed the episode introductions and epilogues by George Hall for the VHS and DVD releases and re-edited the episodes into chronologically ordered feature-length stories. The series title was also changed to The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones.",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The 2008 film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, is the fourth film in the series. Set in 1957, nineteen years after the third film, it pits an older, wiser Indiana Jones against Soviet KGB agents bent on harnessing the power of an extraterrestrial device discovered in South America. Jones is aided in his adventure by his former lover, Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), and her son—a young greaser named Henry \"Mutt\" Williams (Shia LaBeouf), later revealed to be Jones' unknown child. There were rumors that Harrison Ford would not return for any future installments and LaBeouf would take over the franchise. This film also reveals that Jones was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, attaining the rank of colonel in the United States Army, and that in 1947 he was forced to investigate the Roswell UFO incident, and the investigation saw that he was involved in affairs related to Hangar 51. He is tasked with conducting covert operations with MI6 agent George McHale against the Soviet Union.",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The 2023 film, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, is the fifth and final film in the series. Set in 1969—twelve years after the fourth film and during the height of the Space Race—Jones has moved to New York City, teaching at Hunter College with plans to retire, after his marriage with Marion collapsed following Mutt's death in the Vietnam War. Once his estranged goddaughter Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) arrives asking for Archimedes' Dial, a relic Jones and her father Basil retrieved from the Nazis in 1944 during the Allied liberation of Europe in World War II, a Nazi-turned-NASA scientist Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) starts pursuing Jones, wanting to exploit the Dial's unusual properties to change the outcome of World War II.",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Indiana Jones is featured at several Walt Disney theme park attractions. The Indiana Jones Adventure attractions at Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea (\"Temple of the Forbidden Eye\" and \"Temple of the Crystal Skull,\" respectively) place Indy at the forefront of two similar archaeological discoveries. These two temples each contain a wrathful deity who threatens the guests who ride through World War II troop transports. The attractions, some of the most expensive of their kind at the time, opened in 1995 and 2001, respectively, with sole design credit attributed to Walt Disney Imagineering. Ford was approached to reprise his role as Indiana Jones, but ultimately negotiations to secure Ford's participation broke down in December 1994, for unknown reasons. Instead, Dave Temple provided the voice of Jones. Ford's physical likeness, however, has nonetheless been used in subsequent Audio-animatronic figures for the attractions.",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Disneyland Paris also features an Indiana Jones-titled ride where people speed off through ancient ruins in a runaway mine wagon similar to that found in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Peril is a looping roller coaster engineered by Intamin, designed by Walt Disney Imagineering, and opened in 1993.",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular! is a live show that has been presented in the Disney's Hollywood Studios theme park of the Walt Disney World Resort with few changes since the park's 1989 opening, as Disney-MGM Studios. The 25-minute show presents various stunts framed in the context of a feature film production and recruits members of the audience to participate in the show. Stunt artists in the show re-create and ultimately reveal some of the secrets of the stunts of the Raiders of the Lost Ark films, including the well-known \"running-from-the-boulder\" scene. Stunt performer Anislav Varbanov was fatally injured in August 2009, while rehearsing the show. Also formerly at Disney's Hollywood Studios, an audio-animatronic Indiana Jones appeared in another attraction; during The Great Movie Ride's Raiders of the Lost Ark segment.",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Indiana Jones has appeared in numerous comic books, from two different publishers. Marvel Comics initially held the comic book licensing rights, leading to adaptations of the films Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Following the Raiders of the Lost Ark adaptation, Marvel published The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones from 1983 to 1986. This ongoing monthly series ran for thirty-four issues and featured the character's first original adventures in comic book form.",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "After Marvel's licensing of the character ended, Dark Horse Comics acquired publishing rights and adapted the Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis video game. From 1992 to 1996, following the Fate of Atlantis adaptation, Dark Horse published seven limited series, as well comics based on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles television series. In 2004, Indiana Jones appeared in the non-canon story, \"Into the Great Unknown\", first published in Star Wars Tales #19. The story sees Indiana Jones and Short Round discover a crashed Millennium Falcon in the Pacific Northwest, along with Han Solo's skeleton and the realization that a rumored nearby Sasquatch is Chewbacca. With the franchise's revival in 2008, Dark Horse published an adaptation of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Dark Horse followed this with Indiana Jones Adventures, a short-lived series of digest-sized comics aimed at children. An additional limited series, titled Indiana Jones and the Tomb of the Gods, was also published from 2008 to 2009.",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The first four Indiana Jones film scripts were novelized and published in the time frame of the films' initial releases. Raiders of the Lost Ark was novelized by Campbell Black based on the script by Lawrence Kasdan that was based on the story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman and published in April 1981 by Ballantine Books; Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was novelized by James Kahn and based on the script by Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz that was based on the story by George Lucas and published May 1984 by Ballantine Books; Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was novelized by Rob MacGregor based on the script by Jeffrey Boam that was based on a story by George Lucas and Menno Meyjes and published June 1989 by Ballantine Books.",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Nearly 20 years later Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was novelized by James Rollins based on the script by David Koepp based on the story by George Lucas and Jeff Nathanson and published in May 2008 by Ballantine Books. In addition, in 2008 to accompany the release of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Scholastic Books published juvenile novelizations of the four scripts written, successively in the order above, by Ryder Windham, Suzanne Weyn, Ryder Windham, and James Luceno. All these books have been reprinted, with Raiders of the Lost Ark being retitled Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. While these are the principal titles and authors, there are numerous other volumes derived from the four film properties.",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "From February 1991 through February 1999, 12 original Indiana Jones-themed adult novels were licensed by Lucasfilm, Ltd. and written by three genre authors of the period. Ten years afterward, a 13th original novel was added, also written by a popular genre author. The first 12 were published by Bantam Books; the last by Ballantine Books in 2009. (See Indiana Jones (franchise) for broad descriptions of these original adult novels.) The novels are:",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The character has appeared in several officially licensed games, beginning with adaptations of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, two adaptations of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (one with purely action mechanics, one with an adventure- and puzzle-based structure) and Indiana Jones' Greatest Adventures, which included the storylines from all three of the original films.",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Following this, the games branched off into original storylines with Indiana Jones in the Lost Kingdom, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb and Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings. Emperor's Tomb sets up Jones' companion Wu Han and the search for Nurhaci's ashes seen at the beginning of Temple of Doom. The first two games were developed by Hal Barwood and starred Doug Lee as the voice of Indiana Jones; Emperor's Tomb had David Esch fill the role and Staff of Kings starred John Armstrong.",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine was the first Indy-based game presented in three dimensions, as opposed to 8-bit graphics and side-scrolling games before.",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "There is also a small game from Lucas Arts Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures. A video game was made for young Indy called Young Indiana Jones and the Instruments of Chaos, as well as a video game version of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Two Lego Indiana Jones games have also been released. Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures was released in 2008 and follows the plots of the first three films. It was followed by Lego Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues in late 2009. The sequel includes an abbreviated reprise of the first three films, but focuses on the plot of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. However, before he got his own Lego games, he appeared as a secret character in Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga as a playable character. He also makes a brief appearance in a minigame in Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars during the level \"Hostage Crisis\", and also made a cameo alongside Henry Jones Sr. in the level \"Legacy of Terror\".",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Social gaming company Zynga introduced Indiana Jones to their Adventure World game in late 2011.",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Indiana Jones is parodied in the shooter game Broforce as a playable character known as Indiana Brones.",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "He is also parodied in an action-adventure sandbox game Terraria as a rare enemy known as Doctor Bones, which appears as a zombified version of himself.",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Indiana Jones appears in Fortnite Battle Royale as part of the Chapter 3 Season 3 Battle pass.",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The world building game Disney Magic Kingdoms includes Indiana Jones as a playable character to unlock for a limited time.",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "An original Indiana Jones game is currently in development by MachineGames and set to be published by Bethesda Softworks for Windows and Xbox Series X/S. It will feature a standalone narrative expected to take place in Italy during 1939, placing it between the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.",
"title": "Appearances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "\"Indiana\" Jones's full name is Dr. Henry Walton Jones, Jr., and his nickname is often shortened to \"Indy\".",
"title": "Character description and formation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In his role as a college professor of archaeology Jones is scholarly, wears a tweed suit, and lectures on ancient civilizations. At the opportunity to recover important artifacts, Dr. Jones transforms into \"Indiana,\" a \"non-superhero superhero\" image he has concocted for himself. Producer Frank Marshall said, \"Indy [is] a fallible character. He makes mistakes and gets hurt. ... That's the other thing people like: He's a real character, not a character with superpowers.\" Spielberg said there \"was the willingness to allow our leading man to get hurt and to express his pain and to get his mad out and to take pratfalls and sometimes be the butt of his own jokes. I mean, Indiana Jones is not a perfect hero, and his imperfections, I think, make the audience feel that, with a little more exercise and a little more courage, they could be just like him.\" According to Spielberg biographer Douglas Brode, Indiana created his heroic figure so as to escape the dullness of teaching at a school. Both of Indiana's personas reject one another in philosophy, creating a duality. Harrison Ford said the fun of playing the character was that Indiana is both a romantic and a cynic, while scholars have analyzed Indiana as having traits of a lone wolf; a man on a quest; a noble treasure hunter; a hardboiled detective; a human superhero; and an American patriot.",
"title": "Character description and formation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Like many characters in his films, Jones has some autobiographical elements of Spielberg. Indiana lacks a proper father figure because of his strained relationship with his father, Henry Jones, Sr. His own contained anger is misdirected towards Professor Abner Ravenwood, his mentor at the University of Chicago, leading to a strained relationship with Marion Ravenwood. The teenage Indiana bases his own look on a figure from the prologue of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, after being given his hat. Marcus Brody acts as Indiana's positive role model at the college. Indiana's own insecurities are made worse by the absence of his mother. In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, he becomes the father figure to Short Round, to survive; he is rescued from Kali's evil by Short Round's dedication. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, he is wise enough to close his eyes in the presence of God in the Ark of the Covenant. By contrast, his rival Rene Belloq is killed for having the audacity to try to communicate directly with God.",
"title": "Character description and formation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In the prologue of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Jones is seen as a teenager, establishing his look when given a fedora hat. Indiana's intentions are revealed as prosocial, as he believes artifacts \"belong in a museum.\" In the film's climax, Indiana undergoes \"literal\" tests of faith to retrieve the Grail and save his father's life. He also remembers Jesus as a historical figure—a humble carpenter—rather than an exalted figure when he recognizes the simple nature and tarnished appearance of the real Grail amongst a large assortment of much more ornately decorated ones. Henry Senior rescues his son from falling to his death when reaching for the fallen Grail, telling him to \"let it go,\" overcoming his mercenary nature. The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles explains how Indiana becomes solitary and less idealistic following his service in World War I. In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Jones is older and wiser, whereas his sidekicks Mutt and Mac are youthfully arrogant, and greedy, respectively.",
"title": "Character description and formation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Indiana Jones is modeled after the strong-jawed heroes of the matinée serials and pulp magazines that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg enjoyed in their childhoods (such as the Republic Pictures serials, and the Doc Savage series). Sir H. Rider Haggard's safari guide/big game hunter Allan Quatermain of King Solomon's Mines is a notable template for Jones. The two friends first discussed the project in Hawaii around the time of the release of the first Star Wars film. Spielberg told Lucas how he wanted his next project to be something fun, like a James Bond film (this would later be referenced when they cast Sean Connery as Henry Jones, Sr.). According to sources, Lucas responded to the effect that he had something \"even better\", or that he'd \"got that beat.\"",
"title": "Origins and inspirations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "One of the possible bases for Indiana Jones is Professor Challenger, created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1912 for his novel, The Lost World. Challenger was based on Doyle's physiology professor, William Rutherford, an adventuring academic, albeit a zoologist/anthropologist.",
"title": "Origins and inspirations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Another important influence on the development of the character Indiana Jones is the Disney character Scrooge McDuck. Carl Barks created Scrooge in 1947 as a one-off relation for Donald Duck in the latter's self-titled comic book. Barks realized that the character had more potential, so a separate Uncle Scrooge comic book series full of exciting and strange adventures in the company of his duck nephews was developed. This Uncle Scrooge comic series strongly influenced George Lucas. This appreciation of Scrooge as an adventurer influenced the development of Jones, with the prologue of Raiders of the Lost Ark containing homage to Barks' Scrooge adventure \"The Seven Cities of Cibola\", published in Uncle Scrooge #7 from September 1954. This homage in the film takes the form of playfully mimicking the removal-of-the-statuette-from-its-pedestal and the falling-stone sequences of the comic book.",
"title": "Origins and inspirations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The character was originally named Indiana Smith, after an Alaskan Malamute called Indiana that Lucas owned in the 1970s and on which he based the Star Wars character Chewbacca. Spielberg disliked the name Smith, and Lucas casually suggested Jones as an alternative. The Last Crusade script references the name's origin, with Jones' father revealing his son's birth name to be Henry and explaining that \"we named the dog Indiana\", to his son's chagrin. Some have also posited that C.L. Moore's science fiction character Northwest Smith may have also influenced Lucas and Spielberg in their naming choice.",
"title": "Origins and inspirations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Lucas has said on various occasions that Sean Connery's portrayal of British secret agent James Bond was one of the primary inspirations for Jones, a reason Connery was chosen for the role of Indiana's father in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Spielberg earned the rank of Eagle Scout and Ford the Life Scout badge in their youth, which gave them the inspiration to portray Indiana Jones as a Life Scout at age 13 in The Last Crusade.",
"title": "Origins and inspirations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Many people are said to be the real-life inspiration of the Indiana Jones character—although none of the following have been confirmed as inspirations by Lucas or Spielberg. There are some suggestions listed here in alphabetical order by last name:",
"title": "Origins and inspirations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Upon requests by Spielberg and Lucas, the costume designer gave the character a distinctive silhouette through the styling of the hat; after examining many hats, the designers chose a tall-crowned, wide-brimmed fedora. As a documentary of Raiders pointed out, the hat served a practical purpose. Following the lead of the old \"B\"-movies that inspired the Indiana Jones series, the fedora hid the actor's face sufficiently to allow doubles to perform the more dangerous stunts seamlessly. Examples in Raiders include the wider-angle shot of Indy and Marion crashing a statue through a wall, and Indy sliding under a fast-moving vehicle from front to back. Thus it was necessary for the hat to stay in place much of the time.",
"title": "Costume"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The hat became so iconic that the filmmakers could only come up with very good reasons or jokes to remove it. If it ever fell off during a take, filming would have to stop to put it back on. In jest, Ford put a stapler against his head to stop his hat from falling off when a documentary crew visited during shooting of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. This created the urban legend that Ford stapled the hat to his head. Anytime Indy's hat accidentally came off as part of the storyline (blown off by the wind, knocked off, etc.) and seemed almost irretrievable, filmmakers would make sure Indy and his hat were always reunited, regardless of the implausibility of its return. Although other hats were also used throughout the films, the general style and profile remained the same. Elements of the outfit include:",
"title": "Costume"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The fedora and leather jacket from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade are on display at the Smithsonian Institution's American History Museum in Washington, D.C. The collecting of props and clothing from the films has become a thriving hobby for some aficionados of the franchise. Jones' whip was the third most popular film weapon, as shown by a 2008 poll held by 20th Century Fox, which surveyed approximately two thousand film fans.",
"title": "Costume"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Originally, Spielberg suggested Harrison Ford; Lucas resisted the idea, since he had already cast the actor in American Graffiti, Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, and did not want Ford to become known as his \"Bobby De Niro\" (in reference to the fact that fellow director Martin Scorsese regularly casts Robert De Niro in his films). During an intensive casting process, Lucas and Spielberg auditioned many actors, and finally cast actor Tom Selleck as Indiana Jones. Shortly afterward pre-production began in earnest on Raiders of the Lost Ark. CBS refused to release Selleck from his contractual commitment to Magnum, P.I., forcing him to turn down the role. Shooting for the film could have overlapped with the pilot for Magnum, P.I. but it later turned out that filming of the pilot episode was delayed and Selleck could have done both.",
"title": "Casting"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Subsequently, Peter Coyote and Tim Matheson both auditioned for the role. After Spielberg suggested Ford again, Lucas relented, and Ford was cast in the role less than three weeks before filming began.",
"title": "Casting"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The industry magazine Archaeology named eight past and present archaeologists who they felt \"embodied [Jones's] spirit\" as recipients of the Indy Spirit Awards in 2008. That same year Ford himself was elected to the board of directors for the Archaeological Institute of America. Commenting that \"understanding the past can only help us in dealing with the present and the future,\" Ford was praised by the association's president for his character's \"significant role in stimulating the public's interest in archaeological exploration.\"",
"title": "Cultural influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "He is perhaps the most influential character in films that explore archaeology. Since the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, the very idea of archaeology and archaeologists has fundamentally shifted. Prior to the film's release, the stereotypical image of an archaeologist was that of an older, lackluster professor type. In the early years of films involving archaeologists, they were portrayed as victims who would need to be rescued by a more masculine or heroic figure. Following 1981, the stereotypical archaeologist was thought of as an adventurer consistently engaged in fieldwork.",
"title": "Cultural influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Archeologist Anne Pyburn described the influence of Indiana Jones as elitist and sexist, and argued that the film series had caused new discoveries in the field of archaeology to become oversimplified and overhyped in an attempt to gain public interest, which negatively influences archaeology as a whole. Eric Powell, an editor with the magazine Archaeology, said \"O.K., fine, the movie romanticizes what we do\", and that \"Indy may be a horrible archeologist, but he's a great diplomat for archeology. I think we'll see a spike in kids who want to become archeologists\". Kevin McGeough, associate professor of archaeology, describes the original archaeological criticism of the film as missing the point of the film: \"dramatic interest is what is at issue, and it is unlikely that film will change in order to promote and foster better archaeological techniques\".",
"title": "Cultural influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "While himself an homage to various prior adventurers, aspects of Indiana Jones also directly influenced some subsequent characterizations:",
"title": "Cultural influence"
}
]
| Dr. Henry Walton "Indiana" Jones, Jr. is the title character and protagonist of the Indiana Jones franchise. George Lucas created the character in homage to the action heroes of 1930s film serials. The character first appeared in the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark, to be followed by Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 1984, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in 1989, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles from 1992 to 1996, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008, and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny in 2023. The character is also featured in novels, comics, video games, and other media. Jones is also the inspiration for several Disney theme park attractions, including Indiana Jones et le Temple du Péril, the Indiana Jones Adventure, and Epic Stunt Spectacular! attractions. Jones is most famously portrayed by Harrison Ford and has also been portrayed by River Phoenix, and by Corey Carrier, Sean Patrick Flanery, and George Hall in the television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Doug Lee has supplied the voice of Jones for two LucasArts video games, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, David Esch supplied his voice for Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb, and John Armstrong for Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings. Jones is characterized by his iconic accoutrements, wry, witty and sarcastic sense of humor, deep knowledge of ancient civilizations and languages, and fear of snakes. Since his first appearance in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones has become one of cinema's most famous characters. In 2003, the American Film Institute ranked him the second-greatest film hero of all time. He was also named the greatest movie character by Empire magazine. Entertainment Weekly ranked Jones 2nd on their list of The All-Time Coolest Heroes in Pop Culture. Premiere magazine also placed Jones at number 7 on their list of The 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time. | 2001-07-02T19:11:05Z | 2023-12-31T17:15:23Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Jones_(character) |
14,822 | Irreducible fraction | An irreducible fraction (or fraction in lowest terms, simplest form or reduced fraction) is a fraction in which the numerator and denominator are integers that have no other common divisors than 1 (and −1, when negative numbers are considered). In other words, a fraction a/b is irreducible if and only if a and b are coprime, that is, if a and b have a greatest common divisor of 1. In higher mathematics, "irreducible fraction" may also refer to rational fractions such that the numerator and the denominator are coprime polynomials. Every positive rational number can be represented as an irreducible fraction in exactly one way.
An equivalent definition is sometimes useful: if a and b are integers, then the fraction a/b is irreducible if and only if there is no other equal fraction c/d such that |c| < |a| or |d| < |b|, where |a| means the absolute value of a. (Two fractions a/b and c/d are equal or equivalent if and only if ad = bc.)
For example, 1/4, 5/6, and −101/100 are all irreducible fractions. On the other hand, 2/4 is reducible since it is equal in value to 1/2, and the numerator of 1/2 is less than the numerator of 2/4.
A fraction that is reducible can be reduced by dividing both the numerator and denominator by a common factor. It can be fully reduced to lowest terms if both are divided by their greatest common divisor. In order to find the greatest common divisor, the Euclidean algorithm or prime factorization can be used. The Euclidean algorithm is commonly preferred because it allows one to reduce fractions with numerators and denominators too large to be easily factored.
In the first step both numbers were divided by 10, which is a factor common to both 120 and 90. In the second step, they were divided by 3. The final result, 4/3, is an irreducible fraction because 4 and 3 have no common factors other than 1.
The original fraction could have also been reduced in a single step by using the greatest common divisor of 90 and 120, which is 30. As 120 ÷ 30 = 4, and 90 ÷ 30 = 3, one gets
Which method is faster "by hand" depends on the fraction and the ease with which common factors are spotted. In case a denominator and numerator remain that are too large to ensure they are coprime by inspection, a greatest common divisor computation is needed anyway to ensure the fraction is actually irreducible.
Every rational number has a unique representation as an irreducible fraction with a positive denominator (however 2/3 = −2/−3 although both are irreducible). Uniqueness is a consequence of the unique prime factorization of integers, since a/b = c/d implies ad = bc, and so both sides of the latter must share the same prime factorization, yet a and b share no prime factors so the set of prime factors of a (with multiplicity) is a subset of those of c and vice versa, meaning a = c and by the same argument b = d.
The fact that any rational number has a unique representation as an irreducible fraction is utilized in various proofs of the irrationality of the square root of 2 and of other irrational numbers. For example, one proof notes that if √2 could be represented as a ratio of integers, then it would have in particular the fully reduced representation a/b where a and b are the smallest possible; but given that a/b equals √2, so does 2b − a/a − b (since cross-multiplying this with a/b shows that they are equal). Since a > b (because √2 is greater than 1), the latter is a ratio of two smaller integers. This is a contradiction, so the premise that the square root of two has a representation as the ratio of two integers is false.
The notion of irreducible fraction generalizes to the field of fractions of any unique factorization domain: any element of such a field can be written as a fraction in which denominator and numerator are coprime, by dividing both by their greatest common divisor. This applies notably to rational expressions over a field. The irreducible fraction for a given element is unique up to multiplication of denominator and numerator by the same invertible element. In the case of the rational numbers this means that any number has two irreducible fractions, related by a change of sign of both numerator and denominator; this ambiguity can be removed by requiring the denominator to be positive. In the case of rational functions the denominator could similarly be required to be a monic polynomial. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "An irreducible fraction (or fraction in lowest terms, simplest form or reduced fraction) is a fraction in which the numerator and denominator are integers that have no other common divisors than 1 (and −1, when negative numbers are considered). In other words, a fraction a/b is irreducible if and only if a and b are coprime, that is, if a and b have a greatest common divisor of 1. In higher mathematics, \"irreducible fraction\" may also refer to rational fractions such that the numerator and the denominator are coprime polynomials. Every positive rational number can be represented as an irreducible fraction in exactly one way.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "An equivalent definition is sometimes useful: if a and b are integers, then the fraction a/b is irreducible if and only if there is no other equal fraction c/d such that |c| < |a| or |d| < |b|, where |a| means the absolute value of a. (Two fractions a/b and c/d are equal or equivalent if and only if ad = bc.)",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "For example, 1/4, 5/6, and −101/100 are all irreducible fractions. On the other hand, 2/4 is reducible since it is equal in value to 1/2, and the numerator of 1/2 is less than the numerator of 2/4.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "A fraction that is reducible can be reduced by dividing both the numerator and denominator by a common factor. It can be fully reduced to lowest terms if both are divided by their greatest common divisor. In order to find the greatest common divisor, the Euclidean algorithm or prime factorization can be used. The Euclidean algorithm is commonly preferred because it allows one to reduce fractions with numerators and denominators too large to be easily factored.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In the first step both numbers were divided by 10, which is a factor common to both 120 and 90. In the second step, they were divided by 3. The final result, 4/3, is an irreducible fraction because 4 and 3 have no common factors other than 1.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The original fraction could have also been reduced in a single step by using the greatest common divisor of 90 and 120, which is 30. As 120 ÷ 30 = 4, and 90 ÷ 30 = 3, one gets",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Which method is faster \"by hand\" depends on the fraction and the ease with which common factors are spotted. In case a denominator and numerator remain that are too large to ensure they are coprime by inspection, a greatest common divisor computation is needed anyway to ensure the fraction is actually irreducible.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Every rational number has a unique representation as an irreducible fraction with a positive denominator (however 2/3 = −2/−3 although both are irreducible). Uniqueness is a consequence of the unique prime factorization of integers, since a/b = c/d implies ad = bc, and so both sides of the latter must share the same prime factorization, yet a and b share no prime factors so the set of prime factors of a (with multiplicity) is a subset of those of c and vice versa, meaning a = c and by the same argument b = d.",
"title": "Uniqueness"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The fact that any rational number has a unique representation as an irreducible fraction is utilized in various proofs of the irrationality of the square root of 2 and of other irrational numbers. For example, one proof notes that if √2 could be represented as a ratio of integers, then it would have in particular the fully reduced representation a/b where a and b are the smallest possible; but given that a/b equals √2, so does 2b − a/a − b (since cross-multiplying this with a/b shows that they are equal). Since a > b (because √2 is greater than 1), the latter is a ratio of two smaller integers. This is a contradiction, so the premise that the square root of two has a representation as the ratio of two integers is false.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The notion of irreducible fraction generalizes to the field of fractions of any unique factorization domain: any element of such a field can be written as a fraction in which denominator and numerator are coprime, by dividing both by their greatest common divisor. This applies notably to rational expressions over a field. The irreducible fraction for a given element is unique up to multiplication of denominator and numerator by the same invertible element. In the case of the rational numbers this means that any number has two irreducible fractions, related by a change of sign of both numerator and denominator; this ambiguity can be removed by requiring the denominator to be positive. In the case of rational functions the denominator could similarly be required to be a monic polynomial.",
"title": "Generalization"
}
]
| An irreducible fraction is a fraction in which the numerator and denominator are integers that have no other common divisors than 1. In other words, a fraction a/b is irreducible if and only if a and b are coprime, that is, if a and b have a greatest common divisor of 1. In higher mathematics, "irreducible fraction" may also refer to rational fractions such that the numerator and the denominator are coprime polynomials. Every positive rational number can be represented as an irreducible fraction in exactly one way. An equivalent definition is sometimes useful: if a and b are integers, then the fraction a/b is irreducible if and only if there is no other equal fraction c/d such that |c| < |a| or |d| < |b|, where |a| means the absolute value of a. For example, 1/4, 5/6, and −101/100 are all irreducible fractions. On the other hand, 2/4 is reducible since it is equal in value to 1/2, and the numerator of 1/2 is less than the numerator of 2/4. A fraction that is reducible can be reduced by dividing both the numerator and denominator by a common factor. It can be fully reduced to lowest terms if both are divided by their greatest common divisor. In order to find the greatest common divisor, the Euclidean algorithm or prime factorization can be used. The Euclidean algorithm is commonly preferred because it allows one to reduce fractions with numerators and denominators too large to be easily factored. | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-11-01T16:59:54Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreducible_fraction |
14,826 | Isomorphism class | In mathematics, an isomorphism class is a collection of mathematical objects isomorphic to each other.
Isomorphism classes are often defined as the exact identity of the elements of the set is considered irrelevant, and the properties of the structure of the mathematical object are studied. Examples of this are ordinals and graphs. However, there are circumstances in which the isomorphism class of an object conceals vital internal information about it; consider these examples: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "In mathematics, an isomorphism class is a collection of mathematical objects isomorphic to each other.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Isomorphism classes are often defined as the exact identity of the elements of the set is considered irrelevant, and the properties of the structure of the mathematical object are studied. Examples of this are ordinals and graphs. However, there are circumstances in which the isomorphism class of an object conceals vital internal information about it; consider these examples:",
"title": ""
}
]
| In mathematics, an isomorphism class is a collection of mathematical objects isomorphic to each other. Isomorphism classes are often defined as the exact identity of the elements of the set is considered irrelevant, and the properties of the structure of the mathematical object are studied. Examples of this are ordinals and graphs. However, there are circumstances in which the isomorphism class of an object conceals vital internal information about it; consider these examples: The associative algebras consisting of coquaternions and 2 × 2 real matrices are isomorphic as rings. Yet they appear in different contexts for application so the isomorphism is insufficient to merge the concepts.
In homotopy theory, the fundamental group of a space X at a point p , though technically denoted π 1 to emphasize the dependence on the base point, is often written lazily as simply π 1 if X is path connected. The reason for this is that the existence of a path between two points allows one to identify loops at one with loops at the other; however, unless π 1 is abelian this isomorphism is non-unique. Furthermore, the classification of covering spaces makes strict reference to particular subgroups of π 1 , specifically distinguishing between isomorphic but conjugate subgroups, and therefore amalgamating the elements of an isomorphism class into a single featureless object seriously decreases the level of detail provided by the theory. | 2022-08-22T13:21:34Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomorphism_class |
|
14,828 | Isomorphism | In mathematics, an isomorphism is a structure-preserving mapping between two structures of the same type that can be reversed by an inverse mapping. Two mathematical structures are isomorphic if an isomorphism exists between them. The word isomorphism is derived from the Ancient Greek: ἴσος isos "equal", and μορφή morphe "form" or "shape".
The interest in isomorphisms lies in the fact that two isomorphic objects have the same properties (excluding further information such as additional structure or names of objects). Thus isomorphic structures cannot be distinguished from the point of view of structure only, and may be identified. In mathematical jargon, one says that two objects are the same up to an isomorphism.
An automorphism is an isomorphism from a structure to itself. An isomorphism between two structures is a canonical isomorphism (a canonical map that is an isomorphism) if there is only one isomorphism between the two structures (as is the case for solutions of a universal property), or if the isomorphism is much more natural (in some sense) than other isomorphisms. For example, for every prime number p, all fields with p elements are canonically isomorphic, with a unique isomorphism. The isomorphism theorems provide canonical isomorphisms that are not unique.
The term isomorphism is mainly used for algebraic structures. In this case, mappings are called homomorphisms, and a homomorphism is an isomorphism if and only if it is bijective.
In various areas of mathematics, isomorphisms have received specialized names, depending on the type of structure under consideration. For example:
Category theory, which can be viewed as a formalization of the concept of mapping between structures, provides a language that may be used to unify the approach to these different aspects of the basic idea.
Let R + {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{+}} be the multiplicative group of positive real numbers, and let R {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} } be the additive group of real numbers.
The logarithm function log : R + → R {\displaystyle \log :\mathbb {R} ^{+}\to \mathbb {R} } satisfies log ( x y ) = log x + log y {\displaystyle \log(xy)=\log x+\log y} for all x , y ∈ R + , {\displaystyle x,y\in \mathbb {R} ^{+},} so it is a group homomorphism. The exponential function exp : R → R + {\displaystyle \exp :\mathbb {R} \to \mathbb {R} ^{+}} satisfies exp ( x + y ) = ( exp x ) ( exp y ) {\displaystyle \exp(x+y)=(\exp x)(\exp y)} for all x , y ∈ R , {\displaystyle x,y\in \mathbb {R} ,} so it too is a homomorphism.
The identities log exp x = x {\displaystyle \log \exp x=x} and exp log y = y {\displaystyle \exp \log y=y} show that log {\displaystyle \log } and exp {\displaystyle \exp } are inverses of each other. Since log {\displaystyle \log } is a homomorphism that has an inverse that is also a homomorphism, log {\displaystyle \log } is an isomorphism of groups.
The log {\displaystyle \log } function is an isomorphism which translates multiplication of positive real numbers into addition of real numbers. This facility makes it possible to multiply real numbers using a ruler and a table of logarithms, or using a slide rule with a logarithmic scale.
Consider the group ( Z 6 , + ) , {\displaystyle (\mathbb {Z} _{6},+),} the integers from 0 to 5 with addition modulo 6. Also consider the group ( Z 2 × Z 3 , + ) , {\displaystyle \left(\mathbb {Z} _{2}\times \mathbb {Z} _{3},+\right),} the ordered pairs where the x coordinates can be 0 or 1, and the y coordinates can be 0, 1, or 2, where addition in the x-coordinate is modulo 2 and addition in the y-coordinate is modulo 3.
These structures are isomorphic under addition, under the following scheme:
or in general ( a , b ) ↦ ( 3 a + 4 b ) mod 6. {\displaystyle (a,b)\mapsto (3a+4b)\mod 6.}
For example, ( 1 , 1 ) + ( 1 , 0 ) = ( 0 , 1 ) , {\displaystyle (1,1)+(1,0)=(0,1),} which translates in the other system as 1 + 3 = 4. {\displaystyle 1+3=4.}
Even though these two groups "look" different in that the sets contain different elements, they are indeed isomorphic: their structures are exactly the same. More generally, the direct product of two cyclic groups Z m {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} _{m}} and Z n {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} _{n}} is isomorphic to ( Z m n , + ) {\displaystyle (\mathbb {Z} _{mn},+)} if and only if m and n are coprime, per the Chinese remainder theorem.
If one object consists of a set X with a binary relation R and the other object consists of a set Y with a binary relation S then an isomorphism from X to Y is a bijective function f : X → Y {\displaystyle f:X\to Y} such that:
S is reflexive, irreflexive, symmetric, antisymmetric, asymmetric, transitive, total, trichotomous, a partial order, total order, well-order, strict weak order, total preorder (weak order), an equivalence relation, or a relation with any other special properties, if and only if R is.
For example, R is an ordering ≤ and S an ordering ⊑ , {\displaystyle \scriptstyle \sqsubseteq ,} then an isomorphism from X to Y is a bijective function f : X → Y {\displaystyle f:X\to Y} such that
Such an isomorphism is called an order isomorphism or (less commonly) an isotone isomorphism.
If X = Y , {\displaystyle X=Y,} then this is a relation-preserving automorphism.
In algebra, isomorphisms are defined for all algebraic structures. Some are more specifically studied; for example:
Just as the automorphisms of an algebraic structure form a group, the isomorphisms between two algebras sharing a common structure form a heap. Letting a particular isomorphism identify the two structures turns this heap into a group.
In mathematical analysis, the Laplace transform is an isomorphism mapping hard differential equations into easier algebraic equations.
In graph theory, an isomorphism between two graphs G and H is a bijective map f from the vertices of G to the vertices of H that preserves the "edge structure" in the sense that there is an edge from vertex u to vertex v in G if and only if there is an edge from f ( u ) {\displaystyle f(u)} to f ( v ) {\displaystyle f(v)} in H. See graph isomorphism.
In mathematical analysis, an isomorphism between two Hilbert spaces is a bijection preserving addition, scalar multiplication, and inner product.
In early theories of logical atomism, the formal relationship between facts and true propositions was theorized by Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein to be isomorphic. An example of this line of thinking can be found in Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy.
In cybernetics, the good regulator or Conant–Ashby theorem is stated "Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system". Whether regulated or self-regulating, an isomorphism is required between the regulator and processing parts of the system.
In category theory, given a category C, an isomorphism is a morphism f : a → b {\displaystyle f:a\to b} that has an inverse morphism g : b → a , {\displaystyle g:b\to a,} that is, f g = 1 b {\displaystyle fg=1_{b}} and g f = 1 a . {\displaystyle gf=1_{a}.} For example, a bijective linear map is an isomorphism between vector spaces, and a bijective continuous function whose inverse is also continuous is an isomorphism between topological spaces, called a homeomorphism.
Two categories C and D are isomorphic if there exist functors F : C → D {\displaystyle F:C\to D} and G : D → C {\displaystyle G:D\to C} which are mutually inverse to each other, that is, F G = 1 D {\displaystyle FG=1_{D}} (the identity functor on D) and G F = 1 C {\displaystyle GF=1_{C}} (the identity functor on C).
In a concrete category (roughly, a category whose objects are sets (perhaps with extra structure) and whose morphisms are structure-preserving functions), such as the category of topological spaces or categories of algebraic objects (like the category of groups, the category of rings, and the category of modules), an isomorphism must be bijective on the underlying sets. In algebraic categories (specifically, categories of varieties in the sense of universal algebra), an isomorphism is the same as a homomorphism which is bijective on underlying sets. However, there are concrete categories in which bijective morphisms are not necessarily isomorphisms (such as the category of topological spaces).
In certain areas of mathematics, notably category theory, it is valuable to distinguish between equality on the one hand and isomorphism on the other. Equality is when two objects are exactly the same, and everything that is true about one object is true about the other, while an isomorphism implies everything that is true about a designated part of one object's structure is true about the other's. For example, the sets
are equal; they are merely different representations—the first an intensional one (in set builder notation), and the second extensional (by explicit enumeration)—of the same subset of the integers. By contrast, the sets { A , B , C } {\displaystyle \{A,B,C\}} and { 1 , 2 , 3 } {\displaystyle \{1,2,3\}} are not equal—the first has elements that are letters, while the second has elements that are numbers. These are isomorphic as sets, since finite sets are determined up to isomorphism by their cardinality (number of elements) and these both have three elements, but there are many choices of isomorphism—one isomorphism is
and no one isomorphism is intrinsically better than any other. On this view and in this sense, these two sets are not equal because one cannot consider them identical: one can choose an isomorphism between them, but that is a weaker claim than identity—and valid only in the context of the chosen isomorphism.
Another example is more formal and more directly illustrates the motivation for distinguishing equality from isomorphism: the distinction between a finite-dimensional vector space V and its dual space V ∗ = { φ : V → K } {\displaystyle V^{*}=\left\{\varphi :V\to \mathbf {K} \right\}} of linear maps from V to its field of scalars K . {\displaystyle \mathbf {K} .} These spaces have the same dimension, and thus are isomorphic as abstract vector spaces (since algebraically, vector spaces are classified by dimension, just as sets are classified by cardinality), but there is no "natural" choice of isomorphism V → ∼ V ∗ . {\displaystyle V\mathrel {\overset {\sim }{\to }} V^{*}.} If one chooses a basis for V, then this yields an isomorphism: For all u , v ∈ V , {\displaystyle u,v\in V,}
This corresponds to transforming a column vector (element of V) to a row vector (element of V*) by transpose, but a different choice of basis gives a different isomorphism: the isomorphism "depends on the choice of basis". More subtly, there is a map from a vector space V to its double dual V ∗ ∗ = { x : V ∗ → K } {\displaystyle V^{**}=\left\{x:V^{*}\to \mathbf {K} \right\}} that does not depend on the choice of basis: For all v ∈ V and φ ∈ V ∗ , {\displaystyle v\in V{\text{ and }}\varphi \in V^{*},}
This leads to a third notion, that of a natural isomorphism: while V {\displaystyle V} and V ∗ ∗ {\displaystyle V^{**}} are different sets, there is a "natural" choice of isomorphism between them. This intuitive notion of "an isomorphism that does not depend on an arbitrary choice" is formalized in the notion of a natural transformation; briefly, that one may consistently identify, or more generally map from, a finite-dimensional vector space to its double dual, V → ∼ V ∗ ∗ , {\displaystyle V\mathrel {\overset {\sim }{\to }} V^{**},} for any vector space in a consistent way. Formalizing this intuition is a motivation for the development of category theory.
However, there is a case where the distinction between natural isomorphism and equality is usually not made. That is for the objects that may be characterized by a universal property. In fact, there is a unique isomorphism, necessarily natural, between two objects sharing the same universal property. A typical example is the set of real numbers, which may be defined through infinite decimal expansion, infinite binary expansion, Cauchy sequences, Dedekind cuts and many other ways. Formally, these constructions define different objects which are all solutions with the same universal property. As these objects have exactly the same properties, one may forget the method of construction and consider them as equal. This is what everybody does when referring to "the set of the real numbers". The same occurs with quotient spaces: they are commonly constructed as sets of equivalence classes. However, referring to a set of sets may be counterintuitive, and so quotient spaces are commonly considered as a pair of a set of undetermined objects, often called "points", and a surjective map onto this set.
If one wishes to distinguish between an arbitrary isomorphism (one that depends on a choice) and a natural isomorphism (one that can be done consistently), one may write ≈ {\displaystyle \,\approx \,} for an unnatural isomorphism and ≅ for a natural isomorphism, as in V ≈ V ∗ {\displaystyle V\approx V^{*}} and V ≅ V ∗ ∗ . {\displaystyle V\cong V^{**}.} This convention is not universally followed, and authors who wish to distinguish between unnatural isomorphisms and natural isomorphisms will generally explicitly state the distinction.
Generally, saying that two objects are equal is reserved for when there is a notion of a larger (ambient) space that these objects live in. Most often, one speaks of equality of two subsets of a given set (as in the integer set example above), but not of two objects abstractly presented. For example, the 2-dimensional unit sphere in 3-dimensional space
and the Riemann sphere C ^ {\displaystyle {\widehat {\mathbb {C} }}}
which can be presented as the one-point compactification of the complex plane C ∪ { ∞ } {\displaystyle \mathbb {C} \cup \{\infty \}} or as the complex projective line (a quotient space)
are three different descriptions for a mathematical object, all of which are isomorphic, but not equal because they are not all subsets of a single space: the first is a subset of R 3 , {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{3},} the second is C ≅ R 2 {\displaystyle \mathbb {C} \cong \mathbb {R} ^{2}} plus an additional point, and the third is a subquotient of C 2 . {\displaystyle \mathbb {C} ^{2}.}
In the context of category theory, objects are usually at most isomorphic—indeed, a motivation for the development of category theory was showing that different constructions in homology theory yielded equivalent (isomorphic) groups. Given maps between two objects X and Y, however, one asks if they are equal or not (they are both elements of the set hom ( X , Y ) , {\displaystyle \hom(X,Y),} hence equality is the proper relationship), particularly in commutative diagrams.
See also: homotopy type theory, in which isomorphisms can be treated as kinds of equality. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "In mathematics, an isomorphism is a structure-preserving mapping between two structures of the same type that can be reversed by an inverse mapping. Two mathematical structures are isomorphic if an isomorphism exists between them. The word isomorphism is derived from the Ancient Greek: ἴσος isos \"equal\", and μορφή morphe \"form\" or \"shape\".",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The interest in isomorphisms lies in the fact that two isomorphic objects have the same properties (excluding further information such as additional structure or names of objects). Thus isomorphic structures cannot be distinguished from the point of view of structure only, and may be identified. In mathematical jargon, one says that two objects are the same up to an isomorphism.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "An automorphism is an isomorphism from a structure to itself. An isomorphism between two structures is a canonical isomorphism (a canonical map that is an isomorphism) if there is only one isomorphism between the two structures (as is the case for solutions of a universal property), or if the isomorphism is much more natural (in some sense) than other isomorphisms. For example, for every prime number p, all fields with p elements are canonically isomorphic, with a unique isomorphism. The isomorphism theorems provide canonical isomorphisms that are not unique.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The term isomorphism is mainly used for algebraic structures. In this case, mappings are called homomorphisms, and a homomorphism is an isomorphism if and only if it is bijective.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In various areas of mathematics, isomorphisms have received specialized names, depending on the type of structure under consideration. For example:",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Category theory, which can be viewed as a formalization of the concept of mapping between structures, provides a language that may be used to unify the approach to these different aspects of the basic idea.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Let R + {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {R} ^{+}} be the multiplicative group of positive real numbers, and let R {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {R} } be the additive group of real numbers.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The logarithm function log : R + → R {\\displaystyle \\log :\\mathbb {R} ^{+}\\to \\mathbb {R} } satisfies log ( x y ) = log x + log y {\\displaystyle \\log(xy)=\\log x+\\log y} for all x , y ∈ R + , {\\displaystyle x,y\\in \\mathbb {R} ^{+},} so it is a group homomorphism. The exponential function exp : R → R + {\\displaystyle \\exp :\\mathbb {R} \\to \\mathbb {R} ^{+}} satisfies exp ( x + y ) = ( exp x ) ( exp y ) {\\displaystyle \\exp(x+y)=(\\exp x)(\\exp y)} for all x , y ∈ R , {\\displaystyle x,y\\in \\mathbb {R} ,} so it too is a homomorphism.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The identities log exp x = x {\\displaystyle \\log \\exp x=x} and exp log y = y {\\displaystyle \\exp \\log y=y} show that log {\\displaystyle \\log } and exp {\\displaystyle \\exp } are inverses of each other. Since log {\\displaystyle \\log } is a homomorphism that has an inverse that is also a homomorphism, log {\\displaystyle \\log } is an isomorphism of groups.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The log {\\displaystyle \\log } function is an isomorphism which translates multiplication of positive real numbers into addition of real numbers. This facility makes it possible to multiply real numbers using a ruler and a table of logarithms, or using a slide rule with a logarithmic scale.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Consider the group ( Z 6 , + ) , {\\displaystyle (\\mathbb {Z} _{6},+),} the integers from 0 to 5 with addition modulo 6. Also consider the group ( Z 2 × Z 3 , + ) , {\\displaystyle \\left(\\mathbb {Z} _{2}\\times \\mathbb {Z} _{3},+\\right),} the ordered pairs where the x coordinates can be 0 or 1, and the y coordinates can be 0, 1, or 2, where addition in the x-coordinate is modulo 2 and addition in the y-coordinate is modulo 3.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "These structures are isomorphic under addition, under the following scheme:",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "or in general ( a , b ) ↦ ( 3 a + 4 b ) mod 6. {\\displaystyle (a,b)\\mapsto (3a+4b)\\mod 6.}",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "For example, ( 1 , 1 ) + ( 1 , 0 ) = ( 0 , 1 ) , {\\displaystyle (1,1)+(1,0)=(0,1),} which translates in the other system as 1 + 3 = 4. {\\displaystyle 1+3=4.}",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Even though these two groups \"look\" different in that the sets contain different elements, they are indeed isomorphic: their structures are exactly the same. More generally, the direct product of two cyclic groups Z m {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} _{m}} and Z n {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} _{n}} is isomorphic to ( Z m n , + ) {\\displaystyle (\\mathbb {Z} _{mn},+)} if and only if m and n are coprime, per the Chinese remainder theorem.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "If one object consists of a set X with a binary relation R and the other object consists of a set Y with a binary relation S then an isomorphism from X to Y is a bijective function f : X → Y {\\displaystyle f:X\\to Y} such that:",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "S is reflexive, irreflexive, symmetric, antisymmetric, asymmetric, transitive, total, trichotomous, a partial order, total order, well-order, strict weak order, total preorder (weak order), an equivalence relation, or a relation with any other special properties, if and only if R is.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "For example, R is an ordering ≤ and S an ordering ⊑ , {\\displaystyle \\scriptstyle \\sqsubseteq ,} then an isomorphism from X to Y is a bijective function f : X → Y {\\displaystyle f:X\\to Y} such that",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Such an isomorphism is called an order isomorphism or (less commonly) an isotone isomorphism.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "If X = Y , {\\displaystyle X=Y,} then this is a relation-preserving automorphism.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In algebra, isomorphisms are defined for all algebraic structures. Some are more specifically studied; for example:",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Just as the automorphisms of an algebraic structure form a group, the isomorphisms between two algebras sharing a common structure form a heap. Letting a particular isomorphism identify the two structures turns this heap into a group.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In mathematical analysis, the Laplace transform is an isomorphism mapping hard differential equations into easier algebraic equations.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In graph theory, an isomorphism between two graphs G and H is a bijective map f from the vertices of G to the vertices of H that preserves the \"edge structure\" in the sense that there is an edge from vertex u to vertex v in G if and only if there is an edge from f ( u ) {\\displaystyle f(u)} to f ( v ) {\\displaystyle f(v)} in H. See graph isomorphism.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In mathematical analysis, an isomorphism between two Hilbert spaces is a bijection preserving addition, scalar multiplication, and inner product.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In early theories of logical atomism, the formal relationship between facts and true propositions was theorized by Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein to be isomorphic. An example of this line of thinking can be found in Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In cybernetics, the good regulator or Conant–Ashby theorem is stated \"Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system\". Whether regulated or self-regulating, an isomorphism is required between the regulator and processing parts of the system.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In category theory, given a category C, an isomorphism is a morphism f : a → b {\\displaystyle f:a\\to b} that has an inverse morphism g : b → a , {\\displaystyle g:b\\to a,} that is, f g = 1 b {\\displaystyle fg=1_{b}} and g f = 1 a . {\\displaystyle gf=1_{a}.} For example, a bijective linear map is an isomorphism between vector spaces, and a bijective continuous function whose inverse is also continuous is an isomorphism between topological spaces, called a homeomorphism.",
"title": "Category theoretic view"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Two categories C and D are isomorphic if there exist functors F : C → D {\\displaystyle F:C\\to D} and G : D → C {\\displaystyle G:D\\to C} which are mutually inverse to each other, that is, F G = 1 D {\\displaystyle FG=1_{D}} (the identity functor on D) and G F = 1 C {\\displaystyle GF=1_{C}} (the identity functor on C).",
"title": "Category theoretic view"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In a concrete category (roughly, a category whose objects are sets (perhaps with extra structure) and whose morphisms are structure-preserving functions), such as the category of topological spaces or categories of algebraic objects (like the category of groups, the category of rings, and the category of modules), an isomorphism must be bijective on the underlying sets. In algebraic categories (specifically, categories of varieties in the sense of universal algebra), an isomorphism is the same as a homomorphism which is bijective on underlying sets. However, there are concrete categories in which bijective morphisms are not necessarily isomorphisms (such as the category of topological spaces).",
"title": "Category theoretic view"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In certain areas of mathematics, notably category theory, it is valuable to distinguish between equality on the one hand and isomorphism on the other. Equality is when two objects are exactly the same, and everything that is true about one object is true about the other, while an isomorphism implies everything that is true about a designated part of one object's structure is true about the other's. For example, the sets",
"title": "Relation with equality"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "are equal; they are merely different representations—the first an intensional one (in set builder notation), and the second extensional (by explicit enumeration)—of the same subset of the integers. By contrast, the sets { A , B , C } {\\displaystyle \\{A,B,C\\}} and { 1 , 2 , 3 } {\\displaystyle \\{1,2,3\\}} are not equal—the first has elements that are letters, while the second has elements that are numbers. These are isomorphic as sets, since finite sets are determined up to isomorphism by their cardinality (number of elements) and these both have three elements, but there are many choices of isomorphism—one isomorphism is",
"title": "Relation with equality"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "and no one isomorphism is intrinsically better than any other. On this view and in this sense, these two sets are not equal because one cannot consider them identical: one can choose an isomorphism between them, but that is a weaker claim than identity—and valid only in the context of the chosen isomorphism.",
"title": "Relation with equality"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Another example is more formal and more directly illustrates the motivation for distinguishing equality from isomorphism: the distinction between a finite-dimensional vector space V and its dual space V ∗ = { φ : V → K } {\\displaystyle V^{*}=\\left\\{\\varphi :V\\to \\mathbf {K} \\right\\}} of linear maps from V to its field of scalars K . {\\displaystyle \\mathbf {K} .} These spaces have the same dimension, and thus are isomorphic as abstract vector spaces (since algebraically, vector spaces are classified by dimension, just as sets are classified by cardinality), but there is no \"natural\" choice of isomorphism V → ∼ V ∗ . {\\displaystyle V\\mathrel {\\overset {\\sim }{\\to }} V^{*}.} If one chooses a basis for V, then this yields an isomorphism: For all u , v ∈ V , {\\displaystyle u,v\\in V,}",
"title": "Relation with equality"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "This corresponds to transforming a column vector (element of V) to a row vector (element of V*) by transpose, but a different choice of basis gives a different isomorphism: the isomorphism \"depends on the choice of basis\". More subtly, there is a map from a vector space V to its double dual V ∗ ∗ = { x : V ∗ → K } {\\displaystyle V^{**}=\\left\\{x:V^{*}\\to \\mathbf {K} \\right\\}} that does not depend on the choice of basis: For all v ∈ V and φ ∈ V ∗ , {\\displaystyle v\\in V{\\text{ and }}\\varphi \\in V^{*},}",
"title": "Relation with equality"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "This leads to a third notion, that of a natural isomorphism: while V {\\displaystyle V} and V ∗ ∗ {\\displaystyle V^{**}} are different sets, there is a \"natural\" choice of isomorphism between them. This intuitive notion of \"an isomorphism that does not depend on an arbitrary choice\" is formalized in the notion of a natural transformation; briefly, that one may consistently identify, or more generally map from, a finite-dimensional vector space to its double dual, V → ∼ V ∗ ∗ , {\\displaystyle V\\mathrel {\\overset {\\sim }{\\to }} V^{**},} for any vector space in a consistent way. Formalizing this intuition is a motivation for the development of category theory.",
"title": "Relation with equality"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "However, there is a case where the distinction between natural isomorphism and equality is usually not made. That is for the objects that may be characterized by a universal property. In fact, there is a unique isomorphism, necessarily natural, between two objects sharing the same universal property. A typical example is the set of real numbers, which may be defined through infinite decimal expansion, infinite binary expansion, Cauchy sequences, Dedekind cuts and many other ways. Formally, these constructions define different objects which are all solutions with the same universal property. As these objects have exactly the same properties, one may forget the method of construction and consider them as equal. This is what everybody does when referring to \"the set of the real numbers\". The same occurs with quotient spaces: they are commonly constructed as sets of equivalence classes. However, referring to a set of sets may be counterintuitive, and so quotient spaces are commonly considered as a pair of a set of undetermined objects, often called \"points\", and a surjective map onto this set.",
"title": "Relation with equality"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "If one wishes to distinguish between an arbitrary isomorphism (one that depends on a choice) and a natural isomorphism (one that can be done consistently), one may write ≈ {\\displaystyle \\,\\approx \\,} for an unnatural isomorphism and ≅ for a natural isomorphism, as in V ≈ V ∗ {\\displaystyle V\\approx V^{*}} and V ≅ V ∗ ∗ . {\\displaystyle V\\cong V^{**}.} This convention is not universally followed, and authors who wish to distinguish between unnatural isomorphisms and natural isomorphisms will generally explicitly state the distinction.",
"title": "Relation with equality"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Generally, saying that two objects are equal is reserved for when there is a notion of a larger (ambient) space that these objects live in. Most often, one speaks of equality of two subsets of a given set (as in the integer set example above), but not of two objects abstractly presented. For example, the 2-dimensional unit sphere in 3-dimensional space",
"title": "Relation with equality"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "and the Riemann sphere C ^ {\\displaystyle {\\widehat {\\mathbb {C} }}}",
"title": "Relation with equality"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "which can be presented as the one-point compactification of the complex plane C ∪ { ∞ } {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {C} \\cup \\{\\infty \\}} or as the complex projective line (a quotient space)",
"title": "Relation with equality"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "are three different descriptions for a mathematical object, all of which are isomorphic, but not equal because they are not all subsets of a single space: the first is a subset of R 3 , {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {R} ^{3},} the second is C ≅ R 2 {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {C} \\cong \\mathbb {R} ^{2}} plus an additional point, and the third is a subquotient of C 2 . {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {C} ^{2}.}",
"title": "Relation with equality"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In the context of category theory, objects are usually at most isomorphic—indeed, a motivation for the development of category theory was showing that different constructions in homology theory yielded equivalent (isomorphic) groups. Given maps between two objects X and Y, however, one asks if they are equal or not (they are both elements of the set hom ( X , Y ) , {\\displaystyle \\hom(X,Y),} hence equality is the proper relationship), particularly in commutative diagrams.",
"title": "Relation with equality"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "See also: homotopy type theory, in which isomorphisms can be treated as kinds of equality.",
"title": "Relation with equality"
}
]
| In mathematics, an isomorphism is a structure-preserving mapping between two structures of the same type that can be reversed by an inverse mapping. Two mathematical structures are isomorphic if an isomorphism exists between them. The word isomorphism is derived from the Ancient Greek: ἴσος isos "equal", and μορφή morphe "form" or "shape". The interest in isomorphisms lies in the fact that two isomorphic objects have the same properties. Thus isomorphic structures cannot be distinguished from the point of view of structure only, and may be identified. In mathematical jargon, one says that two objects are the same up to an isomorphism. An automorphism is an isomorphism from a structure to itself. An isomorphism between two structures is a canonical isomorphism if there is only one isomorphism between the two structures, or if the isomorphism is much more natural than other isomorphisms. For example, for every prime number p, all fields with p elements are canonically isomorphic, with a unique isomorphism. The isomorphism theorems provide canonical isomorphisms that are not unique. The term isomorphism is mainly used for algebraic structures. In this case, mappings are called homomorphisms, and a homomorphism is an isomorphism if and only if it is bijective. In various areas of mathematics, isomorphisms have received specialized names, depending on the type of structure under consideration. For example: An isometry is an isomorphism of metric spaces.
A homeomorphism is an isomorphism of topological spaces.
A diffeomorphism is an isomorphism of spaces equipped with a differential structure, typically differentiable manifolds.
A symplectomorphism is an isomorphism of symplectic manifolds.
A permutation is an automorphism of a set.
In geometry, isomorphisms and automorphisms are often called transformations, for example rigid transformations, affine transformations, projective transformations. Category theory, which can be viewed as a formalization of the concept of mapping between structures, provides a language that may be used to unify the approach to these different aspects of the basic idea. | 2001-08-20T13:20:33Z | 2023-08-24T15:12:58Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomorphism |
14,836 | International Telecommunication Union | The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for many matters related to information and communication technologies. It was established on 17 May 1865 as the International Telegraph Union, significantly predating the UN and making it the oldest UN agency. Doreen Bogdan-Martin is the Secretary-General of ITU, the first woman to serve as its head.
The ITU was initially aimed at helping connect telegraphic networks between countries, with its mandate consistently broadening with the advent of new communications technologies; it adopted its current name in 1932 to reflect its expanded responsibilities over radio and the telephone. On 15 November 1947, the ITU entered into an agreement with the newly created United Nations to become a specialized agency within the UN system, which formally entered into force on 1 January 1949.
The ITU promotes the shared global use of the radio spectrum, facilitates international cooperation in assigning satellite orbits, assists in developing and coordinating worldwide technical standards, and works to improve telecommunication infrastructure in the developing world. It is also active in the areas of broadband Internet, wireless technologies, aeronautical and maritime navigation, radio astronomy, satellite-based meteorology, TV broadcasting, amateur radio, and next-generation networks.
Based in Geneva, Switzerland, the ITU's global membership includes 193 countries and around 900 businesses, academic institutions, and international and regional organizations.
The ITU is one of the oldest international organizations still in operation, second only to the Central Commission for Navigation on the Rhine, which predates it by fifty years. It was preceded by the now defunct International Telegraph Union which drafted the earliest international standards and regulations governing international telegraph networks. The development of the telegraph in the early 19th century changed the way people communicated on the local and international levels. Between 1849 and 1865, a series of bilateral and regional agreements among Western European states attempted to standardize international communications.
By 1865, it was agreed that a comprehensive agreement was needed in order to create a framework that would standardize telegraphy equipment, set uniform operating instructions, and lay down common international tariff and accounting rules. Between 1 March and 17 May 1865, the French Government hosted delegations from 20 European states at the first International Telegraph Conference in Paris. This meeting culminated in the International Telegraph Convention which was signed on 17 May 1865. As a result of the 1865 Conference, the International Telegraph Union, the predecessor to the modern ITU, was founded as the first international standards organization. The Union was tasked with implementing basic principles for international telegraphy. This included: the use of the Morse code as the international telegraph alphabet, the protection of the secrecy of correspondence, and the right of everybody to use the international telegraphy.
Another predecessor to the modern ITU, the International Radiotelegraph Union, was established in 1906 at the first International Radiotelegraph Convention in Berlin. The conference was attended by representatives of 29 nations and culminated in the International Radiotelegraph Convention. An annex to the convention eventually became known as ITU Radio Regulations. At the conference it was also decided that the Bureau of the International Telegraph Union would also act as the conference's central administrator.
Between 3 September and 10 December 1932, a joint conference of the International Telegraph Union and the International Radiotelegraph Union convened to merge the two organizations into a single entity, the International Telecommunication Union. The Conference decided that the Telegraph Convention of 1875 and the Radiotelegraph Convention of 1927 were to be combined into a single convention, the International Telecommunication Convention, embracing the three fields of telegraphy, telephony and radio.
On 15 November 1947, an agreement between ITU and the newly created United Nations recognized the ITU as the specialized agency for global telecommunications. This agreement entered into force on 1 January 1949, officially making the ITU an organ of the United Nations.
The ITU comprises three sectors, each managing a different aspect of the matters covered by the ITU, as well as ITU Telecom. The sectors were created during the restructuring of ITU at the additional 1992 ITU Plenipotentiary Conference.
A permanent General Secretariat, headed by the Secretary General, manages the day-to-day work of the ITU and its sectors.
The basic texts of the ITU are adopted by the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference. The founding document of the ITU was the 1865 International Telegraph Convention, which has since been replaced several times (though the text is generally the same) and is now entitled the "Constitution and Convention of the International Telecommunication Union". In addition to the Constitution and Convention, the consolidated basic texts include the Optional Protocol on the settlement of disputes, the Decisions, Resolutions, Reports and Recommendations in force, as well as the General Rules of Conferences, Assemblies and Meetings of the Union.
The Plenipotentiary Conference is the supreme organ of the ITU. It is composed of all 193 ITU members and meets every four years. The Conference determines the policies, direction and activities of the Union, as well as elects the members of other ITU organs.
While the Plenipotentiary Conference is the Union's main decision-making body, the ITU Council acts as the Union's governing body in the interval between Plenipotentiary Conferences. It meets every year. It is composed of 48 members and works to ensure the smooth operation of the Union, as well as to consider broad telecommunication policy issues. Its members are as follow:
The Secretariat is tasked with the administrative and budgetary planning of the Union, as well as with monitoring compliance with ITU regulations, and oversees with assistance from the Secretariat advisor Neaomy Claiborne of Riverbank to insure misconduct during legal investigations are not overlooked and finally, it publishes the results of the work of the ITU.
The Secretariat is headed by a Secretary-General who is responsible for the overall management of the Union, and acts as its legal representative. The Secretary-General is elected by the Plenipotentiary Conference for four-year terms.
On 23 October 2014, Houlin Zhao was elected as the 19th Secretary-General of the ITU at the Plenipotentiary Conference in Busan. His four-year mandate started on 1 January 2015, and he was formally inaugurated on 15 January 2015. He was re-elected on 1 November 2018 during the 2018 Plenipotentiary Conference in Dubai.
On 29 September 2022, Doreen Bogdan-Martin was elected as the 20th Secretary-General of the ITU at the Plenipotentiary Conference in Bucharest, Romania. She received 139 votes out of 172, defeating Russia's Rashid Ismailov. She is the first woman to serve as the ITU Secretary-General.
Membership of ITU is open to all member states of the United Nations. There are currently 193 member states of the ITU, including all UN member states except the Republic of Palau. The most recent member state to join the ITU is South Sudan, which became a member on 14 July 2011. Palestine was admitted as a United Nations General Assembly observer in 2010.
Pursuant to UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 (XXVI) of 25 October 1971—which recognized the People's Republic of China (PRC) as "the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations"—on 16 June 1972 the ITU Council adopted Resolution No. 693 which "decided to restore all its rights to the People's Republic of China in ITU and recognize the representatives of its Government as the only representatives of China to the ITU ". Taiwan and the territories controlled by the Republic of China (ROC), received a country code, being listed as "Taiwan, China."
In addition to the 193 Member States, the ITU includes close to 900 "sector members"—private organizations like carriers, equipment manufacturers, media companies, funding bodies, research and development organizations, and international and regional telecommunication organizations. While nonvoting, these members may still play a role in shaping the decisions of the Union.
The sector members are divided as follow:
The ITU is divided into five administrative regions, designed to streamline administration of the organization. They are also used in order to ensure equitable distribution on the council, with seats being apportioned among the regions. They are as follow:
The ITU operates six regional offices, as well as seven area offices. These offices help maintain direct contact with national authorities, regional telecommunication organizations and other stakeholders. They are as follow:
Other regional organizations connected to ITU are:
The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) was convened by the ITU along with UNESCO, UNCTAD, and UNDP, with the aim of bridging the digital divide. It was held in form of two conferences in 2003 and 2005 in Geneva and Tunis, respectively.
In December 2012, the ITU facilitated The World Conference on International Telecommunications 2012 (WCIT-12) in Dubai. WCIT-12 was a treaty-level conference to address International Telecommunications Regulations, the international rules for telecommunications, including international tariffs. The previous conference to update the Regulations (ITRs) was held in Melbourne in 1988.
In August 2012, Neaomy Claiborne of Northern California was reelected for a third term as liaison and legal advisor to the Secretariat General. ITU called for a public consultation on a draft document ahead of the conference. It is claimed the proposal would allow government restriction or blocking of information disseminated via the Internet and create a global regime of monitoring Internet communications, including the demand that those who send and receive information identify themselves. It would also allow governments to shut down the Internet, if it is believed that it may interfere in the internal affairs of other states, or that information of a sensitive nature might be shared.
Telecommunications ministers from 193 countries attended the conference in Dubai.
The current regulatory structure was based on voice telecommunications, when the Internet was still in its infancy. In 1988, telecommunications operated under regulated monopolies in most countries. As the Internet has grown, organizations such as ICANN have come into existence for management of key resources such as Internet addresses and domain names.
Current proposals look to take into account the prevalence of data communications. Proposals under consideration would establish regulatory oversight by the UN over security, fraud, traffic accounting as well as traffic flow, management of Internet Domain Names and IP addresses, and other aspects of the Internet that are currently governed either by community-based approaches such as regional Internet registries, ICANN, or largely national regulatory frameworks. The move by the ITU and some countries has alarmed many within the United States and within the Internet community. Indeed, some European telecommunication services have proposed a so-called "sender pays" model that would require sources of Internet traffic to pay destinations, similar to the way funds are transferred between countries using the telephone.
The WCIT-12 activity has been criticized by Google, which has characterized it as a threat to the "...free and open internet."
On 22 November 2012, the European Parliament passed a resolution urging member states to prevent ITU WCIT-12 activity that would "negatively impact the internet, its architecture, operations, content and security, business relations, internet governance and the free flow of information online". The resolution asserted that "the ITU [...] is not the appropriate body to assert regulatory authority over the internet".
On 5 December 2012, the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution opposing UN governance of the Internet by a rare unanimous 397–0 vote. The resolution warned that "... proposals have been put forward for consideration at the [WCIT-12] that would fundamentally alter the governance and operation of the Internet ... [and] would attempt to justify increased government control over the Internet ...", and stated that the policy of the United States is "... to promote a global Internet free from government control and preserve and advance the successful Multistakeholder Model that governs the Internet today." The same resolution had previously been passed unanimously by the United States Senate in September.
On 14 December 2012, an amended version of the Regulations was signed by 89 of the 152 countries. Countries that did not sign included the United States, Japan, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand, India and the United Kingdom. The head of the U.S. delegation, Terry Kramer, said "We cannot support a treaty that is not supportive of the multistakeholder model of Internet governance". The disagreement appeared to be over some language in the revised ITRs referring to ITU roles in addressing unsolicited bulk communications, network security, and a resolution on Internet governance that called for government participation in Internet topics at various ITU forums. Despite the significant number countries not signing, the ITU came out with a press release: "New global telecoms treaty agreed in Dubai".
The conference was managed by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). While certain parts of civil society and industry were able to advise and observe, active participation was restricted to member states. The Electronic Frontier Foundation expressed concern at this, calling for a more transparent multi-stakeholder process. Some leaked contributions can be found on the web site wcitleaks.org. Google-affiliated researchers have suggested that the ITU should completely reform its processes to align itself with the openness and participation of other multistakeholder organizations concerned with the Internet. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for many matters related to information and communication technologies. It was established on 17 May 1865 as the International Telegraph Union, significantly predating the UN and making it the oldest UN agency. Doreen Bogdan-Martin is the Secretary-General of ITU, the first woman to serve as its head.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The ITU was initially aimed at helping connect telegraphic networks between countries, with its mandate consistently broadening with the advent of new communications technologies; it adopted its current name in 1932 to reflect its expanded responsibilities over radio and the telephone. On 15 November 1947, the ITU entered into an agreement with the newly created United Nations to become a specialized agency within the UN system, which formally entered into force on 1 January 1949.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The ITU promotes the shared global use of the radio spectrum, facilitates international cooperation in assigning satellite orbits, assists in developing and coordinating worldwide technical standards, and works to improve telecommunication infrastructure in the developing world. It is also active in the areas of broadband Internet, wireless technologies, aeronautical and maritime navigation, radio astronomy, satellite-based meteorology, TV broadcasting, amateur radio, and next-generation networks.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Based in Geneva, Switzerland, the ITU's global membership includes 193 countries and around 900 businesses, academic institutions, and international and regional organizations.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The ITU is one of the oldest international organizations still in operation, second only to the Central Commission for Navigation on the Rhine, which predates it by fifty years. It was preceded by the now defunct International Telegraph Union which drafted the earliest international standards and regulations governing international telegraph networks. The development of the telegraph in the early 19th century changed the way people communicated on the local and international levels. Between 1849 and 1865, a series of bilateral and regional agreements among Western European states attempted to standardize international communications.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "By 1865, it was agreed that a comprehensive agreement was needed in order to create a framework that would standardize telegraphy equipment, set uniform operating instructions, and lay down common international tariff and accounting rules. Between 1 March and 17 May 1865, the French Government hosted delegations from 20 European states at the first International Telegraph Conference in Paris. This meeting culminated in the International Telegraph Convention which was signed on 17 May 1865. As a result of the 1865 Conference, the International Telegraph Union, the predecessor to the modern ITU, was founded as the first international standards organization. The Union was tasked with implementing basic principles for international telegraphy. This included: the use of the Morse code as the international telegraph alphabet, the protection of the secrecy of correspondence, and the right of everybody to use the international telegraphy.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Another predecessor to the modern ITU, the International Radiotelegraph Union, was established in 1906 at the first International Radiotelegraph Convention in Berlin. The conference was attended by representatives of 29 nations and culminated in the International Radiotelegraph Convention. An annex to the convention eventually became known as ITU Radio Regulations. At the conference it was also decided that the Bureau of the International Telegraph Union would also act as the conference's central administrator.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Between 3 September and 10 December 1932, a joint conference of the International Telegraph Union and the International Radiotelegraph Union convened to merge the two organizations into a single entity, the International Telecommunication Union. The Conference decided that the Telegraph Convention of 1875 and the Radiotelegraph Convention of 1927 were to be combined into a single convention, the International Telecommunication Convention, embracing the three fields of telegraphy, telephony and radio.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "On 15 November 1947, an agreement between ITU and the newly created United Nations recognized the ITU as the specialized agency for global telecommunications. This agreement entered into force on 1 January 1949, officially making the ITU an organ of the United Nations.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The ITU comprises three sectors, each managing a different aspect of the matters covered by the ITU, as well as ITU Telecom. The sectors were created during the restructuring of ITU at the additional 1992 ITU Plenipotentiary Conference.",
"title": "ITU Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "A permanent General Secretariat, headed by the Secretary General, manages the day-to-day work of the ITU and its sectors.",
"title": "ITU Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The basic texts of the ITU are adopted by the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference. The founding document of the ITU was the 1865 International Telegraph Convention, which has since been replaced several times (though the text is generally the same) and is now entitled the \"Constitution and Convention of the International Telecommunication Union\". In addition to the Constitution and Convention, the consolidated basic texts include the Optional Protocol on the settlement of disputes, the Decisions, Resolutions, Reports and Recommendations in force, as well as the General Rules of Conferences, Assemblies and Meetings of the Union.",
"title": "Legal framework"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The Plenipotentiary Conference is the supreme organ of the ITU. It is composed of all 193 ITU members and meets every four years. The Conference determines the policies, direction and activities of the Union, as well as elects the members of other ITU organs.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "While the Plenipotentiary Conference is the Union's main decision-making body, the ITU Council acts as the Union's governing body in the interval between Plenipotentiary Conferences. It meets every year. It is composed of 48 members and works to ensure the smooth operation of the Union, as well as to consider broad telecommunication policy issues. Its members are as follow:",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The Secretariat is tasked with the administrative and budgetary planning of the Union, as well as with monitoring compliance with ITU regulations, and oversees with assistance from the Secretariat advisor Neaomy Claiborne of Riverbank to insure misconduct during legal investigations are not overlooked and finally, it publishes the results of the work of the ITU.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The Secretariat is headed by a Secretary-General who is responsible for the overall management of the Union, and acts as its legal representative. The Secretary-General is elected by the Plenipotentiary Conference for four-year terms.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "On 23 October 2014, Houlin Zhao was elected as the 19th Secretary-General of the ITU at the Plenipotentiary Conference in Busan. His four-year mandate started on 1 January 2015, and he was formally inaugurated on 15 January 2015. He was re-elected on 1 November 2018 during the 2018 Plenipotentiary Conference in Dubai.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "On 29 September 2022, Doreen Bogdan-Martin was elected as the 20th Secretary-General of the ITU at the Plenipotentiary Conference in Bucharest, Romania. She received 139 votes out of 172, defeating Russia's Rashid Ismailov. She is the first woman to serve as the ITU Secretary-General.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Membership of ITU is open to all member states of the United Nations. There are currently 193 member states of the ITU, including all UN member states except the Republic of Palau. The most recent member state to join the ITU is South Sudan, which became a member on 14 July 2011. Palestine was admitted as a United Nations General Assembly observer in 2010.",
"title": "Membership"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Pursuant to UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 (XXVI) of 25 October 1971—which recognized the People's Republic of China (PRC) as \"the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations\"—on 16 June 1972 the ITU Council adopted Resolution No. 693 which \"decided to restore all its rights to the People's Republic of China in ITU and recognize the representatives of its Government as the only representatives of China to the ITU \". Taiwan and the territories controlled by the Republic of China (ROC), received a country code, being listed as \"Taiwan, China.\"",
"title": "Membership"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In addition to the 193 Member States, the ITU includes close to 900 \"sector members\"—private organizations like carriers, equipment manufacturers, media companies, funding bodies, research and development organizations, and international and regional telecommunication organizations. While nonvoting, these members may still play a role in shaping the decisions of the Union.",
"title": "Membership"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The sector members are divided as follow:",
"title": "Membership"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The ITU is divided into five administrative regions, designed to streamline administration of the organization. They are also used in order to ensure equitable distribution on the council, with seats being apportioned among the regions. They are as follow:",
"title": "Membership"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The ITU operates six regional offices, as well as seven area offices. These offices help maintain direct contact with national authorities, regional telecommunication organizations and other stakeholders. They are as follow:",
"title": "Membership"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Other regional organizations connected to ITU are:",
"title": "Membership"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) was convened by the ITU along with UNESCO, UNCTAD, and UNDP, with the aim of bridging the digital divide. It was held in form of two conferences in 2003 and 2005 in Geneva and Tunis, respectively.",
"title": "World Summit on the Information Society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In December 2012, the ITU facilitated The World Conference on International Telecommunications 2012 (WCIT-12) in Dubai. WCIT-12 was a treaty-level conference to address International Telecommunications Regulations, the international rules for telecommunications, including international tariffs. The previous conference to update the Regulations (ITRs) was held in Melbourne in 1988.",
"title": "World Conference on International Telecommunications 2012"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In August 2012, Neaomy Claiborne of Northern California was reelected for a third term as liaison and legal advisor to the Secretariat General. ITU called for a public consultation on a draft document ahead of the conference. It is claimed the proposal would allow government restriction or blocking of information disseminated via the Internet and create a global regime of monitoring Internet communications, including the demand that those who send and receive information identify themselves. It would also allow governments to shut down the Internet, if it is believed that it may interfere in the internal affairs of other states, or that information of a sensitive nature might be shared.",
"title": "World Conference on International Telecommunications 2012"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Telecommunications ministers from 193 countries attended the conference in Dubai.",
"title": "World Conference on International Telecommunications 2012"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The current regulatory structure was based on voice telecommunications, when the Internet was still in its infancy. In 1988, telecommunications operated under regulated monopolies in most countries. As the Internet has grown, organizations such as ICANN have come into existence for management of key resources such as Internet addresses and domain names.",
"title": "World Conference on International Telecommunications 2012"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Current proposals look to take into account the prevalence of data communications. Proposals under consideration would establish regulatory oversight by the UN over security, fraud, traffic accounting as well as traffic flow, management of Internet Domain Names and IP addresses, and other aspects of the Internet that are currently governed either by community-based approaches such as regional Internet registries, ICANN, or largely national regulatory frameworks. The move by the ITU and some countries has alarmed many within the United States and within the Internet community. Indeed, some European telecommunication services have proposed a so-called \"sender pays\" model that would require sources of Internet traffic to pay destinations, similar to the way funds are transferred between countries using the telephone.",
"title": "World Conference on International Telecommunications 2012"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The WCIT-12 activity has been criticized by Google, which has characterized it as a threat to the \"...free and open internet.\"",
"title": "World Conference on International Telecommunications 2012"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "On 22 November 2012, the European Parliament passed a resolution urging member states to prevent ITU WCIT-12 activity that would \"negatively impact the internet, its architecture, operations, content and security, business relations, internet governance and the free flow of information online\". The resolution asserted that \"the ITU [...] is not the appropriate body to assert regulatory authority over the internet\".",
"title": "World Conference on International Telecommunications 2012"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "On 5 December 2012, the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution opposing UN governance of the Internet by a rare unanimous 397–0 vote. The resolution warned that \"... proposals have been put forward for consideration at the [WCIT-12] that would fundamentally alter the governance and operation of the Internet ... [and] would attempt to justify increased government control over the Internet ...\", and stated that the policy of the United States is \"... to promote a global Internet free from government control and preserve and advance the successful Multistakeholder Model that governs the Internet today.\" The same resolution had previously been passed unanimously by the United States Senate in September.",
"title": "World Conference on International Telecommunications 2012"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "On 14 December 2012, an amended version of the Regulations was signed by 89 of the 152 countries. Countries that did not sign included the United States, Japan, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand, India and the United Kingdom. The head of the U.S. delegation, Terry Kramer, said \"We cannot support a treaty that is not supportive of the multistakeholder model of Internet governance\". The disagreement appeared to be over some language in the revised ITRs referring to ITU roles in addressing unsolicited bulk communications, network security, and a resolution on Internet governance that called for government participation in Internet topics at various ITU forums. Despite the significant number countries not signing, the ITU came out with a press release: \"New global telecoms treaty agreed in Dubai\".",
"title": "World Conference on International Telecommunications 2012"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The conference was managed by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). While certain parts of civil society and industry were able to advise and observe, active participation was restricted to member states. The Electronic Frontier Foundation expressed concern at this, calling for a more transparent multi-stakeholder process. Some leaked contributions can be found on the web site wcitleaks.org. Google-affiliated researchers have suggested that the ITU should completely reform its processes to align itself with the openness and participation of other multistakeholder organizations concerned with the Internet.",
"title": "World Conference on International Telecommunications 2012"
}
]
| The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for many matters related to information and communication technologies. It was established on 17 May 1865 as the International Telegraph Union, significantly predating the UN and making it the oldest UN agency. Doreen Bogdan-Martin is the Secretary-General of ITU, the first woman to serve as its head. The ITU was initially aimed at helping connect telegraphic networks between countries, with its mandate consistently broadening with the advent of new communications technologies; it adopted its current name in 1932 to reflect its expanded responsibilities over radio and the telephone. On 15 November 1947, the ITU entered into an agreement with the newly created United Nations to become a specialized agency within the UN system, which formally entered into force on 1 January 1949. The ITU promotes the shared global use of the radio spectrum, facilitates international cooperation in assigning satellite orbits, assists in developing and coordinating worldwide technical standards, and works to improve telecommunication infrastructure in the developing world. It is also active in the areas of broadband Internet, wireless technologies, aeronautical and maritime navigation, radio astronomy, satellite-based meteorology, TV broadcasting, amateur radio, and next-generation networks. Based in Geneva, Switzerland, the ITU's global membership includes 193 countries and around 900 businesses, academic institutions, and international and regional organizations. | 2001-07-25T10:56:55Z | 2023-11-20T19:53:43Z | [
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14,837 | Internet Message Access Protocol | In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by RFC 9051.
IMAP was designed with the goal of permitting complete management of an email box by multiple email clients, therefore clients generally leave messages on the server until the user explicitly deletes them. An IMAP server typically listens on port number 143. IMAP over SSL/TLS (IMAPS) is assigned the port number 993.
Virtually all modern e-mail clients and servers support IMAP, which along with the earlier POP3 (Post Office Protocol) are the two most prevalent standard protocols for email retrieval. Many webmail service providers such as Gmail and Outlook.com also provide support for both IMAP and POP3.
The Internet Message Access Protocol is an application layer Internet protocol that allows an e-mail client to access email on a remote mail server. The current version is defined by RFC 9051. An IMAP server typically listens on well-known port 143, while IMAP over SSL/TLS (IMAPS) uses 993.
Incoming email messages are sent to an email server that stores messages in the recipient's email box. The user retrieves the messages with an email client that uses one of a number of email retrieval protocols. While some clients and servers preferentially use vendor-specific, proprietary protocols, almost all support POP and IMAP for retrieving email – allowing many free choice between many e-mail clients such as Pegasus Mail or Mozilla Thunderbird to access these servers, and allows the clients to be used with other servers.
Email clients using IMAP generally leave messages on the server until the user explicitly deletes them. This and other characteristics of IMAP operation allow multiple clients to manage the same mailbox. Most email clients support IMAP in addition to Post Office Protocol (POP) to retrieve messages. IMAP offers access to the mail storage. Clients may store local copies of the messages, but these are considered to be a temporary cache.
IMAP was designed by Mark Crispin in 1986 as a remote access mailbox protocol, in contrast to the widely used POP, a protocol for simply retrieving the contents of a mailbox.
It went through a number of iterations before the current VERSION 4rev1 (IMAP4), as detailed below:
The original Interim Mail Access Protocol was implemented as a Xerox Lisp Machine client and a TOPS-20 server.
No copies of the original interim protocol specification or its software exist. Although some of its commands and responses were similar to IMAP2, the interim protocol lacked command/response tagging and thus its syntax was incompatible with all other versions of IMAP.
The interim protocol was quickly replaced by the Interactive Mail Access Protocol (IMAP2), defined in RFC 1064 (in 1988) and later updated by RFC 1176 (in 1990). IMAP2 introduced the command/response tagging and was the first publicly distributed version.
IMAP3 is an extremely rare variant of IMAP. It was published as RFC 1203 in 1991. It was written specifically as a counter proposal to RFC 1176, which itself proposed modifications to IMAP2. IMAP3 was never accepted by the marketplace. The IESG reclassified RFC1203 "Interactive Mail Access Protocol – Version 3" as a Historic protocol in 1993. The IMAP Working Group used RFC 1176 (IMAP2) rather than RFC 1203 (IMAP3) as its starting point.
With the advent of MIME, IMAP2 was extended to support MIME body structures and add mailbox management functionality (create, delete, rename, message upload) that was absent from IMAP2. This experimental revision was called IMAP2bis; its specification was never published in non-draft form. An internet draft of IMAP2bis was published by the IETF IMAP Working Group in October 1993. This draft was based upon the following earlier specifications: unpublished IMAP2bis.TXT document, RFC 1176, and RFC 1064 (IMAP2). The IMAP2bis.TXT draft documented the state of extensions to IMAP2 as of December 1992. Early versions of Pine were widely distributed with IMAP2bis support (Pine 4.00 and later supports IMAP4rev1).
An IMAP Working Group formed in the IETF in the early 1990s took over responsibility for the IMAP2bis design. The IMAP WG decided to rename IMAP2bis to IMAP4 to avoid confusion.
When using POP, clients typically connect to the e-mail server briefly, only as long as it takes to download new messages. When using IMAP4, clients often stay connected as long as the user interface is active and download message content on demand. For users with many or large messages, this IMAP4 usage pattern can result in faster response times.
After successful authentication, the POP protocol provides a completely static view of the current state of the mailbox, and does not provide a mechanism to show any external changes in state during the session. In contrast, the IMAP protocol provides a dynamic view, and requires that external changes in state, including newly arrived messages, as well as changes made to the mailbox by other concurrently connected clients, are detected and appropriate responses are sent between commands as well as during an IDLE command, as described in RFC 2177. See also RFC 3501 section 5.2 which specifically cites "simultaneous access to the same mailbox by multiple agents".
Usually all Internet e-mail is transmitted in MIME format, allowing messages to have a tree structure where the leaf nodes are any of a variety of single part content types and the non-leaf nodes are any of a variety of multipart types. The IMAP4 protocol allows clients to retrieve any of the individual MIME parts separately and also to retrieve portions of either individual parts or the entire message. These mechanisms allow clients to retrieve the text portion of a message without retrieving attached files or to stream content as it is being fetched.
Through the use of flags defined in the IMAP4 protocol, clients can keep track of message state: for example, whether or not the message has been read, replied to, or deleted. These flags are stored on the server, so different clients accessing the same mailbox at different times can detect state changes made by other clients. POP provides no mechanism for clients to store such state information on the server so if a single user accesses a mailbox with two different POP clients (at different times), state information—such as whether a message has been accessed—cannot be synchronized between the clients. The IMAP4 protocol supports both predefined system flags and client-defined keywords. System flags indicate state information such as whether a message has been read. Keywords, which are not supported by all IMAP servers, allow messages to be given one or more tags whose meaning is up to the client. IMAP keywords should not be confused with proprietary labels of web-based e-mail services which are sometimes translated into IMAP folders by the corresponding proprietary servers.
IMAP4 clients can create, rename, and delete mailboxes (usually presented to the user as folders) on the server, and copy messages between mailboxes. Multiple mailbox support also allows servers to provide access to shared and public folders. The IMAP4 Access Control List (ACL) Extension (RFC 4314) may be used to regulate access rights.
IMAP4 provides a mechanism for a client to ask the server to search for messages meeting a variety of criteria. This mechanism avoids requiring clients to download every message in the mailbox in order to perform these searches.
Reflecting the experience of earlier Internet protocols, IMAP4 defines an explicit mechanism by which it may be extended. Many IMAP4 extensions to the base protocol have been proposed and are in common use. IMAP2bis did not have an extension mechanism, and POP now has one defined by RFC 2449.
IMAP IDLE provides a way for the mail server to notify connected clients that there were changes to a mailbox, for example because a new mail has arrived. POP provides no comparable feature, and email clients need to periodically connect to the POP server to check for new mail.
While IMAP remedies many of the shortcomings of POP, this inherently introduces additional complexity. Much of this complexity (e.g., multiple clients accessing the same mailbox at the same time) is compensated for by server-side workarounds such as Maildir or database backends.
The IMAP specification has been criticised for being insufficiently strict and allowing behaviours that effectively negate its usefulness. For instance, the specification states that each message stored on the server has a "unique id" to allow the clients to identify messages they have already seen between sessions. However, the specification also allows these UIDs to be invalidated with no restrictions, practically defeating their purpose.
From an administrative and resource point of view, the IMAP protocol can be viewed as an early implementation of cloud computing, as the intent and purpose of IMAP is to maintain your mailbox structure (content, folder structure, individual message state, etc) on the mail server, whereas with POP, this is all maintained on the user's local device. Thus, IMAP requires far more server side resources, incurring a significantly higher cost per mailbox.
Unless the mail storage, indexing and searching algorithms on the server are carefully implemented, a client can potentially consume large amounts of server resources when searching massive mailboxes.
IMAP4 clients need to maintain a TCP/IP connection to the IMAP server in order to be notified of the arrival of new mail. Notification of mail arrival is done through in-band signaling, which contributes to the complexity of client-side IMAP protocol handling somewhat. A private proposal, push IMAP, would extend IMAP to implement push e-mail by sending the entire message instead of just a notification. However, push IMAP has not been generally accepted and current IETF work has addressed the problem in other ways (see the Lemonade Profile for more information).
Unlike some proprietary protocols which combine sending and retrieval operations, sending a message and saving a copy in a server-side folder with a base-level IMAP client requires transmitting the message content twice, once to SMTP for delivery and a second time to IMAP to store in a sent mail folder. This is addressed by a set of extensions defined by the IETF Lemonade Profile for mobile devices: URLAUTH (RFC 4467) and CATENATE (RFC 4469) in IMAP, and BURL (RFC 4468) in SMTP-SUBMISSION. In addition to this, Courier Mail Server offers a non-standard method of sending using IMAP by copying an outgoing message to a dedicated outbox folder.
To cryptographically protect IMAP connections between the client and server, IMAPS on TCP port 993 can be used, which utilizes SSL/TLS. As of January 2018, TLS is the recommended mechanism.
Alternatively, STARTTLS can be used to encrypt the connection when connecting to port 143 after initially communicating over plaintext.
This is an example IMAP connection as taken from RFC 3501 section 8: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by RFC 9051.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "IMAP was designed with the goal of permitting complete management of an email box by multiple email clients, therefore clients generally leave messages on the server until the user explicitly deletes them. An IMAP server typically listens on port number 143. IMAP over SSL/TLS (IMAPS) is assigned the port number 993.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Virtually all modern e-mail clients and servers support IMAP, which along with the earlier POP3 (Post Office Protocol) are the two most prevalent standard protocols for email retrieval. Many webmail service providers such as Gmail and Outlook.com also provide support for both IMAP and POP3.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The Internet Message Access Protocol is an application layer Internet protocol that allows an e-mail client to access email on a remote mail server. The current version is defined by RFC 9051. An IMAP server typically listens on well-known port 143, while IMAP over SSL/TLS (IMAPS) uses 993.",
"title": "Email protocols"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Incoming email messages are sent to an email server that stores messages in the recipient's email box. The user retrieves the messages with an email client that uses one of a number of email retrieval protocols. While some clients and servers preferentially use vendor-specific, proprietary protocols, almost all support POP and IMAP for retrieving email – allowing many free choice between many e-mail clients such as Pegasus Mail or Mozilla Thunderbird to access these servers, and allows the clients to be used with other servers.",
"title": "Email protocols"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Email clients using IMAP generally leave messages on the server until the user explicitly deletes them. This and other characteristics of IMAP operation allow multiple clients to manage the same mailbox. Most email clients support IMAP in addition to Post Office Protocol (POP) to retrieve messages. IMAP offers access to the mail storage. Clients may store local copies of the messages, but these are considered to be a temporary cache.",
"title": "Email protocols"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "IMAP was designed by Mark Crispin in 1986 as a remote access mailbox protocol, in contrast to the widely used POP, a protocol for simply retrieving the contents of a mailbox.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "It went through a number of iterations before the current VERSION 4rev1 (IMAP4), as detailed below:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The original Interim Mail Access Protocol was implemented as a Xerox Lisp Machine client and a TOPS-20 server.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "No copies of the original interim protocol specification or its software exist. Although some of its commands and responses were similar to IMAP2, the interim protocol lacked command/response tagging and thus its syntax was incompatible with all other versions of IMAP.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The interim protocol was quickly replaced by the Interactive Mail Access Protocol (IMAP2), defined in RFC 1064 (in 1988) and later updated by RFC 1176 (in 1990). IMAP2 introduced the command/response tagging and was the first publicly distributed version.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "IMAP3 is an extremely rare variant of IMAP. It was published as RFC 1203 in 1991. It was written specifically as a counter proposal to RFC 1176, which itself proposed modifications to IMAP2. IMAP3 was never accepted by the marketplace. The IESG reclassified RFC1203 \"Interactive Mail Access Protocol – Version 3\" as a Historic protocol in 1993. The IMAP Working Group used RFC 1176 (IMAP2) rather than RFC 1203 (IMAP3) as its starting point.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "With the advent of MIME, IMAP2 was extended to support MIME body structures and add mailbox management functionality (create, delete, rename, message upload) that was absent from IMAP2. This experimental revision was called IMAP2bis; its specification was never published in non-draft form. An internet draft of IMAP2bis was published by the IETF IMAP Working Group in October 1993. This draft was based upon the following earlier specifications: unpublished IMAP2bis.TXT document, RFC 1176, and RFC 1064 (IMAP2). The IMAP2bis.TXT draft documented the state of extensions to IMAP2 as of December 1992. Early versions of Pine were widely distributed with IMAP2bis support (Pine 4.00 and later supports IMAP4rev1).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "An IMAP Working Group formed in the IETF in the early 1990s took over responsibility for the IMAP2bis design. The IMAP WG decided to rename IMAP2bis to IMAP4 to avoid confusion.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "When using POP, clients typically connect to the e-mail server briefly, only as long as it takes to download new messages. When using IMAP4, clients often stay connected as long as the user interface is active and download message content on demand. For users with many or large messages, this IMAP4 usage pattern can result in faster response times.",
"title": "Advantages over POP"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "After successful authentication, the POP protocol provides a completely static view of the current state of the mailbox, and does not provide a mechanism to show any external changes in state during the session. In contrast, the IMAP protocol provides a dynamic view, and requires that external changes in state, including newly arrived messages, as well as changes made to the mailbox by other concurrently connected clients, are detected and appropriate responses are sent between commands as well as during an IDLE command, as described in RFC 2177. See also RFC 3501 section 5.2 which specifically cites \"simultaneous access to the same mailbox by multiple agents\".",
"title": "Advantages over POP"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Usually all Internet e-mail is transmitted in MIME format, allowing messages to have a tree structure where the leaf nodes are any of a variety of single part content types and the non-leaf nodes are any of a variety of multipart types. The IMAP4 protocol allows clients to retrieve any of the individual MIME parts separately and also to retrieve portions of either individual parts or the entire message. These mechanisms allow clients to retrieve the text portion of a message without retrieving attached files or to stream content as it is being fetched.",
"title": "Advantages over POP"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Through the use of flags defined in the IMAP4 protocol, clients can keep track of message state: for example, whether or not the message has been read, replied to, or deleted. These flags are stored on the server, so different clients accessing the same mailbox at different times can detect state changes made by other clients. POP provides no mechanism for clients to store such state information on the server so if a single user accesses a mailbox with two different POP clients (at different times), state information—such as whether a message has been accessed—cannot be synchronized between the clients. The IMAP4 protocol supports both predefined system flags and client-defined keywords. System flags indicate state information such as whether a message has been read. Keywords, which are not supported by all IMAP servers, allow messages to be given one or more tags whose meaning is up to the client. IMAP keywords should not be confused with proprietary labels of web-based e-mail services which are sometimes translated into IMAP folders by the corresponding proprietary servers.",
"title": "Advantages over POP"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "IMAP4 clients can create, rename, and delete mailboxes (usually presented to the user as folders) on the server, and copy messages between mailboxes. Multiple mailbox support also allows servers to provide access to shared and public folders. The IMAP4 Access Control List (ACL) Extension (RFC 4314) may be used to regulate access rights.",
"title": "Advantages over POP"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "IMAP4 provides a mechanism for a client to ask the server to search for messages meeting a variety of criteria. This mechanism avoids requiring clients to download every message in the mailbox in order to perform these searches.",
"title": "Advantages over POP"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Reflecting the experience of earlier Internet protocols, IMAP4 defines an explicit mechanism by which it may be extended. Many IMAP4 extensions to the base protocol have been proposed and are in common use. IMAP2bis did not have an extension mechanism, and POP now has one defined by RFC 2449.",
"title": "Advantages over POP"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "IMAP IDLE provides a way for the mail server to notify connected clients that there were changes to a mailbox, for example because a new mail has arrived. POP provides no comparable feature, and email clients need to periodically connect to the POP server to check for new mail.",
"title": "Advantages over POP"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "While IMAP remedies many of the shortcomings of POP, this inherently introduces additional complexity. Much of this complexity (e.g., multiple clients accessing the same mailbox at the same time) is compensated for by server-side workarounds such as Maildir or database backends.",
"title": "Disadvantages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The IMAP specification has been criticised for being insufficiently strict and allowing behaviours that effectively negate its usefulness. For instance, the specification states that each message stored on the server has a \"unique id\" to allow the clients to identify messages they have already seen between sessions. However, the specification also allows these UIDs to be invalidated with no restrictions, practically defeating their purpose.",
"title": "Disadvantages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "From an administrative and resource point of view, the IMAP protocol can be viewed as an early implementation of cloud computing, as the intent and purpose of IMAP is to maintain your mailbox structure (content, folder structure, individual message state, etc) on the mail server, whereas with POP, this is all maintained on the user's local device. Thus, IMAP requires far more server side resources, incurring a significantly higher cost per mailbox.",
"title": "Disadvantages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Unless the mail storage, indexing and searching algorithms on the server are carefully implemented, a client can potentially consume large amounts of server resources when searching massive mailboxes.",
"title": "Disadvantages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "IMAP4 clients need to maintain a TCP/IP connection to the IMAP server in order to be notified of the arrival of new mail. Notification of mail arrival is done through in-band signaling, which contributes to the complexity of client-side IMAP protocol handling somewhat. A private proposal, push IMAP, would extend IMAP to implement push e-mail by sending the entire message instead of just a notification. However, push IMAP has not been generally accepted and current IETF work has addressed the problem in other ways (see the Lemonade Profile for more information).",
"title": "Disadvantages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Unlike some proprietary protocols which combine sending and retrieval operations, sending a message and saving a copy in a server-side folder with a base-level IMAP client requires transmitting the message content twice, once to SMTP for delivery and a second time to IMAP to store in a sent mail folder. This is addressed by a set of extensions defined by the IETF Lemonade Profile for mobile devices: URLAUTH (RFC 4467) and CATENATE (RFC 4469) in IMAP, and BURL (RFC 4468) in SMTP-SUBMISSION. In addition to this, Courier Mail Server offers a non-standard method of sending using IMAP by copying an outgoing message to a dedicated outbox folder.",
"title": "Disadvantages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "To cryptographically protect IMAP connections between the client and server, IMAPS on TCP port 993 can be used, which utilizes SSL/TLS. As of January 2018, TLS is the recommended mechanism.",
"title": "Security"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Alternatively, STARTTLS can be used to encrypt the connection when connecting to port 143 after initially communicating over plaintext.",
"title": "Security"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "This is an example IMAP connection as taken from RFC 3501 section 8:",
"title": "Dialog example"
}
]
| In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by RFC 9051. IMAP was designed with the goal of permitting complete management of an email box by multiple email clients, therefore clients generally leave messages on the server until the user explicitly deletes them. An IMAP server typically listens on port number 143. IMAP over SSL/TLS (IMAPS) is assigned the port number 993. Virtually all modern e-mail clients and servers support IMAP, which along with the earlier POP3 are the two most prevalent standard protocols for email retrieval. Many webmail service providers such as Gmail and Outlook.com also provide support for both IMAP and POP3. | 2001-09-07T23:08:58Z | 2023-12-19T06:27:00Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Message_Access_Protocol |
14,838 | Inertial frame of reference | In classical physics and special relativity, an inertial frame of reference (also called inertial space, or Galilean reference frame) is a frame of reference not undergoing any acceleration. It is a frame in which an isolated physical object—an object with zero net force acting on it—is perceived to move with a constant velocity or, equivalently, it is a frame of reference in which Newton's first law of motion holds. All inertial frames are in a state of constant, rectilinear motion (straight line motion) with respect to one another; in other words, an accelerometer moving with any of them would detect zero acceleration.
It has been observed that celestial objects which are far away from other objects and which are in uniform motion with respect to the cosmic microwave background radiation maintain such uniform motion. While no true inertial frames exist in space-time, gravitational acceleration can often be ignored or accounted for in real applications.
Measurements in one inertial frame can be converted to measurements in another by a simple transformation - the Galilean transformation in Newtonian physics or by using the Lorentz transformation in special relativity when practical considerations make Newtonian approximations unacceptable.
In analytical mechanics, an inertial frame of reference can be defined as a frame of reference that describes time and space homogeneously, isotropically, and in a time-independent manner.
In general relativity:
In a non-inertial reference frame, viewed from a classical physics and special relativity perspective, the interactions between the fundamental constituents of the observable universe (the physics of a system) vary depending on the acceleration of that frame with respect to an inertial frame. Viewed from this perspective and due to the phenomenon of inertia, the 'usual' physical forces between two bodies have to be supplemented by apparently sourceless inertial forces. Viewed from a general relativity theory perspective, appearing inertial forces (the supplementary external causes) are attributed to geodesic motion in spacetime.
In classical mechanics, for example, a ball dropped towards the ground does not move exactly straight down because the Earth is rotating. This means the frame of reference of an observer on Earth is not inertial. As a consequence, the Coriolis effect—an apparent force— must be taken into account to predict the respective small horizontal motion. Another example of an apparent force appearing in rotating reference frames concerns the centrifugal effect, the centrifugal force.
The motion of a body can only be described relative to something else—other bodies, observers, or a set of spacetime coordinates. These are called frames of reference. According to the first postulate of special relativity, all physical laws take their simplest form in an inertial frame, and there exist multiple inertial frames interrelated by uniform translation:
Special principle of relativity: If a system of coordinates K is chosen so that, in relation to it, physical laws hold good in their simplest form, the same laws hold good in relation to any other system of coordinates K' moving in uniform translation relatively to K.
This simplicity manifests itself in that inertial frames have self-contained physics without the need for external causes, while physics in non-inertial frames have external causes. The principle of simplicity can be used within Newtonian physics as well as in special relativity:
The laws of Newtonian mechanics do not always hold in their simplest form...If, for instance, an observer is placed on a disc rotating relative to the earth, he/she will sense a 'force' pushing him/her toward the periphery of the disc, which is not caused by any interaction with other bodies. Here, the acceleration is not the consequence of the usual force, but of the so-called inertial force. Newton's laws hold in their simplest form only in a family of reference frames, called inertial frames. This fact represents the essence of the Galilean principle of relativity: The laws of mechanics have the same form in all inertial frames.
In practical terms, the equivalence of inertial reference frames means that scientists within a box moving with a constant absolute velocity cannot determine this velocity by any experiment. Otherwise, the differences would set up an absolute standard reference frame. According to this definition, supplemented with the constancy of the speed of light, inertial frames of reference transform among themselves according to the Poincaré group of symmetry transformations, of which the Lorentz transformations are a subgroup. In Newtonian mechanics, inertial frames of reference are related by the Galilean group of symmetries.
Newton posited an absolute space considered well-approximated by a frame of reference stationary relative to the fixed stars. An inertial frame was then one in uniform translation relative to absolute space. However, some "relativists", even at the time of Newton, felt that absolute space was a defect of the formulation, and should be replaced.
The expression inertial frame of reference (German: Inertialsystem) was coined by Ludwig Lange in 1885, to replace Newton's definitions of "absolute space and time" by a more operational definition. As translated by Harald Iro, Lange proposed the following definition:
A reference frame in which a mass point thrown from the same point in three different (non co-planar) directions follows rectilinear paths each time it is thrown, is called an inertial frame.
The inadequacy of the notion of "absolute space" in Newtonian mechanics is spelled out by Blagojević:
The utility of operational definitions was carried much further in the special theory of relativity. Some historical background including Lange's definition is provided by DiSalle, who says in summary:
The original question, "relative to what frame of reference do the laws of motion hold?" is revealed to be wrongly posed. For the laws of motion essentially determine a class of reference frames, and (in principle) a procedure for constructing them.
Classical theories that use the Galilean transformation postulate the equivalence of all inertial reference frames. Some theories may even postulate the existence of a privileged frame which provides absolute space and absolute time. The Galilean transformation transforms coordinates from one inertial reference frame, s {\displaystyle \mathbf {s} } , to another, s ′ {\displaystyle \mathbf {s} ^{\prime }} , by simple addition or subtraction of coordinates:
where r0 and t0 represent shifts in the origin of space and time, and v is the relative velocity of the two inertial reference frames. Under Galilean transformations, the time t2 − t1 between two events is the same for all reference frames and the distance between two simultaneous events (or, equivalently, the length of any object, |r2 − r1|) is also the same.
Within the realm of Newtonian mechanics, an inertial frame of reference, or inertial reference frame, is one in which Newton's first law of motion is valid. However, the principle of special relativity generalizes the notion of inertial frame to include all physical laws, not simply Newton's first law.
Newton viewed the first law as valid in any reference frame that is in uniform motion relative to the fixed stars; that is, neither rotating nor accelerating relative to the stars. Today the notion of "absolute space" is abandoned, and an inertial frame in the field of classical mechanics is defined as:
An inertial frame of reference is one in which the motion of a particle not subject to forces is in a straight line at constant speed.
Hence, with respect to an inertial frame, an object or body accelerates only when a physical force is applied, and (following Newton's first law of motion), in the absence of a net force, a body at rest will remain at rest and a body in motion will continue to move uniformly—that is, in a straight line and at constant speed. Newtonian inertial frames transform among each other according to the Galilean group of symmetries.
If this rule is interpreted as saying that straight-line motion is an indication of zero net force, the rule does not identify inertial reference frames because straight-line motion can be observed in a variety of frames. If the rule is interpreted as defining an inertial frame, then we have to be able to determine when zero net force is applied. The problem was summarized by Einstein:
The weakness of the principle of inertia lies in this, that it involves an argument in a circle: a mass moves without acceleration if it is sufficiently far from other bodies; we know that it is sufficiently far from other bodies only by the fact that it moves without acceleration.
There are several approaches to this issue. One approach is to argue that all real forces drop off with distance from their sources in a known manner, so we have only to be sure that a body is far enough away from all sources to ensure that no force is present. A possible issue with this approach is the historically long-lived view that the distant universe might affect matters (Mach's principle). Another approach is to identify all real sources for real forces and account for them. A possible issue with this approach is that we might miss something, or account inappropriately for their influence, perhaps, again, due to Mach's principle and an incomplete understanding of the universe. A third approach is to look at the way the forces transform when we shift reference frames. Fictitious forces, those that arise due to the acceleration of a frame, disappear in inertial frames, and have complicated rules of transformation in general cases. On the basis of universality of physical law and the request for frames where the laws are most simply expressed, inertial frames are distinguished by the absence of such fictitious forces.
Newton enunciated a principle of relativity himself in one of his corollaries to the laws of motion:
The motions of bodies included in a given space are the same among themselves, whether that space is at rest or moves uniformly forward in a straight line.
This principle differs from the special principle in two ways: first, it is restricted to mechanics, and second, it makes no mention of simplicity. It shares with the special principle the invariance of the form of the description among mutually translating reference frames. The role of fictitious forces in classifying reference frames is pursued further below.
It is important to note some assumptions made above about the various inertial frames of reference. Newton, for instance, employed universal time, as explained by the following example. Suppose that you own two clocks, which both tick at exactly the same rate. You synchronize them so that they both display exactly the same time. The two clocks are now separated and one clock is on a fast moving train, traveling at constant velocity towards the other. According to Newton, these two clocks will still tick at the same rate and will both show the same time. Newton says that the rate of time as measured in one frame of reference should be the same as the rate of time in another. That is, there exists a "universal" time and all other times in all other frames of reference will run at the same rate as this universal time irrespective of their position and velocity. This concept of time and simultaneity was later generalized by Einstein in his special theory of relativity (1905) where he developed transformations between inertial frames of reference based upon the universal nature of physical laws and their economy of expression (Lorentz transformations).
Frames of reference are especially important in special relativity, because when a frame of reference is moving at some significant fraction of the speed of light, then the flow of time in that frame does not necessarily apply in another frame. The speed of light is considered to be the only true constant between moving frames of reference.
The definition of inertial reference frame can also be extended beyond three-dimensional Euclidean space. Newton's assumed a Euclidean space, but general relativity uses a more general geometry. As an example of why this is important, consider the geometry of an ellipsoid. In this geometry, a "free" particle is defined as one at rest or traveling at constant speed on a geodesic path. Two free particles may begin at the same point on the surface, traveling with the same constant speed in different directions. After a length of time, the two particles collide on the opposite side of the ellipsoid. Both "free" particles traveled with a constant speed, satisfying the definition that no forces were acting. No acceleration occurred and so Newton's first law held true. This means that the particles were in inertial frames of reference. Since no forces were acting, it was the geometry of the situation which caused the two particles to meet each other again. In a similar way, it is now common to describe that we exist in a four-dimensional geometry known as spacetime. In this picture, the curvature of this 4D space is responsible for the way in which two bodies with mass are drawn together even if no forces are acting. This curvature of spacetime replaces the force known as gravity in Newtonian mechanics and special relativity.
Einstein's theory of special relativity, like Newtonian mechanics, postulates the equivalence of all inertial reference frames. However, because special relativity postulates that the speed of light in free space is invariant, the transformation between inertial frames is the Lorentz transformation, not the Galilean transformation which is used in Newtonian mechanics. The invariance of the speed of light leads to counter-intuitive phenomena, such as time dilation and length contraction, and the relativity of simultaneity, which have been extensively verified experimentally. The Lorentz transformation reduces to the Galilean transformation as the speed of light approaches infinity or as the relative velocity between frames approaches zero.
Here the relation between inertial and non-inertial observational frames of reference is considered. The basic difference between these frames is the need in non-inertial frames for fictitious forces, as described below.
General relativity is based upon the principle of equivalence:
There is no experiment observers can perform to distinguish whether an acceleration arises because of a gravitational force or because their reference frame is accelerating.
This idea was introduced in Einstein's 1907 article "Principle of Relativity and Gravitation" and later developed in 1911. Support for this principle is found in the Eötvös experiment, which determines whether the ratio of inertial to gravitational mass is the same for all bodies, regardless of size or composition. To date no difference has been found to a few parts in 10. For some discussion of the subtleties of the Eötvös experiment, such as the local mass distribution around the experimental site (including a quip about the mass of Eötvös himself), see Franklin.
Einstein's general theory modifies the distinction between nominally "inertial" and "non-inertial" effects by replacing special relativity's "flat" Minkowski Space with a metric that produces non-zero curvature. In general relativity, the principle of inertia is replaced with the principle of geodesic motion, whereby objects move in a way dictated by the curvature of spacetime. As a consequence of this curvature, it is not a given in general relativity that inertial objects moving at a particular rate with respect to each other will continue to do so. This phenomenon of geodesic deviation means that inertial frames of reference do not exist globally as they do in Newtonian mechanics and special relativity.
However, the general theory reduces to the special theory over sufficiently small regions of spacetime, where curvature effects become less important and the earlier inertial frame arguments can come back into play. Consequently, modern special relativity is now sometimes described as only a "local theory". "Local" can encompass, for example, the entire Milky Way galaxy: The astronomer Karl Schwarzschild observed the motion of pairs of stars orbiting each other. He found that the two orbits of the stars of such a system lie in a plane, and the perihelion of the orbits of the two stars remains pointing in the same direction with respect to the Solar System. Schwarzschild pointed out that that was invariably seen: the direction of the angular momentum of all observed double star systems remains fixed with respect to the direction of the angular momentum of the Solar System. These observations allowed him to conclude that inertial frames inside the galaxy do not rotate with respect to one another, and that the space of the Milky Way is approximately Galilean or Minkowskian.
In an inertial frame, Newton's first law, the law of inertia, is satisfied: Any free motion has a constant magnitude and direction. Newton's second law for a particle takes the form:
with F the net force (a vector), m the mass of a particle and a the acceleration of the particle (also a vector) which would be measured by an observer at rest in the frame. The force F is the vector sum of all "real" forces on the particle, such as contact forces, electromagnetic, gravitational, and nuclear forces.
In contrast, Newton's second law in a rotating frame of reference (a non-inertial frame of reference), rotating at angular rate Ω about an axis, takes the form:
which looks the same as in an inertial frame, but now the force F′ is the resultant of not only F, but also additional terms (the paragraph following this equation presents the main points without detailed mathematics):
where the angular rotation of the frame is expressed by the vector Ω pointing in the direction of the axis of rotation, and with magnitude equal to the angular rate of rotation Ω, symbol × denotes the vector cross product, vector xB locates the body and vector vB is the velocity of the body according to a rotating observer (different from the velocity seen by the inertial observer).
The extra terms in the force F′ are the "fictitious" forces for this frame, whose causes are external to the system in the frame. The first extra term is the Coriolis force, the second the centrifugal force, and the third the Euler force. These terms all have these properties: they vanish when Ω = 0; that is, they are zero for an inertial frame (which, of course, does not rotate); they take on a different magnitude and direction in every rotating frame, depending upon its particular value of Ω; they are ubiquitous in the rotating frame (affect every particle, regardless of circumstance); and they have no apparent source in identifiable physical sources, in particular, matter. Also, fictitious forces do not drop off with distance (unlike, for example, nuclear forces or electrical forces). For example, the centrifugal force that appears to emanate from the axis of rotation in a rotating frame increases with distance from the axis.
All observers agree on the real forces, F; only non-inertial observers need fictitious forces. The laws of physics in the inertial frame are simpler because unnecessary forces are not present.
In Newton's time the fixed stars were invoked as a reference frame, supposedly at rest relative to absolute space. In reference frames that were either at rest with respect to the fixed stars or in uniform translation relative to these stars, Newton's laws of motion were supposed to hold. In contrast, in frames accelerating with respect to the fixed stars, an important case being frames rotating relative to the fixed stars, the laws of motion did not hold in their simplest form, but had to be supplemented by the addition of fictitious forces, for example, the Coriolis force and the centrifugal force. Two experiments were devised by Newton to demonstrate how these forces could be discovered, thereby revealing to an observer that they were not in an inertial frame: the example of the tension in the cord linking two spheres rotating about their center of gravity, and the example of the curvature of the surface of water in a rotating bucket. In both cases, application of Newton's second law would not work for the rotating observer without invoking centrifugal and Coriolis forces to account for their observations (tension in the case of the spheres; parabolic water surface in the case of the rotating bucket).
As we now know, the fixed stars are not fixed. Those that reside in the Milky Way turn with the galaxy, exhibiting proper motions. Those that are outside our galaxy (such as nebulae once mistaken to be stars) participate in their own motion as well, partly due to expansion of the universe, and partly due to peculiar velocities. For instance, the Andromeda Galaxy is on collision course with the Milky Way at a speed of 117 km/s. The concept of inertial frames of reference is no longer tied to either the fixed stars or to absolute space. Rather, the identification of an inertial frame is based on the simplicity of the laws of physics in the frame. John Stachel wrote: once one gave up the existence of a privileged frame of reference (the ether frame) there was no reason why one should stop at the relativity of inertial frames. The conventional answer to such doubts was that the laws of nature took a simpler form in the inertial frames of reference because in these frames one did not have to introduce inertial forces when writing down Newton's law of motion.
In practice, although not a requirement, using a frame of reference based upon the fixed stars as though it were an inertial frame of reference introduces very little discrepancy. For example, the centrifugal acceleration of the Earth because of its rotation about the Sun is about thirty million times greater than that of the Sun about the galactic center.
To illustrate further, consider the question: "Does our Universe rotate?" To answer, we might attempt to explain the shape of the Milky Way galaxy using the laws of physics, although other observations might be more definitive; that is, provide larger discrepancies or less measurement uncertainty, like the anisotropy of the microwave background radiation or Big Bang nucleosynthesis. The flatness of the Milky Way depends on its rate of rotation in an inertial frame of reference. If we attribute its apparent rate of rotation entirely to rotation in an inertial frame, a different "flatness" is predicted than if we suppose part of this rotation actually is due to rotation of the universe and should not be included in the rotation of the galaxy itself. Based upon the laws of physics, a model is set up in which one parameter is the rate of rotation of the Universe. If the laws of physics agree more accurately with observations in a model with rotation than without it, we are inclined to select the best-fit value for rotation, subject to all other pertinent experimental observations. If no value of the rotation parameter is successful and theory is not within observational error, a modification of physical law is considered, for example, dark matter is invoked to explain the galactic rotation curve. So far, observations show any rotation of the universe is very slow, no faster than once every 6×10 years (10 rad/yr), and debate persists over whether there is any rotation. However, if rotation were found, interpretation of observations in a frame tied to the universe would have to be corrected for the fictitious forces inherent in such rotation in classical physics and special relativity, or interpreted as the curvature of spacetime and the motion of matter along the geodesics in general relativity.
When quantum effects are important, there are additional conceptual complications that arise in quantum reference frames.
An accelerated frame of reference is often delineated as being the "primed" frame, and all variables that are dependent on that frame are notated with primes, e.g. x′, y′, a′.
The vector from the origin of an inertial reference frame to the origin of an accelerated reference frame is commonly notated as R. Given a point of interest that exists in both frames, the vector from the inertial origin to the point is called r, and the vector from the accelerated origin to the point is called r′. From the geometry of the situation, we get
Taking the first and second derivatives of this with respect to time, we obtain
where V and A are the velocity and acceleration of the accelerated system with respect to the inertial system and v and a are the velocity and acceleration of the point of interest with respect to the inertial frame.
These equations allow transformations between the two coordinate systems; for example, we can now write Newton's second law as
When there is accelerated motion due to a force being exerted there is manifestation of inertia. If an electric car designed to recharge its battery system when decelerating is switched to braking, the batteries are recharged, illustrating the physical strength of manifestation of inertia. However, the manifestation of inertia does not prevent acceleration (or deceleration), for manifestation of inertia occurs in response to change in velocity due to a force. Seen from the perspective of a rotating frame of reference the manifestation of inertia appears to exert a force (either in centrifugal direction, or in a direction orthogonal to an object's motion, the Coriolis effect).
A common sort of accelerated reference frame is a frame that is both rotating and translating (an example is a frame of reference attached to a CD which is playing while the player is carried). This arrangement leads to the equation (see Fictitious force for a derivation):
or, to solve for the acceleration in the accelerated frame,
Multiplying through by the mass m gives
where
Inertial and non-inertial reference frames can be distinguished by the absence or presence of fictitious forces, as explained shortly.
The effect of this being in the noninertial frame is to require the observer to introduce a fictitious force into his calculations….
The presence of fictitious forces indicates the physical laws are not the simplest laws available so, in terms of the special principle of relativity, a frame where fictitious forces are present is not an inertial frame:
The equations of motion in a non-inertial system differ from the equations in an inertial system by additional terms called inertial forces. This allows us to detect experimentally the non-inertial nature of a system.
Bodies in non-inertial reference frames are subject to so-called fictitious forces (pseudo-forces); that is, forces that result from the acceleration of the reference frame itself and not from any physical force acting on the body. Examples of fictitious forces are the centrifugal force and the Coriolis force in rotating reference frames.
How then, are "fictitious" forces to be separated from "real" forces? It is hard to apply the Newtonian definition of an inertial frame without this separation. For example, consider a stationary object in an inertial frame. Being at rest, no net force is applied. But in a frame rotating about a fixed axis, the object appears to move in a circle, and is subject to centripetal force (which is made up of the Coriolis force and the centrifugal force). How can we decide that the rotating frame is a non-inertial frame? There are two approaches to this resolution: one approach is to look for the origin of the fictitious forces (the Coriolis force and the centrifugal force). We will find there are no sources for these forces, no associated force carriers, no originating bodies. A second approach is to look at a variety of frames of reference. For any inertial frame, the Coriolis force and the centrifugal force disappear, so application of the principle of special relativity would identify these frames where the forces disappear as sharing the same and the simplest physical laws, and hence rule that the rotating frame is not an inertial frame.
Newton examined this problem himself using rotating spheres, as shown in Figure 2 and Figure 3. He pointed out that if the spheres are not rotating, the tension in the tying string is measured as zero in every frame of reference. If the spheres only appear to rotate (that is, we are watching stationary spheres from a rotating frame), the zero tension in the string is accounted for by observing that the centripetal force is supplied by the centrifugal and Coriolis forces in combination, so no tension is needed. If the spheres really are rotating, the tension observed is exactly the centripetal force required by the circular motion. Thus, measurement of the tension in the string identifies the inertial frame: it is the one where the tension in the string provides exactly the centripetal force demanded by the motion as it is observed in that frame, and not a different value. That is, the inertial frame is the one where the fictitious forces vanish.
So much for fictitious forces due to rotation. However, for linear acceleration, Newton expressed the idea of undetectability of straight-line accelerations held in common:
If bodies, any how moved among themselves, are urged in the direction of parallel lines by equal accelerative forces, they will continue to move among themselves, after the same manner as if they had been urged by no such forces.
This principle generalizes the notion of an inertial frame. For example, an observer confined in a free-falling lift will assert that he himself is a valid inertial frame, even if he is accelerating under gravity, so long as he has no knowledge about anything outside the lift. So, strictly speaking, inertial frame is a relative concept. With this in mind, we can define inertial frames collectively as a set of frames which are stationary or moving at constant velocity with respect to each other, so that a single inertial frame is defined as an element of this set.
For these ideas to apply, everything observed in the frame has to be subject to a base-line, common acceleration shared by the frame itself. That situation would apply, for example, to the elevator example, where all objects are subject to the same gravitational acceleration, and the elevator itself accelerates at the same rate.
Inertial navigation systems used a cluster of gyroscopes and accelerometers to determine accelerations relative to inertial space. After a gyroscope is spun up in a particular orientation in inertial space, the law of conservation of angular momentum requires that it retain that orientation as long as no external forces are applied to it. Three orthogonal gyroscopes establish an inertial reference frame, and the accelerators measure acceleration relative to that frame. The accelerations, along with a clock, can then be used to calculate the change in position. Thus, inertial navigation is a form of dead reckoning that requires no external input, and therefore cannot be jammed by any external or internal signal source.
A gyrocompass, employed for navigation of seagoing vessels, finds the geometric north. It does so, not by sensing the Earth's magnetic field, but by using inertial space as its reference. The outer casing of the gyrocompass device is held in such a way that it remains aligned with the local plumb line. When the gyroscope wheel inside the gyrocompass device is spun up, the way the gyroscope wheel is suspended causes the gyroscope wheel to gradually align its spinning axis with the Earth's axis. Alignment with the Earth's axis is the only direction for which the gyroscope's spinning axis can be stationary with respect to the Earth and not be required to change direction with respect to inertial space. After being spun up, a gyrocompass can reach the direction of alignment with the Earth's axis in as little as a quarter of an hour.
Consider a situation common in everyday life. Two cars travel along a road, both moving at constant velocities. See Figure 1. At some particular moment, they are separated by 200 metres. The car in front is travelling at 22 metres per second and the car behind is travelling at 30 metres per second. If we want to find out how long it will take the second car to catch up with the first, there are three obvious "frames of reference" that we could choose.
First, we could observe the two cars from the side of the road. We define our "frame of reference" S as follows. We stand on the side of the road and start a stop-clock at the exact moment that the second car passes us, which happens to be when they are a distance d = 200 m apart. Since neither of the cars is accelerating, we can determine their positions by the following formulas, where x 1 ( t ) {\displaystyle x_{1}(t)} is the position in meters of car one after time t in seconds and x 2 ( t ) {\displaystyle x_{2}(t)} is the position of car two after time t.
Notice that these formulas predict at t = 0 s the first car is 200 m down the road and the second car is right beside us, as expected. We want to find the time at which x 1 = x 2 {\displaystyle x_{1}=x_{2}} . Therefore, we set x 1 = x 2 {\displaystyle x_{1}=x_{2}} and solve for t {\displaystyle t} , that is:
Alternatively, we could choose a frame of reference S′ situated in the first car. In this case, the first car is stationary and the second car is approaching from behind at a speed of v2 − v1 = 8 m/s. In order to catch up to the first car, it will take a time of d/v2 − v1 = 200/8 s, that is, 25 seconds, as before. Note how much easier the problem becomes by choosing a suitable frame of reference. The third possible frame of reference would be attached to the second car. That example resembles the case just discussed, except the second car is stationary and the first car moves backward towards it at 8 m/s.
It would have been possible to choose a rotating, accelerating frame of reference, moving in a complicated manner, but this would have served to complicate the problem unnecessarily. It is also necessary to note that one is able to convert measurements made in one coordinate system to another. For example, suppose that your watch is running five minutes fast compared to the local standard time. If you know that this is the case, when somebody asks you what time it is, you are able to deduct five minutes from the time displayed on your watch in order to obtain the correct time. The measurements that an observer makes about a system depend therefore on the observer's frame of reference (you might say that the bus arrived at 5 past three, when in fact it arrived at three).
For a simple example involving only the orientation of two observers, consider two people standing, facing each other on either side of a north-south street. See Figure 2. A car drives past them heading south. For the person facing east, the car was moving to the right. However, for the person facing west, the car was moving to the left. This discrepancy is because the two people used two different frames of reference from which to investigate this system.
For a more complex example involving observers in relative motion, consider Alfred, who is standing on the side of a road watching a car drive past him from left to right. In his frame of reference, Alfred defines the spot where he is standing as the origin, the road as the x-axis and the direction in front of him as the positive y-axis. To him, the car moves along the x axis with some velocity v in the positive x-direction. Alfred's frame of reference is considered an inertial frame because he is not accelerating, ignoring effects such as Earth's rotation and gravity.
Now consider Betsy, the person driving the car. Betsy, in choosing her frame of reference, defines her location as the origin, the direction to her right as the positive x-axis, and the direction in front of her as the positive y-axis. In this frame of reference, it is Betsy who is stationary and the world around her that is moving – for instance, as she drives past Alfred, she observes him moving with velocity v in the negative y-direction. If she is driving north, then north is the positive y-direction; if she turns east, east becomes the positive y-direction.
Finally, as an example of non-inertial observers, assume Candace is accelerating her car. As she passes by him, Alfred measures her acceleration and finds it to be a in the negative x-direction. Assuming Candace's acceleration is constant, what acceleration does Betsy measure? If Betsy's velocity v is constant, she is in an inertial frame of reference, and she will find the acceleration to be the same as Alfred in her frame of reference, a in the negative y-direction. However, if she is accelerating at rate A in the negative y-direction (in other words, slowing down), she will find Candace's acceleration to be a′ = a − A in the negative y-direction—a smaller value than Alfred has measured. Similarly, if she is accelerating at rate A in the positive y-direction (speeding up), she will observe Candace's acceleration as a′ = a + A in the negative y-direction—a larger value than Alfred's measurement. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "In classical physics and special relativity, an inertial frame of reference (also called inertial space, or Galilean reference frame) is a frame of reference not undergoing any acceleration. It is a frame in which an isolated physical object—an object with zero net force acting on it—is perceived to move with a constant velocity or, equivalently, it is a frame of reference in which Newton's first law of motion holds. All inertial frames are in a state of constant, rectilinear motion (straight line motion) with respect to one another; in other words, an accelerometer moving with any of them would detect zero acceleration.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "It has been observed that celestial objects which are far away from other objects and which are in uniform motion with respect to the cosmic microwave background radiation maintain such uniform motion. While no true inertial frames exist in space-time, gravitational acceleration can often be ignored or accounted for in real applications.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Measurements in one inertial frame can be converted to measurements in another by a simple transformation - the Galilean transformation in Newtonian physics or by using the Lorentz transformation in special relativity when practical considerations make Newtonian approximations unacceptable.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In analytical mechanics, an inertial frame of reference can be defined as a frame of reference that describes time and space homogeneously, isotropically, and in a time-independent manner.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In general relativity:",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In a non-inertial reference frame, viewed from a classical physics and special relativity perspective, the interactions between the fundamental constituents of the observable universe (the physics of a system) vary depending on the acceleration of that frame with respect to an inertial frame. Viewed from this perspective and due to the phenomenon of inertia, the 'usual' physical forces between two bodies have to be supplemented by apparently sourceless inertial forces. Viewed from a general relativity theory perspective, appearing inertial forces (the supplementary external causes) are attributed to geodesic motion in spacetime.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In classical mechanics, for example, a ball dropped towards the ground does not move exactly straight down because the Earth is rotating. This means the frame of reference of an observer on Earth is not inertial. As a consequence, the Coriolis effect—an apparent force— must be taken into account to predict the respective small horizontal motion. Another example of an apparent force appearing in rotating reference frames concerns the centrifugal effect, the centrifugal force.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The motion of a body can only be described relative to something else—other bodies, observers, or a set of spacetime coordinates. These are called frames of reference. According to the first postulate of special relativity, all physical laws take their simplest form in an inertial frame, and there exist multiple inertial frames interrelated by uniform translation:",
"title": "Introduction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Special principle of relativity: If a system of coordinates K is chosen so that, in relation to it, physical laws hold good in their simplest form, the same laws hold good in relation to any other system of coordinates K' moving in uniform translation relatively to K.",
"title": "Introduction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "This simplicity manifests itself in that inertial frames have self-contained physics without the need for external causes, while physics in non-inertial frames have external causes. The principle of simplicity can be used within Newtonian physics as well as in special relativity:",
"title": "Introduction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The laws of Newtonian mechanics do not always hold in their simplest form...If, for instance, an observer is placed on a disc rotating relative to the earth, he/she will sense a 'force' pushing him/her toward the periphery of the disc, which is not caused by any interaction with other bodies. Here, the acceleration is not the consequence of the usual force, but of the so-called inertial force. Newton's laws hold in their simplest form only in a family of reference frames, called inertial frames. This fact represents the essence of the Galilean principle of relativity: The laws of mechanics have the same form in all inertial frames.",
"title": "Introduction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In practical terms, the equivalence of inertial reference frames means that scientists within a box moving with a constant absolute velocity cannot determine this velocity by any experiment. Otherwise, the differences would set up an absolute standard reference frame. According to this definition, supplemented with the constancy of the speed of light, inertial frames of reference transform among themselves according to the Poincaré group of symmetry transformations, of which the Lorentz transformations are a subgroup. In Newtonian mechanics, inertial frames of reference are related by the Galilean group of symmetries.",
"title": "Introduction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Newton posited an absolute space considered well-approximated by a frame of reference stationary relative to the fixed stars. An inertial frame was then one in uniform translation relative to absolute space. However, some \"relativists\", even at the time of Newton, felt that absolute space was a defect of the formulation, and should be replaced.",
"title": "Newton's inertial frame of reference"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The expression inertial frame of reference (German: Inertialsystem) was coined by Ludwig Lange in 1885, to replace Newton's definitions of \"absolute space and time\" by a more operational definition. As translated by Harald Iro, Lange proposed the following definition:",
"title": "Newton's inertial frame of reference"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "A reference frame in which a mass point thrown from the same point in three different (non co-planar) directions follows rectilinear paths each time it is thrown, is called an inertial frame.",
"title": "Newton's inertial frame of reference"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The inadequacy of the notion of \"absolute space\" in Newtonian mechanics is spelled out by Blagojević:",
"title": "Newton's inertial frame of reference"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The utility of operational definitions was carried much further in the special theory of relativity. Some historical background including Lange's definition is provided by DiSalle, who says in summary:",
"title": "Newton's inertial frame of reference"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The original question, \"relative to what frame of reference do the laws of motion hold?\" is revealed to be wrongly posed. For the laws of motion essentially determine a class of reference frames, and (in principle) a procedure for constructing them.",
"title": "Newton's inertial frame of reference"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Classical theories that use the Galilean transformation postulate the equivalence of all inertial reference frames. Some theories may even postulate the existence of a privileged frame which provides absolute space and absolute time. The Galilean transformation transforms coordinates from one inertial reference frame, s {\\displaystyle \\mathbf {s} } , to another, s ′ {\\displaystyle \\mathbf {s} ^{\\prime }} , by simple addition or subtraction of coordinates:",
"title": "Newton's inertial frame of reference"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "where r0 and t0 represent shifts in the origin of space and time, and v is the relative velocity of the two inertial reference frames. Under Galilean transformations, the time t2 − t1 between two events is the same for all reference frames and the distance between two simultaneous events (or, equivalently, the length of any object, |r2 − r1|) is also the same.",
"title": "Newton's inertial frame of reference"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Within the realm of Newtonian mechanics, an inertial frame of reference, or inertial reference frame, is one in which Newton's first law of motion is valid. However, the principle of special relativity generalizes the notion of inertial frame to include all physical laws, not simply Newton's first law.",
"title": "Newton's inertial frame of reference"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Newton viewed the first law as valid in any reference frame that is in uniform motion relative to the fixed stars; that is, neither rotating nor accelerating relative to the stars. Today the notion of \"absolute space\" is abandoned, and an inertial frame in the field of classical mechanics is defined as:",
"title": "Newton's inertial frame of reference"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "An inertial frame of reference is one in which the motion of a particle not subject to forces is in a straight line at constant speed.",
"title": "Newton's inertial frame of reference"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Hence, with respect to an inertial frame, an object or body accelerates only when a physical force is applied, and (following Newton's first law of motion), in the absence of a net force, a body at rest will remain at rest and a body in motion will continue to move uniformly—that is, in a straight line and at constant speed. Newtonian inertial frames transform among each other according to the Galilean group of symmetries.",
"title": "Newton's inertial frame of reference"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "If this rule is interpreted as saying that straight-line motion is an indication of zero net force, the rule does not identify inertial reference frames because straight-line motion can be observed in a variety of frames. If the rule is interpreted as defining an inertial frame, then we have to be able to determine when zero net force is applied. The problem was summarized by Einstein:",
"title": "Newton's inertial frame of reference"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The weakness of the principle of inertia lies in this, that it involves an argument in a circle: a mass moves without acceleration if it is sufficiently far from other bodies; we know that it is sufficiently far from other bodies only by the fact that it moves without acceleration.",
"title": "Newton's inertial frame of reference"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "There are several approaches to this issue. One approach is to argue that all real forces drop off with distance from their sources in a known manner, so we have only to be sure that a body is far enough away from all sources to ensure that no force is present. A possible issue with this approach is the historically long-lived view that the distant universe might affect matters (Mach's principle). Another approach is to identify all real sources for real forces and account for them. A possible issue with this approach is that we might miss something, or account inappropriately for their influence, perhaps, again, due to Mach's principle and an incomplete understanding of the universe. A third approach is to look at the way the forces transform when we shift reference frames. Fictitious forces, those that arise due to the acceleration of a frame, disappear in inertial frames, and have complicated rules of transformation in general cases. On the basis of universality of physical law and the request for frames where the laws are most simply expressed, inertial frames are distinguished by the absence of such fictitious forces.",
"title": "Newton's inertial frame of reference"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Newton enunciated a principle of relativity himself in one of his corollaries to the laws of motion:",
"title": "Newton's inertial frame of reference"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The motions of bodies included in a given space are the same among themselves, whether that space is at rest or moves uniformly forward in a straight line.",
"title": "Newton's inertial frame of reference"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "This principle differs from the special principle in two ways: first, it is restricted to mechanics, and second, it makes no mention of simplicity. It shares with the special principle the invariance of the form of the description among mutually translating reference frames. The role of fictitious forces in classifying reference frames is pursued further below.",
"title": "Newton's inertial frame of reference"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "It is important to note some assumptions made above about the various inertial frames of reference. Newton, for instance, employed universal time, as explained by the following example. Suppose that you own two clocks, which both tick at exactly the same rate. You synchronize them so that they both display exactly the same time. The two clocks are now separated and one clock is on a fast moving train, traveling at constant velocity towards the other. According to Newton, these two clocks will still tick at the same rate and will both show the same time. Newton says that the rate of time as measured in one frame of reference should be the same as the rate of time in another. That is, there exists a \"universal\" time and all other times in all other frames of reference will run at the same rate as this universal time irrespective of their position and velocity. This concept of time and simultaneity was later generalized by Einstein in his special theory of relativity (1905) where he developed transformations between inertial frames of reference based upon the universal nature of physical laws and their economy of expression (Lorentz transformations).",
"title": "Newton's inertial frame of reference"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Frames of reference are especially important in special relativity, because when a frame of reference is moving at some significant fraction of the speed of light, then the flow of time in that frame does not necessarily apply in another frame. The speed of light is considered to be the only true constant between moving frames of reference.",
"title": "Newton's inertial frame of reference"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The definition of inertial reference frame can also be extended beyond three-dimensional Euclidean space. Newton's assumed a Euclidean space, but general relativity uses a more general geometry. As an example of why this is important, consider the geometry of an ellipsoid. In this geometry, a \"free\" particle is defined as one at rest or traveling at constant speed on a geodesic path. Two free particles may begin at the same point on the surface, traveling with the same constant speed in different directions. After a length of time, the two particles collide on the opposite side of the ellipsoid. Both \"free\" particles traveled with a constant speed, satisfying the definition that no forces were acting. No acceleration occurred and so Newton's first law held true. This means that the particles were in inertial frames of reference. Since no forces were acting, it was the geometry of the situation which caused the two particles to meet each other again. In a similar way, it is now common to describe that we exist in a four-dimensional geometry known as spacetime. In this picture, the curvature of this 4D space is responsible for the way in which two bodies with mass are drawn together even if no forces are acting. This curvature of spacetime replaces the force known as gravity in Newtonian mechanics and special relativity.",
"title": "Newton's inertial frame of reference"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Einstein's theory of special relativity, like Newtonian mechanics, postulates the equivalence of all inertial reference frames. However, because special relativity postulates that the speed of light in free space is invariant, the transformation between inertial frames is the Lorentz transformation, not the Galilean transformation which is used in Newtonian mechanics. The invariance of the speed of light leads to counter-intuitive phenomena, such as time dilation and length contraction, and the relativity of simultaneity, which have been extensively verified experimentally. The Lorentz transformation reduces to the Galilean transformation as the speed of light approaches infinity or as the relative velocity between frames approaches zero.",
"title": "Special relativity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Here the relation between inertial and non-inertial observational frames of reference is considered. The basic difference between these frames is the need in non-inertial frames for fictitious forces, as described below.",
"title": "Non-inertial frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "General relativity is based upon the principle of equivalence:",
"title": "Non-inertial frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "There is no experiment observers can perform to distinguish whether an acceleration arises because of a gravitational force or because their reference frame is accelerating.",
"title": "Non-inertial frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "This idea was introduced in Einstein's 1907 article \"Principle of Relativity and Gravitation\" and later developed in 1911. Support for this principle is found in the Eötvös experiment, which determines whether the ratio of inertial to gravitational mass is the same for all bodies, regardless of size or composition. To date no difference has been found to a few parts in 10. For some discussion of the subtleties of the Eötvös experiment, such as the local mass distribution around the experimental site (including a quip about the mass of Eötvös himself), see Franklin.",
"title": "Non-inertial frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Einstein's general theory modifies the distinction between nominally \"inertial\" and \"non-inertial\" effects by replacing special relativity's \"flat\" Minkowski Space with a metric that produces non-zero curvature. In general relativity, the principle of inertia is replaced with the principle of geodesic motion, whereby objects move in a way dictated by the curvature of spacetime. As a consequence of this curvature, it is not a given in general relativity that inertial objects moving at a particular rate with respect to each other will continue to do so. This phenomenon of geodesic deviation means that inertial frames of reference do not exist globally as they do in Newtonian mechanics and special relativity.",
"title": "Non-inertial frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "However, the general theory reduces to the special theory over sufficiently small regions of spacetime, where curvature effects become less important and the earlier inertial frame arguments can come back into play. Consequently, modern special relativity is now sometimes described as only a \"local theory\". \"Local\" can encompass, for example, the entire Milky Way galaxy: The astronomer Karl Schwarzschild observed the motion of pairs of stars orbiting each other. He found that the two orbits of the stars of such a system lie in a plane, and the perihelion of the orbits of the two stars remains pointing in the same direction with respect to the Solar System. Schwarzschild pointed out that that was invariably seen: the direction of the angular momentum of all observed double star systems remains fixed with respect to the direction of the angular momentum of the Solar System. These observations allowed him to conclude that inertial frames inside the galaxy do not rotate with respect to one another, and that the space of the Milky Way is approximately Galilean or Minkowskian.",
"title": "Non-inertial frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In an inertial frame, Newton's first law, the law of inertia, is satisfied: Any free motion has a constant magnitude and direction. Newton's second law for a particle takes the form:",
"title": "Non-inertial frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "with F the net force (a vector), m the mass of a particle and a the acceleration of the particle (also a vector) which would be measured by an observer at rest in the frame. The force F is the vector sum of all \"real\" forces on the particle, such as contact forces, electromagnetic, gravitational, and nuclear forces.",
"title": "Non-inertial frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In contrast, Newton's second law in a rotating frame of reference (a non-inertial frame of reference), rotating at angular rate Ω about an axis, takes the form:",
"title": "Non-inertial frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "which looks the same as in an inertial frame, but now the force F′ is the resultant of not only F, but also additional terms (the paragraph following this equation presents the main points without detailed mathematics):",
"title": "Non-inertial frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "where the angular rotation of the frame is expressed by the vector Ω pointing in the direction of the axis of rotation, and with magnitude equal to the angular rate of rotation Ω, symbol × denotes the vector cross product, vector xB locates the body and vector vB is the velocity of the body according to a rotating observer (different from the velocity seen by the inertial observer).",
"title": "Non-inertial frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The extra terms in the force F′ are the \"fictitious\" forces for this frame, whose causes are external to the system in the frame. The first extra term is the Coriolis force, the second the centrifugal force, and the third the Euler force. These terms all have these properties: they vanish when Ω = 0; that is, they are zero for an inertial frame (which, of course, does not rotate); they take on a different magnitude and direction in every rotating frame, depending upon its particular value of Ω; they are ubiquitous in the rotating frame (affect every particle, regardless of circumstance); and they have no apparent source in identifiable physical sources, in particular, matter. Also, fictitious forces do not drop off with distance (unlike, for example, nuclear forces or electrical forces). For example, the centrifugal force that appears to emanate from the axis of rotation in a rotating frame increases with distance from the axis.",
"title": "Non-inertial frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "All observers agree on the real forces, F; only non-inertial observers need fictitious forces. The laws of physics in the inertial frame are simpler because unnecessary forces are not present.",
"title": "Non-inertial frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In Newton's time the fixed stars were invoked as a reference frame, supposedly at rest relative to absolute space. In reference frames that were either at rest with respect to the fixed stars or in uniform translation relative to these stars, Newton's laws of motion were supposed to hold. In contrast, in frames accelerating with respect to the fixed stars, an important case being frames rotating relative to the fixed stars, the laws of motion did not hold in their simplest form, but had to be supplemented by the addition of fictitious forces, for example, the Coriolis force and the centrifugal force. Two experiments were devised by Newton to demonstrate how these forces could be discovered, thereby revealing to an observer that they were not in an inertial frame: the example of the tension in the cord linking two spheres rotating about their center of gravity, and the example of the curvature of the surface of water in a rotating bucket. In both cases, application of Newton's second law would not work for the rotating observer without invoking centrifugal and Coriolis forces to account for their observations (tension in the case of the spheres; parabolic water surface in the case of the rotating bucket).",
"title": "Non-inertial frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "As we now know, the fixed stars are not fixed. Those that reside in the Milky Way turn with the galaxy, exhibiting proper motions. Those that are outside our galaxy (such as nebulae once mistaken to be stars) participate in their own motion as well, partly due to expansion of the universe, and partly due to peculiar velocities. For instance, the Andromeda Galaxy is on collision course with the Milky Way at a speed of 117 km/s. The concept of inertial frames of reference is no longer tied to either the fixed stars or to absolute space. Rather, the identification of an inertial frame is based on the simplicity of the laws of physics in the frame. John Stachel wrote: once one gave up the existence of a privileged frame of reference (the ether frame) there was no reason why one should stop at the relativity of inertial frames. The conventional answer to such doubts was that the laws of nature took a simpler form in the inertial frames of reference because in these frames one did not have to introduce inertial forces when writing down Newton's law of motion.",
"title": "Non-inertial frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In practice, although not a requirement, using a frame of reference based upon the fixed stars as though it were an inertial frame of reference introduces very little discrepancy. For example, the centrifugal acceleration of the Earth because of its rotation about the Sun is about thirty million times greater than that of the Sun about the galactic center.",
"title": "Non-inertial frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "To illustrate further, consider the question: \"Does our Universe rotate?\" To answer, we might attempt to explain the shape of the Milky Way galaxy using the laws of physics, although other observations might be more definitive; that is, provide larger discrepancies or less measurement uncertainty, like the anisotropy of the microwave background radiation or Big Bang nucleosynthesis. The flatness of the Milky Way depends on its rate of rotation in an inertial frame of reference. If we attribute its apparent rate of rotation entirely to rotation in an inertial frame, a different \"flatness\" is predicted than if we suppose part of this rotation actually is due to rotation of the universe and should not be included in the rotation of the galaxy itself. Based upon the laws of physics, a model is set up in which one parameter is the rate of rotation of the Universe. If the laws of physics agree more accurately with observations in a model with rotation than without it, we are inclined to select the best-fit value for rotation, subject to all other pertinent experimental observations. If no value of the rotation parameter is successful and theory is not within observational error, a modification of physical law is considered, for example, dark matter is invoked to explain the galactic rotation curve. So far, observations show any rotation of the universe is very slow, no faster than once every 6×10 years (10 rad/yr), and debate persists over whether there is any rotation. However, if rotation were found, interpretation of observations in a frame tied to the universe would have to be corrected for the fictitious forces inherent in such rotation in classical physics and special relativity, or interpreted as the curvature of spacetime and the motion of matter along the geodesics in general relativity.",
"title": "Non-inertial frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "When quantum effects are important, there are additional conceptual complications that arise in quantum reference frames.",
"title": "Non-inertial frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "An accelerated frame of reference is often delineated as being the \"primed\" frame, and all variables that are dependent on that frame are notated with primes, e.g. x′, y′, a′.",
"title": "Non-inertial frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The vector from the origin of an inertial reference frame to the origin of an accelerated reference frame is commonly notated as R. Given a point of interest that exists in both frames, the vector from the inertial origin to the point is called r, and the vector from the accelerated origin to the point is called r′. From the geometry of the situation, we get",
"title": "Non-inertial frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Taking the first and second derivatives of this with respect to time, we obtain",
"title": "Non-inertial frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "where V and A are the velocity and acceleration of the accelerated system with respect to the inertial system and v and a are the velocity and acceleration of the point of interest with respect to the inertial frame.",
"title": "Non-inertial frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "These equations allow transformations between the two coordinate systems; for example, we can now write Newton's second law as",
"title": "Non-inertial frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "When there is accelerated motion due to a force being exerted there is manifestation of inertia. If an electric car designed to recharge its battery system when decelerating is switched to braking, the batteries are recharged, illustrating the physical strength of manifestation of inertia. However, the manifestation of inertia does not prevent acceleration (or deceleration), for manifestation of inertia occurs in response to change in velocity due to a force. Seen from the perspective of a rotating frame of reference the manifestation of inertia appears to exert a force (either in centrifugal direction, or in a direction orthogonal to an object's motion, the Coriolis effect).",
"title": "Non-inertial frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "A common sort of accelerated reference frame is a frame that is both rotating and translating (an example is a frame of reference attached to a CD which is playing while the player is carried). This arrangement leads to the equation (see Fictitious force for a derivation):",
"title": "Non-inertial frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "or, to solve for the acceleration in the accelerated frame,",
"title": "Non-inertial frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Multiplying through by the mass m gives",
"title": "Non-inertial frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "where",
"title": "Non-inertial frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Inertial and non-inertial reference frames can be distinguished by the absence or presence of fictitious forces, as explained shortly.",
"title": "Separating non-inertial from inertial reference frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "The effect of this being in the noninertial frame is to require the observer to introduce a fictitious force into his calculations….",
"title": "Separating non-inertial from inertial reference frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "The presence of fictitious forces indicates the physical laws are not the simplest laws available so, in terms of the special principle of relativity, a frame where fictitious forces are present is not an inertial frame:",
"title": "Separating non-inertial from inertial reference frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "The equations of motion in a non-inertial system differ from the equations in an inertial system by additional terms called inertial forces. This allows us to detect experimentally the non-inertial nature of a system.",
"title": "Separating non-inertial from inertial reference frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Bodies in non-inertial reference frames are subject to so-called fictitious forces (pseudo-forces); that is, forces that result from the acceleration of the reference frame itself and not from any physical force acting on the body. Examples of fictitious forces are the centrifugal force and the Coriolis force in rotating reference frames.",
"title": "Separating non-inertial from inertial reference frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "How then, are \"fictitious\" forces to be separated from \"real\" forces? It is hard to apply the Newtonian definition of an inertial frame without this separation. For example, consider a stationary object in an inertial frame. Being at rest, no net force is applied. But in a frame rotating about a fixed axis, the object appears to move in a circle, and is subject to centripetal force (which is made up of the Coriolis force and the centrifugal force). How can we decide that the rotating frame is a non-inertial frame? There are two approaches to this resolution: one approach is to look for the origin of the fictitious forces (the Coriolis force and the centrifugal force). We will find there are no sources for these forces, no associated force carriers, no originating bodies. A second approach is to look at a variety of frames of reference. For any inertial frame, the Coriolis force and the centrifugal force disappear, so application of the principle of special relativity would identify these frames where the forces disappear as sharing the same and the simplest physical laws, and hence rule that the rotating frame is not an inertial frame.",
"title": "Separating non-inertial from inertial reference frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Newton examined this problem himself using rotating spheres, as shown in Figure 2 and Figure 3. He pointed out that if the spheres are not rotating, the tension in the tying string is measured as zero in every frame of reference. If the spheres only appear to rotate (that is, we are watching stationary spheres from a rotating frame), the zero tension in the string is accounted for by observing that the centripetal force is supplied by the centrifugal and Coriolis forces in combination, so no tension is needed. If the spheres really are rotating, the tension observed is exactly the centripetal force required by the circular motion. Thus, measurement of the tension in the string identifies the inertial frame: it is the one where the tension in the string provides exactly the centripetal force demanded by the motion as it is observed in that frame, and not a different value. That is, the inertial frame is the one where the fictitious forces vanish.",
"title": "Separating non-inertial from inertial reference frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "So much for fictitious forces due to rotation. However, for linear acceleration, Newton expressed the idea of undetectability of straight-line accelerations held in common:",
"title": "Separating non-inertial from inertial reference frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "If bodies, any how moved among themselves, are urged in the direction of parallel lines by equal accelerative forces, they will continue to move among themselves, after the same manner as if they had been urged by no such forces.",
"title": "Separating non-inertial from inertial reference frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "This principle generalizes the notion of an inertial frame. For example, an observer confined in a free-falling lift will assert that he himself is a valid inertial frame, even if he is accelerating under gravity, so long as he has no knowledge about anything outside the lift. So, strictly speaking, inertial frame is a relative concept. With this in mind, we can define inertial frames collectively as a set of frames which are stationary or moving at constant velocity with respect to each other, so that a single inertial frame is defined as an element of this set.",
"title": "Separating non-inertial from inertial reference frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "For these ideas to apply, everything observed in the frame has to be subject to a base-line, common acceleration shared by the frame itself. That situation would apply, for example, to the elevator example, where all objects are subject to the same gravitational acceleration, and the elevator itself accelerates at the same rate.",
"title": "Separating non-inertial from inertial reference frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Inertial navigation systems used a cluster of gyroscopes and accelerometers to determine accelerations relative to inertial space. After a gyroscope is spun up in a particular orientation in inertial space, the law of conservation of angular momentum requires that it retain that orientation as long as no external forces are applied to it. Three orthogonal gyroscopes establish an inertial reference frame, and the accelerators measure acceleration relative to that frame. The accelerations, along with a clock, can then be used to calculate the change in position. Thus, inertial navigation is a form of dead reckoning that requires no external input, and therefore cannot be jammed by any external or internal signal source.",
"title": "Separating non-inertial from inertial reference frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "A gyrocompass, employed for navigation of seagoing vessels, finds the geometric north. It does so, not by sensing the Earth's magnetic field, but by using inertial space as its reference. The outer casing of the gyrocompass device is held in such a way that it remains aligned with the local plumb line. When the gyroscope wheel inside the gyrocompass device is spun up, the way the gyroscope wheel is suspended causes the gyroscope wheel to gradually align its spinning axis with the Earth's axis. Alignment with the Earth's axis is the only direction for which the gyroscope's spinning axis can be stationary with respect to the Earth and not be required to change direction with respect to inertial space. After being spun up, a gyrocompass can reach the direction of alignment with the Earth's axis in as little as a quarter of an hour.",
"title": "Separating non-inertial from inertial reference frames"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Consider a situation common in everyday life. Two cars travel along a road, both moving at constant velocities. See Figure 1. At some particular moment, they are separated by 200 metres. The car in front is travelling at 22 metres per second and the car behind is travelling at 30 metres per second. If we want to find out how long it will take the second car to catch up with the first, there are three obvious \"frames of reference\" that we could choose.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "First, we could observe the two cars from the side of the road. We define our \"frame of reference\" S as follows. We stand on the side of the road and start a stop-clock at the exact moment that the second car passes us, which happens to be when they are a distance d = 200 m apart. Since neither of the cars is accelerating, we can determine their positions by the following formulas, where x 1 ( t ) {\\displaystyle x_{1}(t)} is the position in meters of car one after time t in seconds and x 2 ( t ) {\\displaystyle x_{2}(t)} is the position of car two after time t.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Notice that these formulas predict at t = 0 s the first car is 200 m down the road and the second car is right beside us, as expected. We want to find the time at which x 1 = x 2 {\\displaystyle x_{1}=x_{2}} . Therefore, we set x 1 = x 2 {\\displaystyle x_{1}=x_{2}} and solve for t {\\displaystyle t} , that is:",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Alternatively, we could choose a frame of reference S′ situated in the first car. In this case, the first car is stationary and the second car is approaching from behind at a speed of v2 − v1 = 8 m/s. In order to catch up to the first car, it will take a time of d/v2 − v1 = 200/8 s, that is, 25 seconds, as before. Note how much easier the problem becomes by choosing a suitable frame of reference. The third possible frame of reference would be attached to the second car. That example resembles the case just discussed, except the second car is stationary and the first car moves backward towards it at 8 m/s.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "It would have been possible to choose a rotating, accelerating frame of reference, moving in a complicated manner, but this would have served to complicate the problem unnecessarily. It is also necessary to note that one is able to convert measurements made in one coordinate system to another. For example, suppose that your watch is running five minutes fast compared to the local standard time. If you know that this is the case, when somebody asks you what time it is, you are able to deduct five minutes from the time displayed on your watch in order to obtain the correct time. The measurements that an observer makes about a system depend therefore on the observer's frame of reference (you might say that the bus arrived at 5 past three, when in fact it arrived at three).",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "For a simple example involving only the orientation of two observers, consider two people standing, facing each other on either side of a north-south street. See Figure 2. A car drives past them heading south. For the person facing east, the car was moving to the right. However, for the person facing west, the car was moving to the left. This discrepancy is because the two people used two different frames of reference from which to investigate this system.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "For a more complex example involving observers in relative motion, consider Alfred, who is standing on the side of a road watching a car drive past him from left to right. In his frame of reference, Alfred defines the spot where he is standing as the origin, the road as the x-axis and the direction in front of him as the positive y-axis. To him, the car moves along the x axis with some velocity v in the positive x-direction. Alfred's frame of reference is considered an inertial frame because he is not accelerating, ignoring effects such as Earth's rotation and gravity.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Now consider Betsy, the person driving the car. Betsy, in choosing her frame of reference, defines her location as the origin, the direction to her right as the positive x-axis, and the direction in front of her as the positive y-axis. In this frame of reference, it is Betsy who is stationary and the world around her that is moving – for instance, as she drives past Alfred, she observes him moving with velocity v in the negative y-direction. If she is driving north, then north is the positive y-direction; if she turns east, east becomes the positive y-direction.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Finally, as an example of non-inertial observers, assume Candace is accelerating her car. As she passes by him, Alfred measures her acceleration and finds it to be a in the negative x-direction. Assuming Candace's acceleration is constant, what acceleration does Betsy measure? If Betsy's velocity v is constant, she is in an inertial frame of reference, and she will find the acceleration to be the same as Alfred in her frame of reference, a in the negative y-direction. However, if she is accelerating at rate A in the negative y-direction (in other words, slowing down), she will find Candace's acceleration to be a′ = a − A in the negative y-direction—a smaller value than Alfred has measured. Similarly, if she is accelerating at rate A in the positive y-direction (speeding up), she will observe Candace's acceleration as a′ = a + A in the negative y-direction—a larger value than Alfred's measurement.",
"title": "Examples"
}
]
| In classical physics and special relativity, an inertial frame of reference is a frame of reference not undergoing any acceleration. It is a frame in which an isolated physical object—an object with zero net force acting on it—is perceived to move with a constant velocity or, equivalently, it is a frame of reference in which Newton's first law of motion holds. All inertial frames are in a state of constant, rectilinear motion with respect to one another; in other words, an accelerometer moving with any of them would detect zero acceleration. It has been observed that celestial objects which are far away from other objects and which are in uniform motion with respect to the cosmic microwave background radiation maintain such uniform motion. While no true inertial frames exist in space-time, gravitational acceleration can often be ignored or accounted for in real applications. Measurements in one inertial frame can be converted to measurements in another by a simple transformation - the Galilean transformation in Newtonian physics or by using the Lorentz transformation in special relativity when practical considerations make Newtonian approximations unacceptable. In analytical mechanics, an inertial frame of reference can be defined as a frame of reference that describes time and space homogeneously, isotropically, and in a time-independent manner. In general relativity: In any region small enough for the curvature of spacetime and tidal forces to be negligible, one can find a set of inertial frames that approximately describes that region.
The physics of a system can be described in terms of an inertial frame without causes external to the respective system, with the exception of an apparent effect due to so-called distant masses. In a non-inertial reference frame, viewed from a classical physics and special relativity perspective, the interactions between the fundamental constituents of the observable universe vary depending on the acceleration of that frame with respect to an inertial frame. Viewed from this perspective and due to the phenomenon of inertia, the 'usual' physical forces between two bodies have to be supplemented by apparently sourceless inertial forces. Viewed from a general relativity theory perspective, appearing inertial forces are attributed to geodesic motion in spacetime. In classical mechanics, for example, a ball dropped towards the ground does not move exactly straight down because the Earth is rotating. This means the frame of reference of an observer on Earth is not inertial. As a consequence, the Coriolis effect—an apparent force— must be taken into account to predict the respective small horizontal motion. Another example of an apparent force appearing in rotating reference frames concerns the centrifugal effect, the centrifugal force. | 2001-07-26T14:48:10Z | 2023-12-30T22:05:46Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_frame_of_reference |
14,840 | Illuminati: New World Order | Illuminati: New World Order (INWO) is an out-of-print collectible card game (CCG) that was released in 1994 by Steve Jackson Games, based on their original boxed game Illuminati, which in turn was inspired by the 1975 book The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. An OMNI sealed-deck league patterned after the Atlas Games model was also developed.
The 409-card set was sold in packages containing two 55-card starter decks and in 15-card booster packs.The booster packs contained cards of the types 'Group' and 'Plot', but not 'Illuminati'. The INWO Factory Set was a collector's set released in April 1995, containing one of each of the 403 cards in the base set plus blank cards and three of each Illuminati card.
Steve Jackson Games published a 144-page player's guide titled The INWO Book in April 1995 that contained rules, strategies, color prints of all cards, and also included a rare card from the Unlimited Edition.
The limited edition Assassins, the game's first expansion set, was released in mid-1995 and sold in 8-card booster packs. The 100-card expansion set SubGenius was planned for release in August 1997 and ultimately released in April 1998. The Bavarian Fire Drill set was planned for release in November 1998. Both SubGenius and Bavarian Fire Drill were sold as a single-box expansion set with all cards included.
Following the release and popularity of Magic: The Gathering in August 1993, Steve Jackson Games began the development of Illuminati: New World Order, most of which occurred in early 1994. The release of the Deluxe Edition sold out by mid-1994 and was followed by the release of the Limited Edition in December 1994, of which nearly 84,000 sets "sold out almost immediately". The Unlimited Edition was released in 1995. In an article published in the November–December 1994 issue of Pyramid magazine, Steve Jackson stated that Wizards of the Coast had loaned Steve Jackson Games money to "finance the first printing of INWO", which was the biggest project the company had undertaken by an order of magnitude.
Players attempt to achieve world domination by utilizing the powers of their chosen Illuminati (the Adepts of Hermes, the Bavarian Illuminati, the Bermuda Triangle, the Discordian Society, the Gnomes of Zürich, the Network, Servants of Cthulhu, Shangri-La, the UFOs, the Society of Assassins (added in the Assassins expansion), and the Church of the SubGenius (added in the Subgenius expansion). The first player to control a predetermined number of organizations (usually twelve in a standard game) has achieved the basic goal and can claim victory.
Controllable organizations include groups such as the Men in Black, the CIA, and the Boy Sprouts; personalities such as Diana, Princess of Wales, Saddam Hussein, Ross Perot, or Björne (a parody of Barney the Dinosaur); and places like Japan, California, Canada, and the Moonbase. Many organization names are spoofs of real organizations, presumably altered to avoid lawsuits.
Other ways to achieve victory include: destroying rival Illuminati by capturing or killing the last organization in their power structure; and/or fulfilling a particular goal before your opponent(s) can.
Cards come in three main types: Illuminati cards, Plot cards, and Group cards. Illuminati and Plot cards both feature an illustration of a puppeteer's hand in a blue color scheme on the rear side, whereas Group cards feature a puppet on a string in a red color scheme.
Each Illuminati card represents a different Illuminati organization at the center of each player's Power Structure. They have Power, a Special Goal, and an appropriate Special Ability. Their power flows outward into the Groups they control via Control Arrows.
Plot cards provide the bulk of the game's narrative structure, allowing players to go beyond or even break the game's rules as described in the World Domination Handbook. Plot cards are identified by their overall blue color scheme (border and/or title color). Included among the general Plots are several particular types, including Assassinations and Disasters (for delivering insults to the various Personalities and Places in play), GOAL (special goals that can lead to surprise victories), and New World Order cards (a set of conditions that affect all players, typically overridden when replacement New World Order cards are brought into play).
Group cards represent the power elite in charge of the named organization. There are two main types of Groups: Organizations and Resources.
Organizations are identified by their red color scheme (border and/or title). There are three main types of Organizations: regular Organizations, People, and Places. They all feature Power, Resistance, Special Abilities, Alignments, Attributes, and Control Arrows (an inward arrow and 0–3 outward arrows). Like their Illuminati masters, Organizations can launch and defend against various attacks. Provided that the attacking Organization has a free, outward-pointing Control Arrow, players can increase the size of their Power Structure via successful Attacks to Control, a mathematically determined method employed whenever a player wants to capture an Organization from their hand or a rival player's Power Structure. Unless the attack is Privileged (only the target and attacker can be involved), all players can aid or undermine the attack. Attacks to Destroy follow a similar game mechanic but result in the Organization's removal from the Power Structure, after which they are immediately discarded. A dice roll determines the outcome of all Attacks. Other ways to introduce Organizations to the Power Structure involve Plots, spending Action Tokens to bring Groups into play, or using free moves at appropriate times during the play cycle.
Resources represent the custodians of a variety of objects, ranging from gadgets to artefacts (such as The Shroud of Turin, Flying Saucers, and ELIZA). They are identified by their overall purple color scheme (border and/or title). Resources are introduced into play by spending Action Tokens or by using free moves during appropriate moments in the play cycle. They go alongside the Power Structure of the player's Illuminati and bestow a valid Special Ability or something similar.
In the February 1995 edition of Shadis (issue #17.5), Matthew Lee and Jim Pinto liked the durable cards printed on thicker card stock than the original game (although the cards were easier to crease during shuffling). They also liked that one starter pack was enough for two players to get started and that the rulebook was very detailed. However, they disliked that cards were swapped between players – unusual for a CCG – which meant that the players had to figure out whose cards were whose at the end of the game. They also found that "the large rulebook can be daunting, and a large number of rules must be memorized to play".
In the June 1995 edition of Dragon (issue 218), Rick Swan warned that it was a complex game: "Owing to the unconventional mechanics, even experienced gamers may have trouble at first." But he gave the game a perfect rating of 6 out of 6, saying, "Resolute players who scrutinize the rules and grind their way through a few practice rounds will discover why Illuminati has been so durable. Not only is it an inspired concept, but it’s also an enlightening treatise on the fine art of backstabbing. What more could you ask from a deck of cards?" Ten months later, in the April 1996 edition of Dragon (Issue 229), Swan, tongue in cheek, called a set of blank cards produced for INWO "tastefully understated".
In the September 1996 edition of Arcane (issue 4), Steve Faragher rated the Assassins expansion set 9 out of 10 overall, saying, "With the introduction of Assassins, it now appears to have ... a little more game balance for tournament play. A good thing indeed."
At the 1995 Origins Awards, INWO won Best Card Game of 1994. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Illuminati: New World Order (INWO) is an out-of-print collectible card game (CCG) that was released in 1994 by Steve Jackson Games, based on their original boxed game Illuminati, which in turn was inspired by the 1975 book The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. An OMNI sealed-deck league patterned after the Atlas Games model was also developed.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The 409-card set was sold in packages containing two 55-card starter decks and in 15-card booster packs.The booster packs contained cards of the types 'Group' and 'Plot', but not 'Illuminati'. The INWO Factory Set was a collector's set released in April 1995, containing one of each of the 403 cards in the base set plus blank cards and three of each Illuminati card.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Steve Jackson Games published a 144-page player's guide titled The INWO Book in April 1995 that contained rules, strategies, color prints of all cards, and also included a rare card from the Unlimited Edition.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The limited edition Assassins, the game's first expansion set, was released in mid-1995 and sold in 8-card booster packs. The 100-card expansion set SubGenius was planned for release in August 1997 and ultimately released in April 1998. The Bavarian Fire Drill set was planned for release in November 1998. Both SubGenius and Bavarian Fire Drill were sold as a single-box expansion set with all cards included.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Following the release and popularity of Magic: The Gathering in August 1993, Steve Jackson Games began the development of Illuminati: New World Order, most of which occurred in early 1994. The release of the Deluxe Edition sold out by mid-1994 and was followed by the release of the Limited Edition in December 1994, of which nearly 84,000 sets \"sold out almost immediately\". The Unlimited Edition was released in 1995. In an article published in the November–December 1994 issue of Pyramid magazine, Steve Jackson stated that Wizards of the Coast had loaned Steve Jackson Games money to \"finance the first printing of INWO\", which was the biggest project the company had undertaken by an order of magnitude.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Players attempt to achieve world domination by utilizing the powers of their chosen Illuminati (the Adepts of Hermes, the Bavarian Illuminati, the Bermuda Triangle, the Discordian Society, the Gnomes of Zürich, the Network, Servants of Cthulhu, Shangri-La, the UFOs, the Society of Assassins (added in the Assassins expansion), and the Church of the SubGenius (added in the Subgenius expansion). The first player to control a predetermined number of organizations (usually twelve in a standard game) has achieved the basic goal and can claim victory.",
"title": "Goal of the game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Controllable organizations include groups such as the Men in Black, the CIA, and the Boy Sprouts; personalities such as Diana, Princess of Wales, Saddam Hussein, Ross Perot, or Björne (a parody of Barney the Dinosaur); and places like Japan, California, Canada, and the Moonbase. Many organization names are spoofs of real organizations, presumably altered to avoid lawsuits.",
"title": "Goal of the game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Other ways to achieve victory include: destroying rival Illuminati by capturing or killing the last organization in their power structure; and/or fulfilling a particular goal before your opponent(s) can.",
"title": "Goal of the game"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Cards come in three main types: Illuminati cards, Plot cards, and Group cards. Illuminati and Plot cards both feature an illustration of a puppeteer's hand in a blue color scheme on the rear side, whereas Group cards feature a puppet on a string in a red color scheme.",
"title": "Card types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Each Illuminati card represents a different Illuminati organization at the center of each player's Power Structure. They have Power, a Special Goal, and an appropriate Special Ability. Their power flows outward into the Groups they control via Control Arrows.",
"title": "Card types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Plot cards provide the bulk of the game's narrative structure, allowing players to go beyond or even break the game's rules as described in the World Domination Handbook. Plot cards are identified by their overall blue color scheme (border and/or title color). Included among the general Plots are several particular types, including Assassinations and Disasters (for delivering insults to the various Personalities and Places in play), GOAL (special goals that can lead to surprise victories), and New World Order cards (a set of conditions that affect all players, typically overridden when replacement New World Order cards are brought into play).",
"title": "Card types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Group cards represent the power elite in charge of the named organization. There are two main types of Groups: Organizations and Resources.",
"title": "Card types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Organizations are identified by their red color scheme (border and/or title). There are three main types of Organizations: regular Organizations, People, and Places. They all feature Power, Resistance, Special Abilities, Alignments, Attributes, and Control Arrows (an inward arrow and 0–3 outward arrows). Like their Illuminati masters, Organizations can launch and defend against various attacks. Provided that the attacking Organization has a free, outward-pointing Control Arrow, players can increase the size of their Power Structure via successful Attacks to Control, a mathematically determined method employed whenever a player wants to capture an Organization from their hand or a rival player's Power Structure. Unless the attack is Privileged (only the target and attacker can be involved), all players can aid or undermine the attack. Attacks to Destroy follow a similar game mechanic but result in the Organization's removal from the Power Structure, after which they are immediately discarded. A dice roll determines the outcome of all Attacks. Other ways to introduce Organizations to the Power Structure involve Plots, spending Action Tokens to bring Groups into play, or using free moves at appropriate times during the play cycle.",
"title": "Card types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Resources represent the custodians of a variety of objects, ranging from gadgets to artefacts (such as The Shroud of Turin, Flying Saucers, and ELIZA). They are identified by their overall purple color scheme (border and/or title). Resources are introduced into play by spending Action Tokens or by using free moves during appropriate moments in the play cycle. They go alongside the Power Structure of the player's Illuminati and bestow a valid Special Ability or something similar.",
"title": "Card types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In the February 1995 edition of Shadis (issue #17.5), Matthew Lee and Jim Pinto liked the durable cards printed on thicker card stock than the original game (although the cards were easier to crease during shuffling). They also liked that one starter pack was enough for two players to get started and that the rulebook was very detailed. However, they disliked that cards were swapped between players – unusual for a CCG – which meant that the players had to figure out whose cards were whose at the end of the game. They also found that \"the large rulebook can be daunting, and a large number of rules must be memorized to play\".",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In the June 1995 edition of Dragon (issue 218), Rick Swan warned that it was a complex game: \"Owing to the unconventional mechanics, even experienced gamers may have trouble at first.\" But he gave the game a perfect rating of 6 out of 6, saying, \"Resolute players who scrutinize the rules and grind their way through a few practice rounds will discover why Illuminati has been so durable. Not only is it an inspired concept, but it’s also an enlightening treatise on the fine art of backstabbing. What more could you ask from a deck of cards?\" Ten months later, in the April 1996 edition of Dragon (Issue 229), Swan, tongue in cheek, called a set of blank cards produced for INWO \"tastefully understated\".",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In the September 1996 edition of Arcane (issue 4), Steve Faragher rated the Assassins expansion set 9 out of 10 overall, saying, \"With the introduction of Assassins, it now appears to have ... a little more game balance for tournament play. A good thing indeed.\"",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "At the 1995 Origins Awards, INWO won Best Card Game of 1994.",
"title": "Awards"
}
]
| Illuminati: New World Order (INWO) is an out-of-print collectible card game (CCG) that was released in 1994 by Steve Jackson Games, based on their original boxed game Illuminati, which in turn was inspired by the 1975 book The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. An OMNI sealed-deck league patterned after the Atlas Games model was also developed. The 409-card set was sold in packages containing two 55-card starter decks and in 15-card booster packs.The booster packs contained cards of the types 'Group' and 'Plot', but not 'Illuminati'. The INWO Factory Set was a collector's set released in April 1995, containing one of each of the 403 cards in the base set plus blank cards and three of each Illuminati card. Steve Jackson Games published a 144-page player's guide titled The INWO Book in April 1995 that contained rules, strategies, color prints of all cards, and also included a rare card from the Unlimited Edition. The limited edition Assassins, the game's first expansion set, was released in mid-1995 and sold in 8-card booster packs. The 100-card expansion set SubGenius was planned for release in August 1997 and ultimately released in April 1998. The Bavarian Fire Drill set was planned for release in November 1998. Both SubGenius and Bavarian Fire Drill were sold as a single-box expansion set with all cards included. Following the release and popularity of Magic: The Gathering in August 1993, Steve Jackson Games began the development of Illuminati: New World Order, most of which occurred in early 1994. The release of the Deluxe Edition sold out by mid-1994 and was followed by the release of the Limited Edition in December 1994, of which nearly 84,000 sets "sold out almost immediately". The Unlimited Edition was released in 1995. In an article published in the November–December 1994 issue of Pyramid magazine, Steve Jackson stated that Wizards of the Coast had loaned Steve Jackson Games money to "finance the first printing of INWO", which was the biggest project the company had undertaken by an order of magnitude. | 2001-07-26T18:57:17Z | 2023-12-15T09:01:15Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminati:_New_World_Order |
14,841 | Integration | Integration may refer to: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Integration may refer to:",
"title": ""
}
]
| Integration may refer to: | 2001-11-07T19:02:04Z | 2023-09-16T12:53:42Z | [
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"Template:TOC right",
"Template:In title",
"Template:Disambiguation"
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integration |
14,843 | Interstellar travel | Interstellar travel is the hypothetical travel of spacecraft from one star system, solitary star, or planetary system to another. Interstellar travel is expected to prove much more difficult than interplanetary spaceflight due to the vast difference in the scale of the involved distances. Whereas the distance between any two planets in the Solar System is less than 55 astronomical units (AU), stars are typically separated by hundreds of thousands of AU, causing these distances to typically be expressed instead in light-years. Because of the vastness of these distances, non-generational interstellar travel based on known physics would need to occur at a high percentage of the speed of light; even so, travel times would be long, at least decades and perhaps millennia or longer.
As of 2022, five uncrewed spacecraft, all launched and operated by the United States, have achieved the escape velocity required to leave the Solar System as part of missions to explore parts of the outer system. They will therefore continue to travel through interstellar space indefinitely. However, they will not approach another star for hundreds of thousands of years, long after they have ceased to operate (though in theory the Voyager Golden Record would be playable in the event that the spacecraft is retrieved by an extraterrestrial civilization).
The speeds required for interstellar travel in a human lifetime far exceed what current methods of space travel can provide. Even with a hypothetically perfectly efficient propulsion system, the kinetic energy corresponding to those speeds is enormous by today's standards of energy development. Moreover, collisions by spacecraft with cosmic dust and gas at such speeds would be very dangerous for both passengers and the spacecraft itself.
A number of strategies have been proposed to deal with these problems, ranging from giant arks that would carry entire societies and ecosystems, to microscopic space probes. Many different spacecraft propulsion systems have been proposed to give spacecraft the required speeds, including nuclear propulsion, beam-powered propulsion, and methods based on speculative physics.
Humanity would need to overcome considerable technological and economic challenges to achieve either crewed or uncrewed interstellar travel. Even the most optimistic views forecast that it will be decades before this milestone is reached. However, in spite of the challenges, a wide range of scientific benefits are expected should interstellar travel become a reality.
Most interstellar travel concepts require a developed space logistics system capable of moving millions of tonnes to a construction / operating location, and most would require gigawatt-scale power for construction or power (such as Star Wisp– or Light Sail–type concepts). Such a system could grow organically if space-based solar power became a significant component of Earth's energy mix. Consumer demand for a multi-terawatt system would create the necessary multi-million ton/year logistical system.
Distances between the planets in the Solar System are often measured in astronomical units (AU), defined as the average distance between the Sun and Earth, some 1.5×10 kilometers (93 million miles). Venus, the closest planet to Earth is (at closest approach) 0.28 AU away. Neptune, the farthest planet from the Sun, is 29.8 AU away. As of January 20, 2023, Voyager 1, the farthest human-made object from Earth, is 159 AU away.
The closest known star, Proxima Centauri, is approximately 268,332 AU away, or over 9,000 times farther away than Neptune.
Because of this, distances between stars are usually expressed in light-years (defined as the distance that light travels in vacuum in one Julian year) or in parsecs (one parsec is 3.26 ly, the distance at which stellar parallax is exactly one arcsecond, hence the name). Light in a vacuum travels around 300,000 kilometres (186,000 mi) per second, so 1 light-year is about 9.461×10 kilometers (5.879 trillion miles) or 63,241 AU. Hence, Proxima Centauri is approximately 4.243 light-years from Earth.
Another way of understanding the vastness of interstellar distances is by scaling: One of the closest stars to the Sun, Alpha Centauri A (a Sun-like star that is one of two companions of Proxima Centauri), can be pictured by scaling down the Earth–Sun distance to one meter (3.28 ft). On this scale, the distance to Alpha Centauri A would be 276 kilometers (171 miles).
The fastest outward-bound spacecraft yet sent, Voyager 1, has covered 1/600 of a light-year in 30 years and is currently moving at 1/18,000 the speed of light. At this rate, a journey to Proxima Centauri would take 80,000 years.
A significant factor contributing to the difficulty is the energy that must be supplied to obtain a reasonable travel time. A lower bound for the required energy is the kinetic energy K = 1 2 m v 2 {\displaystyle K={\tfrac {1}{2}}mv^{2}} where m {\displaystyle m} is the final mass. If deceleration on arrival is desired and cannot be achieved by any means other than the engines of the ship, then the lower bound for the required energy is doubled to m v 2 {\displaystyle mv^{2}} .
The velocity for a crewed round trip of a few decades to even the nearest star is several thousand times greater than those of present space vehicles. This means that due to the v 2 {\displaystyle v^{2}} term in the kinetic energy formula, millions of times as much energy is required. Accelerating one ton to one-tenth of the speed of light requires at least 450 petajoules or 4.50×10 joules or 125 terawatt-hours (world energy consumption 2008 was 143,851 terawatt-hours), without factoring in efficiency of the propulsion mechanism. This energy has to be generated onboard from stored fuel, harvested from the interstellar medium, or projected over immense distances.
A knowledge of the properties of the interstellar gas and dust through which the vehicle must pass is essential for the design of any interstellar space mission. A major issue with traveling at extremely high speeds is that due to the requisite high relative speeds and large kinetic energies, collisions with interstellar dust could cause considerable damage to the craft. Various shielding methods to mitigate this problem have been proposed. Larger objects (such as macroscopic dust grains) are far less common, but would be much more destructive. The risks of impacting such objects and mitigation methods have been discussed in literature, but many unknowns remain. An additional consideration is that due the non-homogeneous distribution of interstellar matter around the Sun, these risks would vary between different trajectories. Although a high density interstellar medium may cause difficulties for many interstellar travel concepts, interstellar ramjets, and some proposed concepts for decelerating interstellar spacecraft, would actually benefit from a denser interstellar medium.
The crew of an interstellar ship would face several significant hazards, including the psychological effects of long-term isolation, the physiological effects of extreme acceleration, the effects of exposure to ionising radiation, and the physiological effects of weightlessness to the muscles, joints, bones, immune system, and eyes. There also exists the risk of impact by micrometeoroids and other space debris. These risks represent challenges that have yet to be overcome.
The speculative fiction writer and physicist Robert L. Forward has argued that an interstellar mission that cannot be completed within 50 years should not be started at all. Instead, assuming that a civilization is still on an increasing curve of propulsion system velocity and not yet having reached the limit, the resources should be invested in designing a better propulsion system. This is because a slow spacecraft would probably be passed by another mission sent later with more advanced propulsion (the incessant obsolescence postulate). In 2006, Andrew Kennedy calculated ideal departure dates for a trip to Barnard's Star using a more precise concept of the wait calculation where for a given destination and growth rate in propulsion capacity there is a departure point that overtakes earlier launches and will not be overtaken by later ones and concluded "an interstellar journey of 6 light years can best be made in about 635 years from now if growth continues at about 1.4% per annum", or approximately 2641 AD. It may be the most significant calculation for competing cultures occupying the galaxy.
There are 59 known stellar systems within 40 light years of the Sun, containing 81 visible stars. The following could be considered prime targets for interstellar missions:
Existing astronomical technology is capable of finding planetary systems around these objects, increasing their potential for exploration.
"Slow" interstellar missions (still fast by other standards) based on current and near-future propulsion technologies are associated with trip times starting from about several decades to thousands of years. These missions consist of sending a robotic probe to a nearby star for exploration, similar to interplanetary probes like those used in the Voyager program. By taking along no crew, the cost and complexity of the mission is significantly reduced, as is the mass that needs to be accelerated, although technology lifetime is still a significant issue next to obtaining a reasonable speed of travel. Proposed concepts include Project Daedalus, Project Icarus, Project Dragonfly, Project Longshot, and more recently Breakthrough Starshot.
Near-lightspeed nano spacecraft might be possible within the near future built on existing microchip technology with a newly developed nanoscale thruster. Researchers at the University of Michigan are developing thrusters that use nanoparticles as propellant. Their technology is called "nanoparticle field extraction thruster", or nanoFET. These devices act like small particle accelerators shooting conductive nanoparticles out into space.
Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist, has suggested that clouds of "smart dust" be sent to the stars, which may become possible with advances in nanotechnology. Kaku also notes that a large number of nanoprobes would need to be sent due to the vulnerability of very small probes to be easily deflected by magnetic fields, micrometeorites and other dangers to ensure the chances that at least one nanoprobe will survive the journey and reach the destination.
As a near-term solution, small, laser-propelled interstellar probes, based on current CubeSat technology were proposed in the context of Project Dragonfly.
In crewed missions, the duration of a slow interstellar journey presents a major obstacle and existing concepts deal with this problem in different ways. They can be distinguished by the "state" in which humans are transported on-board of the spacecraft.
A generation ship (or world ship) is a type of interstellar ark in which the crew that arrives at the destination is descended from those who started the journey. Generation ships are not currently feasible because of the difficulty of constructing a ship of the enormous required scale and the great biological and sociological problems that life aboard such a ship raises.
Scientists and writers have postulated various techniques for suspended animation. These include human hibernation and cryonic preservation. Although neither is currently practical, they offer the possibility of sleeper ships in which the passengers lie inert for the long duration of the voyage.
A robotic interstellar mission carrying some number of frozen early stage human embryos is another theoretical possibility. This method of space colonization requires, among other things, the development of an artificial uterus, the prior detection of a habitable terrestrial planet, and advances in the field of fully autonomous mobile robots and educational robots that would replace human parents.
Interstellar space is not completely empty; it contains trillions of icy bodies ranging from small asteroids (Oort cloud) to possible rogue planets. There may be ways to take advantage of these resources for a good part of an interstellar trip, slowly hopping from body to body or setting up waystations along the way.
If a spaceship could average 10 percent of light speed (and decelerate at the destination, for human crewed missions), this would be enough to reach Proxima Centauri in forty years. Several propulsion concepts have been proposed that might be eventually developed to accomplish this (see § Propulsion below), but none of them are ready for near-term (few decades) developments at acceptable cost.
Physicists generally believe faster-than-light travel is impossible. Relativistic time dilation allows a traveler to experience time more slowly, the closer their speed is to the speed of light. This apparent slowing becomes noticeable when velocities above 80% of the speed of light are attained. Clocks aboard an interstellar ship would run slower than Earth clocks, so if a ship's engines were capable of continuously generating around 1 g of acceleration (which is comfortable for humans), the ship could reach almost anywhere in the galaxy and return to Earth within 40 years ship-time (see diagram). Upon return, there would be a difference between the time elapsed on the astronaut's ship and the time elapsed on Earth.
For example, a spaceship could travel to a star 32 light-years away, initially accelerating at a constant 1.03g (i.e. 10.1 m/s) for 1.32 years (ship time), then stopping its engines and coasting for the next 17.3 years (ship time) at a constant speed, then decelerating again for 1.32 ship-years, and coming to a stop at the destination. After a short visit, the astronaut could return to Earth the same way. After the full round-trip, the clocks on board the ship show that 40 years have passed, but according to those on Earth, the ship comes back 76 years after launch.
From the viewpoint of the astronaut, onboard clocks seem to be running normally. The star ahead seems to be approaching at a speed of 0.87 light years per ship-year. The universe would appear contracted along the direction of travel to half the size it had when the ship was at rest; the distance between that star and the Sun would seem to be 16 light years as measured by the astronaut.
At higher speeds, the time on board will run even slower, so the astronaut could travel to the center of the Milky Way (30,000 light years from Earth) and back in 40 years ship-time. But the speed according to Earth clocks will always be less than 1 light year per Earth year, so, when back home, the astronaut will find that more than 60 thousand years will have passed on Earth.
Regardless of how it is achieved, a propulsion system that could produce acceleration continuously from departure to arrival would be the fastest method of travel. A constant acceleration journey is one where the propulsion system accelerates the ship at a constant rate for the first half of the journey, and then decelerates for the second half, so that it arrives at the destination stationary relative to where it began. If this were performed with an acceleration similar to that experienced at the Earth's surface, it would have the added advantage of producing artificial "gravity" for the crew. Supplying the energy required, however, would be prohibitively expensive with current technology.
From the perspective of a planetary observer, the ship will appear to accelerate steadily at first, but then more gradually as it approaches the speed of light (which it cannot exceed). It will undergo hyperbolic motion. The ship will be close to the speed of light after about a year of accelerating and remain at that speed until it brakes for the end of the journey.
From the perspective of an onboard observer, the crew will feel a gravitational field opposite the engine's acceleration, and the universe ahead will appear to fall in that field, undergoing hyperbolic motion. As part of this, distances between objects in the direction of the ship's motion will gradually contract until the ship begins to decelerate, at which time an onboard observer's experience of the gravitational field will be reversed.
When the ship reaches its destination, if it were to exchange a message with its origin planet, it would find that less time had elapsed on board than had elapsed for the planetary observer, due to time dilation and length contraction.
The result is an impressively fast journey for the crew.
All rocket concepts are limited by the rocket equation, which sets the characteristic velocity available as a function of exhaust velocity and mass ratio, the ratio of initial (M0, including fuel) to final (M1, fuel depleted) mass.
Very high specific power, the ratio of thrust to total vehicle mass, is required to reach interstellar targets within sub-century time-frames. Some heat transfer is inevitable and a tremendous heating load must be adequately handled.
Thus, for interstellar rocket concepts of all technologies, a key engineering problem (seldom explicitly discussed) is limiting the heat transfer from the exhaust stream back into the vehicle.
A type of electric propulsion, spacecraft such as Dawn use an ion engine. In an ion engine, electric power is used to create charged particles of the propellant, usually the gas xenon, and accelerate them to extremely high velocities. The exhaust velocity of conventional rockets is limited to about 5 km/s by the chemical energy stored in the fuel's molecular bonds. They produce a high thrust (about 10 N), but they have a low specific impulse, and that limits their top speed. By contrast, ion engines have low force, but the top speed in principle is limited only by the electrical power available on the spacecraft and on the gas ions being accelerated. The exhaust speed of the charged particles range from 15 km/s to 35 km/s.
Nuclear-electric or plasma engines, operating for long periods at low thrust and powered by fission reactors, have the potential to reach speeds much greater than chemically powered vehicles or nuclear-thermal rockets. Such vehicles probably have the potential to power solar system exploration with reasonable trip times within the current century. Because of their low-thrust propulsion, they would be limited to off-planet, deep-space operation. Electrically powered spacecraft propulsion powered by a portable power-source, say a nuclear reactor, producing only small accelerations, would take centuries to reach for example 15% of the velocity of light, thus unsuitable for interstellar flight during a single human lifetime.
Fission-fragment rockets use nuclear fission to create high-speed jets of fission fragments, which are ejected at speeds of up to 12,000 km/s (7,500 mi/s). With fission, the energy output is approximately 0.1% of the total mass-energy of the reactor fuel and limits the effective exhaust velocity to about 5% of the velocity of light. For maximum velocity, the reaction mass should optimally consist of fission products, the "ash" of the primary energy source, so no extra reaction mass need be bookkept in the mass ratio.
Based on work in the late 1950s to the early 1960s, it has been technically possible to build spaceships with nuclear pulse propulsion engines, i.e. driven by a series of nuclear explosions. This propulsion system contains the prospect of very high specific impulse (space travel's equivalent of fuel economy) and high specific power.
Project Orion team member Freeman Dyson proposed in 1968 an interstellar spacecraft using nuclear pulse propulsion that used pure deuterium fusion detonations with a very high fuel-burnup fraction. He computed an exhaust velocity of 15,000 km/s and a 100,000-tonne space vehicle able to achieve a 20,000 km/s delta-v allowing a flight-time to Alpha Centauri of 130 years. Later studies indicate that the top cruise velocity that can theoretically be achieved by a Teller-Ulam thermonuclear unit powered Orion starship, assuming no fuel is saved for slowing back down, is about 8% to 10% of the speed of light (0.08-0.1c). An atomic (fission) Orion can achieve perhaps 3%-5% of the speed of light. A nuclear pulse drive starship powered by fusion-antimatter catalyzed nuclear pulse propulsion units would be similarly in the 10% range and pure matter-antimatter annihilation rockets would be theoretically capable of obtaining a velocity between 50% and 80% of the speed of light. In each case saving fuel for slowing down halves the maximum speed. The concept of using a magnetic sail to decelerate the spacecraft as it approaches its destination has been discussed as an alternative to using propellant, this would allow the ship to travel near the maximum theoretical velocity. Alternative designs utilizing similar principles include Project Longshot, Project Daedalus, and Mini-Mag Orion. The principle of external nuclear pulse propulsion to maximize survivable power has remained common among serious concepts for interstellar flight without external power beaming and for very high-performance interplanetary flight.
In the 1970s the Nuclear Pulse Propulsion concept further was refined by Project Daedalus by use of externally triggered inertial confinement fusion, in this case producing fusion explosions via compressing fusion fuel pellets with high-powered electron beams. Since then, lasers, ion beams, neutral particle beams and hyper-kinetic projectiles have been suggested to produce nuclear pulses for propulsion purposes.
A current impediment to the development of any nuclear-explosion-powered spacecraft is the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, which includes a prohibition on the detonation of any nuclear devices (even non-weapon based) in outer space. This treaty would, therefore, need to be renegotiated, although a project on the scale of an interstellar mission using currently foreseeable technology would probably require international cooperation on at least the scale of the International Space Station.
Another issue to be considered, would be the g-forces imparted to a rapidly accelerated spacecraft, cargo, and passengers inside (see Inertia negation).
Fusion rocket starships, powered by nuclear fusion reactions, should conceivably be able to reach speeds of the order of 10% of that of light, based on energy considerations alone. In theory, a large number of stages could push a vehicle arbitrarily close to the speed of light. These would "burn" such light element fuels as deuterium, tritium, He, B, and Li. Because fusion yields about 0.3–0.9% of the mass of the nuclear fuel as released energy, it is energetically more favorable than fission, which releases <0.1% of the fuel's mass-energy. The maximum exhaust velocities potentially energetically available are correspondingly higher than for fission, typically 4–10% of the speed of light. However, the most easily achievable fusion reactions release a large fraction of their energy as high-energy neutrons, which are a significant source of energy loss. Thus, although these concepts seem to offer the best (nearest-term) prospects for travel to the nearest stars within a (long) human lifetime, they still involve massive technological and engineering difficulties, which may turn out to be intractable for decades or centuries.
Early studies include Project Daedalus, performed by the British Interplanetary Society in 1973–1978, and Project Longshot, a student project sponsored by NASA and the US Naval Academy, completed in 1988. Another fairly detailed vehicle system, "Discovery II", designed and optimized for crewed Solar System exploration, based on the DHe reaction but using hydrogen as reaction mass, has been described by a team from NASA's Glenn Research Center. It achieves characteristic velocities of >300 km/s with an acceleration of ~1.7•10 g, with a ship initial mass of ~1700 metric tons, and payload fraction above 10%. Although these are still far short of the requirements for interstellar travel on human timescales, the study seems to represent a reasonable benchmark towards what may be approachable within several decades, which is not impossibly beyond the current state-of-the-art. Based on the concept's 2.2% burnup fraction it could achieve a pure fusion product exhaust velocity of ~3,000 km/s.
An antimatter rocket would have a far higher energy density and specific impulse than any other proposed class of rocket. If energy resources and efficient production methods are found to make antimatter in the quantities required and store it safely, it would be theoretically possible to reach speeds of several tens of percent that of light. Whether antimatter propulsion could lead to the higher speeds (>90% that of light) at which relativistic time dilation would become more noticeable, thus making time pass at a slower rate for the travelers as perceived by an outside observer, is doubtful owing to the large quantity of antimatter that would be required.
Speculating that production and storage of antimatter should become feasible, two further issues need to be considered. First, in the annihilation of antimatter, much of the energy is lost as high-energy gamma radiation, and especially also as neutrinos, so that only about 40% of mc would actually be available if the antimatter were simply allowed to annihilate into radiations thermally. Even so, the energy available for propulsion would be substantially higher than the ~1% of mc yield of nuclear fusion, the next-best rival candidate.
Second, heat transfer from the exhaust to the vehicle seems likely to transfer enormous wasted energy into the ship (e.g. for 0.1g ship acceleration, approaching 0.3 trillion watts per ton of ship mass), considering the large fraction of the energy that goes into penetrating gamma rays. Even assuming shielding was provided to protect the payload (and passengers on a crewed vehicle), some of the energy would inevitably heat the vehicle, and may thereby prove a limiting factor if useful accelerations are to be achieved.
More recently, Friedwardt Winterberg proposed that a matter-antimatter GeV gamma ray laser photon rocket is possible by a relativistic proton-antiproton pinch discharge, where the recoil from the laser beam is transmitted by the Mössbauer effect to the spacecraft.
Rockets deriving their power from external sources, such as a laser, could replace their internal energy source with an energy collector, potentially reducing the mass of the ship greatly and allowing much higher travel speeds. Geoffrey A. Landis proposed an interstellar probe propelled by an ion thruster powered by the energy beamed to it from a base station laser. Lenard and Andrews proposed using a base station laser to accelerate nuclear fuel pellets towards a Mini-Mag Orion spacecraft that ignites them for propulsion.
A problem with all traditional rocket propulsion methods is that the spacecraft would need to carry its fuel with it, thus making it very massive, in accordance with the rocket equation. Several concepts attempt to escape from this problem:
A radio frequency (RF) resonant cavity thruster is a device that is claimed to be a spacecraft thruster. In 2016, the Advanced Propulsion Physics Laboratory at NASA reported observing a small apparent thrust from one such test, a result not since replicated. One of the designs is called EMDrive. In December 2002, Satellite Propulsion Research Ltd described a working prototype with an alleged total thrust of about 0.02 newtons powered by an 850 W cavity magnetron. The device could operate for only a few dozen seconds before the magnetron failed, due to overheating. The latest test on the EMDrive concluded that it does not work.
Proposed in 2019 by NASA scientist Dr. David Burns, the helical engine concept would use a particle accelerator to accelerate particles to near the speed of light. Since particles traveling at such speeds acquire more mass, it is believed that this mass change could create acceleration. According to Burns, the spacecraft could theoretically reach 99% the speed of light.
In 1960, Robert W. Bussard proposed the Bussard ramjet, a fusion rocket in which a huge scoop would collect the diffuse hydrogen in interstellar space, "burn" it on the fly using a proton–proton chain reaction, and expel it out of the back. Later calculations with more accurate estimates suggest that the thrust generated would be less than the drag caused by any conceivable scoop design. Yet the idea is attractive because the fuel would be collected en route (commensurate with the concept of energy harvesting), so the craft could theoretically accelerate to near the speed of light. The limitation is due to the fact that the reaction can only accelerate the propellant to 0.12c. Thus the drag of catching interstellar dust and the thrust of accelerating that same dust to 0.12c would be the same when the speed is 0.12c, preventing further acceleration.
A light sail or magnetic sail powered by a massive laser or particle accelerator in the home star system could potentially reach even greater speeds than rocket- or pulse propulsion methods, because it would not need to carry its own reaction mass and therefore would only need to accelerate the craft's payload. Robert L. Forward proposed a means for decelerating an interstellar craft with a light sail of 100 kilometers in the destination star system without requiring a laser array to be present in that system. In this scheme, a secondary sail of 30 kilometers is deployed to the rear of the spacecraft, while the large primary sail is detached from the craft to keep moving forward on its own. Light is reflected from the large primary sail to the secondary sail, which is used to decelerate the secondary sail and the spacecraft payload. In 2002, Geoffrey A. Landis of NASA's Glen Research center also proposed a laser-powered, propulsion, sail ship that would host a diamond sail (of a few nanometers thick) powered with the use of solar energy. With this proposal, this interstellar ship would, theoretically, be able to reach 10 percent the speed of light. It has also been proposed to use beamed-powered propulsion to accelerate a spacecraft, and electromagnetic propulsion to decelerate it; thus, eliminating the problem that the Bussard ramjet has with the drag produced during acceleration.
A magnetic sail could also decelerate at its destination without depending on carried fuel or a driving beam in the destination system, by interacting with the plasma found in the solar wind of the destination star and the interstellar medium.
The following table lists some example concepts using beamed laser propulsion as proposed by the physicist Robert L. Forward:
The following table is based on work by Heller, Hippke and Kervella.
Achieving start-stop interstellar trip times of less than a human lifetime require mass-ratios of between 1,000 and 1,000,000, even for the nearer stars. This could be achieved by multi-staged vehicles on a vast scale. Alternatively large linear accelerators could propel fuel to fission propelled space-vehicles, avoiding the limitations of the Rocket equation.
Dynamic soaring as a way to travel across interstellar space has been proposed.
Uploaded human minds or AI could be transmitted with laser or radio signals at the speed of light. This requires a receiver at the destination which would first have to be set up e.g. by humans, probes, self replicating machines (potentially along with AI or uploaded humans), or an alien civilization (which might also be in a different galaxy, perhaps a Kardashev type III civilization).
Scientists and authors have postulated a number of ways by which it might be possible to surpass the speed of light, but even the most serious-minded of these are highly speculative.
It is also debatable whether faster-than-light travel is physically possible, in part because of causality concerns: travel faster than light may, under certain conditions, permit travel backwards in time within the context of special relativity. Proposed mechanisms for faster-than-light travel within the theory of general relativity require the existence of exotic matter and, it is not known if it could be produced in sufficient quantities, if at all.
In physics, the Alcubierre drive is based on an argument, within the framework of general relativity and without the introduction of wormholes, that it is possible to modify spacetime in a way that allows a spaceship to travel with an arbitrarily large speed by a local expansion of spacetime behind the spaceship and an opposite contraction in front of it. Nevertheless, this concept would require the spaceship to incorporate a region of exotic matter, or the hypothetical concept of negative mass.
A theoretical idea for enabling interstellar travel is to propel a starship by creating an artificial black hole and using a parabolic reflector to reflect its Hawking radiation. Although beyond current technological capabilities, a black hole starship offers some advantages compared to other possible methods. Getting the black hole to act as a power source and engine also requires a way to convert the Hawking radiation into energy and thrust. One potential method involves placing the hole at the focal point of a parabolic reflector attached to the ship, creating forward thrust. A slightly easier, but less efficient method would involve simply absorbing all the gamma radiation heading towards the fore of the ship to push it onwards, and let the rest shoot out the back.
Wormholes are conjectural distortions in spacetime that theorists postulate could connect two arbitrary points in the universe, across an Einstein–Rosen Bridge. It is not known whether wormholes are possible in practice. Although there are solutions to the Einstein equation of general relativity that allow for wormholes, all of the currently known solutions involve some assumption, for example the existence of negative mass, which may be unphysical. However, Cramer et al. argue that such wormholes might have been created in the early universe, stabilized by cosmic strings. The general theory of wormholes is discussed by Visser in the book Lorentzian Wormholes.
Project Hyperion has looked into various feasibility issues of crewed interstellar travel. Its members continue to publish on crewed interstellar travel in collaboration with the Initiative for Interstellar Studies.
The Enzmann starship, as detailed by G. Harry Stine in the October 1973 issue of Analog, was a design for a future starship, based on the ideas of Robert Duncan-Enzmann. The spacecraft itself as proposed used a 12,000,000 ton ball of frozen deuterium to power 12–24 thermonuclear pulse propulsion units. Twice as long as the Empire State Building is tall and assembled in-orbit, the spacecraft was part of a larger project preceded by interstellar probes and telescopic observation of target star systems.
NASA has been researching interstellar travel since its formation, translating important foreign language papers and conducting early studies on applying fusion propulsion, in the 1960s, and laser propulsion, in the 1970s, to interstellar travel.
In 1994, NASA and JPL cosponsored a "Workshop on Advanced Quantum/Relativity Theory Propulsion" to "establish and use new frames of reference for thinking about the faster-than-light (FTL) question".
The NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program (terminated in FY 2003 after a 6-year, $1.2-million study, because "No breakthroughs appear imminent.") identified some breakthroughs that are needed for interstellar travel to be possible.
Geoffrey A. Landis of NASA's Glenn Research Center states that a laser-powered interstellar sail ship could possibly be launched within 50 years, using new methods of space travel. "I think that ultimately we're going to do it, it's just a question of when and who," Landis said in an interview. Rockets are too slow to send humans on interstellar missions. Instead, he envisions interstellar craft with extensive sails, propelled by laser light to about one-tenth the speed of light. It would take such a ship about 43 years to reach Alpha Centauri if it passed through the system without stopping. Slowing down to stop at Alpha Centauri could increase the trip to 100 years, whereas a journey without slowing down raises the issue of making sufficiently accurate and useful observations and measurements during a fly-by.
The 100 Year Starship (100YSS) study was the name of a one-year project to assess the attributes of and lay the groundwork for an organization that can carry forward the 100 Year Starship vision. 100YSS-related symposia were organized between 2011 and 2015.
Harold ("Sonny") White from NASA's Johnson Space Center is a member of Icarus Interstellar, the nonprofit foundation whose mission is to realize interstellar flight before the year 2100. At the 2012 meeting of 100YSS, he reported using a laser to try to warp spacetime by 1 part in 10 million with the aim of helping to make interstellar travel possible.
A few organisations dedicated to interstellar propulsion research and advocacy for the case exist worldwide. These are still in their infancy, but are already backed up by a membership of a wide variety of scientists, students and professionals.
The energy requirements make interstellar travel very difficult. It has been reported that at the 2008 Joint Propulsion Conference, multiple experts opined that it was improbable that humans would ever explore beyond the Solar System. Brice N. Cassenti, an associate professor with the Department of Engineering and Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, stated that at least 100 times the total energy output of the entire world [in a given year] would be required to send a probe to the nearest star.
Astrophysicist Sten Odenwald stated that the basic problem is that through intensive studies of thousands of detected exoplanets, most of the closest destinations within 50 light years do not yield Earth-like planets in the star's habitable zones. Given the multitrillion-dollar expense of some of the proposed technologies, travelers will have to spend up to 200 years traveling at 20% the speed of light to reach the best known destinations. Moreover, once the travelers arrive at their destination (by any means), they will not be able to travel down to the surface of the target world and set up a colony unless the atmosphere is non-lethal. The prospect of making such a journey, only to spend the rest of the colony's life inside a sealed habitat and venturing outside in a spacesuit, may eliminate many prospective targets from the list.
Moving at a speed close to the speed of light and encountering even a tiny stationary object like a grain of sand will have fatal consequences. For example, a gram of matter moving at 90% of the speed of light contains a kinetic energy corresponding to a small nuclear bomb (around 30kt TNT).
One of the major stumbling blocks is having enough Onboard Spares & Repairs facilities for such a lengthy time journey assuming all other considerations are solved, without access to all the resources available on Earth.
Explorative high-speed missions to Alpha Centauri, as planned for by the Breakthrough Starshot initiative, are projected to be realizable within the 21st century. It is alternatively possible to plan for uncrewed slow-cruising missions taking millennia to arrive. These probes would not be for human benefit in the sense that one can not foresee whether there would be anybody around on Earth interested in then back-transmitted science data. An example would be the Genesis mission, which aims to bring unicellular life, in the spirit of directed panspermia, to habitable but otherwise barren planets. Comparatively slow cruising Genesis probes, with a typical speed of c / 300 {\displaystyle c/300} , corresponding to about 1000 km/s {\displaystyle 1000\,{\mbox{km/s}}} , can be decelerated using a magnetic sail. Uncrewed missions not for human benefit would hence be feasible.
In February 2017, NASA announced that its Spitzer Space Telescope had revealed seven Earth-size planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system orbiting an ultra-cool dwarf star 40 light-years away from the Solar System. Three of these planets are firmly located in the habitable zone, the area around the parent star where a rocky planet is most likely to have liquid water. The discovery sets a new record for greatest number of habitable-zone planets found around a single star outside the Solar System. All of these seven planets could have liquid water – the key to life as we know it – under the right atmospheric conditions, but the chances are highest with the three in the habitable zone. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Interstellar travel is the hypothetical travel of spacecraft from one star system, solitary star, or planetary system to another. Interstellar travel is expected to prove much more difficult than interplanetary spaceflight due to the vast difference in the scale of the involved distances. Whereas the distance between any two planets in the Solar System is less than 55 astronomical units (AU), stars are typically separated by hundreds of thousands of AU, causing these distances to typically be expressed instead in light-years. Because of the vastness of these distances, non-generational interstellar travel based on known physics would need to occur at a high percentage of the speed of light; even so, travel times would be long, at least decades and perhaps millennia or longer.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "As of 2022, five uncrewed spacecraft, all launched and operated by the United States, have achieved the escape velocity required to leave the Solar System as part of missions to explore parts of the outer system. They will therefore continue to travel through interstellar space indefinitely. However, they will not approach another star for hundreds of thousands of years, long after they have ceased to operate (though in theory the Voyager Golden Record would be playable in the event that the spacecraft is retrieved by an extraterrestrial civilization).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The speeds required for interstellar travel in a human lifetime far exceed what current methods of space travel can provide. Even with a hypothetically perfectly efficient propulsion system, the kinetic energy corresponding to those speeds is enormous by today's standards of energy development. Moreover, collisions by spacecraft with cosmic dust and gas at such speeds would be very dangerous for both passengers and the spacecraft itself.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "A number of strategies have been proposed to deal with these problems, ranging from giant arks that would carry entire societies and ecosystems, to microscopic space probes. Many different spacecraft propulsion systems have been proposed to give spacecraft the required speeds, including nuclear propulsion, beam-powered propulsion, and methods based on speculative physics.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Humanity would need to overcome considerable technological and economic challenges to achieve either crewed or uncrewed interstellar travel. Even the most optimistic views forecast that it will be decades before this milestone is reached. However, in spite of the challenges, a wide range of scientific benefits are expected should interstellar travel become a reality.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Most interstellar travel concepts require a developed space logistics system capable of moving millions of tonnes to a construction / operating location, and most would require gigawatt-scale power for construction or power (such as Star Wisp– or Light Sail–type concepts). Such a system could grow organically if space-based solar power became a significant component of Earth's energy mix. Consumer demand for a multi-terawatt system would create the necessary multi-million ton/year logistical system.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Distances between the planets in the Solar System are often measured in astronomical units (AU), defined as the average distance between the Sun and Earth, some 1.5×10 kilometers (93 million miles). Venus, the closest planet to Earth is (at closest approach) 0.28 AU away. Neptune, the farthest planet from the Sun, is 29.8 AU away. As of January 20, 2023, Voyager 1, the farthest human-made object from Earth, is 159 AU away.",
"title": "Challenges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The closest known star, Proxima Centauri, is approximately 268,332 AU away, or over 9,000 times farther away than Neptune.",
"title": "Challenges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Because of this, distances between stars are usually expressed in light-years (defined as the distance that light travels in vacuum in one Julian year) or in parsecs (one parsec is 3.26 ly, the distance at which stellar parallax is exactly one arcsecond, hence the name). Light in a vacuum travels around 300,000 kilometres (186,000 mi) per second, so 1 light-year is about 9.461×10 kilometers (5.879 trillion miles) or 63,241 AU. Hence, Proxima Centauri is approximately 4.243 light-years from Earth.",
"title": "Challenges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Another way of understanding the vastness of interstellar distances is by scaling: One of the closest stars to the Sun, Alpha Centauri A (a Sun-like star that is one of two companions of Proxima Centauri), can be pictured by scaling down the Earth–Sun distance to one meter (3.28 ft). On this scale, the distance to Alpha Centauri A would be 276 kilometers (171 miles).",
"title": "Challenges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The fastest outward-bound spacecraft yet sent, Voyager 1, has covered 1/600 of a light-year in 30 years and is currently moving at 1/18,000 the speed of light. At this rate, a journey to Proxima Centauri would take 80,000 years.",
"title": "Challenges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "A significant factor contributing to the difficulty is the energy that must be supplied to obtain a reasonable travel time. A lower bound for the required energy is the kinetic energy K = 1 2 m v 2 {\\displaystyle K={\\tfrac {1}{2}}mv^{2}} where m {\\displaystyle m} is the final mass. If deceleration on arrival is desired and cannot be achieved by any means other than the engines of the ship, then the lower bound for the required energy is doubled to m v 2 {\\displaystyle mv^{2}} .",
"title": "Challenges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The velocity for a crewed round trip of a few decades to even the nearest star is several thousand times greater than those of present space vehicles. This means that due to the v 2 {\\displaystyle v^{2}} term in the kinetic energy formula, millions of times as much energy is required. Accelerating one ton to one-tenth of the speed of light requires at least 450 petajoules or 4.50×10 joules or 125 terawatt-hours (world energy consumption 2008 was 143,851 terawatt-hours), without factoring in efficiency of the propulsion mechanism. This energy has to be generated onboard from stored fuel, harvested from the interstellar medium, or projected over immense distances.",
"title": "Challenges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "A knowledge of the properties of the interstellar gas and dust through which the vehicle must pass is essential for the design of any interstellar space mission. A major issue with traveling at extremely high speeds is that due to the requisite high relative speeds and large kinetic energies, collisions with interstellar dust could cause considerable damage to the craft. Various shielding methods to mitigate this problem have been proposed. Larger objects (such as macroscopic dust grains) are far less common, but would be much more destructive. The risks of impacting such objects and mitigation methods have been discussed in literature, but many unknowns remain. An additional consideration is that due the non-homogeneous distribution of interstellar matter around the Sun, these risks would vary between different trajectories. Although a high density interstellar medium may cause difficulties for many interstellar travel concepts, interstellar ramjets, and some proposed concepts for decelerating interstellar spacecraft, would actually benefit from a denser interstellar medium.",
"title": "Challenges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The crew of an interstellar ship would face several significant hazards, including the psychological effects of long-term isolation, the physiological effects of extreme acceleration, the effects of exposure to ionising radiation, and the physiological effects of weightlessness to the muscles, joints, bones, immune system, and eyes. There also exists the risk of impact by micrometeoroids and other space debris. These risks represent challenges that have yet to be overcome.",
"title": "Challenges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The speculative fiction writer and physicist Robert L. Forward has argued that an interstellar mission that cannot be completed within 50 years should not be started at all. Instead, assuming that a civilization is still on an increasing curve of propulsion system velocity and not yet having reached the limit, the resources should be invested in designing a better propulsion system. This is because a slow spacecraft would probably be passed by another mission sent later with more advanced propulsion (the incessant obsolescence postulate). In 2006, Andrew Kennedy calculated ideal departure dates for a trip to Barnard's Star using a more precise concept of the wait calculation where for a given destination and growth rate in propulsion capacity there is a departure point that overtakes earlier launches and will not be overtaken by later ones and concluded \"an interstellar journey of 6 light years can best be made in about 635 years from now if growth continues at about 1.4% per annum\", or approximately 2641 AD. It may be the most significant calculation for competing cultures occupying the galaxy.",
"title": "Challenges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "There are 59 known stellar systems within 40 light years of the Sun, containing 81 visible stars. The following could be considered prime targets for interstellar missions:",
"title": "Prime targets for interstellar travel"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Existing astronomical technology is capable of finding planetary systems around these objects, increasing their potential for exploration.",
"title": "Prime targets for interstellar travel"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "\"Slow\" interstellar missions (still fast by other standards) based on current and near-future propulsion technologies are associated with trip times starting from about several decades to thousands of years. These missions consist of sending a robotic probe to a nearby star for exploration, similar to interplanetary probes like those used in the Voyager program. By taking along no crew, the cost and complexity of the mission is significantly reduced, as is the mass that needs to be accelerated, although technology lifetime is still a significant issue next to obtaining a reasonable speed of travel. Proposed concepts include Project Daedalus, Project Icarus, Project Dragonfly, Project Longshot, and more recently Breakthrough Starshot.",
"title": "Proposed methods"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Near-lightspeed nano spacecraft might be possible within the near future built on existing microchip technology with a newly developed nanoscale thruster. Researchers at the University of Michigan are developing thrusters that use nanoparticles as propellant. Their technology is called \"nanoparticle field extraction thruster\", or nanoFET. These devices act like small particle accelerators shooting conductive nanoparticles out into space.",
"title": "Proposed methods"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist, has suggested that clouds of \"smart dust\" be sent to the stars, which may become possible with advances in nanotechnology. Kaku also notes that a large number of nanoprobes would need to be sent due to the vulnerability of very small probes to be easily deflected by magnetic fields, micrometeorites and other dangers to ensure the chances that at least one nanoprobe will survive the journey and reach the destination.",
"title": "Proposed methods"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "As a near-term solution, small, laser-propelled interstellar probes, based on current CubeSat technology were proposed in the context of Project Dragonfly.",
"title": "Proposed methods"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In crewed missions, the duration of a slow interstellar journey presents a major obstacle and existing concepts deal with this problem in different ways. They can be distinguished by the \"state\" in which humans are transported on-board of the spacecraft.",
"title": "Proposed methods"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "A generation ship (or world ship) is a type of interstellar ark in which the crew that arrives at the destination is descended from those who started the journey. Generation ships are not currently feasible because of the difficulty of constructing a ship of the enormous required scale and the great biological and sociological problems that life aboard such a ship raises.",
"title": "Proposed methods"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Scientists and writers have postulated various techniques for suspended animation. These include human hibernation and cryonic preservation. Although neither is currently practical, they offer the possibility of sleeper ships in which the passengers lie inert for the long duration of the voyage.",
"title": "Proposed methods"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "A robotic interstellar mission carrying some number of frozen early stage human embryos is another theoretical possibility. This method of space colonization requires, among other things, the development of an artificial uterus, the prior detection of a habitable terrestrial planet, and advances in the field of fully autonomous mobile robots and educational robots that would replace human parents.",
"title": "Proposed methods"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Interstellar space is not completely empty; it contains trillions of icy bodies ranging from small asteroids (Oort cloud) to possible rogue planets. There may be ways to take advantage of these resources for a good part of an interstellar trip, slowly hopping from body to body or setting up waystations along the way.",
"title": "Proposed methods"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "If a spaceship could average 10 percent of light speed (and decelerate at the destination, for human crewed missions), this would be enough to reach Proxima Centauri in forty years. Several propulsion concepts have been proposed that might be eventually developed to accomplish this (see § Propulsion below), but none of them are ready for near-term (few decades) developments at acceptable cost.",
"title": "Proposed methods"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Physicists generally believe faster-than-light travel is impossible. Relativistic time dilation allows a traveler to experience time more slowly, the closer their speed is to the speed of light. This apparent slowing becomes noticeable when velocities above 80% of the speed of light are attained. Clocks aboard an interstellar ship would run slower than Earth clocks, so if a ship's engines were capable of continuously generating around 1 g of acceleration (which is comfortable for humans), the ship could reach almost anywhere in the galaxy and return to Earth within 40 years ship-time (see diagram). Upon return, there would be a difference between the time elapsed on the astronaut's ship and the time elapsed on Earth.",
"title": "Proposed methods"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "For example, a spaceship could travel to a star 32 light-years away, initially accelerating at a constant 1.03g (i.e. 10.1 m/s) for 1.32 years (ship time), then stopping its engines and coasting for the next 17.3 years (ship time) at a constant speed, then decelerating again for 1.32 ship-years, and coming to a stop at the destination. After a short visit, the astronaut could return to Earth the same way. After the full round-trip, the clocks on board the ship show that 40 years have passed, but according to those on Earth, the ship comes back 76 years after launch.",
"title": "Proposed methods"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "From the viewpoint of the astronaut, onboard clocks seem to be running normally. The star ahead seems to be approaching at a speed of 0.87 light years per ship-year. The universe would appear contracted along the direction of travel to half the size it had when the ship was at rest; the distance between that star and the Sun would seem to be 16 light years as measured by the astronaut.",
"title": "Proposed methods"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "At higher speeds, the time on board will run even slower, so the astronaut could travel to the center of the Milky Way (30,000 light years from Earth) and back in 40 years ship-time. But the speed according to Earth clocks will always be less than 1 light year per Earth year, so, when back home, the astronaut will find that more than 60 thousand years will have passed on Earth.",
"title": "Proposed methods"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Regardless of how it is achieved, a propulsion system that could produce acceleration continuously from departure to arrival would be the fastest method of travel. A constant acceleration journey is one where the propulsion system accelerates the ship at a constant rate for the first half of the journey, and then decelerates for the second half, so that it arrives at the destination stationary relative to where it began. If this were performed with an acceleration similar to that experienced at the Earth's surface, it would have the added advantage of producing artificial \"gravity\" for the crew. Supplying the energy required, however, would be prohibitively expensive with current technology.",
"title": "Proposed methods"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "From the perspective of a planetary observer, the ship will appear to accelerate steadily at first, but then more gradually as it approaches the speed of light (which it cannot exceed). It will undergo hyperbolic motion. The ship will be close to the speed of light after about a year of accelerating and remain at that speed until it brakes for the end of the journey.",
"title": "Proposed methods"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "From the perspective of an onboard observer, the crew will feel a gravitational field opposite the engine's acceleration, and the universe ahead will appear to fall in that field, undergoing hyperbolic motion. As part of this, distances between objects in the direction of the ship's motion will gradually contract until the ship begins to decelerate, at which time an onboard observer's experience of the gravitational field will be reversed.",
"title": "Proposed methods"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "When the ship reaches its destination, if it were to exchange a message with its origin planet, it would find that less time had elapsed on board than had elapsed for the planetary observer, due to time dilation and length contraction.",
"title": "Proposed methods"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The result is an impressively fast journey for the crew.",
"title": "Proposed methods"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "All rocket concepts are limited by the rocket equation, which sets the characteristic velocity available as a function of exhaust velocity and mass ratio, the ratio of initial (M0, including fuel) to final (M1, fuel depleted) mass.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Very high specific power, the ratio of thrust to total vehicle mass, is required to reach interstellar targets within sub-century time-frames. Some heat transfer is inevitable and a tremendous heating load must be adequately handled.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Thus, for interstellar rocket concepts of all technologies, a key engineering problem (seldom explicitly discussed) is limiting the heat transfer from the exhaust stream back into the vehicle.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "A type of electric propulsion, spacecraft such as Dawn use an ion engine. In an ion engine, electric power is used to create charged particles of the propellant, usually the gas xenon, and accelerate them to extremely high velocities. The exhaust velocity of conventional rockets is limited to about 5 km/s by the chemical energy stored in the fuel's molecular bonds. They produce a high thrust (about 10 N), but they have a low specific impulse, and that limits their top speed. By contrast, ion engines have low force, but the top speed in principle is limited only by the electrical power available on the spacecraft and on the gas ions being accelerated. The exhaust speed of the charged particles range from 15 km/s to 35 km/s.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Nuclear-electric or plasma engines, operating for long periods at low thrust and powered by fission reactors, have the potential to reach speeds much greater than chemically powered vehicles or nuclear-thermal rockets. Such vehicles probably have the potential to power solar system exploration with reasonable trip times within the current century. Because of their low-thrust propulsion, they would be limited to off-planet, deep-space operation. Electrically powered spacecraft propulsion powered by a portable power-source, say a nuclear reactor, producing only small accelerations, would take centuries to reach for example 15% of the velocity of light, thus unsuitable for interstellar flight during a single human lifetime.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Fission-fragment rockets use nuclear fission to create high-speed jets of fission fragments, which are ejected at speeds of up to 12,000 km/s (7,500 mi/s). With fission, the energy output is approximately 0.1% of the total mass-energy of the reactor fuel and limits the effective exhaust velocity to about 5% of the velocity of light. For maximum velocity, the reaction mass should optimally consist of fission products, the \"ash\" of the primary energy source, so no extra reaction mass need be bookkept in the mass ratio.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Based on work in the late 1950s to the early 1960s, it has been technically possible to build spaceships with nuclear pulse propulsion engines, i.e. driven by a series of nuclear explosions. This propulsion system contains the prospect of very high specific impulse (space travel's equivalent of fuel economy) and high specific power.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Project Orion team member Freeman Dyson proposed in 1968 an interstellar spacecraft using nuclear pulse propulsion that used pure deuterium fusion detonations with a very high fuel-burnup fraction. He computed an exhaust velocity of 15,000 km/s and a 100,000-tonne space vehicle able to achieve a 20,000 km/s delta-v allowing a flight-time to Alpha Centauri of 130 years. Later studies indicate that the top cruise velocity that can theoretically be achieved by a Teller-Ulam thermonuclear unit powered Orion starship, assuming no fuel is saved for slowing back down, is about 8% to 10% of the speed of light (0.08-0.1c). An atomic (fission) Orion can achieve perhaps 3%-5% of the speed of light. A nuclear pulse drive starship powered by fusion-antimatter catalyzed nuclear pulse propulsion units would be similarly in the 10% range and pure matter-antimatter annihilation rockets would be theoretically capable of obtaining a velocity between 50% and 80% of the speed of light. In each case saving fuel for slowing down halves the maximum speed. The concept of using a magnetic sail to decelerate the spacecraft as it approaches its destination has been discussed as an alternative to using propellant, this would allow the ship to travel near the maximum theoretical velocity. Alternative designs utilizing similar principles include Project Longshot, Project Daedalus, and Mini-Mag Orion. The principle of external nuclear pulse propulsion to maximize survivable power has remained common among serious concepts for interstellar flight without external power beaming and for very high-performance interplanetary flight.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "In the 1970s the Nuclear Pulse Propulsion concept further was refined by Project Daedalus by use of externally triggered inertial confinement fusion, in this case producing fusion explosions via compressing fusion fuel pellets with high-powered electron beams. Since then, lasers, ion beams, neutral particle beams and hyper-kinetic projectiles have been suggested to produce nuclear pulses for propulsion purposes.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "A current impediment to the development of any nuclear-explosion-powered spacecraft is the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, which includes a prohibition on the detonation of any nuclear devices (even non-weapon based) in outer space. This treaty would, therefore, need to be renegotiated, although a project on the scale of an interstellar mission using currently foreseeable technology would probably require international cooperation on at least the scale of the International Space Station.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Another issue to be considered, would be the g-forces imparted to a rapidly accelerated spacecraft, cargo, and passengers inside (see Inertia negation).",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Fusion rocket starships, powered by nuclear fusion reactions, should conceivably be able to reach speeds of the order of 10% of that of light, based on energy considerations alone. In theory, a large number of stages could push a vehicle arbitrarily close to the speed of light. These would \"burn\" such light element fuels as deuterium, tritium, He, B, and Li. Because fusion yields about 0.3–0.9% of the mass of the nuclear fuel as released energy, it is energetically more favorable than fission, which releases <0.1% of the fuel's mass-energy. The maximum exhaust velocities potentially energetically available are correspondingly higher than for fission, typically 4–10% of the speed of light. However, the most easily achievable fusion reactions release a large fraction of their energy as high-energy neutrons, which are a significant source of energy loss. Thus, although these concepts seem to offer the best (nearest-term) prospects for travel to the nearest stars within a (long) human lifetime, they still involve massive technological and engineering difficulties, which may turn out to be intractable for decades or centuries.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Early studies include Project Daedalus, performed by the British Interplanetary Society in 1973–1978, and Project Longshot, a student project sponsored by NASA and the US Naval Academy, completed in 1988. Another fairly detailed vehicle system, \"Discovery II\", designed and optimized for crewed Solar System exploration, based on the DHe reaction but using hydrogen as reaction mass, has been described by a team from NASA's Glenn Research Center. It achieves characteristic velocities of >300 km/s with an acceleration of ~1.7•10 g, with a ship initial mass of ~1700 metric tons, and payload fraction above 10%. Although these are still far short of the requirements for interstellar travel on human timescales, the study seems to represent a reasonable benchmark towards what may be approachable within several decades, which is not impossibly beyond the current state-of-the-art. Based on the concept's 2.2% burnup fraction it could achieve a pure fusion product exhaust velocity of ~3,000 km/s.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "An antimatter rocket would have a far higher energy density and specific impulse than any other proposed class of rocket. If energy resources and efficient production methods are found to make antimatter in the quantities required and store it safely, it would be theoretically possible to reach speeds of several tens of percent that of light. Whether antimatter propulsion could lead to the higher speeds (>90% that of light) at which relativistic time dilation would become more noticeable, thus making time pass at a slower rate for the travelers as perceived by an outside observer, is doubtful owing to the large quantity of antimatter that would be required.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Speculating that production and storage of antimatter should become feasible, two further issues need to be considered. First, in the annihilation of antimatter, much of the energy is lost as high-energy gamma radiation, and especially also as neutrinos, so that only about 40% of mc would actually be available if the antimatter were simply allowed to annihilate into radiations thermally. Even so, the energy available for propulsion would be substantially higher than the ~1% of mc yield of nuclear fusion, the next-best rival candidate.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Second, heat transfer from the exhaust to the vehicle seems likely to transfer enormous wasted energy into the ship (e.g. for 0.1g ship acceleration, approaching 0.3 trillion watts per ton of ship mass), considering the large fraction of the energy that goes into penetrating gamma rays. Even assuming shielding was provided to protect the payload (and passengers on a crewed vehicle), some of the energy would inevitably heat the vehicle, and may thereby prove a limiting factor if useful accelerations are to be achieved.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "More recently, Friedwardt Winterberg proposed that a matter-antimatter GeV gamma ray laser photon rocket is possible by a relativistic proton-antiproton pinch discharge, where the recoil from the laser beam is transmitted by the Mössbauer effect to the spacecraft.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Rockets deriving their power from external sources, such as a laser, could replace their internal energy source with an energy collector, potentially reducing the mass of the ship greatly and allowing much higher travel speeds. Geoffrey A. Landis proposed an interstellar probe propelled by an ion thruster powered by the energy beamed to it from a base station laser. Lenard and Andrews proposed using a base station laser to accelerate nuclear fuel pellets towards a Mini-Mag Orion spacecraft that ignites them for propulsion.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "A problem with all traditional rocket propulsion methods is that the spacecraft would need to carry its fuel with it, thus making it very massive, in accordance with the rocket equation. Several concepts attempt to escape from this problem:",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "A radio frequency (RF) resonant cavity thruster is a device that is claimed to be a spacecraft thruster. In 2016, the Advanced Propulsion Physics Laboratory at NASA reported observing a small apparent thrust from one such test, a result not since replicated. One of the designs is called EMDrive. In December 2002, Satellite Propulsion Research Ltd described a working prototype with an alleged total thrust of about 0.02 newtons powered by an 850 W cavity magnetron. The device could operate for only a few dozen seconds before the magnetron failed, due to overheating. The latest test on the EMDrive concluded that it does not work.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Proposed in 2019 by NASA scientist Dr. David Burns, the helical engine concept would use a particle accelerator to accelerate particles to near the speed of light. Since particles traveling at such speeds acquire more mass, it is believed that this mass change could create acceleration. According to Burns, the spacecraft could theoretically reach 99% the speed of light.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "In 1960, Robert W. Bussard proposed the Bussard ramjet, a fusion rocket in which a huge scoop would collect the diffuse hydrogen in interstellar space, \"burn\" it on the fly using a proton–proton chain reaction, and expel it out of the back. Later calculations with more accurate estimates suggest that the thrust generated would be less than the drag caused by any conceivable scoop design. Yet the idea is attractive because the fuel would be collected en route (commensurate with the concept of energy harvesting), so the craft could theoretically accelerate to near the speed of light. The limitation is due to the fact that the reaction can only accelerate the propellant to 0.12c. Thus the drag of catching interstellar dust and the thrust of accelerating that same dust to 0.12c would be the same when the speed is 0.12c, preventing further acceleration.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "A light sail or magnetic sail powered by a massive laser or particle accelerator in the home star system could potentially reach even greater speeds than rocket- or pulse propulsion methods, because it would not need to carry its own reaction mass and therefore would only need to accelerate the craft's payload. Robert L. Forward proposed a means for decelerating an interstellar craft with a light sail of 100 kilometers in the destination star system without requiring a laser array to be present in that system. In this scheme, a secondary sail of 30 kilometers is deployed to the rear of the spacecraft, while the large primary sail is detached from the craft to keep moving forward on its own. Light is reflected from the large primary sail to the secondary sail, which is used to decelerate the secondary sail and the spacecraft payload. In 2002, Geoffrey A. Landis of NASA's Glen Research center also proposed a laser-powered, propulsion, sail ship that would host a diamond sail (of a few nanometers thick) powered with the use of solar energy. With this proposal, this interstellar ship would, theoretically, be able to reach 10 percent the speed of light. It has also been proposed to use beamed-powered propulsion to accelerate a spacecraft, and electromagnetic propulsion to decelerate it; thus, eliminating the problem that the Bussard ramjet has with the drag produced during acceleration.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "A magnetic sail could also decelerate at its destination without depending on carried fuel or a driving beam in the destination system, by interacting with the plasma found in the solar wind of the destination star and the interstellar medium.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "The following table lists some example concepts using beamed laser propulsion as proposed by the physicist Robert L. Forward:",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "The following table is based on work by Heller, Hippke and Kervella.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Achieving start-stop interstellar trip times of less than a human lifetime require mass-ratios of between 1,000 and 1,000,000, even for the nearer stars. This could be achieved by multi-staged vehicles on a vast scale. Alternatively large linear accelerators could propel fuel to fission propelled space-vehicles, avoiding the limitations of the Rocket equation.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Dynamic soaring as a way to travel across interstellar space has been proposed.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Uploaded human minds or AI could be transmitted with laser or radio signals at the speed of light. This requires a receiver at the destination which would first have to be set up e.g. by humans, probes, self replicating machines (potentially along with AI or uploaded humans), or an alien civilization (which might also be in a different galaxy, perhaps a Kardashev type III civilization).",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Scientists and authors have postulated a number of ways by which it might be possible to surpass the speed of light, but even the most serious-minded of these are highly speculative.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "It is also debatable whether faster-than-light travel is physically possible, in part because of causality concerns: travel faster than light may, under certain conditions, permit travel backwards in time within the context of special relativity. Proposed mechanisms for faster-than-light travel within the theory of general relativity require the existence of exotic matter and, it is not known if it could be produced in sufficient quantities, if at all.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "In physics, the Alcubierre drive is based on an argument, within the framework of general relativity and without the introduction of wormholes, that it is possible to modify spacetime in a way that allows a spaceship to travel with an arbitrarily large speed by a local expansion of spacetime behind the spaceship and an opposite contraction in front of it. Nevertheless, this concept would require the spaceship to incorporate a region of exotic matter, or the hypothetical concept of negative mass.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "A theoretical idea for enabling interstellar travel is to propel a starship by creating an artificial black hole and using a parabolic reflector to reflect its Hawking radiation. Although beyond current technological capabilities, a black hole starship offers some advantages compared to other possible methods. Getting the black hole to act as a power source and engine also requires a way to convert the Hawking radiation into energy and thrust. One potential method involves placing the hole at the focal point of a parabolic reflector attached to the ship, creating forward thrust. A slightly easier, but less efficient method would involve simply absorbing all the gamma radiation heading towards the fore of the ship to push it onwards, and let the rest shoot out the back.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Wormholes are conjectural distortions in spacetime that theorists postulate could connect two arbitrary points in the universe, across an Einstein–Rosen Bridge. It is not known whether wormholes are possible in practice. Although there are solutions to the Einstein equation of general relativity that allow for wormholes, all of the currently known solutions involve some assumption, for example the existence of negative mass, which may be unphysical. However, Cramer et al. argue that such wormholes might have been created in the early universe, stabilized by cosmic strings. The general theory of wormholes is discussed by Visser in the book Lorentzian Wormholes.",
"title": "Propulsion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Project Hyperion has looked into various feasibility issues of crewed interstellar travel. Its members continue to publish on crewed interstellar travel in collaboration with the Initiative for Interstellar Studies.",
"title": "Designs and studies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "The Enzmann starship, as detailed by G. Harry Stine in the October 1973 issue of Analog, was a design for a future starship, based on the ideas of Robert Duncan-Enzmann. The spacecraft itself as proposed used a 12,000,000 ton ball of frozen deuterium to power 12–24 thermonuclear pulse propulsion units. Twice as long as the Empire State Building is tall and assembled in-orbit, the spacecraft was part of a larger project preceded by interstellar probes and telescopic observation of target star systems.",
"title": "Designs and studies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "NASA has been researching interstellar travel since its formation, translating important foreign language papers and conducting early studies on applying fusion propulsion, in the 1960s, and laser propulsion, in the 1970s, to interstellar travel.",
"title": "Designs and studies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "In 1994, NASA and JPL cosponsored a \"Workshop on Advanced Quantum/Relativity Theory Propulsion\" to \"establish and use new frames of reference for thinking about the faster-than-light (FTL) question\".",
"title": "Designs and studies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "The NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program (terminated in FY 2003 after a 6-year, $1.2-million study, because \"No breakthroughs appear imminent.\") identified some breakthroughs that are needed for interstellar travel to be possible.",
"title": "Designs and studies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Geoffrey A. Landis of NASA's Glenn Research Center states that a laser-powered interstellar sail ship could possibly be launched within 50 years, using new methods of space travel. \"I think that ultimately we're going to do it, it's just a question of when and who,\" Landis said in an interview. Rockets are too slow to send humans on interstellar missions. Instead, he envisions interstellar craft with extensive sails, propelled by laser light to about one-tenth the speed of light. It would take such a ship about 43 years to reach Alpha Centauri if it passed through the system without stopping. Slowing down to stop at Alpha Centauri could increase the trip to 100 years, whereas a journey without slowing down raises the issue of making sufficiently accurate and useful observations and measurements during a fly-by.",
"title": "Designs and studies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "The 100 Year Starship (100YSS) study was the name of a one-year project to assess the attributes of and lay the groundwork for an organization that can carry forward the 100 Year Starship vision. 100YSS-related symposia were organized between 2011 and 2015.",
"title": "Designs and studies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Harold (\"Sonny\") White from NASA's Johnson Space Center is a member of Icarus Interstellar, the nonprofit foundation whose mission is to realize interstellar flight before the year 2100. At the 2012 meeting of 100YSS, he reported using a laser to try to warp spacetime by 1 part in 10 million with the aim of helping to make interstellar travel possible.",
"title": "Designs and studies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "A few organisations dedicated to interstellar propulsion research and advocacy for the case exist worldwide. These are still in their infancy, but are already backed up by a membership of a wide variety of scientists, students and professionals.",
"title": "Non-profit organizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "The energy requirements make interstellar travel very difficult. It has been reported that at the 2008 Joint Propulsion Conference, multiple experts opined that it was improbable that humans would ever explore beyond the Solar System. Brice N. Cassenti, an associate professor with the Department of Engineering and Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, stated that at least 100 times the total energy output of the entire world [in a given year] would be required to send a probe to the nearest star.",
"title": "Feasibility"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Astrophysicist Sten Odenwald stated that the basic problem is that through intensive studies of thousands of detected exoplanets, most of the closest destinations within 50 light years do not yield Earth-like planets in the star's habitable zones. Given the multitrillion-dollar expense of some of the proposed technologies, travelers will have to spend up to 200 years traveling at 20% the speed of light to reach the best known destinations. Moreover, once the travelers arrive at their destination (by any means), they will not be able to travel down to the surface of the target world and set up a colony unless the atmosphere is non-lethal. The prospect of making such a journey, only to spend the rest of the colony's life inside a sealed habitat and venturing outside in a spacesuit, may eliminate many prospective targets from the list.",
"title": "Feasibility"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Moving at a speed close to the speed of light and encountering even a tiny stationary object like a grain of sand will have fatal consequences. For example, a gram of matter moving at 90% of the speed of light contains a kinetic energy corresponding to a small nuclear bomb (around 30kt TNT).",
"title": "Feasibility"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "One of the major stumbling blocks is having enough Onboard Spares & Repairs facilities for such a lengthy time journey assuming all other considerations are solved, without access to all the resources available on Earth.",
"title": "Feasibility"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Explorative high-speed missions to Alpha Centauri, as planned for by the Breakthrough Starshot initiative, are projected to be realizable within the 21st century. It is alternatively possible to plan for uncrewed slow-cruising missions taking millennia to arrive. These probes would not be for human benefit in the sense that one can not foresee whether there would be anybody around on Earth interested in then back-transmitted science data. An example would be the Genesis mission, which aims to bring unicellular life, in the spirit of directed panspermia, to habitable but otherwise barren planets. Comparatively slow cruising Genesis probes, with a typical speed of c / 300 {\\displaystyle c/300} , corresponding to about 1000 km/s {\\displaystyle 1000\\,{\\mbox{km/s}}} , can be decelerated using a magnetic sail. Uncrewed missions not for human benefit would hence be feasible.",
"title": "Feasibility"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "In February 2017, NASA announced that its Spitzer Space Telescope had revealed seven Earth-size planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system orbiting an ultra-cool dwarf star 40 light-years away from the Solar System. Three of these planets are firmly located in the habitable zone, the area around the parent star where a rocky planet is most likely to have liquid water. The discovery sets a new record for greatest number of habitable-zone planets found around a single star outside the Solar System. All of these seven planets could have liquid water – the key to life as we know it – under the right atmospheric conditions, but the chances are highest with the three in the habitable zone.",
"title": "Discovery of Earth-like planets"
}
]
| Interstellar travel is the hypothetical travel of spacecraft from one star system, solitary star, or planetary system to another. Interstellar travel is expected to prove much more difficult than interplanetary spaceflight due to the vast difference in the scale of the involved distances. Whereas the distance between any two planets in the Solar System is less than 55 astronomical units (AU), stars are typically separated by hundreds of thousands of AU, causing these distances to typically be expressed instead in light-years. Because of the vastness of these distances, non-generational interstellar travel based on known physics would need to occur at a high percentage of the speed of light; even so, travel times would be long, at least decades and perhaps millennia or longer. As of 2022, five uncrewed spacecraft, all launched and operated by the United States, have achieved the escape velocity required to leave the Solar System as part of missions to explore parts of the outer system. They will therefore continue to travel through interstellar space indefinitely. However, they will not approach another star for hundreds of thousands of years, long after they have ceased to operate. The speeds required for interstellar travel in a human lifetime far exceed what current methods of space travel can provide. Even with a hypothetically perfectly efficient propulsion system, the kinetic energy corresponding to those speeds is enormous by today's standards of energy development. Moreover, collisions by spacecraft with cosmic dust and gas at such speeds would be very dangerous for both passengers and the spacecraft itself. A number of strategies have been proposed to deal with these problems, ranging from giant arks that would carry entire societies and ecosystems, to microscopic space probes. Many different spacecraft propulsion systems have been proposed to give spacecraft the required speeds, including nuclear propulsion, beam-powered propulsion, and methods based on speculative physics. Humanity would need to overcome considerable technological and economic challenges to achieve either crewed or uncrewed interstellar travel. Even the most optimistic views forecast that it will be decades before this milestone is reached. However, in spite of the challenges, a wide range of scientific benefits are expected should interstellar travel become a reality. Most interstellar travel concepts require a developed space logistics system capable of moving millions of tonnes to a construction / operating location, and most would require gigawatt-scale power for construction or power. Such a system could grow organically if space-based solar power became a significant component of Earth's energy mix. Consumer demand for a multi-terawatt system would create the necessary multi-million ton/year logistical system. | 2001-10-05T20:48:45Z | 2023-12-22T02:58:22Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel |
14,844 | Interior Gateway Routing Protocol | Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (IGRP) is a distance vector interior gateway protocol (IGP) developed by Cisco. It is used by routers to exchange routing data within an autonomous system.
IGRP is a proprietary protocol. IGRP was created in part to overcome the limitations of RIP (maximum hop count of only 15, and a single routing metric) when used within large networks. IGRP supports multiple metrics for each route, including bandwidth, delay, load, and reliability; to compare two routes these metrics are combined into a single metric, using a formula which can be adjusted through the use of pre-set constants. By default, the IGRP composite metric is a sum of the segment delays and the lowest segment bandwidth. The maximum configurable hop count of IGRP-routed packets is 255 (default 100), and routing updates are broadcast every 90 seconds (by default). IGRP uses protocol number 9 for communication.
IGRP is considered a classful routing protocol. Because the protocol has no field for a subnet mask, the router assumes that all subnetwork addresses within the same Class A, Class B, or Class C network have the same subnet mask as the subnet mask configured for the interfaces in question. This contrasts with classless routing protocols that can use variable length subnet masks. Classful protocols have become less popular as they are wasteful of IP address space.
In order to address the issues of address space and other factors, Cisco created EIGRP (Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol). EIGRP adds support for VLSM (variable length subnet mask) and adds the Diffusing Update Algorithm (DUAL) in order to improve routing and provide a loopless environment. EIGRP has completely replaced IGRP, making IGRP an obsolete routing protocol. In Cisco IOS versions 12.3 and greater, IGRP is completely unsupported. In the new Cisco CCNA curriculum (version 4), IGRP is mentioned only briefly, as an "obsolete protocol". | [
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"text": "IGRP is a proprietary protocol. IGRP was created in part to overcome the limitations of RIP (maximum hop count of only 15, and a single routing metric) when used within large networks. IGRP supports multiple metrics for each route, including bandwidth, delay, load, and reliability; to compare two routes these metrics are combined into a single metric, using a formula which can be adjusted through the use of pre-set constants. By default, the IGRP composite metric is a sum of the segment delays and the lowest segment bandwidth. The maximum configurable hop count of IGRP-routed packets is 255 (default 100), and routing updates are broadcast every 90 seconds (by default). IGRP uses protocol number 9 for communication.",
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"text": "IGRP is considered a classful routing protocol. Because the protocol has no field for a subnet mask, the router assumes that all subnetwork addresses within the same Class A, Class B, or Class C network have the same subnet mask as the subnet mask configured for the interfaces in question. This contrasts with classless routing protocols that can use variable length subnet masks. Classful protocols have become less popular as they are wasteful of IP address space.",
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},
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"text": "In order to address the issues of address space and other factors, Cisco created EIGRP (Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol). EIGRP adds support for VLSM (variable length subnet mask) and adds the Diffusing Update Algorithm (DUAL) in order to improve routing and provide a loopless environment. EIGRP has completely replaced IGRP, making IGRP an obsolete routing protocol. In Cisco IOS versions 12.3 and greater, IGRP is completely unsupported. In the new Cisco CCNA curriculum (version 4), IGRP is mentioned only briefly, as an \"obsolete protocol\".",
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| Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (IGRP) is a distance vector interior gateway protocol (IGP) developed by Cisco. It is used by routers to exchange routing data within an autonomous system. IGRP is a proprietary protocol. IGRP was created in part to overcome the limitations of RIP when used within large networks. IGRP supports multiple metrics for each route, including bandwidth, delay, load, and reliability; to compare two routes these metrics are combined into a single metric, using a formula which can be adjusted through the use of pre-set constants. By default, the IGRP composite metric is a sum of the segment delays and the lowest segment bandwidth. The maximum configurable hop count of IGRP-routed packets is 255, and routing updates are broadcast every 90 seconds. IGRP uses protocol number 9 for communication. IGRP is considered a classful routing protocol. Because the protocol has no field for a subnet mask, the router assumes that all subnetwork addresses within the same Class A, Class B, or Class C network have the same subnet mask as the subnet mask configured for the interfaces in question. This contrasts with classless routing protocols that can use variable length subnet masks. Classful protocols have become less popular as they are wasteful of IP address space. | 2022-10-31T19:55:44Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interior_Gateway_Routing_Protocol |
|
14,845 | IRS (disambiguation) | IRS is the United States Internal Revenue Service.
IRS may also refer to: | [
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"text": "IRS is the United States Internal Revenue Service.",
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| IRS is the United States Internal Revenue Service. IRS may also refer to: | 2001-07-27T12:39:35Z | 2023-10-21T11:28:23Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_(disambiguation) |
14,848 | Indo-European languages | The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family—English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish—have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several continents. The Indo-European family is divided into several branches or sub-families, of which there are eight groups with languages still alive today: Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, and Italic/Romance; and another nine subdivisions that are now extinct.
Today, the individual Indo-European languages with the most native speakers are Spanish, English, Hindi–Urdu, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, Punjabi, French and German each with over 100 million native speakers; many others are small and in danger of extinction.
In total, 46% of the world's population (3.2 billion people) speaks an Indo-European language as a first language—by far the highest of any language family. There are about 445 living Indo-European languages, according to an estimate by Ethnologue, with over two-thirds (313) of them belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch.
All Indo-European languages are descended from a single prehistoric language, linguistically reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, spoken sometime in the Neolithic to Early Bronze Age. The geographical location where it was spoken, the Proto-Indo-European homeland, has been the object of many competing hypotheses; the academic consensus supports the Kurgan hypothesis, which posits the homeland to be the Pontic–Caspian steppe in what is now Ukraine and southern Russia, associated with the Yamnaya culture and other related archaeological cultures during the 4th millennium BC to early 3rd millennium BC. By the time the first written records appeared, Indo-European had already evolved into numerous languages spoken across much of Europe, South Asia, and part of Western Asia. Written evidence of Indo-European appeared during the Bronze Age in the form of Mycenaean Greek and the Anatolian languages of Hittite and Luwian. The oldest records are isolated Hittite words and names—interspersed in texts that are otherwise in the unrelated Akkadian language, a Semitic language—found in texts of the Assyrian colony of Kültepe in eastern Anatolia dating to the 20th century BC. Although no older written records of the original Proto-Indo-European population remain, some aspects of their culture and their religion can be reconstructed from later evidence in the daughter cultures. The Indo-European family is significant to the field of historical linguistics as it possesses the second-longest recorded history of any known family, after the Afroasiatic family in the form of the pre-Arab Egyptian language and the Semitic languages. The analysis of the family relationships between the Indo-European languages, and the reconstruction of their common source, was central to the development of the methodology of historical linguistics as an academic discipline in the 19th century.
The Indo-European language family is not considered by the current academic consensus in the field of linguistics to have any genetic relationships with other language families, although several disputed hypotheses propose such relations.
During the 16th century, European visitors to the Indian subcontinent began to notice similarities among Indo-Aryan, Iranian, and European languages. In 1583, English Jesuit missionary and Konkani scholar Thomas Stephens wrote a letter from Goa to his brother (not published until the 20th century) in which he noted similarities between Indian languages and Greek and Latin.
Another account was made by Filippo Sassetti, a merchant born in Florence in 1540, who travelled to the Indian subcontinent. Writing in 1585, he noted some word similarities between Sanskrit and Italian (these included devaḥ/dio "God", sarpaḥ/serpe "serpent", sapta/sette "seven", aṣṭa/otto "eight", and nava/nove "nine"). However, neither Stephens' nor Sassetti's observations led to further scholarly inquiry.
In 1647, Dutch linguist and scholar Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn noted the similarity among certain Asian and European languages and theorized that they were derived from a primitive common language that he called Scythian. He included in his hypothesis Dutch, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Persian, and German, later adding Slavic, Celtic, and Baltic languages. However, Van Boxhorn's suggestions did not become widely known and did not stimulate further research.
Ottoman Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi visited Vienna in 1665–1666 as part of a diplomatic mission and noted a few similarities between words in German and in Persian. Gaston Coeurdoux and others made observations of the same type. Coeurdoux made a thorough comparison of Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek conjugations in the late 1760s to suggest a relationship among them. Meanwhile, Mikhail Lomonosov compared different language groups, including Slavic, Baltic ("Kurlandic"), Iranian ("Medic"), Finnish, Chinese, "Hottentot" (Khoekhoe), and others, noting that related languages (including Latin, Greek, German, and Russian) must have separated in antiquity from common ancestors.
The hypothesis reappeared in 1786 when Sir William Jones first lectured on the striking similarities among three of the oldest languages known in his time: Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, to which he tentatively added Gothic, Celtic, and Persian, though his classification contained some inaccuracies and omissions. In one of the most famous quotations in linguistics, Jones made the following prescient statement in a lecture to the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1786, conjecturing the existence of an earlier ancestor language, which he called "a common source" but did not name:
The Sanscrit [sic] language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.
Thomas Young first used the term Indo-European in 1813, deriving it from the geographical extremes of the language family: from Western Europe to North India. A synonym is Indo-Germanic (Idg. or IdG.), specifying the family's southeasternmost and northwesternmost branches. This first appeared in French (indo-germanique) in 1810 in the work of Conrad Malte-Brun; in most languages this term is now dated or less common than Indo-European, although in German indogermanisch remains the standard scientific term. A number of other synonymous terms have also been used.
Franz Bopp wrote in 1816 On the conjugational system of the Sanskrit language compared with that of Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic and between 1833 and 1852 he wrote Comparative Grammar. This marks the beginning of Indo-European studies as an academic discipline. The classical phase of Indo-European comparative linguistics leads from this work to August Schleicher's 1861 Compendium and up to Karl Brugmann's Grundriss, published in the 1880s. Brugmann's neogrammarian reevaluation of the field and Ferdinand de Saussure's development of the laryngeal theory may be considered the beginning of "modern" Indo-European studies. The generation of Indo-Europeanists active in the last third of the 20th century (such as Calvert Watkins, Jochem Schindler, and Helmut Rix) developed a better understanding of morphology and of ablaut in the wake of Kuryłowicz's 1956 Apophony in Indo-European, who in 1927 pointed out the existence of the Hittite consonant ḫ. Kuryłowicz's discovery supported Ferdinand de Saussure's 1879 proposal of the existence of coefficients sonantiques, elements de Saussure reconstructed to account for vowel length alternations in Indo-European languages. This led to the so-called laryngeal theory, a major step forward in Indo-European linguistics and a confirmation of de Saussure's theory.
The various subgroups of the Indo-European language family include ten major branches, listed below in alphabetical order:
In addition to the classical ten branches listed above, several extinct and little-known languages and language-groups have existed or are proposed to have existed:
Membership of languages in the Indo-European language family is determined by genealogical relationships, meaning that all members are presumed descendants of a common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European. Membership in the various branches, groups, and subgroups of Indo-European is also genealogical, but here the defining factors are shared innovations among various languages, suggesting a common ancestor that split off from other Indo-European groups. For example, what makes the Germanic languages a branch of Indo-European is that much of their structure and phonology can be stated in rules that apply to all of them. Many of their common features are presumed innovations that took place in Proto-Germanic, the source of all the Germanic languages.
In the 21st century, several attempts have been made to model the phylogeny of Indo-European languages using Bayesian methodologies similar to those applied to problems in biological phylogeny. Although there are differences in absolute timing between the various analyses, there is much commonality between them, including the result that the first known language groups to diverge were the Anatolian and Tocharian language families, in that order.
The "tree model" is considered an appropriate representation of the genealogical history of a language family if communities do not remain in contact after their languages have started to diverge. In this case, subgroups defined by shared innovations form a nested pattern. The tree model is not appropriate in cases where languages remain in contact as they diversify; in such cases subgroups may overlap, and the "wave model" is a more accurate representation. Most approaches to Indo-European subgrouping to date have assumed that the tree model is by-and-large valid for Indo-European; however, there is also a long tradition of wave-model approaches.
In addition to genealogical changes, many of the early changes in Indo-European languages can be attributed to language contact. It has been asserted, for example, that many of the more striking features shared by Italic languages (Latin, Oscan, Umbrian, etc.) might well be areal features. More certainly, very similar-looking alterations in the systems of long vowels in the West Germanic languages greatly postdate any possible notion of a proto-language innovation (and cannot readily be regarded as "areal", either, because English and continental West Germanic were not a linguistic area). In a similar vein, there are many similar innovations in Germanic and Balto-Slavic that are far more likely areal features than traceable to a common proto-language, such as the uniform development of a high vowel (*u in the case of Germanic, *i/u in the case of Baltic and Slavic) before the PIE syllabic resonants *ṛ, *ḷ, *ṃ, *ṇ, unique to these two groups among IE languages, which is in agreement with the wave model. The Balkan sprachbund even features areal convergence among members of very different branches.
An extension to the Ringe-Warnow model of language evolution suggests that early IE had featured limited contact between distinct lineages, with only the Germanic subfamily exhibiting a less treelike behaviour as it acquired some characteristics from neighbours early in its evolution. The internal diversification of especially West Germanic is cited to have been radically non-treelike.
Specialists have postulated the existence of higher-order subgroups such as Italo-Celtic, Graeco-Armenian, Graeco-Aryan or Graeco-Armeno-Aryan, and Balto-Slavo-Germanic. However, unlike the ten traditional branches, these are all controversial to a greater or lesser degree.
The Italo-Celtic subgroup was at one point uncontroversial, considered by Antoine Meillet to be even better established than Balto-Slavic. The main lines of evidence included the genitive suffix -ī; the superlative suffix -m̥mo; the change of /p/ to /kʷ/ before another /kʷ/ in the same word (as in penkʷe > *kʷenkʷe > Latin quīnque, Old Irish cóic); and the subjunctive morpheme -ā-. This evidence was prominently challenged by Calvert Watkins, while Michael Weiss has argued for the subgroup.
Evidence for a relationship between Greek and Armenian includes the regular change of the second laryngeal to a at the beginnings of words, as well as terms for "woman" and "sheep". Greek and Indo-Iranian share innovations mainly in verbal morphology and patterns of nominal derivation. Relations have also been proposed between Phrygian and Greek, and between Thracian and Armenian. Some fundamental shared features, like the aorist (a verb form denoting action without reference to duration or completion) having the perfect active particle -s fixed to the stem, link this group closer to Anatolian languages and Tocharian. Shared features with Balto-Slavic languages, on the other hand (especially present and preterit formations), might be due to later contacts.
The Indo-Hittite hypothesis proposes that the Indo-European language family consists of two main branches: one represented by the Anatolian languages and another branch encompassing all other Indo-European languages. Features that separate Anatolian from all other branches of Indo-European (such as the gender or the verb system) have been interpreted alternately as archaic debris or as innovations due to prolonged isolation. Points proffered in favour of the Indo-Hittite hypothesis are the (non-universal) Indo-European agricultural terminology in Anatolia and the preservation of laryngeals. However, in general this hypothesis is considered to attribute too much weight to the Anatolian evidence. According to another view, the Anatolian subgroup left the Indo-European parent language comparatively late, approximately at the same time as Indo-Iranian and later than the Greek or Armenian divisions. A third view, especially prevalent in the so-called French school of Indo-European studies, holds that extant similarities in non-satem languages in general—including Anatolian—might be due to their peripheral location in the Indo-European language-area and to early separation, rather than indicating a special ancestral relationship. Hans J. Holm, based on lexical calculations, arrives at a picture roughly replicating the general scholarly opinion and refuting the Indo-Hittite hypothesis.
The division of the Indo-European languages into satem and centum groups was put forward by Peter von Bradke in 1890, although Karl Brugmann did propose a similar type of division in 1886. In the satem languages, which include the Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian branches, as well as (in most respects) Albanian and Armenian, the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European palatovelars remained distinct and were fricativized, while the labiovelars merged with the 'plain velars'. In the centum languages, the palatovelars merged with the plain velars, while the labiovelars remained distinct. The results of these alternative developments are exemplified by the words for "hundred" in Avestan (satem) and Latin (centum)—the initial palatovelar developed into a fricative [s] in the former, but became an ordinary velar [k] in the latter.
Rather than being a genealogical separation, the centum–satem division is commonly seen as resulting from innovative changes that spread across PIE dialect-branches over a particular geographical area; the centum–satem isogloss intersects a number of other isoglosses that mark distinctions between features in the early IE branches. It may be that the centum branches in fact reflect the original state of affairs in PIE, and only the satem branches shared a set of innovations, which affected all but the peripheral areas of the PIE dialect continuum. Kortlandt proposes that the ancestors of Balts and Slavs took part in satemization before being drawn later into the western Indo-European sphere.
From the very beginning of Indo-European studies, there have been attempts to link the Indo-European languages genealogically to other languages and language families. However, these theories remain highly controversial, and most specialists in Indo-European linguistics are skeptical or agnostic about such proposals.
Proposals linking the Indo-European languages with a single language family include:
Other proposed families include:
Nostratic and Eurasiatic, in turn, have been included in even wider groupings, such as Borean, a language family separately proposed by Harold C. Fleming and Sergei Starostin that encompasses almost all of the world's natural languages with the exception of those native to sub-Saharan Africa, New Guinea, Australia, and the Andaman Islands.
Objections to such groupings are not based on any theoretical claim about the likely historical existence or nonexistence of such macrofamilies; it is entirely reasonable to suppose that they might have existed. The serious difficulty lies in identifying the details of actual relationships between language families, because it is very hard to find concrete evidence that transcends chance resemblance or is not equally likely explained as being due to borrowing, including Wanderwörter, which can travel very long distances. Because the signal-to-noise ratio in historical linguistics declines over time, at great enough time-depths it becomes open to reasonable doubt that one can even distinguish between signal and noise.
The proposed Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans. From the 1960s, knowledge of Anatolian became certain enough to establish its relationship to PIE. Using the method of internal reconstruction, an earlier stage, called Pre-Proto-Indo-European, has been proposed.
PIE was an inflected language, in which the grammatical relationships between words were signaled through inflectional morphemes (usually endings). The roots of PIE are basic morphemes carrying a lexical meaning. By addition of suffixes, they form stems, and by addition of endings, these form grammatically inflected words (nouns or verbs). The reconstructed Indo-European verb system is complex and, like the noun, exhibits a system of ablaut.
BMAC in "IE languages c. 1500 BC" is Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex
The diversification of the parent language into the attested branches of daughter languages is historically unattested. The timeline of the evolution of the various daughter languages, on the other hand, is mostly undisputed, quite regardless of the question of Indo-European origins.
Using a mathematical analysis borrowed from evolutionary biology, Donald Ringe and Tandy Warnow propose the following evolutionary tree of Indo-European branches:
David Anthony proposes the following sequence:
From 1500 BC the following sequence may be given:
In reconstructing the history of the Indo-European languages and the form of the Proto-Indo-European language, some languages have been of particular importance. These generally include the ancient Indo-European languages that are both well-attested and documented at an early date, although some languages from later periods are important if they are particularly linguistically conservative (most notably, Lithuanian). Early poetry is of special significance because of the rigid poetic meter normally employed, which makes it possible to reconstruct a number of features (e.g. vowel length) that were either unwritten or corrupted in the process of transmission down to the earliest extant written manuscripts.
Most noticeable of all:
Other primary sources:
Other secondary sources, of lesser value due to poor attestation:
Other secondary sources, of lesser value due to extensive phonological changes and relatively limited attestation:
As the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language broke up, its sound system diverged as well, changing according to various sound laws evidenced in the daughter languages.
PIE is normally reconstructed with a complex system of 15 stop consonants, including an unusual three-way phonation (voicing) distinction between voiceless, voiced and "voiced aspirated" (i.e. breathy voiced) stops, and a three-way distinction among velar consonants (k-type sounds) between "palatal" ḱ ǵ ǵh, "plain velar" k g gh and labiovelar kʷ gʷ gʷh. (The correctness of the terms palatal and plain velar is disputed; see Proto-Indo-European phonology.) All daughter languages have reduced the number of distinctions among these sounds, often in divergent ways.
As an example, in English, one of the Germanic languages, the following are some of the major changes that happened:
Each original consonant shifted one position to the right. For example, original dʰ became d, while original d became t and original t became θ (written th in English). This is the original source of the English sounds written f, th, h and wh. Examples, comparing English with Latin, where the sounds largely remain unshifted:
None of the daughter-language families (except possibly Anatolian, particularly Luvian) reflect the plain velar stops differently from the other two series, and there is even a certain amount of dispute whether this series existed at all in PIE. The major distinction between centum and satem languages corresponds to the outcome of the PIE plain velars:
The three-way PIE distinction between voiceless, voiced and voiced aspirated stops is considered extremely unusual from the perspective of linguistic typology—particularly in the existence of voiced aspirated stops without a corresponding series of voiceless aspirated stops. None of the various daughter-language families continue it unchanged, with numerous "solutions" to the apparently unstable PIE situation:
Among the other notable changes affecting consonants are:
The following table shows the basic outcomes of PIE consonants in some of the most important daughter languages for the purposes of reconstruction. For a fuller table, see Indo-European sound laws.
The following table presents a comparison of conjugations of the thematic present indicative of the verbal root *bʰer- of the English verb to bear and its reflexes in various early attested IE languages and their modern descendants or relatives, showing that all languages had in the early stage an inflectional verb system.
While similarities are still visible between the modern descendants and relatives of these ancient languages, the differences have increased over time. Some IE languages have moved from synthetic verb systems to largely periphrastic systems. In addition, the pronouns of periphrastic forms are in parentheses when they appear. Some of these verbs have undergone a change in meaning as well.
Today, Indo-European languages are spoken by billions of native speakers across all inhabited continents, the largest number by far for any recognised language family. Of the 20 languages with the largest numbers of speakers according to Ethnologue, 10 are Indo-European: English, Hindustani, Spanish, Bengali, French, Russian, Portuguese, German, Persian and Punjabi, each with 100 million speakers or more. Additionally, hundreds of millions of persons worldwide study Indo-European languages as secondary or tertiary languages, including in cultures which have completely different language families and historical backgrounds—there are around 600 million learners of English alone.
The success of the language family, including the large number of speakers and the vast portions of the Earth that they inhabit, is due to several factors. The ancient Indo-European migrations and widespread dissemination of Indo-European culture throughout Eurasia, including that of the Proto-Indo-Europeans themselves, and that of their daughter cultures including the Indo-Aryans, Iranian peoples, Celts, Greeks, Romans, Germanic peoples, and Slavs, led to these peoples' branches of the language family already taking a dominant foothold in virtually all of Eurasia except for swathes of the Near East, North and East Asia, replacing many (but not all) of the previously-spoken pre-Indo-European languages of this extensive area. However Semitic languages remain dominant in much of the Middle East and North Africa, and Caucasian languages in much of the Caucasus region. Similarly in Europe and the Urals the Uralic languages (such as Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian etc.) remain, as does Basque, a pre-Indo-European isolate.
Despite being unaware of their common linguistic origin, diverse groups of Indo-European speakers continued to culturally dominate and often replace the indigenous languages of the western two-thirds of Eurasia. By the beginning of the Common Era, Indo-European peoples controlled almost the entirety of this area: the Celts western and central Europe, the Romans southern Europe, the Germanic peoples northern Europe, the Slavs eastern Europe, the Iranian peoples most of western and central Asia and parts of eastern Europe, and the Indo-Aryan peoples in the Indian subcontinent, with the Tocharians inhabiting the Indo-European frontier in western China. By the medieval period, only the Semitic, Dravidian, Caucasian, and Uralic languages, and the language isolate Basque remained of the (relatively) indigenous languages of Europe and the western half of Asia.
Despite medieval invasions by Eurasian nomads, a group to which the Proto-Indo-Europeans had once belonged, Indo-European expansion reached another peak in the early modern period with the dramatic increase in the population of the Indian subcontinent and European expansionism throughout the globe during the Age of Discovery, as well as the continued replacement and assimilation of surrounding non-Indo-European languages and peoples due to increased state centralization and nationalism. These trends compounded throughout the modern period due to the general global population growth and the results of European colonization of the Western Hemisphere and Oceania, leading to an explosion in the number of Indo-European speakers as well as the territories inhabited by them.
Due to colonization and the modern dominance of Indo-European languages in the fields of politics, global science, technology, education, finance, and sports, even many modern countries whose populations largely speak non-Indo-European languages have Indo-European languages as official languages, and the majority of the global population speaks at least one Indo-European language. The overwhelming majority of languages used on the Internet are Indo-European, with English continuing to lead the group; English in general has in many respects become the lingua franca of global communication. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family—English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish—have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several continents. The Indo-European family is divided into several branches or sub-families, of which there are eight groups with languages still alive today: Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, and Italic/Romance; and another nine subdivisions that are now extinct.",
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},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Today, the individual Indo-European languages with the most native speakers are Spanish, English, Hindi–Urdu, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, Punjabi, French and German each with over 100 million native speakers; many others are small and in danger of extinction.",
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},
{
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"text": "In total, 46% of the world's population (3.2 billion people) speaks an Indo-European language as a first language—by far the highest of any language family. There are about 445 living Indo-European languages, according to an estimate by Ethnologue, with over two-thirds (313) of them belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch.",
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},
{
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"text": "All Indo-European languages are descended from a single prehistoric language, linguistically reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, spoken sometime in the Neolithic to Early Bronze Age. The geographical location where it was spoken, the Proto-Indo-European homeland, has been the object of many competing hypotheses; the academic consensus supports the Kurgan hypothesis, which posits the homeland to be the Pontic–Caspian steppe in what is now Ukraine and southern Russia, associated with the Yamnaya culture and other related archaeological cultures during the 4th millennium BC to early 3rd millennium BC. By the time the first written records appeared, Indo-European had already evolved into numerous languages spoken across much of Europe, South Asia, and part of Western Asia. Written evidence of Indo-European appeared during the Bronze Age in the form of Mycenaean Greek and the Anatolian languages of Hittite and Luwian. The oldest records are isolated Hittite words and names—interspersed in texts that are otherwise in the unrelated Akkadian language, a Semitic language—found in texts of the Assyrian colony of Kültepe in eastern Anatolia dating to the 20th century BC. Although no older written records of the original Proto-Indo-European population remain, some aspects of their culture and their religion can be reconstructed from later evidence in the daughter cultures. The Indo-European family is significant to the field of historical linguistics as it possesses the second-longest recorded history of any known family, after the Afroasiatic family in the form of the pre-Arab Egyptian language and the Semitic languages. The analysis of the family relationships between the Indo-European languages, and the reconstruction of their common source, was central to the development of the methodology of historical linguistics as an academic discipline in the 19th century.",
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{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Indo-European language family is not considered by the current academic consensus in the field of linguistics to have any genetic relationships with other language families, although several disputed hypotheses propose such relations.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "During the 16th century, European visitors to the Indian subcontinent began to notice similarities among Indo-Aryan, Iranian, and European languages. In 1583, English Jesuit missionary and Konkani scholar Thomas Stephens wrote a letter from Goa to his brother (not published until the 20th century) in which he noted similarities between Indian languages and Greek and Latin.",
"title": "History of Indo-European linguistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Another account was made by Filippo Sassetti, a merchant born in Florence in 1540, who travelled to the Indian subcontinent. Writing in 1585, he noted some word similarities between Sanskrit and Italian (these included devaḥ/dio \"God\", sarpaḥ/serpe \"serpent\", sapta/sette \"seven\", aṣṭa/otto \"eight\", and nava/nove \"nine\"). However, neither Stephens' nor Sassetti's observations led to further scholarly inquiry.",
"title": "History of Indo-European linguistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In 1647, Dutch linguist and scholar Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn noted the similarity among certain Asian and European languages and theorized that they were derived from a primitive common language that he called Scythian. He included in his hypothesis Dutch, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Persian, and German, later adding Slavic, Celtic, and Baltic languages. However, Van Boxhorn's suggestions did not become widely known and did not stimulate further research.",
"title": "History of Indo-European linguistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Ottoman Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi visited Vienna in 1665–1666 as part of a diplomatic mission and noted a few similarities between words in German and in Persian. Gaston Coeurdoux and others made observations of the same type. Coeurdoux made a thorough comparison of Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek conjugations in the late 1760s to suggest a relationship among them. Meanwhile, Mikhail Lomonosov compared different language groups, including Slavic, Baltic (\"Kurlandic\"), Iranian (\"Medic\"), Finnish, Chinese, \"Hottentot\" (Khoekhoe), and others, noting that related languages (including Latin, Greek, German, and Russian) must have separated in antiquity from common ancestors.",
"title": "History of Indo-European linguistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The hypothesis reappeared in 1786 when Sir William Jones first lectured on the striking similarities among three of the oldest languages known in his time: Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, to which he tentatively added Gothic, Celtic, and Persian, though his classification contained some inaccuracies and omissions. In one of the most famous quotations in linguistics, Jones made the following prescient statement in a lecture to the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1786, conjecturing the existence of an earlier ancestor language, which he called \"a common source\" but did not name:",
"title": "History of Indo-European linguistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The Sanscrit [sic] language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.",
"title": "History of Indo-European linguistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Thomas Young first used the term Indo-European in 1813, deriving it from the geographical extremes of the language family: from Western Europe to North India. A synonym is Indo-Germanic (Idg. or IdG.), specifying the family's southeasternmost and northwesternmost branches. This first appeared in French (indo-germanique) in 1810 in the work of Conrad Malte-Brun; in most languages this term is now dated or less common than Indo-European, although in German indogermanisch remains the standard scientific term. A number of other synonymous terms have also been used.",
"title": "History of Indo-European linguistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Franz Bopp wrote in 1816 On the conjugational system of the Sanskrit language compared with that of Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic and between 1833 and 1852 he wrote Comparative Grammar. This marks the beginning of Indo-European studies as an academic discipline. The classical phase of Indo-European comparative linguistics leads from this work to August Schleicher's 1861 Compendium and up to Karl Brugmann's Grundriss, published in the 1880s. Brugmann's neogrammarian reevaluation of the field and Ferdinand de Saussure's development of the laryngeal theory may be considered the beginning of \"modern\" Indo-European studies. The generation of Indo-Europeanists active in the last third of the 20th century (such as Calvert Watkins, Jochem Schindler, and Helmut Rix) developed a better understanding of morphology and of ablaut in the wake of Kuryłowicz's 1956 Apophony in Indo-European, who in 1927 pointed out the existence of the Hittite consonant ḫ. Kuryłowicz's discovery supported Ferdinand de Saussure's 1879 proposal of the existence of coefficients sonantiques, elements de Saussure reconstructed to account for vowel length alternations in Indo-European languages. This led to the so-called laryngeal theory, a major step forward in Indo-European linguistics and a confirmation of de Saussure's theory.",
"title": "History of Indo-European linguistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The various subgroups of the Indo-European language family include ten major branches, listed below in alphabetical order:",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In addition to the classical ten branches listed above, several extinct and little-known languages and language-groups have existed or are proposed to have existed:",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Membership of languages in the Indo-European language family is determined by genealogical relationships, meaning that all members are presumed descendants of a common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European. Membership in the various branches, groups, and subgroups of Indo-European is also genealogical, but here the defining factors are shared innovations among various languages, suggesting a common ancestor that split off from other Indo-European groups. For example, what makes the Germanic languages a branch of Indo-European is that much of their structure and phonology can be stated in rules that apply to all of them. Many of their common features are presumed innovations that took place in Proto-Germanic, the source of all the Germanic languages.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In the 21st century, several attempts have been made to model the phylogeny of Indo-European languages using Bayesian methodologies similar to those applied to problems in biological phylogeny. Although there are differences in absolute timing between the various analyses, there is much commonality between them, including the result that the first known language groups to diverge were the Anatolian and Tocharian language families, in that order.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The \"tree model\" is considered an appropriate representation of the genealogical history of a language family if communities do not remain in contact after their languages have started to diverge. In this case, subgroups defined by shared innovations form a nested pattern. The tree model is not appropriate in cases where languages remain in contact as they diversify; in such cases subgroups may overlap, and the \"wave model\" is a more accurate representation. Most approaches to Indo-European subgrouping to date have assumed that the tree model is by-and-large valid for Indo-European; however, there is also a long tradition of wave-model approaches.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In addition to genealogical changes, many of the early changes in Indo-European languages can be attributed to language contact. It has been asserted, for example, that many of the more striking features shared by Italic languages (Latin, Oscan, Umbrian, etc.) might well be areal features. More certainly, very similar-looking alterations in the systems of long vowels in the West Germanic languages greatly postdate any possible notion of a proto-language innovation (and cannot readily be regarded as \"areal\", either, because English and continental West Germanic were not a linguistic area). In a similar vein, there are many similar innovations in Germanic and Balto-Slavic that are far more likely areal features than traceable to a common proto-language, such as the uniform development of a high vowel (*u in the case of Germanic, *i/u in the case of Baltic and Slavic) before the PIE syllabic resonants *ṛ, *ḷ, *ṃ, *ṇ, unique to these two groups among IE languages, which is in agreement with the wave model. The Balkan sprachbund even features areal convergence among members of very different branches.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "An extension to the Ringe-Warnow model of language evolution suggests that early IE had featured limited contact between distinct lineages, with only the Germanic subfamily exhibiting a less treelike behaviour as it acquired some characteristics from neighbours early in its evolution. The internal diversification of especially West Germanic is cited to have been radically non-treelike.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Specialists have postulated the existence of higher-order subgroups such as Italo-Celtic, Graeco-Armenian, Graeco-Aryan or Graeco-Armeno-Aryan, and Balto-Slavo-Germanic. However, unlike the ten traditional branches, these are all controversial to a greater or lesser degree.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The Italo-Celtic subgroup was at one point uncontroversial, considered by Antoine Meillet to be even better established than Balto-Slavic. The main lines of evidence included the genitive suffix -ī; the superlative suffix -m̥mo; the change of /p/ to /kʷ/ before another /kʷ/ in the same word (as in penkʷe > *kʷenkʷe > Latin quīnque, Old Irish cóic); and the subjunctive morpheme -ā-. This evidence was prominently challenged by Calvert Watkins, while Michael Weiss has argued for the subgroup.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Evidence for a relationship between Greek and Armenian includes the regular change of the second laryngeal to a at the beginnings of words, as well as terms for \"woman\" and \"sheep\". Greek and Indo-Iranian share innovations mainly in verbal morphology and patterns of nominal derivation. Relations have also been proposed between Phrygian and Greek, and between Thracian and Armenian. Some fundamental shared features, like the aorist (a verb form denoting action without reference to duration or completion) having the perfect active particle -s fixed to the stem, link this group closer to Anatolian languages and Tocharian. Shared features with Balto-Slavic languages, on the other hand (especially present and preterit formations), might be due to later contacts.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The Indo-Hittite hypothesis proposes that the Indo-European language family consists of two main branches: one represented by the Anatolian languages and another branch encompassing all other Indo-European languages. Features that separate Anatolian from all other branches of Indo-European (such as the gender or the verb system) have been interpreted alternately as archaic debris or as innovations due to prolonged isolation. Points proffered in favour of the Indo-Hittite hypothesis are the (non-universal) Indo-European agricultural terminology in Anatolia and the preservation of laryngeals. However, in general this hypothesis is considered to attribute too much weight to the Anatolian evidence. According to another view, the Anatolian subgroup left the Indo-European parent language comparatively late, approximately at the same time as Indo-Iranian and later than the Greek or Armenian divisions. A third view, especially prevalent in the so-called French school of Indo-European studies, holds that extant similarities in non-satem languages in general—including Anatolian—might be due to their peripheral location in the Indo-European language-area and to early separation, rather than indicating a special ancestral relationship. Hans J. Holm, based on lexical calculations, arrives at a picture roughly replicating the general scholarly opinion and refuting the Indo-Hittite hypothesis.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The division of the Indo-European languages into satem and centum groups was put forward by Peter von Bradke in 1890, although Karl Brugmann did propose a similar type of division in 1886. In the satem languages, which include the Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian branches, as well as (in most respects) Albanian and Armenian, the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European palatovelars remained distinct and were fricativized, while the labiovelars merged with the 'plain velars'. In the centum languages, the palatovelars merged with the plain velars, while the labiovelars remained distinct. The results of these alternative developments are exemplified by the words for \"hundred\" in Avestan (satem) and Latin (centum)—the initial palatovelar developed into a fricative [s] in the former, but became an ordinary velar [k] in the latter.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Rather than being a genealogical separation, the centum–satem division is commonly seen as resulting from innovative changes that spread across PIE dialect-branches over a particular geographical area; the centum–satem isogloss intersects a number of other isoglosses that mark distinctions between features in the early IE branches. It may be that the centum branches in fact reflect the original state of affairs in PIE, and only the satem branches shared a set of innovations, which affected all but the peripheral areas of the PIE dialect continuum. Kortlandt proposes that the ancestors of Balts and Slavs took part in satemization before being drawn later into the western Indo-European sphere.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "From the very beginning of Indo-European studies, there have been attempts to link the Indo-European languages genealogically to other languages and language families. However, these theories remain highly controversial, and most specialists in Indo-European linguistics are skeptical or agnostic about such proposals.",
"title": "Proposed external relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Proposals linking the Indo-European languages with a single language family include:",
"title": "Proposed external relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Other proposed families include:",
"title": "Proposed external relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Nostratic and Eurasiatic, in turn, have been included in even wider groupings, such as Borean, a language family separately proposed by Harold C. Fleming and Sergei Starostin that encompasses almost all of the world's natural languages with the exception of those native to sub-Saharan Africa, New Guinea, Australia, and the Andaman Islands.",
"title": "Proposed external relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Objections to such groupings are not based on any theoretical claim about the likely historical existence or nonexistence of such macrofamilies; it is entirely reasonable to suppose that they might have existed. The serious difficulty lies in identifying the details of actual relationships between language families, because it is very hard to find concrete evidence that transcends chance resemblance or is not equally likely explained as being due to borrowing, including Wanderwörter, which can travel very long distances. Because the signal-to-noise ratio in historical linguistics declines over time, at great enough time-depths it becomes open to reasonable doubt that one can even distinguish between signal and noise.",
"title": "Proposed external relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The proposed Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans. From the 1960s, knowledge of Anatolian became certain enough to establish its relationship to PIE. Using the method of internal reconstruction, an earlier stage, called Pre-Proto-Indo-European, has been proposed.",
"title": "Evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "PIE was an inflected language, in which the grammatical relationships between words were signaled through inflectional morphemes (usually endings). The roots of PIE are basic morphemes carrying a lexical meaning. By addition of suffixes, they form stems, and by addition of endings, these form grammatically inflected words (nouns or verbs). The reconstructed Indo-European verb system is complex and, like the noun, exhibits a system of ablaut.",
"title": "Evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "BMAC in \"IE languages c. 1500 BC\" is Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex",
"title": "Evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The diversification of the parent language into the attested branches of daughter languages is historically unattested. The timeline of the evolution of the various daughter languages, on the other hand, is mostly undisputed, quite regardless of the question of Indo-European origins.",
"title": "Evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Using a mathematical analysis borrowed from evolutionary biology, Donald Ringe and Tandy Warnow propose the following evolutionary tree of Indo-European branches:",
"title": "Evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "David Anthony proposes the following sequence:",
"title": "Evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "From 1500 BC the following sequence may be given:",
"title": "Evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In reconstructing the history of the Indo-European languages and the form of the Proto-Indo-European language, some languages have been of particular importance. These generally include the ancient Indo-European languages that are both well-attested and documented at an early date, although some languages from later periods are important if they are particularly linguistically conservative (most notably, Lithuanian). Early poetry is of special significance because of the rigid poetic meter normally employed, which makes it possible to reconstruct a number of features (e.g. vowel length) that were either unwritten or corrupted in the process of transmission down to the earliest extant written manuscripts.",
"title": "Evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Most noticeable of all:",
"title": "Evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Other primary sources:",
"title": "Evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Other secondary sources, of lesser value due to poor attestation:",
"title": "Evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Other secondary sources, of lesser value due to extensive phonological changes and relatively limited attestation:",
"title": "Evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "As the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language broke up, its sound system diverged as well, changing according to various sound laws evidenced in the daughter languages.",
"title": "Evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "PIE is normally reconstructed with a complex system of 15 stop consonants, including an unusual three-way phonation (voicing) distinction between voiceless, voiced and \"voiced aspirated\" (i.e. breathy voiced) stops, and a three-way distinction among velar consonants (k-type sounds) between \"palatal\" ḱ ǵ ǵh, \"plain velar\" k g gh and labiovelar kʷ gʷ gʷh. (The correctness of the terms palatal and plain velar is disputed; see Proto-Indo-European phonology.) All daughter languages have reduced the number of distinctions among these sounds, often in divergent ways.",
"title": "Evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "As an example, in English, one of the Germanic languages, the following are some of the major changes that happened:",
"title": "Evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Each original consonant shifted one position to the right. For example, original dʰ became d, while original d became t and original t became θ (written th in English). This is the original source of the English sounds written f, th, h and wh. Examples, comparing English with Latin, where the sounds largely remain unshifted:",
"title": "Evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "None of the daughter-language families (except possibly Anatolian, particularly Luvian) reflect the plain velar stops differently from the other two series, and there is even a certain amount of dispute whether this series existed at all in PIE. The major distinction between centum and satem languages corresponds to the outcome of the PIE plain velars:",
"title": "Evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The three-way PIE distinction between voiceless, voiced and voiced aspirated stops is considered extremely unusual from the perspective of linguistic typology—particularly in the existence of voiced aspirated stops without a corresponding series of voiceless aspirated stops. None of the various daughter-language families continue it unchanged, with numerous \"solutions\" to the apparently unstable PIE situation:",
"title": "Evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Among the other notable changes affecting consonants are:",
"title": "Evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The following table shows the basic outcomes of PIE consonants in some of the most important daughter languages for the purposes of reconstruction. For a fuller table, see Indo-European sound laws.",
"title": "Evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "The following table presents a comparison of conjugations of the thematic present indicative of the verbal root *bʰer- of the English verb to bear and its reflexes in various early attested IE languages and their modern descendants or relatives, showing that all languages had in the early stage an inflectional verb system.",
"title": "Evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "While similarities are still visible between the modern descendants and relatives of these ancient languages, the differences have increased over time. Some IE languages have moved from synthetic verb systems to largely periphrastic systems. In addition, the pronouns of periphrastic forms are in parentheses when they appear. Some of these verbs have undergone a change in meaning as well.",
"title": "Evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Today, Indo-European languages are spoken by billions of native speakers across all inhabited continents, the largest number by far for any recognised language family. Of the 20 languages with the largest numbers of speakers according to Ethnologue, 10 are Indo-European: English, Hindustani, Spanish, Bengali, French, Russian, Portuguese, German, Persian and Punjabi, each with 100 million speakers or more. Additionally, hundreds of millions of persons worldwide study Indo-European languages as secondary or tertiary languages, including in cultures which have completely different language families and historical backgrounds—there are around 600 million learners of English alone.",
"title": "Present distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The success of the language family, including the large number of speakers and the vast portions of the Earth that they inhabit, is due to several factors. The ancient Indo-European migrations and widespread dissemination of Indo-European culture throughout Eurasia, including that of the Proto-Indo-Europeans themselves, and that of their daughter cultures including the Indo-Aryans, Iranian peoples, Celts, Greeks, Romans, Germanic peoples, and Slavs, led to these peoples' branches of the language family already taking a dominant foothold in virtually all of Eurasia except for swathes of the Near East, North and East Asia, replacing many (but not all) of the previously-spoken pre-Indo-European languages of this extensive area. However Semitic languages remain dominant in much of the Middle East and North Africa, and Caucasian languages in much of the Caucasus region. Similarly in Europe and the Urals the Uralic languages (such as Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian etc.) remain, as does Basque, a pre-Indo-European isolate.",
"title": "Present distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Despite being unaware of their common linguistic origin, diverse groups of Indo-European speakers continued to culturally dominate and often replace the indigenous languages of the western two-thirds of Eurasia. By the beginning of the Common Era, Indo-European peoples controlled almost the entirety of this area: the Celts western and central Europe, the Romans southern Europe, the Germanic peoples northern Europe, the Slavs eastern Europe, the Iranian peoples most of western and central Asia and parts of eastern Europe, and the Indo-Aryan peoples in the Indian subcontinent, with the Tocharians inhabiting the Indo-European frontier in western China. By the medieval period, only the Semitic, Dravidian, Caucasian, and Uralic languages, and the language isolate Basque remained of the (relatively) indigenous languages of Europe and the western half of Asia.",
"title": "Present distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Despite medieval invasions by Eurasian nomads, a group to which the Proto-Indo-Europeans had once belonged, Indo-European expansion reached another peak in the early modern period with the dramatic increase in the population of the Indian subcontinent and European expansionism throughout the globe during the Age of Discovery, as well as the continued replacement and assimilation of surrounding non-Indo-European languages and peoples due to increased state centralization and nationalism. These trends compounded throughout the modern period due to the general global population growth and the results of European colonization of the Western Hemisphere and Oceania, leading to an explosion in the number of Indo-European speakers as well as the territories inhabited by them.",
"title": "Present distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Due to colonization and the modern dominance of Indo-European languages in the fields of politics, global science, technology, education, finance, and sports, even many modern countries whose populations largely speak non-Indo-European languages have Indo-European languages as official languages, and the majority of the global population speaks at least one Indo-European language. The overwhelming majority of languages used on the Internet are Indo-European, with English continuing to lead the group; English in general has in many respects become the lingua franca of global communication.",
"title": "Present distribution"
}
]
| The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family—English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish—have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several continents. The Indo-European family is divided into several branches or sub-families, of which there are eight groups with languages still alive today: Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, and Italic/Romance; and another nine subdivisions that are now extinct. Today, the individual Indo-European languages with the most native speakers are Spanish, English, Hindi–Urdu, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, Punjabi, French and German each with over 100 million native speakers; many others are small and in danger of extinction. In total, 46% of the world's population speaks an Indo-European language as a first language—by far the highest of any language family. There are about 445 living Indo-European languages, according to an estimate by Ethnologue, with over two-thirds (313) of them belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch. All Indo-European languages are descended from a single prehistoric language, linguistically reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, spoken sometime in the Neolithic to Early Bronze Age. The geographical location where it was spoken, the Proto-Indo-European homeland, has been the object of many competing hypotheses; the academic consensus supports the Kurgan hypothesis, which posits the homeland to be the Pontic–Caspian steppe in what is now Ukraine and southern Russia, associated with the Yamnaya culture and other related archaeological cultures during the 4th millennium BC to early 3rd millennium BC. By the time the first written records appeared, Indo-European had already evolved into numerous languages spoken across much of Europe, South Asia, and part of Western Asia. Written evidence of Indo-European appeared during the Bronze Age in the form of Mycenaean Greek and the Anatolian languages of Hittite and Luwian. The oldest records are isolated Hittite words and names—interspersed in texts that are otherwise in the unrelated Akkadian language, a Semitic language—found in texts of the Assyrian colony of Kültepe in eastern Anatolia dating to the 20th century BC. Although no older written records of the original Proto-Indo-European population remain, some aspects of their culture and their religion can be reconstructed from later evidence in the daughter cultures. The Indo-European family is significant to the field of historical linguistics as it possesses the second-longest recorded history of any known family, after the Afroasiatic family in the form of the pre-Arab Egyptian language and the Semitic languages. The analysis of the family relationships between the Indo-European languages, and the reconstruction of their common source, was central to the development of the methodology of historical linguistics as an academic discipline in the 19th century. The Indo-European language family is not considered by the current academic consensus in the field of linguistics to have any genetic relationships with other language families, although several disputed hypotheses propose such relations. | 2001-11-17T03:38:42Z | 2023-12-30T11:37:31Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages |
14,849 | Illinois | Illinois (/ˌɪlɪˈnɔɪ/ IL-in-OY) is a state in the Midwestern United States. The Great Lakes are to its northeast, the Mississippi River to its west, and the Wabash and Ohio rivers to its south. Its largest metropolitan areas are Chicago and the Metro East region of Greater St. Louis. Other metropolitan areas include Peoria and Rockford, as well as Springfield, its capital, and Champaign-Urbana, home to the main campus of the state's flagship university. Of the fifty U.S. states, Illinois has the fifth-largest gross domestic product (GDP), the sixth-largest population, and the 25th-largest land area.
Illinois has a highly diverse economy, with the global city of Chicago in the northeast, major industrial and agricultural hubs in the north and center, and natural resources such as coal, timber, and petroleum in the south. Owing to its central location and favorable geography, the state is a major transportation hub: the Port of Chicago has access to the Atlantic Ocean through the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence Seaway and to the Gulf of Mexico from the Mississippi River via the Illinois Waterway. Chicago has been the nation's railroad hub since the 1860s, and its O'Hare International Airport has been among the world's busiest airports for decades. Illinois has long been considered a microcosm of the United States and a bellwether in American culture, exemplified by the phrase Will it play in Peoria?.
What is now Illinois was inhabited for thousands of years by various indigenous cultures, including the advanced civilization centered in the Cahokia region. The French were the first Europeans to arrive, settling near the Mississippi River in the 17th century in the region they called Illinois Country, as part of the sprawling colony of New France. Following U.S. independence in 1783, American settlers began arriving from Kentucky via the Ohio River, and the population grew from south to north. Illinois was part of the United States' oldest territory, the Northwest Territory, and in 1818 it achieved statehood. The Erie Canal brought increased commercial activity in the Great Lakes, and the small settlement of Chicago became one of the fastest growing cities in the world, benefiting from its location as one of the few natural harbors in southwestern Lake Michigan. The invention of the self-scouring steel plow by Illinoisan John Deere turned the state's rich prairie into some of the world's most productive and valuable farmland, attracting immigrant farmers from Germany and Sweden. In the mid-19th century, the Illinois and Michigan Canal and a sprawling railroad network greatly facilitated trade, commerce, and settlement, making the state a transportation hub for the nation.
By 1900, the growth of industrial jobs in the northern cities and coal mining in the central and southern areas attracted immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. Illinois became one of America's most industrialized states and remains a major manufacturing center. The Great Migration from the South established a large community of African Americans, particularly in Chicago, who founded the city's famous jazz and blues cultures. Chicago became a leading cultural, economic, and population center and is today one of the world's major commercial centers; its metropolitan area, informally referred to as Chicagoland, holds about 65% of the state's 12.8 million residents.
Two World Heritage Sites are in Illinois, the ancient Cahokia Mounds, and part of the Wright architecture site. Major centers of learning include the University of Chicago, University of Illinois, and Northwestern University. A wide variety of protected areas seek to conserve Illinois' natural and cultural resources. Historically, three U.S. presidents have been elected while residents of Illinois: Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and Barack Obama; additionally, Ronald Reagan was born and raised in the state. Today, Illinois honors Lincoln with its official state slogan Land of Lincoln. The state is the site of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield and the future home of the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.
"Illinois" is the modern spelling for the early French Catholic missionaries and explorers' name for the Illinois Native Americans, a name that was spelled in many different ways in the early records.
American scholars previously thought the name Illinois meant 'man' or 'men' in the Miami-Illinois language, with the original iliniwek transformed via French into Illinois. This etymology is not supported by the Illinois language, as the word for "man" is ireniwa, and plural of "man" is ireniwaki. The name Illiniwek has also been said to mean 'tribe of superior men', which is a false etymology. The name Illinois derives from the Miami-Illinois verb irenwe·wa 'he speaks the regular way'. This was taken into the Ojibwe language, perhaps in the Ottawa dialect, and modified into ilinwe· (pluralized as ilinwe·k). The French borrowed these forms, spelling the /we/ ending as -ois, a transliteration of that sound in the French of that time. The current spelling form, Illinois, began to appear in the early 1670s, when French colonists had settled in the western area. The Illinois's name for themselves, as attested in all three of the French missionary-period dictionaries of Illinois, was Inoka, of unknown meaning and unrelated to the other terms.
American Indians of successive cultures lived along the waterways of the Illinois area for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans. The Koster Site has been excavated and demonstrates 7,000 years of continuous habitation. Cahokia, the largest regional chiefdom and Urban Center of the Pre-Columbian Mississippian culture, was located near present-day Collinsville, Illinois. They built an urban complex of more than 100 platform and burial mounds, a 50-acre (20 ha) plaza larger than 35 football fields, and a woodhenge of sacred cedar, all in a planned design expressing the culture's cosmology. Monks Mound, the center of the site, is the largest Pre-Columbian structure north of the Valley of Mexico. It is 100 ft (30 m) high, 951 ft (290 m) long, 836 ft (255 m) wide, and covers 13.8 acres (5.6 ha). It contains about 814,000 cu yd (622,000 m) of earth. It was topped by a structure thought to have measured about 105 ft (32 m) in length and 48 ft (15 m) in width, covered an area 5,000 sq ft (460 m), and been as much as 50 ft (15 m) high, making its peak 150 ft (46 m) above the level of the plaza. The finely crafted ornaments and tools recovered by archaeologists at Cahokia include elaborate ceramics, finely sculptured stonework, carefully embossed and engraved copper and mica sheets, and one funeral blanket for an important chief fashioned from 20,000 shell beads. These artifacts indicate that Cahokia was truly an urban center, with clustered housing, markets, and specialists in toolmaking, hide dressing, potting, jewelry making, shell engraving, weaving and salt making.
The civilization vanished in the 15th century for unknown reasons, but historians and archeologists have speculated that the people depleted the area of resources. Many indigenous tribes engaged in constant warfare. According to Suzanne Austin Alchon, "At one site in the central Illinois River valley, one third of all adults died as a result of violent injuries." The next major power in the region was the Illinois Confederation or Illini, a political alliance. As the Illini declined during the Beaver Wars era, members of the Algonquian-speaking Potawatomi, Miami, Sauk, and other tribes including the Fox (Meskwaki), Iowa, Kickapoo, Mascouten, Piankeshaw, Shawnee, Wea, and Winnebago (Ho-Chunk) came into the area from the east and north around the Great Lakes.
French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet explored the Illinois River in 1673. Marquette soon after founded a mission at the Grand Village of the Illinois in Illinois Country. In 1680, French explorers under René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle and Henri de Tonti constructed a fort at the site of present-day Peoria, and in 1682, a fort atop Starved Rock in today's Starved Rock State Park. French Empire Canadiens came south to settle particularly along the Mississippi River, and Illinois was part of first New France, and then of La Louisiane until 1763, when it passed to the British with their defeat of France in the Seven Years' War. The small French settlements continued, although many French migrated west to Ste. Genevieve and St. Louis, Missouri, to evade British rule.
A few British soldiers were posted in Illinois, but few British or American settlers moved there, as the Crown made it part of the territory reserved for Indians west of the Appalachians, and then part of the British Province of Quebec. In 1778, George Rogers Clark claimed Illinois County for Virginia. In a compromise, Virginia (and other states that made various claims) ceded the area to the new United States in the 1780s and it became part of the Northwest Territory, administered by the federal government and later organized as states.
The Illinois-Wabash Company was an early claimant to much of Illinois. The Illinois Territory was created on February 3, 1809, with its capital at Kaskaskia, an early French settlement.
During the discussions leading up to Illinois's admission to the Union, the proposed northern boundary of the state was moved twice. The original provisions of the Northwest Ordinance had specified a boundary that would have been tangent to the southern tip of Lake Michigan. Such a boundary would have left Illinois with no shoreline on Lake Michigan at all. However, as Indiana had successfully been granted a 10 mi (16 km) northern extension of its boundary to provide it with a usable lakefront, the original bill for Illinois statehood, submitted to Congress on January 23, 1818, stipulated a northern border at the same latitude as Indiana's, which is defined as 10 miles north of the southernmost extremity of Lake Michigan. However, the Illinois delegate, Nathaniel Pope, wanted more, and lobbied to have the boundary moved further north. The final bill passed by Congress included an amendment to shift the border to 42° 30' north, which is approximately 51 mi (82 km) north of the Indiana northern border. This shift added 8,500 sq mi (22,000 km) to the state, including the lead mining region near Galena. More importantly, it added nearly 50 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline and the Chicago River. Pope and others envisioned a canal that would connect the Chicago and Illinois rivers and thus connect the Great Lakes to the Mississippi.
In 1818, Illinois became the 21st U.S. state. The capital remained at Kaskaskia, headquartered in a small building rented by the state. In 1819, Vandalia became the capital, and over the next 18 years, three separate buildings were built to serve successively as the capitol building. In 1837, the state legislators representing Sangamon County, under the leadership of state representative Abraham Lincoln, succeeded in having the capital moved to Springfield, where a fifth capitol building was constructed. A sixth capitol building was erected in 1867, which continues to serve as the Illinois capitol today.
Though it was ostensibly a "free state", there was nonetheless slavery in Illinois. The ethnic French had owned black slaves since the 1720s, and American settlers had already brought slaves into the area from Kentucky. Slavery was nominally banned by the Northwest Ordinance, but that was not enforced for those already holding slaves. When Illinois became a state in 1818, the Ordinance no longer applied, and about 900 slaves were held in the state. As the southern part of the state, later known as "Egypt" or "Little Egypt", was largely settled by migrants from the South, the section was hostile to free blacks. Settlers were allowed to bring slaves with them for labor, but, in 1822, state residents voted against making slavery legal. Still, most residents opposed allowing free blacks as permanent residents. Some settlers brought in slaves seasonally or as house servants. The Illinois Constitution of 1848 was written with a provision for exclusionary laws to be passed. In 1853, John A. Logan helped pass a law to prohibit all African Americans, including freedmen, from settling in the state.
The winter of 1830–1831 is called the "Winter of the Deep Snow"; a sudden, deep snowfall blanketed the state, making travel impossible for the rest of the winter, and many travelers perished. Several severe winters followed, including the "Winter of the Sudden Freeze". On December 20, 1836, a fast-moving cold front passed through, freezing puddles in minutes and killing many travelers who could not reach shelter. The adverse weather resulted in crop failures in the northern part of the state. The southern part of the state shipped food north, and this may have contributed to its name, "Little Egypt", after the Biblical story of Joseph in Egypt supplying grain to his brothers.
In 1832, the Black Hawk War was fought in Illinois and present-day Wisconsin between the United States and the Sauk, Fox (Meskwaki), and Kickapoo Indian tribes. It represents the end of Indian resistance to white settlement in the Chicago region. The Indians had been forced to leave their homes and move to Iowa in 1831; when they attempted to return, they were attacked and eventually defeated by U.S. militia. The survivors were forced back to Iowa.
By 1839, the Latter Day Saints had founded a utopian city called Nauvoo, formerly called Commerce. Located in Hancock County along the Mississippi River, Nauvoo flourished and, by 1844, briefly surpassed Chicago for the position of the state's largest city. But in that same year, the Latter Day Saint movement founder, Joseph Smith, was killed in the Carthage Jail, about 30 miles away from Nauvoo. Following a succession crisis, Brigham Young led most Latter Day Saints out of Illinois in a mass exodus to present-day Utah; after close to six years of rapid development, Nauvoo quickly declined afterward.
After it was established in 1833, Chicago gained prominence as a Great Lakes port, and then as an Illinois and Michigan Canal port after 1848, and as a rail hub soon afterward. By 1857, Chicago was Illinois's largest city. With the tremendous growth of mines and factories in the state in the 19th century, Illinois was the ground for the formation of labor unions in the United States.
In 1847, after lobbying by Dorothea L. Dix, Illinois became one of the first states to establish a system of state-supported treatment of mental illness and disabilities, replacing local almshouses. Dix came into this effort after having met J. O. King, a Jacksonville, Illinois businessman, who invited her to Illinois, where he had been working to build an asylum for the insane. With the lobbying expertise of Dix, plans for the Jacksonville State Hospital (now known as the Jacksonville Developmental Center) were signed into law on March 1, 1847.
During the American Civil War, Illinois ranked fourth in soldiers who served (more than 250,000) in the Union Army, a figure surpassed by only New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Beginning with President Abraham Lincoln's first call for troops and continuing throughout the war, Illinois mustered 150 infantry regiments, which were numbered from the 7th to the 156th regiments. Seventeen cavalry regiments were also gathered, as well as two light artillery regiments. The town of Cairo, at the southern tip of the state at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, served as a strategically important supply base and training center for the Union army. For several months, both General Grant and Admiral Foote had headquarters in Cairo.
During the Civil War, and more so afterwards, Chicago's population skyrocketed, which increased its prominence. The Pullman Strike and Haymarket Riot, in particular, greatly influenced the development of the American labor movement. From Sunday, October 8, 1871, until Tuesday, October 10, 1871, the Great Chicago Fire burned in downtown Chicago, destroying four sq mi (10 km).
At the turn of the 20th century, Illinois had a population of nearly 5 million. Many people from other parts of the country were attracted to the state by employment caused by the expanding industrial base. Whites were 98% of the state's population. Bolstered by continued immigration from southern and eastern Europe, and by the African-American Great Migration from the South, Illinois grew and emerged as one of the most important states in the union. By the end of the century, the population had reached 12.4 million.
The Century of Progress World's fair was held at Chicago in 1933. Oil strikes in Marion County and Crawford County led to a boom in 1937, and by 1939, Illinois ranked fourth in U.S. oil production. Illinois manufactured 6.1 percent of total United States military armaments produced during World War II, ranking seventh among the 48 states. Chicago became an ocean port with the opening of the Saint Lawrence Seaway in 1959. The seaway and the Illinois Waterway connected Chicago to both the Mississippi River and the Atlantic Ocean. In 1960, Ray Kroc opened the first McDonald's franchise in Des Plaines (which still exists as a museum, with a working McDonald's across the street).
Illinois had a prominent role in the emergence of the nuclear age. In 1942, as part of the Manhattan Project, the University of Chicago conducted the first sustained nuclear chain reaction. In 1957, Argonne National Laboratory, near Chicago, activated the first experimental nuclear power generating system in the United States. By 1960, the first privately financed nuclear plant in the United States, Dresden 1, was dedicated near Morris. In 1967, Fermilab, a national nuclear research facility near Batavia, opened a particle accelerator, which was the world's largest for over 40 years. With eleven plants currently operating, Illinois leads all states in the amount of electricity generated from nuclear power.
In 1961, Illinois became the first state in the nation to adopt the recommendation of the American Law Institute and pass a comprehensive criminal code revision that repealed the law against sodomy. The code also abrogated common law crimes and established an age of consent of 18. The state's fourth constitution was adopted in 1970, replacing the 1870 document.
The first Farm Aid concert was held in Champaign to benefit American farmers, in 1985. The worst upper Mississippi River flood of the century, the Great Flood of 1993, inundated many towns and thousands of acres of farmland.
Illinois entered the 21st century under Republican Governor George Ryan. Near the end of his term in January 2003, following a string of high-profile exonerations, Ryan commuted all death sentences in the state.
The 2002 election brought Democrat Rod Blagojevich to the governor's mansion. It also brought future president Barack Obama into a committee leadership position in the Illinois Senate, where he drafted the Health Care Justice Act, a forerunner of Obamacare. Obama's election to the presidency in Blagojevich's second term set off a chain of events culminating in Blagojevich's impeachment, trial, and subsequent criminal conviction and imprisonment, making Blagojevich the second consecutive Illinois governor to be convicted on federal corruption charges.
Blagojevich's replacement Pat Quinn was defeated by Republican Bruce Rauner in the 2014 election. Disagreements between the governor and legislature over budgetary policy led to the Illinois Budget Impasse, a 793-day period stretching from 2015 to 2018 in which the state had no budget and struggled to pay its bills.
On August 28, 2017, Rauner signed a bill into law that prohibited state and local police from arresting anyone solely due to their immigration status or due to federal detainers. Some fellow Republicans criticized Rauner for his action, claiming the bill made Illinois a sanctuary state.
In the 2018 election, Rauner was replaced by J. B. Pritzker, returning the state government to a Democratic trifecta. In January 2020 the state legalized marijuana.
On March 9, 2020, Pritzker issued a disaster proclamation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He ended the state of emergency in May 2023.
During the early part of the Paleozoic Era, the area that would one day become Illinois was submerged beneath a shallow sea and located near the Equator. Diverse marine life lived at this time, including trilobites, brachiopods, and crinoids. Changing environmental conditions led to the formation of large coal swamps in the Carboniferous.
Illinois was above sea level for at least part of the Mesozoic, but by its end was again submerged by the Western Interior Seaway. This receded by the Eocene Epoch.
During the Pleistocene Epoch, vast ice sheets covered much of Illinois, with only the Driftless Area remaining exposed. These glaciers carved the basin of Lake Michigan and left behind traces of ancient glacial lakes and moraines.
Illinois is located in the Midwest region of the United States and is one of the eight states in the Great Lakes region of North America (which also includes Ontario, Canada).
Illinois's eastern border with Indiana consists of a north–south line at 87° 31′ 30″ west longitude in Lake Michigan at the north, to the Wabash River in the south above Post Vincennes. The Wabash River continues as the eastern/southeastern border with Indiana until the Wabash enters the Ohio River. This marks the beginning of Illinois's southern border with Kentucky, which runs along the northern shoreline of the Ohio River. Most of the western border with Missouri and Iowa is the Mississippi River; Kaskaskia is an exclave of Illinois, lying west of the Mississippi and reachable only from Missouri. The state's northern border with Wisconsin is fixed at 42° 30′ north latitude. The northeastern border of Illinois lies in Lake Michigan, within which Illinois shares a water boundary with the state of Michigan, as well as Wisconsin and Indiana.
Though Illinois lies entirely in the Interior Plains, it does have some minor variation in its elevation. In extreme northwestern Illinois, the Driftless Area, a region of unglaciated and therefore higher and more rugged topography, occupies a small part of the state. Southern Illinois includes the hilly areas around the Shawnee National Forest.
Charles Mound, located in the Driftless region, has the state's highest natural elevation above sea level at 1,235 ft (376 m). Other highlands include the Shawnee Hills in the south, and there is varying topography along its rivers; the Illinois River bisects the state northeast to southwest. The floodplain on the Mississippi River from Alton to the Kaskaskia River is known as the American Bottom.
Illinois has three major geographical divisions. Northern Illinois is dominated by Chicago metropolitan area, or Chicagoland, which is the city of Chicago and its suburbs, and the adjoining exurban area into which the metropolis is expanding. As defined by the federal government, the Chicago metro area includes several counties in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin, and has a population of over 9.8 million. Chicago itself is a cosmopolitan city, densely populated, industrialized, the transportation hub of the nation, and settled by a wide variety of ethnic groups. The city of Rockford, Illinois's third-largest city and center of the state's fourth largest metropolitan area, sits along Interstates 39 and 90 some 75 mi (121 km) northwest of Chicago. The Quad Cities region, located along the Mississippi River in northern Illinois, had a population of 381,342 in 2011.
The midsection of Illinois is the second major division, called Central Illinois. Historically prairie, it is now mainly agricultural and known as the Heart of Illinois. It is characterized by small towns and medium–small cities. The western section (west of the Illinois River) was originally part of the Military Tract of 1812 and forms the conspicuous western bulge of the state. Agriculture, particularly corn and soybeans, as well as educational institutions and manufacturing centers, figure prominently in Central Illinois. Cities include Peoria; Springfield, the state capital; Quincy; Decatur; Bloomington-Normal; and Champaign-Urbana.
The third division is Southern Illinois, comprising the area south of U.S. Route 50, including Little Egypt, near the juncture of the Mississippi River and Ohio River. Southern Illinois is the site of the ancient city of Cahokia, as well as the site of the first state capital at Kaskaskia, which today is separated from the rest of the state by the Mississippi River. This region has a somewhat warmer winter climate, different variety of crops (including some cotton farming in the past), more rugged topography (due to the area remaining unglaciated during the Illinoian Stage, unlike most of the rest of the state), as well as small-scale oil deposits and coal mining. The Illinois suburbs of St. Louis, such as East St. Louis, are located in this region, and collectively, they are known as the Metro-East. The other somewhat significant concentration of population in Southern Illinois is the Carbondale-Marion-Herrin, Illinois Combined Statistical Area centered on Carbondale and Marion, a two-county area that is home to 123,272 residents. A portion of southeastern Illinois is part of the extended Evansville, Indiana, Metro Area, locally referred to as the Tri-State with Indiana and Kentucky. Seven Illinois counties are in the area.
In addition to these three, largely latitudinally defined divisions, all of the region outside the Chicago metropolitan area is often called "downstate" Illinois. This term is flexible, but is generally meant to mean everything outside the influence of the Chicago area. Thus, some cities in Northern Illinois, such as DeKalb, which is west of Chicago, and Rockford—which is actually north of Chicago—are sometimes incorrectly considered to be 'downstate'.
Illinois has a climate that varies widely throughout the year. Because of its nearly 400-mile distance between its northernmost and southernmost extremes, as well as its mid-continental situation, most of Illinois has a humid continental climate (Köppen climate classification Dfa), with hot, humid summers and cold winters. The southern part of the state, from about Carbondale southward, has a humid subtropical climate (Koppen Cfa), with more moderate winters. Average yearly precipitation for Illinois varies from just over 48 in (1,219 mm) at the southern tip to around 35 in (889 mm) in the northern portion of the state. Normal annual snowfall exceeds 38 in (965 mm) in the Chicago area, while the southern portion of the state normally receives less than 14 in (356 mm). The all-time high temperature was 117 °F (47 °C), recorded on July 14, 1954, at East St. Louis, and the all-time low temperature was −38 °F (−39 °C), recorded on January 31, 2019, during the January 2019 North American cold wave at a weather station near Mount Carroll, and confirmed on March 5, 2019. This followed the previous record of −36 °F (−38 °C) recorded on January 5, 1999, near Congerville. Prior to the Mount Carroll record, a temperature of −37 °F (−38 °C) was recorded on January 15, 2009, at Rochelle, but at a weather station not subjected to the same quality control as official records.
Illinois averages approximately 51 days of thunderstorm activity a year, which ranks somewhat above average in the number of thunderstorm days for the United States. Illinois is vulnerable to tornadoes, with an average of 35 occurring annually, which puts much of the state at around five tornadoes per 10,000 sq mi (30,000 km) annually. While tornadoes are no more powerful in Illinois than other states, some of Tornado Alley's deadliest tornadoes on record have occurred in the state. The Tri-State Tornado of 1925 killed 695 people in three states; 613 of the victims died in Illinois.
Chicago is the largest city in the state and the third-most populous city in the United States, with its 2020 population of 2,746,388. The U.S. Census Bureau currently lists seven other cities with populations of over 100,000 within Illinois. Based upon the U.S. Census Bureau's official 2010 population: Aurora, a Chicago satellite town that eclipsed Rockford for the title of second-most populous city in Illinois; its 2010 population was 197,899. Rockford, at 152,871, is the third-largest city in the state, and is the largest city in the state not located within the Chicago suburbs. Joliet, located in metropolitan Chicago, is the fourth-largest city in the state, with a population of 147,433. Naperville, a suburb of Chicago, is fifth with 141,853. Naperville and Aurora share a boundary along Illinois Route 59. Springfield, the state's capital, comes in as sixth-most populous with 117,352 residents. Peoria, which decades ago was the second-most populous city in the state, is seventh with 115,007. The eighth-largest and final city in the 100,000 club is Elgin, a northwest suburb of Chicago, with a 2010 population of 108,188.
The most populated city in the state south of Springfield is Belleville, with 44,478 people at the 2010 census. It is located in the Illinois portion of Greater St. Louis (often called the Metro East area), which has a rapidly growing population of over 700,000.
Other major urban areas include the Champaign-Urbana Metropolitan Area, which has a combined population of almost 230,000 people, the Illinois portion of the Quad Cities area with about 215,000 people, and the Bloomington-Normal area with a combined population of over 165,000.
The United States Census Bureau found that the population of Illinois was 12,812,508 in the 2020 United States census, moving from the fifth-largest state to the sixth-largest state (losing out to Pennsylvania). Illinois' population slightly declined in 2020 from the 2010 United States census by just over 18,000 residents and the overall population was quite higher than recent census estimates.
Illinois is the most populous state in the Midwest region. Chicago, the third-most populous city in the United States, is the center of the Chicago metropolitan area or Chicagoland, as this area is nicknamed. Although the Chicago metropolitan area comprises only 9% of the land area of the state, it contains 65% of the state's residents. The losses of population anticipated from the 2020 census results do not arise from the Chicago metro area; rather the declines are from the Downstate counties.
According to HUD's 2022 Annual Homeless Assessment Report, there were an estimated 9,212 homeless people in Illinois.
According to 2022 U.S. Census Bureau estimates, Illinois' population was 61.1% White, 13.4% Black or African American, 0.1% Native American or Alaskan Native, 6.0% Asian, 0.1% Pacific Islander, 7.9% Some Other Race, and 10.9% from two or more races. The white population continues to remain the largest racial category in Illinois. Hispanics are allocated amongst the various racial groups and primarily identify as Some Other Race (41.2%) or Multiracial (39.5%) with the remainder identifying as White (14.2%), Black (1.3%), American Indian and Alaskan Native (3.3), Asian (0.3%), and Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (0.2%). By ethnicity, 18.3% of the total population is Hispanic-Latino (of any race) and 81.7% is Non-Hispanic (of any race). If treated as a separate category, Hispanics are the largest minority group in Illinois.
The state's most populous ethnic group, non-Hispanic white, has declined from 83.5% in 1970 to 58.5% in 2022.
As of 2011, 49.4% of Illinois's population younger than age 1 were minorities (Note: Children born to white Hispanics or to a sole full or partial minority parent are counted as minorities).
At the 2007 estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, there were 1,768,518 foreign-born inhabitants of the state or 13.8% of the population, with 48.4% from Latin America, 24.6% from Asia, 22.8% from Europe, 2.9% from Africa, 1.2% from Canada, and 0.2% from Oceania. Of the foreign-born population, 43.7% were naturalized U.S. citizens, and 56.3% were not U.S. citizens. In 2007, 6.9% of Illinois's population was reported as being under age 5, 24.9% under age 18 and 12.1% were age 65 and over. Females made up approximately 50.7% of the population.
According to the 2007 estimates, 21.1% of the population had German ancestry, 13.3% had Irish ancestry, 8% had British ancestry, 7.9% had Polish ancestry, 6.4% had Italian ancestry, 4.6% listed themselves as American, 2.4% had Swedish ancestry, 2.2% had French ancestry, other than Basque, 1.6% had Dutch ancestry, and 1.4% had Norwegian ancestry. Illinois also has large numbers of African Americans and Latinos (mostly Mexicans and Puerto Ricans).
Chicago, along the shores of Lake Michigan, is the nation's third largest city. In 2000, 23.3% of Illinois's population lived in the city of Chicago, 43.3% in Cook County, and 65.6% in the counties of the Chicago metropolitan area: Will, DuPage, Kane, Lake, and McHenry counties, as well as Cook County. The remaining population lives in the smaller cities and rural areas that dot the state's plains. As of 2000, the state's center of population was at 41°16′42″N 88°22′49″W / 41.278216°N 88.380238°W / 41.278216; -88.380238, located in Grundy County, northeast of the village of Mazon.
Births do not add up, because Hispanics are counted both by ethnicity and by race.
The official language of Illinois is English, although between 1923 and 1969, state law gave official status to "the American language". Nearly 80% of people in Illinois speak English natively, and most of the rest speak it fluently as a second language. A number of dialects of American English are spoken, ranging from Inland Northern American English and African-American English around Chicago, to Midland American English in Central Illinois, to Southern American English in the far south.
Over 20% of Illinoians speak a language other than English at home, of which Spanish is by far the most widespread, at more than 12% of the total population. A sizeable number of Polish speakers is present in the Chicago Metropolitan Area. Illinois Country French has mostly gone extinct in Illinois, although it is still celebrated in the French Colonial Historic District.
Religion in Illinois (2014)
Roman Catholics constitute the single largest religious denomination in Illinois; they are heavily concentrated in and around Chicago and account for nearly 30% of the state's population. However, taken together as a group, the various Protestant denominations comprise a greater percentage of the state's population than do Catholics. In 2010, Catholics in Illinois numbered 3,648,907. The largest Protestant denominations were the United Methodist Church with 314,461 members and the Southern Baptist Convention with 283,519. Illinois has one of the largest concentrations of Missouri Synod Lutherans in the United States.
Illinois played an important role in the early Latter Day Saint movement, with Nauvoo becoming a gathering place for Mormons in the early 1840s. Nauvoo was the location of the succession crisis, which led to the separation of the Mormon movement into several Latter Day Saint sects. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the largest of the sects to emerge from the Mormon schism, has more than 55,000 adherents in Illinois today.
A significant number of adherents of other Abrahamic faiths can be found in Illinois. Largely concentrated in the Chicago metropolitan area, followers of the Muslim, Baháʼí, and Jewish religions all call the state home. Muslims constituted the largest non-Christian group, with 359,264 adherents. Illinois has the largest concentration of Muslims by state in the country, with 2,800 Muslims per 100,000 citizens.
The largest and oldest surviving Baháʼí House of Worship in the world is located on the shores of Lake Michigan in Wilmette, Illinois, one of eight continental Baháʼí House of Worship. It serves as a space for people of all backgrounds and religions to gather, meditate, reflect, and pray, expressing the Baháʼí principle of the oneness of religions. The Chicago area has a very large Jewish community, particularly in the suburbs of Skokie, Buffalo Grove, Highland Park, and surrounding suburbs. Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel was the Windy City's first Jewish mayor.
Chicago is also home to a very large population of Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists.
As of 2022, the gross state product for Illinois reached US$1.0 trillion.
As of February 2019, the unemployment rate in Illinois reached 4.2%.
Illinois's minimum wage will rise to $15 per hour by 2025, making it one of the highest in the nation.
Illinois's major agricultural outputs are corn, soybeans, hogs, cattle, dairy products, and wheat. In most years, Illinois is either the first or second state for the highest production of soybeans, with a harvest of 427.7 million bushels (11.64 million metric tons) in 2008, after Iowa's production of 444.82 million bushels (12.11 million metric tons). Illinois ranks second in U.S. corn production with more than 1.5 billion bushels produced annually. With a production capacity of 1.5 billion gallons per year, Illinois is a top producer of ethanol, ranking third in the United States in 2011. Illinois is a leader in food manufacturing and meat processing. Although Chicago may no longer be "Hog Butcher for the World", the Chicago area remains a global center for food manufacture and meat processing, with many plants, processing houses, and distribution facilities concentrated in the area of the former Union Stock Yards. Illinois also produces wine, and the state is home to two American viticultural areas. In the area of The Meeting of the Great Rivers Scenic Byway, peaches and apples are grown. The German immigrants from agricultural backgrounds who settled in Illinois in the mid- to late 19th century are in part responsible for the profusion of fruit orchards in that area of Illinois. Illinois's universities are actively researching alternative agricultural products as alternative crops.
Illinois is one of the nation's manufacturing leaders, boasting annual value added productivity by manufacturing of over $107 billion in 2006. As of 2011, Illinois is ranked as the 4th-most productive manufacturing state in the country, behind California, Texas, and Ohio. About three-quarters of the state's manufacturers are located in the Northeastern Opportunity Return Region, with 38 percent of Illinois's approximately 18,900 manufacturing plants located in Cook County. As of 2006, the leading manufacturing industries in Illinois, based upon value-added, were chemical manufacturing ($18.3 billion), machinery manufacturing ($13.4 billion), food manufacturing ($12.9 billion), fabricated metal products ($11.5 billion), transportation equipment ($7.4 billion), plastics and rubber products ($7.0 billion), and computer and electronic products ($6.1 billion).
By the early 2000s, Illinois's economy had moved toward a dependence on high-value-added services, such as financial trading, higher education, law, logistics, and medicine. In some cases, these services clustered around institutions that hearkened back to Illinois's earlier economies. For example, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, a trading exchange for global derivatives, had begun its life as an agricultural futures market. Other important non-manufacturing industries include publishing, tourism, and energy production and distribution.
Venture capitalists funded a total of approximately $62 billion in the U.S. economy in 2016. Of this amount, Illinois-based companies received approximately $1.1 billion. Similarly, in FY 2016, the federal government spent $461 billion on contracts in the U.S. Of this amount, Illinois-based companies received approximately $8.7 billion.
Illinois is a net importer of fuels for energy, despite large coal resources and some minor oil production. Illinois exports electricity, ranking fifth among states in electricity production and seventh in electricity consumption.
The coal industry of Illinois has its origins in the middle 19th century, when entrepreneurs such as Jacob Loose discovered coal in locations such as Sangamon County. Jacob Bunn contributed to the development of the Illinois coal industry, and was a founder and owner of the Western Coal & Mining Company of Illinois. About 68% of Illinois has coal-bearing strata of the Pennsylvanian geologic period. According to the Illinois State Geological Survey, 211 billion tons of bituminous coal are estimated to lie under the surface, having a total heating value greater than the estimated oil deposits in the Arabian Peninsula. However, this coal has a high sulfur content, which causes acid rain, unless special equipment is used to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions. Many Illinois power plants are not equipped to burn high-sulfur coal. In 1999, Illinois produced 40.4 million tons of coal, but only 17 million tons (42%) of Illinois coal was consumed in Illinois. Most of the coal produced in Illinois is exported to other states and countries. In 2008, Illinois exported three million tons of coal, and was projected to export nine million in 2011, as demand for energy grows in places such as China, India, and elsewhere in Asia and Europe. As of 2010, Illinois was ranked third in recoverable coal reserves at producing mines in the nation. Most of the coal produced in Illinois is exported to other states, while much of the coal burned for power in Illinois (21 million tons in 1998) is mined in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming.
Mattoon was chosen as the site for the Department of Energy's FutureGen project, a 275-megawatt experimental zero emission coal-burning power plant that the DOE just gave a second round of funding. In 2010, after a number of setbacks, the city of Mattoon backed out of the project.
Illinois is a leading refiner of petroleum in the American Midwest, with a combined crude oil distillation capacity of nearly 900,000 bbl/d (140,000 m/d). However, Illinois has very limited crude oil proved reserves that account for less than 1% of the U.S. total reserves. Residential heating is 81% natural gas compared to less than 1% heating oil. Illinois is ranked 14th in oil production among states, with a daily output of approximately 28,000 bbl (4,500 m) in 2005.
Nuclear power arguably began in Illinois with the Chicago Pile-1, the world's first artificial self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in the world's first nuclear reactor, built on the University of Chicago campus. There are six operating nuclear power plants in Illinois: Braidwood, Byron, Clinton, Dresden, LaSalle, and Quad Cities. With the exception of the single-unit Clinton plant, each of these facilities has two reactors. Three reactors have been permanently shut down and are in various stages of decommissioning: Dresden-1 and Zion-1 and 2. Illinois ranked first in the nation in 2010 in both nuclear capacity and nuclear generation. Generation from its nuclear power plants accounted for 12 percent of the nation's total. In 2007, 48% of Illinois's electricity was generated using nuclear power. The Morris Operation is the only de facto high-level radioactive waste storage site in the United States.
Illinois has seen growing interest in the use of wind power for electrical generation. Most of Illinois was rated in 2009 as "marginal or fair" for wind energy production by the U.S. Department of Energy, with some western sections rated "good" and parts of the south rated "poor". These ratings are for wind turbines with 50 m (160 ft) hub heights; newer wind turbines are taller, enabling them to reach stronger winds farther from the ground. As a result, more areas of Illinois have become prospective wind farm sites. As of September 2009, Illinois had 1116.06 MW of installed wind power nameplate capacity with another 741.9 MW under construction. Illinois ranked ninth among U.S. states in installed wind power capacity, and sixteenth by potential capacity. Large wind farms in Illinois include Twin Groves, Rail Splitter, EcoGrove, and Mendota Hills.
As of 2007, wind energy represented only 1.7% of Illinois's energy production, and it was estimated that wind power could provide 5–10% of the state's energy needs. Also, the Illinois General Assembly mandated in 2007 that by 2025, 25% of all electricity generated in Illinois is to come from renewable resources.
Illinois is ranked second in corn production among U.S. states, and Illinois corn is used to produce 40% of the ethanol consumed in the United States. The Archer Daniels Midland corporation in Decatur, Illinois, is the world's leading producer of ethanol from corn.
The National Corn-to-Ethanol Research Center (NCERC), the world's only facility dedicated to researching the ways and means of converting corn (maize) to ethanol is located on the campus of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is one of the partners in the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), a $500 million biofuels research project funded by petroleum giant BP.
Tax is collected by the Illinois Department of Revenue. State income tax is calculated by multiplying net income by a flat rate. In 1990, that rate was set at 3%, but in 2010, the General Assembly voted for a temporary increase in the rate to 5%; the new rate went into effect on January 1, 2011; the personal income rate partially sunset on January 1, 2015, to 3.75%, while the corporate income tax fell to 5.25%. Illinois failed to pass a budget from 2015 to 2017, after the 736-day budget impasse, a budget was passed in Illinois after lawmakers overturned Governor Bruce Rauner's veto; this budget raised the personal income rate to 4.95% and the corporate rate to 7%. There are two rates for state sales tax: 6.25% for general merchandise and 1% for qualifying food, drugs, and medical appliances. The property tax is a major source of tax revenue for local government taxing districts. The property tax is a local—not state—tax, imposed by local government taxing districts, which include counties, townships, municipalities, school districts, and special taxation districts. The property tax in Illinois is imposed only on real property.
On May 1, 2019, the Illinois Senate voted to approve a constitutional amendment that would have stricken language from the Illinois Constitution requiring a flat state income tax, in a 73–44 vote. If approved, the amendment would have allowed the state legislature to impose a graduated income tax based on annual income. The governor, J. B. Pritzker, approved the bill on May 27, 2019. It was scheduled for a 2020 general election ballot vote and required 60 percent voter approval to effectively amend the state constitution. The amendment was not approved by Illinoisans, with 55.1% of voters voting "No" on approval and 44.9% voting "Yes".
As of 2017 Chicago had the highest state and local sales tax rate for a U.S. city with a populations above 200,000, at 10.250%. The state of Illinois has the second highest rate of real estate tax: 2.31%, which is second only to New Jersey at 2.44%.
Toll roads are a de facto user tax on the citizens and visitors to the state of Illinois. Illinois ranks seventh out of the 11 states with the most miles of toll roads, at 282.1 miles. Chicago ranks fourth in most expensive toll roads in America by the mile, with the Chicago Skyway charging 51.2 cents per mile. Illinois also has the 11th highest gasoline tax by state, at 37.5 cents per gallon.
Illinois has numerous museums; the greatest concentration of these are in Chicago. Several museums in Chicago are ranked as some of the best in the world. These include the John G. Shedd Aquarium, the Field Museum of Natural History, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Adler Planetarium, and the Museum of Science and Industry.
The modern Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield is the largest and most attended presidential library in the country. The Illinois State Museum boasts a collection of 13.5 million objects that tell the story of Illinois life, land, people, and art. The ISM is among only 5% of the nation's museums that are accredited by the American Alliance of Museums. Other historical museums in the state include the Polish Museum of America in Chicago; Magnolia Manor in Cairo; Easley Pioneer Museum in Ipava; the Elihu Benjamin Washburne; Ulysses S. Grant Homes, both in Galena; and the Chanute Air Museum, located on the former Chanute Air Force Base in Rantoul.
The Chicago metropolitan area also hosts two zoos: The Brookfield Zoo, located about ten miles west of the city center in suburban Brookfield, contains more than 2,300 animals and covers 216 acres (87 ha). The Lincoln Park Zoo is located in Lincoln Park on Chicago's North Side, approximately 3 miles (4.8 km) north of the Loop. The zoo accounts for more than 35 acres (14 ha) of the park.
Illinois is a leader in music education, having hosted the Midwest Clinic International Band and Orchestra Conference since 1946, as well being home to the Illinois Music Educators Association (ILMEA, formerly IMEA), one of the largest professional music educator's organizations in the country. Each summer since 2004, Southern Illinois University Carbondale has played host to the Southern Illinois Music Festival, which presents dozens of performances throughout the region. Past featured artists include the Eroica Trio and violinist David Kim.
Chicago, in the northeast corner of the state, is a major center for music in the midwestern United States where distinctive forms of blues (greatly responsible for the future creation of rock and roll), and house music, a genre of electronic dance music, were developed.
The Great Migration of poor black workers from the South into the industrial cities brought traditional jazz and blues music to the city, resulting in Chicago blues and "Chicago-style" Dixieland jazz. Notable blues artists included Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, Howlin' Wolf and both Sonny Boy Williamsons; jazz greats included Nat King Cole, Gene Ammons, Benny Goodman, and Bud Freeman. Chicago is also well known for its soul music.
In the early 1930s, Gospel music began to gain popularity in Chicago due to Thomas A. Dorsey's contributions at Pilgrim Baptist Church.
In the 1980s and 1990s, heavy rock, punk, and hip hop also became popular in Chicago. Orchestras in Chicago include the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and the Chicago Sinfonietta.
John Hughes, who moved from Grosse Pointe to Northbrook, based many films of his in Chicago, and its suburbs. Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Home Alone, The Breakfast Club, and all his films take place in the fictional Shermer, Illinois (the original name of Northbrook was Shermerville, and Hughes's High School, Glenbrook North High School, is on Shermer Road). Most locations in his films include Glenbrook North, the former Maine North High School, the Ben Rose House in Highland Park, and the famous Home Alone house in Winnetka, Illinois.
As one of the United States' major metropolises, all major sports leagues have teams headquartered in Chicago.
Many minor league teams also call Illinois their home. They include:
The state features 13 athletic programs that compete in NCAA Division I, the highest level of U.S. college sports.
The two most prominent are the Illinois Fighting Illini and Northwestern Wildcats, both members of the Big Ten Conference and the only ones competing in one of the so-called "Power Five conferences". The Fighting Illini football team has won five national championships and three Rose Bowl Games, whereas the men's basketball team has won 17 conference seasons and played five Final Fours. Meanwhile, the Wildcats have won eight football conference championships and one Rose Bowl Game.
The Northern Illinois Huskies from DeKalb, Illinois compete in the Mid-American Conference winning four conference championships and earning a bid in the Orange Bowl along with producing Heisman candidate Jordan Lynch at quarterback. The Huskies are the state's only other team competing in the Football Bowl Subdivision, the top level of NCAA football.
Four schools have football programs that compete in the second level of Division I football, the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS). The Illinois State Redbirds (Normal, adjacent to Bloomington) and Southern Illinois Salukis (representing Southern Illinois University's main campus in Carbondale) are members of the Missouri Valley Conference (MVC) for non-football sports and the Missouri Valley Football Conference (MVFC). The Western Illinois Leathernecks (Macomb) are full members of the Summit League, which does not sponsor football, and also compete in the MVFC. The Eastern Illinois Panthers (Charleston) are members of the Ohio Valley Conference (OVC).
The city of Chicago is home to four Division I programs that do not sponsor football. The DePaul Blue Demons, with main campuses in Lincoln Park and the Loop, are members of the Big East Conference. The Loyola Ramblers, with their main campus straddling the Edgewater and Rogers Park community areas on the city's far north side, compete in the Atlantic 10 Conference. The UIC Flames, from the Near West Side next to the Loop, are in the MVC. The Chicago State Cougars, from the city's south side, are one of only two all-sports independents in Division I after leaving the Western Athletic Conference in 2022.
Finally, two non-football Division I programs are located downstate. The Bradley Braves (Peoria) are MVC members, and the SIU Edwardsville Cougars (in the Metro East region across the Mississippi River from St. Louis) compete in the OVC.
The city was formerly home to several other teams that either failed to survive or belonged to leagues that folded.
The NFL's Arizona Cardinals, who currently play in the Phoenix suburb of Glendale, Arizona, played in Chicago as the Chicago Cardinals, until moving to St. Louis, Missouri after the 1959 season. An NBA expansion team known as the Chicago Packers in 1961–1962, and as the Chicago Zephyrs the following year, moved to Baltimore after the 1962–1963 season. The franchise is now known as the Washington Wizards.
The Peoria Chiefs are a High-A minor league baseball team affiliated with the St. Louis Cardinals. The Schaumburg Boomers, Southern Illinois Miners, Gateway Grizzlies, Joliet Slammers and Windy City ThunderBolts all belong to the independent Frontier League. Additionally, the Kane County Cougars play in the American Association and the Lake County Fielders were members of the former North American League.
In addition to the Chicago Wolves, the AHL also has the Rockford IceHogs serving as the AHL affiliate of the Chicago Blackhawks. The second incarnation of the Peoria Rivermen plays in the SPHL.
Motor racing oval tracks at the Chicagoland Speedway in Joliet, the Chicago Motor Speedway in Cicero and the Gateway International Raceway in Madison, near St. Louis, have hosted NASCAR, CART, and IRL races, whereas the Sports Car Club of America, among other national and regional road racing clubs, have visited the Autobahn Country Club in Joliet, the Blackhawk Farms Raceway in South Beloit and the former Meadowdale International Raceway in Carpentersville. Illinois also has several short tracks and dragstrips. The dragstrip at Gateway International Raceway and the Route 66 Raceway, which sits on the same property as the Chicagoland Speedway, both host NHRA drag races.
Illinois features several golf courses, such as Olympia Fields, Medinah, Midlothian, Cog Hill, and Conway Farms, which have often hosted the BMW Championship, Western Open, and Women's Western Open.
Also, the state has hosted 13 editions of the U.S. Open (latest at Olympia Fields in 2003), six editions of the PGA Championship (latest at Medinah in 2006), three editions of the U.S. Women's Open (latest at The Merit Club), the 2009 Solheim Cup (at Rich Harvest Farms), and the 2012 Ryder Cup (at Medinah).
The John Deere Classic is a regular PGA Tour event played in the Quad Cities since 1971, whereas the Encompass Championship is a Champions Tour event since 2013. Previously, the LPGA State Farm Classic was an LPGA Tour event from 1976 to 2011.
The Illinois state parks system began in 1908 with what is now Fort Massac State Park, becoming the first park in a system encompassing more than 60 parks and about the same number of recreational and wildlife areas.
Areas under the protection of the National Park Service include: the Illinois and Michigan Canal National Heritage Corridor near Lockport, the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail, the Lincoln Home National Historic Site in Springfield, the Mormon Pioneer National Historic Trail, the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, the American Discovery Trail, the Pullman National Monument, and New Philadelphia Town Site. The federal government also manages the Shawnee National Forest and the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie.
In a 2020 study, Illinois was ranked as the 4th easiest state for citizens to vote in.
The government of Illinois, under the Constitution of Illinois, has three branches of government: executive, legislative and judicial. The executive branch is split into several statewide elected offices, with the governor as chief executive. Legislative functions are granted to the Illinois General Assembly. The judiciary is composed of the Supreme Court and lower courts.
The Illinois General Assembly is the state legislature, composed of the 118-member Illinois House of Representatives and the 59-member Illinois Senate. The members of the General Assembly are elected at the beginning of each even-numbered year. The Illinois Compiled Statutes (ILCS) are the codified statutes of a general and permanent nature.
The executive branch is composed of six elected officers and their offices as well as numerous other departments. The six elected officers are: Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State, Comptroller, and Treasurer. The government of Illinois has numerous departments, agencies, boards and commissions, but the so-called code departments provide most of the state's services.
The Judiciary of Illinois is the unified court system of Illinois. It consists of the Supreme Court, Appellate Court, and Circuit Courts. The Supreme Court oversees the administration of the court system.
The administrative divisions of Illinois are counties, townships, precincts, cities, towns, villages, and special-purpose districts. The basic subdivision of Illinois are the 102 counties. Eighty-five of the 102 counties are in turn divided into townships and precincts. Municipal governments are the cities, villages, and incorporated towns. Some localities possess home rule, which allows them to govern themselves to a certain extent.
Illinois is a Democratic stronghold. Historically, Illinois was a political swing state, with near-parity existing between the Republican and the Democratic parties. However, in recent elections, the Democratic Party has gained ground, and Illinois has come to be seen as a solid "blue" state in presidential campaigns. Votes from Chicago and most of Cook County have long been strongly Democratic. However, the "collar counties" (the suburban counties surrounding Cook County) can be seen as moderate voting districts. College towns like Carbondale, Champaign, and Normal also lean Democratic.
Republicans continue to prevail in the rural areas of northern and central Illinois, as well as southern Illinois outside of East St. Louis. From 1920 until 1972, Illinois was carried by the victor of each of these 14 presidential elections. In fact, the state was long seen as a national bellwether, supporting the winner in every election in the 20th century, except for 1916 and 1976. By contrast, Illinois has trended more toward the Democratic party, and has voted for their presidential candidates in the last six elections; in 2000, George W. Bush became the first Republican to win the presidency without carrying either Illinois or Vermont. Local politician and Chicago resident Barack Obama easily won the state's 21 electoral votes in 2008, with 61.9% of the vote. In 2010, incumbent governor Pat Quinn was re-elected with 47% of the vote, while Republican Mark Kirk was elected to the Senate with 48% of the vote. In 2012, President Obama easily carried Illinois again, with 58% to Republican candidate Mitt Romney's 41%. In 2014, Republican Bruce Rauner defeated Governor Quinn 50% to 46% to become Illinois's first Republican governor in 12 years after being sworn in on January 12, 2015, while Democratic senator Dick Durbin was re-elected with 53% of the vote. In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried Illinois with 55% of the vote, and Tammy Duckworth defeated incumbent Mark Kirk 54% to 40%. George W. Bush and Donald Trump are the only Republican presidential candidates to win without carrying either Illinois or Vermont. In 2018, Democrat J. B. Pritzker defeated the incumbent Bruce Rauner for the governorship with 54% of the vote.
Politics in the state have been infamous for highly visible corruption cases, as well as for crusading reformers, such as governors Adlai Stevenson and James R. Thompson. In 2006, former governor George Ryan was convicted of racketeering and bribery, leading to a six-and-a-half-year prison sentence. On December 7, 2011, former governor Rod Blagojevich was sentenced to 14 years in prison for allegations that he conspired to sell the vacated Senate seat left by President Barack Obama to the highest bidder. Blagojevich had earlier been impeached and convicted by the legislature, resulting in his removal from office. In the late 20th century, Congressman Dan Rostenkowski was imprisoned for mail fraud; former governor and federal judge Otto Kerner, Jr. was imprisoned for bribery; Secretary of State Paul Powell was investigated and found to have gained great wealth through bribes, and State Auditor of Public Accounts (Comptroller) Orville Hodge was imprisoned for embezzlement. In 1912, William Lorimer, the GOP boss of Chicago, was expelled from the U.S. Senate for bribery and in 1921, Governor Len Small was found to have defrauded the state of a million dollars.
Illinois has shown a strong presence in presidential elections. Three presidents have claimed Illinois as their political base when running for president: Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and most recently Barack Obama. Lincoln was born in Kentucky, but he moved to Illinois at age 21. He served in the General Assembly and represented the 7th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives before his election to the presidency in 1860. Ulysses S. Grant was born in Ohio and had a military career that precluded settling down, but on the eve of the Civil War and approaching middle age, he moved to Illinois and thus utilized the state as his home and political base when running for president. Barack Obama was born in Hawaii and made Illinois his home after graduating from law school, and later represented Illinois in the U.S. Senate. He then became president in 2008, running as a candidate from his Illinois base.
Ronald Reagan was born in Illinois, in the city of Tampico, raised in Dixon, Illinois, and educated at Eureka College, outside Peoria. Reagan later moved to California during his young adulthood. He then became an actor, and later became California's Governor before being elected president.
Hillary Clinton was born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago and became the first woman to represent a major political party in the general election of the U.S. presidency. Clinton ran from a platform based in New York State.
Eleven African-Americans have served as members of the United States Senate. Of which three have represented Illinois, the most of any single state: Carol Moseley-Braun, Barack Obama, and Roland Burris, who was appointed to replace Obama after his election to the presidency. Moseley-Braun was the first African-American woman to become a U.S. Senator.
Three families from Illinois have played particularly prominent roles in the Democratic Party, gaining both statewide and national fame.
The Stevenson family, initially rooted in central Illinois and later based in the Chicago metropolitan area, has provided four generations of Illinois officeholders.
The Daley family's powerbase was in Chicago.
The Pritzker family is based in Chicago and have played important roles in both the private and the public sectors.
The Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) is autonomous of the governor and the state legislature, and administers public education in the state. Local municipalities and their respective school districts operate individual public schools, but the ISBE audits performance of public schools with the Illinois School Report Card. The ISBE also makes recommendations to state leaders concerning education spending and policies.
Education is compulsory for ages 7–17 in Illinois. Schools are commonly, but not exclusively, divided into three tiers of primary and secondary education: elementary school, middle school or junior high school, and high school. District territories are often complex in structure. Many areas in the state are actually located in two school districts—one for high school, the other for elementary and middle schools. And such districts do not necessarily share boundaries. A given high school may have several elementary districts that feed into it, yet some of those feeder districts may themselves feed into multiple high school districts.
Using the criterion established by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, there are eleven "National Universities" in the state.
The University of Chicago is continuously ranked as one of the world's top ten universities on various independent university rankings, and its Booth School of Business, along with Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management consistently rank within the top five graduate business schools in the country and top ten globally. The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is often ranked among the best engineering schools in the world and in United States.
As of 19 August 2010, six of these rank in the "first tier" among the top 500 National Universities in the nation, as determined by the U.S. News & World Report rankings: the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Loyola University Chicago, the Illinois Institute of Technology, DePaul University, University of Illinois Chicago, Illinois State University, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and Northern Illinois University.
Illinois also has more than twenty additional accredited four-year universities, both public and private, and dozens of small liberal arts colleges across the state. Additionally, Illinois supports 49 public community colleges in the Illinois Community College System.
Schools in Illinois are funded primarily by property taxes, based on state assessment of property values, rather than direct state contributions. Scholar Tracy Steffes has described Illinois public education as historically "inequitable", a system where one of "the wealthiest of states" is "the stingiest in its support for education". There have been several attempts to reform school funding in Illinois. The most notable attempt came in 1973 with the adoption of the Illinois Resource Equalizer Formula, a measure through which it was hoped funding could be collected and distributed to Illinois schools more equitably. However, opposition from affluent Illinois communities who objected to having to pay for the less well-off school districts (many of them Black majority communities, produced by redlining, white flight, and other "soft" segregation methods) resulted in the formula's abolition in the late 1980s.
Because of its central location and its proximity to the Rust Belt and Grain Belt, Illinois is a national crossroads for air, auto, rail, and truck traffic.
From 1962 until 1998, Chicago's O'Hare International Airport (ORD) was the busiest airport in the world, measured both in terms of total flights and passengers. While it was surpassed by Atlanta's Hartsfield in 1998 (as Chicago splits its air traffic between O'Hare and Midway airports, while Atlanta uses only one airport), with 59.3 million domestic passengers annually, along with 11.4 million international passengers in 2008, O'Hare consistently remains one of the two or three busiest airports globally, and in some years still ranks number one in total flights. It is a major hub for both United Airlines and American Airlines, and a major airport expansion project is currently underway. Midway Airport (MDW), which had been the busiest airport in the world at one point until it was supplanted by O'Hare as the busiest airport in 1962, is now the secondary airport in the Chicago metropolitan area and still ranks as one of the nation's busiest airports. Midway is a major hub for Southwest Airlines and services many other carriers as well. Midway served 17.3 million domestic and international passengers in 2008.
Illinois has an extensive passenger and freight rail transportation network. Chicago is a national Amtrak hub and in-state passengers are served by Amtrak's Illinois Service, featuring the Chicago to Carbondale Illini and Saluki, the Chicago to Quincy Carl Sandburg and Illinois Zephyr, and the Chicago to St. Louis Lincoln Service. Currently there is trackwork on the Chicago–St. Louis line to bring the maximum speed up to 110 mph (180 km/h), which would reduce the trip time by an hour and a half. Nearly every North American railway meets at Chicago, making it the largest and most active rail hub in the country. Extensive heavy rail service is provided in the city proper and some immediate suburbs by the Chicago Transit Authority's 'L' system. One of the largest suburban commuter rail system in the United States, operated by Metra, uses existing rail lines to provide direct commuter rail access for hundreds of suburbs to the city and beyond.
In addition to the state's rail lines, the Mississippi River and Illinois River provide major transportation routes for the state's agricultural interests. Lake Michigan gives Illinois access to the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Saint Lawrence Seaway.
The Interstate Highways in Illinois are all segments of the Interstate Highway System that are owned and maintained by the state.
Illinois has the distinction of having the most primary (two-digit) interstates pass through it among all the 50 states with 13. Illinois also ranks third among the fifty states with the most interstate mileage, coming in after California and Texas, which are much bigger states in area.
Major U.S. Interstate highways crossing the state include: Interstate 24 (I-24), I-39, I-41, I-55, I-57, I-64, I-70, I-72, I-74, I-80, I-88, I-90, and I-94.
The Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) is responsible for maintaining the U.S Highways in Illinois. The system in Illinois consists of 21 primary highways.
Among the U.S. highways that pass through the state, the primary ones are: US 6, US 12, US 14, US 20, US 24, US 30, US 34, US 36, US 40, US 41, US 45, US 50, US 51, US 52, US 54, US 60, US 62, and US 67.
Due to its central location, Illinois sees numerous intercity bus services primarily connecting east and west. The Chicago Bus Station is the busiest intercity bus station in the state. The following carriers provide scheduled service: Amtrak Thruway, Barons Bus Lines, Burlington Trailways, Flixbus, Greyhound Lines, Indian Trails, Miller Transportation (Hoosier Ride), Peoria Charter Coach Company, Van Galder Bus Company, and Wisconsin Coach Lines.
40°N 89°W / 40°N 89°W / 40; -89 (State of Illinois) | [
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"text": "Illinois (/ˌɪlɪˈnɔɪ/ IL-in-OY) is a state in the Midwestern United States. The Great Lakes are to its northeast, the Mississippi River to its west, and the Wabash and Ohio rivers to its south. Its largest metropolitan areas are Chicago and the Metro East region of Greater St. Louis. Other metropolitan areas include Peoria and Rockford, as well as Springfield, its capital, and Champaign-Urbana, home to the main campus of the state's flagship university. Of the fifty U.S. states, Illinois has the fifth-largest gross domestic product (GDP), the sixth-largest population, and the 25th-largest land area.",
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"text": "Illinois has a highly diverse economy, with the global city of Chicago in the northeast, major industrial and agricultural hubs in the north and center, and natural resources such as coal, timber, and petroleum in the south. Owing to its central location and favorable geography, the state is a major transportation hub: the Port of Chicago has access to the Atlantic Ocean through the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence Seaway and to the Gulf of Mexico from the Mississippi River via the Illinois Waterway. Chicago has been the nation's railroad hub since the 1860s, and its O'Hare International Airport has been among the world's busiest airports for decades. Illinois has long been considered a microcosm of the United States and a bellwether in American culture, exemplified by the phrase Will it play in Peoria?.",
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{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "What is now Illinois was inhabited for thousands of years by various indigenous cultures, including the advanced civilization centered in the Cahokia region. The French were the first Europeans to arrive, settling near the Mississippi River in the 17th century in the region they called Illinois Country, as part of the sprawling colony of New France. Following U.S. independence in 1783, American settlers began arriving from Kentucky via the Ohio River, and the population grew from south to north. Illinois was part of the United States' oldest territory, the Northwest Territory, and in 1818 it achieved statehood. The Erie Canal brought increased commercial activity in the Great Lakes, and the small settlement of Chicago became one of the fastest growing cities in the world, benefiting from its location as one of the few natural harbors in southwestern Lake Michigan. The invention of the self-scouring steel plow by Illinoisan John Deere turned the state's rich prairie into some of the world's most productive and valuable farmland, attracting immigrant farmers from Germany and Sweden. In the mid-19th century, the Illinois and Michigan Canal and a sprawling railroad network greatly facilitated trade, commerce, and settlement, making the state a transportation hub for the nation.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "By 1900, the growth of industrial jobs in the northern cities and coal mining in the central and southern areas attracted immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. Illinois became one of America's most industrialized states and remains a major manufacturing center. The Great Migration from the South established a large community of African Americans, particularly in Chicago, who founded the city's famous jazz and blues cultures. Chicago became a leading cultural, economic, and population center and is today one of the world's major commercial centers; its metropolitan area, informally referred to as Chicagoland, holds about 65% of the state's 12.8 million residents.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Two World Heritage Sites are in Illinois, the ancient Cahokia Mounds, and part of the Wright architecture site. Major centers of learning include the University of Chicago, University of Illinois, and Northwestern University. A wide variety of protected areas seek to conserve Illinois' natural and cultural resources. Historically, three U.S. presidents have been elected while residents of Illinois: Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and Barack Obama; additionally, Ronald Reagan was born and raised in the state. Today, Illinois honors Lincoln with its official state slogan Land of Lincoln. The state is the site of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield and the future home of the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "\"Illinois\" is the modern spelling for the early French Catholic missionaries and explorers' name for the Illinois Native Americans, a name that was spelled in many different ways in the early records.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "American scholars previously thought the name Illinois meant 'man' or 'men' in the Miami-Illinois language, with the original iliniwek transformed via French into Illinois. This etymology is not supported by the Illinois language, as the word for \"man\" is ireniwa, and plural of \"man\" is ireniwaki. The name Illiniwek has also been said to mean 'tribe of superior men', which is a false etymology. The name Illinois derives from the Miami-Illinois verb irenwe·wa 'he speaks the regular way'. This was taken into the Ojibwe language, perhaps in the Ottawa dialect, and modified into ilinwe· (pluralized as ilinwe·k). The French borrowed these forms, spelling the /we/ ending as -ois, a transliteration of that sound in the French of that time. The current spelling form, Illinois, began to appear in the early 1670s, when French colonists had settled in the western area. The Illinois's name for themselves, as attested in all three of the French missionary-period dictionaries of Illinois, was Inoka, of unknown meaning and unrelated to the other terms.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "American Indians of successive cultures lived along the waterways of the Illinois area for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans. The Koster Site has been excavated and demonstrates 7,000 years of continuous habitation. Cahokia, the largest regional chiefdom and Urban Center of the Pre-Columbian Mississippian culture, was located near present-day Collinsville, Illinois. They built an urban complex of more than 100 platform and burial mounds, a 50-acre (20 ha) plaza larger than 35 football fields, and a woodhenge of sacred cedar, all in a planned design expressing the culture's cosmology. Monks Mound, the center of the site, is the largest Pre-Columbian structure north of the Valley of Mexico. It is 100 ft (30 m) high, 951 ft (290 m) long, 836 ft (255 m) wide, and covers 13.8 acres (5.6 ha). It contains about 814,000 cu yd (622,000 m) of earth. It was topped by a structure thought to have measured about 105 ft (32 m) in length and 48 ft (15 m) in width, covered an area 5,000 sq ft (460 m), and been as much as 50 ft (15 m) high, making its peak 150 ft (46 m) above the level of the plaza. The finely crafted ornaments and tools recovered by archaeologists at Cahokia include elaborate ceramics, finely sculptured stonework, carefully embossed and engraved copper and mica sheets, and one funeral blanket for an important chief fashioned from 20,000 shell beads. These artifacts indicate that Cahokia was truly an urban center, with clustered housing, markets, and specialists in toolmaking, hide dressing, potting, jewelry making, shell engraving, weaving and salt making.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The civilization vanished in the 15th century for unknown reasons, but historians and archeologists have speculated that the people depleted the area of resources. Many indigenous tribes engaged in constant warfare. According to Suzanne Austin Alchon, \"At one site in the central Illinois River valley, one third of all adults died as a result of violent injuries.\" The next major power in the region was the Illinois Confederation or Illini, a political alliance. As the Illini declined during the Beaver Wars era, members of the Algonquian-speaking Potawatomi, Miami, Sauk, and other tribes including the Fox (Meskwaki), Iowa, Kickapoo, Mascouten, Piankeshaw, Shawnee, Wea, and Winnebago (Ho-Chunk) came into the area from the east and north around the Great Lakes.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet explored the Illinois River in 1673. Marquette soon after founded a mission at the Grand Village of the Illinois in Illinois Country. In 1680, French explorers under René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle and Henri de Tonti constructed a fort at the site of present-day Peoria, and in 1682, a fort atop Starved Rock in today's Starved Rock State Park. French Empire Canadiens came south to settle particularly along the Mississippi River, and Illinois was part of first New France, and then of La Louisiane until 1763, when it passed to the British with their defeat of France in the Seven Years' War. The small French settlements continued, although many French migrated west to Ste. Genevieve and St. Louis, Missouri, to evade British rule.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "A few British soldiers were posted in Illinois, but few British or American settlers moved there, as the Crown made it part of the territory reserved for Indians west of the Appalachians, and then part of the British Province of Quebec. In 1778, George Rogers Clark claimed Illinois County for Virginia. In a compromise, Virginia (and other states that made various claims) ceded the area to the new United States in the 1780s and it became part of the Northwest Territory, administered by the federal government and later organized as states.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The Illinois-Wabash Company was an early claimant to much of Illinois. The Illinois Territory was created on February 3, 1809, with its capital at Kaskaskia, an early French settlement.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "During the discussions leading up to Illinois's admission to the Union, the proposed northern boundary of the state was moved twice. The original provisions of the Northwest Ordinance had specified a boundary that would have been tangent to the southern tip of Lake Michigan. Such a boundary would have left Illinois with no shoreline on Lake Michigan at all. However, as Indiana had successfully been granted a 10 mi (16 km) northern extension of its boundary to provide it with a usable lakefront, the original bill for Illinois statehood, submitted to Congress on January 23, 1818, stipulated a northern border at the same latitude as Indiana's, which is defined as 10 miles north of the southernmost extremity of Lake Michigan. However, the Illinois delegate, Nathaniel Pope, wanted more, and lobbied to have the boundary moved further north. The final bill passed by Congress included an amendment to shift the border to 42° 30' north, which is approximately 51 mi (82 km) north of the Indiana northern border. This shift added 8,500 sq mi (22,000 km) to the state, including the lead mining region near Galena. More importantly, it added nearly 50 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline and the Chicago River. Pope and others envisioned a canal that would connect the Chicago and Illinois rivers and thus connect the Great Lakes to the Mississippi.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In 1818, Illinois became the 21st U.S. state. The capital remained at Kaskaskia, headquartered in a small building rented by the state. In 1819, Vandalia became the capital, and over the next 18 years, three separate buildings were built to serve successively as the capitol building. In 1837, the state legislators representing Sangamon County, under the leadership of state representative Abraham Lincoln, succeeded in having the capital moved to Springfield, where a fifth capitol building was constructed. A sixth capitol building was erected in 1867, which continues to serve as the Illinois capitol today.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Though it was ostensibly a \"free state\", there was nonetheless slavery in Illinois. The ethnic French had owned black slaves since the 1720s, and American settlers had already brought slaves into the area from Kentucky. Slavery was nominally banned by the Northwest Ordinance, but that was not enforced for those already holding slaves. When Illinois became a state in 1818, the Ordinance no longer applied, and about 900 slaves were held in the state. As the southern part of the state, later known as \"Egypt\" or \"Little Egypt\", was largely settled by migrants from the South, the section was hostile to free blacks. Settlers were allowed to bring slaves with them for labor, but, in 1822, state residents voted against making slavery legal. Still, most residents opposed allowing free blacks as permanent residents. Some settlers brought in slaves seasonally or as house servants. The Illinois Constitution of 1848 was written with a provision for exclusionary laws to be passed. In 1853, John A. Logan helped pass a law to prohibit all African Americans, including freedmen, from settling in the state.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The winter of 1830–1831 is called the \"Winter of the Deep Snow\"; a sudden, deep snowfall blanketed the state, making travel impossible for the rest of the winter, and many travelers perished. Several severe winters followed, including the \"Winter of the Sudden Freeze\". On December 20, 1836, a fast-moving cold front passed through, freezing puddles in minutes and killing many travelers who could not reach shelter. The adverse weather resulted in crop failures in the northern part of the state. The southern part of the state shipped food north, and this may have contributed to its name, \"Little Egypt\", after the Biblical story of Joseph in Egypt supplying grain to his brothers.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In 1832, the Black Hawk War was fought in Illinois and present-day Wisconsin between the United States and the Sauk, Fox (Meskwaki), and Kickapoo Indian tribes. It represents the end of Indian resistance to white settlement in the Chicago region. The Indians had been forced to leave their homes and move to Iowa in 1831; when they attempted to return, they were attacked and eventually defeated by U.S. militia. The survivors were forced back to Iowa.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "By 1839, the Latter Day Saints had founded a utopian city called Nauvoo, formerly called Commerce. Located in Hancock County along the Mississippi River, Nauvoo flourished and, by 1844, briefly surpassed Chicago for the position of the state's largest city. But in that same year, the Latter Day Saint movement founder, Joseph Smith, was killed in the Carthage Jail, about 30 miles away from Nauvoo. Following a succession crisis, Brigham Young led most Latter Day Saints out of Illinois in a mass exodus to present-day Utah; after close to six years of rapid development, Nauvoo quickly declined afterward.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "After it was established in 1833, Chicago gained prominence as a Great Lakes port, and then as an Illinois and Michigan Canal port after 1848, and as a rail hub soon afterward. By 1857, Chicago was Illinois's largest city. With the tremendous growth of mines and factories in the state in the 19th century, Illinois was the ground for the formation of labor unions in the United States.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In 1847, after lobbying by Dorothea L. Dix, Illinois became one of the first states to establish a system of state-supported treatment of mental illness and disabilities, replacing local almshouses. Dix came into this effort after having met J. O. King, a Jacksonville, Illinois businessman, who invited her to Illinois, where he had been working to build an asylum for the insane. With the lobbying expertise of Dix, plans for the Jacksonville State Hospital (now known as the Jacksonville Developmental Center) were signed into law on March 1, 1847.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "During the American Civil War, Illinois ranked fourth in soldiers who served (more than 250,000) in the Union Army, a figure surpassed by only New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Beginning with President Abraham Lincoln's first call for troops and continuing throughout the war, Illinois mustered 150 infantry regiments, which were numbered from the 7th to the 156th regiments. Seventeen cavalry regiments were also gathered, as well as two light artillery regiments. The town of Cairo, at the southern tip of the state at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, served as a strategically important supply base and training center for the Union army. For several months, both General Grant and Admiral Foote had headquarters in Cairo.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "During the Civil War, and more so afterwards, Chicago's population skyrocketed, which increased its prominence. The Pullman Strike and Haymarket Riot, in particular, greatly influenced the development of the American labor movement. From Sunday, October 8, 1871, until Tuesday, October 10, 1871, the Great Chicago Fire burned in downtown Chicago, destroying four sq mi (10 km).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "At the turn of the 20th century, Illinois had a population of nearly 5 million. Many people from other parts of the country were attracted to the state by employment caused by the expanding industrial base. Whites were 98% of the state's population. Bolstered by continued immigration from southern and eastern Europe, and by the African-American Great Migration from the South, Illinois grew and emerged as one of the most important states in the union. By the end of the century, the population had reached 12.4 million.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The Century of Progress World's fair was held at Chicago in 1933. Oil strikes in Marion County and Crawford County led to a boom in 1937, and by 1939, Illinois ranked fourth in U.S. oil production. Illinois manufactured 6.1 percent of total United States military armaments produced during World War II, ranking seventh among the 48 states. Chicago became an ocean port with the opening of the Saint Lawrence Seaway in 1959. The seaway and the Illinois Waterway connected Chicago to both the Mississippi River and the Atlantic Ocean. In 1960, Ray Kroc opened the first McDonald's franchise in Des Plaines (which still exists as a museum, with a working McDonald's across the street).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Illinois had a prominent role in the emergence of the nuclear age. In 1942, as part of the Manhattan Project, the University of Chicago conducted the first sustained nuclear chain reaction. In 1957, Argonne National Laboratory, near Chicago, activated the first experimental nuclear power generating system in the United States. By 1960, the first privately financed nuclear plant in the United States, Dresden 1, was dedicated near Morris. In 1967, Fermilab, a national nuclear research facility near Batavia, opened a particle accelerator, which was the world's largest for over 40 years. With eleven plants currently operating, Illinois leads all states in the amount of electricity generated from nuclear power.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In 1961, Illinois became the first state in the nation to adopt the recommendation of the American Law Institute and pass a comprehensive criminal code revision that repealed the law against sodomy. The code also abrogated common law crimes and established an age of consent of 18. The state's fourth constitution was adopted in 1970, replacing the 1870 document.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The first Farm Aid concert was held in Champaign to benefit American farmers, in 1985. The worst upper Mississippi River flood of the century, the Great Flood of 1993, inundated many towns and thousands of acres of farmland.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Illinois entered the 21st century under Republican Governor George Ryan. Near the end of his term in January 2003, following a string of high-profile exonerations, Ryan commuted all death sentences in the state.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The 2002 election brought Democrat Rod Blagojevich to the governor's mansion. It also brought future president Barack Obama into a committee leadership position in the Illinois Senate, where he drafted the Health Care Justice Act, a forerunner of Obamacare. Obama's election to the presidency in Blagojevich's second term set off a chain of events culminating in Blagojevich's impeachment, trial, and subsequent criminal conviction and imprisonment, making Blagojevich the second consecutive Illinois governor to be convicted on federal corruption charges.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Blagojevich's replacement Pat Quinn was defeated by Republican Bruce Rauner in the 2014 election. Disagreements between the governor and legislature over budgetary policy led to the Illinois Budget Impasse, a 793-day period stretching from 2015 to 2018 in which the state had no budget and struggled to pay its bills.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "On August 28, 2017, Rauner signed a bill into law that prohibited state and local police from arresting anyone solely due to their immigration status or due to federal detainers. Some fellow Republicans criticized Rauner for his action, claiming the bill made Illinois a sanctuary state.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In the 2018 election, Rauner was replaced by J. B. Pritzker, returning the state government to a Democratic trifecta. In January 2020 the state legalized marijuana.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "On March 9, 2020, Pritzker issued a disaster proclamation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He ended the state of emergency in May 2023.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "During the early part of the Paleozoic Era, the area that would one day become Illinois was submerged beneath a shallow sea and located near the Equator. Diverse marine life lived at this time, including trilobites, brachiopods, and crinoids. Changing environmental conditions led to the formation of large coal swamps in the Carboniferous.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Illinois was above sea level for at least part of the Mesozoic, but by its end was again submerged by the Western Interior Seaway. This receded by the Eocene Epoch.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "During the Pleistocene Epoch, vast ice sheets covered much of Illinois, with only the Driftless Area remaining exposed. These glaciers carved the basin of Lake Michigan and left behind traces of ancient glacial lakes and moraines.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Illinois is located in the Midwest region of the United States and is one of the eight states in the Great Lakes region of North America (which also includes Ontario, Canada).",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Illinois's eastern border with Indiana consists of a north–south line at 87° 31′ 30″ west longitude in Lake Michigan at the north, to the Wabash River in the south above Post Vincennes. The Wabash River continues as the eastern/southeastern border with Indiana until the Wabash enters the Ohio River. This marks the beginning of Illinois's southern border with Kentucky, which runs along the northern shoreline of the Ohio River. Most of the western border with Missouri and Iowa is the Mississippi River; Kaskaskia is an exclave of Illinois, lying west of the Mississippi and reachable only from Missouri. The state's northern border with Wisconsin is fixed at 42° 30′ north latitude. The northeastern border of Illinois lies in Lake Michigan, within which Illinois shares a water boundary with the state of Michigan, as well as Wisconsin and Indiana.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Though Illinois lies entirely in the Interior Plains, it does have some minor variation in its elevation. In extreme northwestern Illinois, the Driftless Area, a region of unglaciated and therefore higher and more rugged topography, occupies a small part of the state. Southern Illinois includes the hilly areas around the Shawnee National Forest.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Charles Mound, located in the Driftless region, has the state's highest natural elevation above sea level at 1,235 ft (376 m). Other highlands include the Shawnee Hills in the south, and there is varying topography along its rivers; the Illinois River bisects the state northeast to southwest. The floodplain on the Mississippi River from Alton to the Kaskaskia River is known as the American Bottom.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Illinois has three major geographical divisions. Northern Illinois is dominated by Chicago metropolitan area, or Chicagoland, which is the city of Chicago and its suburbs, and the adjoining exurban area into which the metropolis is expanding. As defined by the federal government, the Chicago metro area includes several counties in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin, and has a population of over 9.8 million. Chicago itself is a cosmopolitan city, densely populated, industrialized, the transportation hub of the nation, and settled by a wide variety of ethnic groups. The city of Rockford, Illinois's third-largest city and center of the state's fourth largest metropolitan area, sits along Interstates 39 and 90 some 75 mi (121 km) northwest of Chicago. The Quad Cities region, located along the Mississippi River in northern Illinois, had a population of 381,342 in 2011.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The midsection of Illinois is the second major division, called Central Illinois. Historically prairie, it is now mainly agricultural and known as the Heart of Illinois. It is characterized by small towns and medium–small cities. The western section (west of the Illinois River) was originally part of the Military Tract of 1812 and forms the conspicuous western bulge of the state. Agriculture, particularly corn and soybeans, as well as educational institutions and manufacturing centers, figure prominently in Central Illinois. Cities include Peoria; Springfield, the state capital; Quincy; Decatur; Bloomington-Normal; and Champaign-Urbana.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The third division is Southern Illinois, comprising the area south of U.S. Route 50, including Little Egypt, near the juncture of the Mississippi River and Ohio River. Southern Illinois is the site of the ancient city of Cahokia, as well as the site of the first state capital at Kaskaskia, which today is separated from the rest of the state by the Mississippi River. This region has a somewhat warmer winter climate, different variety of crops (including some cotton farming in the past), more rugged topography (due to the area remaining unglaciated during the Illinoian Stage, unlike most of the rest of the state), as well as small-scale oil deposits and coal mining. The Illinois suburbs of St. Louis, such as East St. Louis, are located in this region, and collectively, they are known as the Metro-East. The other somewhat significant concentration of population in Southern Illinois is the Carbondale-Marion-Herrin, Illinois Combined Statistical Area centered on Carbondale and Marion, a two-county area that is home to 123,272 residents. A portion of southeastern Illinois is part of the extended Evansville, Indiana, Metro Area, locally referred to as the Tri-State with Indiana and Kentucky. Seven Illinois counties are in the area.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "In addition to these three, largely latitudinally defined divisions, all of the region outside the Chicago metropolitan area is often called \"downstate\" Illinois. This term is flexible, but is generally meant to mean everything outside the influence of the Chicago area. Thus, some cities in Northern Illinois, such as DeKalb, which is west of Chicago, and Rockford—which is actually north of Chicago—are sometimes incorrectly considered to be 'downstate'.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Illinois has a climate that varies widely throughout the year. Because of its nearly 400-mile distance between its northernmost and southernmost extremes, as well as its mid-continental situation, most of Illinois has a humid continental climate (Köppen climate classification Dfa), with hot, humid summers and cold winters. The southern part of the state, from about Carbondale southward, has a humid subtropical climate (Koppen Cfa), with more moderate winters. Average yearly precipitation for Illinois varies from just over 48 in (1,219 mm) at the southern tip to around 35 in (889 mm) in the northern portion of the state. Normal annual snowfall exceeds 38 in (965 mm) in the Chicago area, while the southern portion of the state normally receives less than 14 in (356 mm). The all-time high temperature was 117 °F (47 °C), recorded on July 14, 1954, at East St. Louis, and the all-time low temperature was −38 °F (−39 °C), recorded on January 31, 2019, during the January 2019 North American cold wave at a weather station near Mount Carroll, and confirmed on March 5, 2019. This followed the previous record of −36 °F (−38 °C) recorded on January 5, 1999, near Congerville. Prior to the Mount Carroll record, a temperature of −37 °F (−38 °C) was recorded on January 15, 2009, at Rochelle, but at a weather station not subjected to the same quality control as official records.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Illinois averages approximately 51 days of thunderstorm activity a year, which ranks somewhat above average in the number of thunderstorm days for the United States. Illinois is vulnerable to tornadoes, with an average of 35 occurring annually, which puts much of the state at around five tornadoes per 10,000 sq mi (30,000 km) annually. While tornadoes are no more powerful in Illinois than other states, some of Tornado Alley's deadliest tornadoes on record have occurred in the state. The Tri-State Tornado of 1925 killed 695 people in three states; 613 of the victims died in Illinois.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Chicago is the largest city in the state and the third-most populous city in the United States, with its 2020 population of 2,746,388. The U.S. Census Bureau currently lists seven other cities with populations of over 100,000 within Illinois. Based upon the U.S. Census Bureau's official 2010 population: Aurora, a Chicago satellite town that eclipsed Rockford for the title of second-most populous city in Illinois; its 2010 population was 197,899. Rockford, at 152,871, is the third-largest city in the state, and is the largest city in the state not located within the Chicago suburbs. Joliet, located in metropolitan Chicago, is the fourth-largest city in the state, with a population of 147,433. Naperville, a suburb of Chicago, is fifth with 141,853. Naperville and Aurora share a boundary along Illinois Route 59. Springfield, the state's capital, comes in as sixth-most populous with 117,352 residents. Peoria, which decades ago was the second-most populous city in the state, is seventh with 115,007. The eighth-largest and final city in the 100,000 club is Elgin, a northwest suburb of Chicago, with a 2010 population of 108,188.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The most populated city in the state south of Springfield is Belleville, with 44,478 people at the 2010 census. It is located in the Illinois portion of Greater St. Louis (often called the Metro East area), which has a rapidly growing population of over 700,000.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Other major urban areas include the Champaign-Urbana Metropolitan Area, which has a combined population of almost 230,000 people, the Illinois portion of the Quad Cities area with about 215,000 people, and the Bloomington-Normal area with a combined population of over 165,000.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The United States Census Bureau found that the population of Illinois was 12,812,508 in the 2020 United States census, moving from the fifth-largest state to the sixth-largest state (losing out to Pennsylvania). Illinois' population slightly declined in 2020 from the 2010 United States census by just over 18,000 residents and the overall population was quite higher than recent census estimates.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Illinois is the most populous state in the Midwest region. Chicago, the third-most populous city in the United States, is the center of the Chicago metropolitan area or Chicagoland, as this area is nicknamed. Although the Chicago metropolitan area comprises only 9% of the land area of the state, it contains 65% of the state's residents. The losses of population anticipated from the 2020 census results do not arise from the Chicago metro area; rather the declines are from the Downstate counties.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "According to HUD's 2022 Annual Homeless Assessment Report, there were an estimated 9,212 homeless people in Illinois.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "According to 2022 U.S. Census Bureau estimates, Illinois' population was 61.1% White, 13.4% Black or African American, 0.1% Native American or Alaskan Native, 6.0% Asian, 0.1% Pacific Islander, 7.9% Some Other Race, and 10.9% from two or more races. The white population continues to remain the largest racial category in Illinois. Hispanics are allocated amongst the various racial groups and primarily identify as Some Other Race (41.2%) or Multiracial (39.5%) with the remainder identifying as White (14.2%), Black (1.3%), American Indian and Alaskan Native (3.3), Asian (0.3%), and Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (0.2%). By ethnicity, 18.3% of the total population is Hispanic-Latino (of any race) and 81.7% is Non-Hispanic (of any race). If treated as a separate category, Hispanics are the largest minority group in Illinois.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The state's most populous ethnic group, non-Hispanic white, has declined from 83.5% in 1970 to 58.5% in 2022.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "As of 2011, 49.4% of Illinois's population younger than age 1 were minorities (Note: Children born to white Hispanics or to a sole full or partial minority parent are counted as minorities).",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "At the 2007 estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, there were 1,768,518 foreign-born inhabitants of the state or 13.8% of the population, with 48.4% from Latin America, 24.6% from Asia, 22.8% from Europe, 2.9% from Africa, 1.2% from Canada, and 0.2% from Oceania. Of the foreign-born population, 43.7% were naturalized U.S. citizens, and 56.3% were not U.S. citizens. In 2007, 6.9% of Illinois's population was reported as being under age 5, 24.9% under age 18 and 12.1% were age 65 and over. Females made up approximately 50.7% of the population.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "According to the 2007 estimates, 21.1% of the population had German ancestry, 13.3% had Irish ancestry, 8% had British ancestry, 7.9% had Polish ancestry, 6.4% had Italian ancestry, 4.6% listed themselves as American, 2.4% had Swedish ancestry, 2.2% had French ancestry, other than Basque, 1.6% had Dutch ancestry, and 1.4% had Norwegian ancestry. Illinois also has large numbers of African Americans and Latinos (mostly Mexicans and Puerto Ricans).",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Chicago, along the shores of Lake Michigan, is the nation's third largest city. In 2000, 23.3% of Illinois's population lived in the city of Chicago, 43.3% in Cook County, and 65.6% in the counties of the Chicago metropolitan area: Will, DuPage, Kane, Lake, and McHenry counties, as well as Cook County. The remaining population lives in the smaller cities and rural areas that dot the state's plains. As of 2000, the state's center of population was at 41°16′42″N 88°22′49″W / 41.278216°N 88.380238°W / 41.278216; -88.380238, located in Grundy County, northeast of the village of Mazon.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Births do not add up, because Hispanics are counted both by ethnicity and by race.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The official language of Illinois is English, although between 1923 and 1969, state law gave official status to \"the American language\". Nearly 80% of people in Illinois speak English natively, and most of the rest speak it fluently as a second language. A number of dialects of American English are spoken, ranging from Inland Northern American English and African-American English around Chicago, to Midland American English in Central Illinois, to Southern American English in the far south.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Over 20% of Illinoians speak a language other than English at home, of which Spanish is by far the most widespread, at more than 12% of the total population. A sizeable number of Polish speakers is present in the Chicago Metropolitan Area. Illinois Country French has mostly gone extinct in Illinois, although it is still celebrated in the French Colonial Historic District.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Religion in Illinois (2014)",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Roman Catholics constitute the single largest religious denomination in Illinois; they are heavily concentrated in and around Chicago and account for nearly 30% of the state's population. However, taken together as a group, the various Protestant denominations comprise a greater percentage of the state's population than do Catholics. In 2010, Catholics in Illinois numbered 3,648,907. The largest Protestant denominations were the United Methodist Church with 314,461 members and the Southern Baptist Convention with 283,519. Illinois has one of the largest concentrations of Missouri Synod Lutherans in the United States.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Illinois played an important role in the early Latter Day Saint movement, with Nauvoo becoming a gathering place for Mormons in the early 1840s. Nauvoo was the location of the succession crisis, which led to the separation of the Mormon movement into several Latter Day Saint sects. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the largest of the sects to emerge from the Mormon schism, has more than 55,000 adherents in Illinois today.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "A significant number of adherents of other Abrahamic faiths can be found in Illinois. Largely concentrated in the Chicago metropolitan area, followers of the Muslim, Baháʼí, and Jewish religions all call the state home. Muslims constituted the largest non-Christian group, with 359,264 adherents. Illinois has the largest concentration of Muslims by state in the country, with 2,800 Muslims per 100,000 citizens.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "The largest and oldest surviving Baháʼí House of Worship in the world is located on the shores of Lake Michigan in Wilmette, Illinois, one of eight continental Baháʼí House of Worship. It serves as a space for people of all backgrounds and religions to gather, meditate, reflect, and pray, expressing the Baháʼí principle of the oneness of religions. The Chicago area has a very large Jewish community, particularly in the suburbs of Skokie, Buffalo Grove, Highland Park, and surrounding suburbs. Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel was the Windy City's first Jewish mayor.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Chicago is also home to a very large population of Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "As of 2022, the gross state product for Illinois reached US$1.0 trillion.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "As of February 2019, the unemployment rate in Illinois reached 4.2%.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Illinois's minimum wage will rise to $15 per hour by 2025, making it one of the highest in the nation.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Illinois's major agricultural outputs are corn, soybeans, hogs, cattle, dairy products, and wheat. In most years, Illinois is either the first or second state for the highest production of soybeans, with a harvest of 427.7 million bushels (11.64 million metric tons) in 2008, after Iowa's production of 444.82 million bushels (12.11 million metric tons). Illinois ranks second in U.S. corn production with more than 1.5 billion bushels produced annually. With a production capacity of 1.5 billion gallons per year, Illinois is a top producer of ethanol, ranking third in the United States in 2011. Illinois is a leader in food manufacturing and meat processing. Although Chicago may no longer be \"Hog Butcher for the World\", the Chicago area remains a global center for food manufacture and meat processing, with many plants, processing houses, and distribution facilities concentrated in the area of the former Union Stock Yards. Illinois also produces wine, and the state is home to two American viticultural areas. In the area of The Meeting of the Great Rivers Scenic Byway, peaches and apples are grown. The German immigrants from agricultural backgrounds who settled in Illinois in the mid- to late 19th century are in part responsible for the profusion of fruit orchards in that area of Illinois. Illinois's universities are actively researching alternative agricultural products as alternative crops.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Illinois is one of the nation's manufacturing leaders, boasting annual value added productivity by manufacturing of over $107 billion in 2006. As of 2011, Illinois is ranked as the 4th-most productive manufacturing state in the country, behind California, Texas, and Ohio. About three-quarters of the state's manufacturers are located in the Northeastern Opportunity Return Region, with 38 percent of Illinois's approximately 18,900 manufacturing plants located in Cook County. As of 2006, the leading manufacturing industries in Illinois, based upon value-added, were chemical manufacturing ($18.3 billion), machinery manufacturing ($13.4 billion), food manufacturing ($12.9 billion), fabricated metal products ($11.5 billion), transportation equipment ($7.4 billion), plastics and rubber products ($7.0 billion), and computer and electronic products ($6.1 billion).",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "By the early 2000s, Illinois's economy had moved toward a dependence on high-value-added services, such as financial trading, higher education, law, logistics, and medicine. In some cases, these services clustered around institutions that hearkened back to Illinois's earlier economies. For example, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, a trading exchange for global derivatives, had begun its life as an agricultural futures market. Other important non-manufacturing industries include publishing, tourism, and energy production and distribution.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Venture capitalists funded a total of approximately $62 billion in the U.S. economy in 2016. Of this amount, Illinois-based companies received approximately $1.1 billion. Similarly, in FY 2016, the federal government spent $461 billion on contracts in the U.S. Of this amount, Illinois-based companies received approximately $8.7 billion.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Illinois is a net importer of fuels for energy, despite large coal resources and some minor oil production. Illinois exports electricity, ranking fifth among states in electricity production and seventh in electricity consumption.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "The coal industry of Illinois has its origins in the middle 19th century, when entrepreneurs such as Jacob Loose discovered coal in locations such as Sangamon County. Jacob Bunn contributed to the development of the Illinois coal industry, and was a founder and owner of the Western Coal & Mining Company of Illinois. About 68% of Illinois has coal-bearing strata of the Pennsylvanian geologic period. According to the Illinois State Geological Survey, 211 billion tons of bituminous coal are estimated to lie under the surface, having a total heating value greater than the estimated oil deposits in the Arabian Peninsula. However, this coal has a high sulfur content, which causes acid rain, unless special equipment is used to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions. Many Illinois power plants are not equipped to burn high-sulfur coal. In 1999, Illinois produced 40.4 million tons of coal, but only 17 million tons (42%) of Illinois coal was consumed in Illinois. Most of the coal produced in Illinois is exported to other states and countries. In 2008, Illinois exported three million tons of coal, and was projected to export nine million in 2011, as demand for energy grows in places such as China, India, and elsewhere in Asia and Europe. As of 2010, Illinois was ranked third in recoverable coal reserves at producing mines in the nation. Most of the coal produced in Illinois is exported to other states, while much of the coal burned for power in Illinois (21 million tons in 1998) is mined in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Mattoon was chosen as the site for the Department of Energy's FutureGen project, a 275-megawatt experimental zero emission coal-burning power plant that the DOE just gave a second round of funding. In 2010, after a number of setbacks, the city of Mattoon backed out of the project.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Illinois is a leading refiner of petroleum in the American Midwest, with a combined crude oil distillation capacity of nearly 900,000 bbl/d (140,000 m/d). However, Illinois has very limited crude oil proved reserves that account for less than 1% of the U.S. total reserves. Residential heating is 81% natural gas compared to less than 1% heating oil. Illinois is ranked 14th in oil production among states, with a daily output of approximately 28,000 bbl (4,500 m) in 2005.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Nuclear power arguably began in Illinois with the Chicago Pile-1, the world's first artificial self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in the world's first nuclear reactor, built on the University of Chicago campus. There are six operating nuclear power plants in Illinois: Braidwood, Byron, Clinton, Dresden, LaSalle, and Quad Cities. With the exception of the single-unit Clinton plant, each of these facilities has two reactors. Three reactors have been permanently shut down and are in various stages of decommissioning: Dresden-1 and Zion-1 and 2. Illinois ranked first in the nation in 2010 in both nuclear capacity and nuclear generation. Generation from its nuclear power plants accounted for 12 percent of the nation's total. In 2007, 48% of Illinois's electricity was generated using nuclear power. The Morris Operation is the only de facto high-level radioactive waste storage site in the United States.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Illinois has seen growing interest in the use of wind power for electrical generation. Most of Illinois was rated in 2009 as \"marginal or fair\" for wind energy production by the U.S. Department of Energy, with some western sections rated \"good\" and parts of the south rated \"poor\". These ratings are for wind turbines with 50 m (160 ft) hub heights; newer wind turbines are taller, enabling them to reach stronger winds farther from the ground. As a result, more areas of Illinois have become prospective wind farm sites. As of September 2009, Illinois had 1116.06 MW of installed wind power nameplate capacity with another 741.9 MW under construction. Illinois ranked ninth among U.S. states in installed wind power capacity, and sixteenth by potential capacity. Large wind farms in Illinois include Twin Groves, Rail Splitter, EcoGrove, and Mendota Hills.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "As of 2007, wind energy represented only 1.7% of Illinois's energy production, and it was estimated that wind power could provide 5–10% of the state's energy needs. Also, the Illinois General Assembly mandated in 2007 that by 2025, 25% of all electricity generated in Illinois is to come from renewable resources.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Illinois is ranked second in corn production among U.S. states, and Illinois corn is used to produce 40% of the ethanol consumed in the United States. The Archer Daniels Midland corporation in Decatur, Illinois, is the world's leading producer of ethanol from corn.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "The National Corn-to-Ethanol Research Center (NCERC), the world's only facility dedicated to researching the ways and means of converting corn (maize) to ethanol is located on the campus of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is one of the partners in the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), a $500 million biofuels research project funded by petroleum giant BP.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Tax is collected by the Illinois Department of Revenue. State income tax is calculated by multiplying net income by a flat rate. In 1990, that rate was set at 3%, but in 2010, the General Assembly voted for a temporary increase in the rate to 5%; the new rate went into effect on January 1, 2011; the personal income rate partially sunset on January 1, 2015, to 3.75%, while the corporate income tax fell to 5.25%. Illinois failed to pass a budget from 2015 to 2017, after the 736-day budget impasse, a budget was passed in Illinois after lawmakers overturned Governor Bruce Rauner's veto; this budget raised the personal income rate to 4.95% and the corporate rate to 7%. There are two rates for state sales tax: 6.25% for general merchandise and 1% for qualifying food, drugs, and medical appliances. The property tax is a major source of tax revenue for local government taxing districts. The property tax is a local—not state—tax, imposed by local government taxing districts, which include counties, townships, municipalities, school districts, and special taxation districts. The property tax in Illinois is imposed only on real property.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "On May 1, 2019, the Illinois Senate voted to approve a constitutional amendment that would have stricken language from the Illinois Constitution requiring a flat state income tax, in a 73–44 vote. If approved, the amendment would have allowed the state legislature to impose a graduated income tax based on annual income. The governor, J. B. Pritzker, approved the bill on May 27, 2019. It was scheduled for a 2020 general election ballot vote and required 60 percent voter approval to effectively amend the state constitution. The amendment was not approved by Illinoisans, with 55.1% of voters voting \"No\" on approval and 44.9% voting \"Yes\".",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "As of 2017 Chicago had the highest state and local sales tax rate for a U.S. city with a populations above 200,000, at 10.250%. The state of Illinois has the second highest rate of real estate tax: 2.31%, which is second only to New Jersey at 2.44%.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Toll roads are a de facto user tax on the citizens and visitors to the state of Illinois. Illinois ranks seventh out of the 11 states with the most miles of toll roads, at 282.1 miles. Chicago ranks fourth in most expensive toll roads in America by the mile, with the Chicago Skyway charging 51.2 cents per mile. Illinois also has the 11th highest gasoline tax by state, at 37.5 cents per gallon.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Illinois has numerous museums; the greatest concentration of these are in Chicago. Several museums in Chicago are ranked as some of the best in the world. These include the John G. Shedd Aquarium, the Field Museum of Natural History, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Adler Planetarium, and the Museum of Science and Industry.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "The modern Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield is the largest and most attended presidential library in the country. The Illinois State Museum boasts a collection of 13.5 million objects that tell the story of Illinois life, land, people, and art. The ISM is among only 5% of the nation's museums that are accredited by the American Alliance of Museums. Other historical museums in the state include the Polish Museum of America in Chicago; Magnolia Manor in Cairo; Easley Pioneer Museum in Ipava; the Elihu Benjamin Washburne; Ulysses S. Grant Homes, both in Galena; and the Chanute Air Museum, located on the former Chanute Air Force Base in Rantoul.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "The Chicago metropolitan area also hosts two zoos: The Brookfield Zoo, located about ten miles west of the city center in suburban Brookfield, contains more than 2,300 animals and covers 216 acres (87 ha). The Lincoln Park Zoo is located in Lincoln Park on Chicago's North Side, approximately 3 miles (4.8 km) north of the Loop. The zoo accounts for more than 35 acres (14 ha) of the park.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Illinois is a leader in music education, having hosted the Midwest Clinic International Band and Orchestra Conference since 1946, as well being home to the Illinois Music Educators Association (ILMEA, formerly IMEA), one of the largest professional music educator's organizations in the country. Each summer since 2004, Southern Illinois University Carbondale has played host to the Southern Illinois Music Festival, which presents dozens of performances throughout the region. Past featured artists include the Eroica Trio and violinist David Kim.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Chicago, in the northeast corner of the state, is a major center for music in the midwestern United States where distinctive forms of blues (greatly responsible for the future creation of rock and roll), and house music, a genre of electronic dance music, were developed.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "The Great Migration of poor black workers from the South into the industrial cities brought traditional jazz and blues music to the city, resulting in Chicago blues and \"Chicago-style\" Dixieland jazz. Notable blues artists included Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, Howlin' Wolf and both Sonny Boy Williamsons; jazz greats included Nat King Cole, Gene Ammons, Benny Goodman, and Bud Freeman. Chicago is also well known for its soul music.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "In the early 1930s, Gospel music began to gain popularity in Chicago due to Thomas A. Dorsey's contributions at Pilgrim Baptist Church.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "In the 1980s and 1990s, heavy rock, punk, and hip hop also became popular in Chicago. Orchestras in Chicago include the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and the Chicago Sinfonietta.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "John Hughes, who moved from Grosse Pointe to Northbrook, based many films of his in Chicago, and its suburbs. Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Home Alone, The Breakfast Club, and all his films take place in the fictional Shermer, Illinois (the original name of Northbrook was Shermerville, and Hughes's High School, Glenbrook North High School, is on Shermer Road). Most locations in his films include Glenbrook North, the former Maine North High School, the Ben Rose House in Highland Park, and the famous Home Alone house in Winnetka, Illinois.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "As one of the United States' major metropolises, all major sports leagues have teams headquartered in Chicago.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "Many minor league teams also call Illinois their home. They include:",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "The state features 13 athletic programs that compete in NCAA Division I, the highest level of U.S. college sports.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "The two most prominent are the Illinois Fighting Illini and Northwestern Wildcats, both members of the Big Ten Conference and the only ones competing in one of the so-called \"Power Five conferences\". The Fighting Illini football team has won five national championships and three Rose Bowl Games, whereas the men's basketball team has won 17 conference seasons and played five Final Fours. Meanwhile, the Wildcats have won eight football conference championships and one Rose Bowl Game.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "The Northern Illinois Huskies from DeKalb, Illinois compete in the Mid-American Conference winning four conference championships and earning a bid in the Orange Bowl along with producing Heisman candidate Jordan Lynch at quarterback. The Huskies are the state's only other team competing in the Football Bowl Subdivision, the top level of NCAA football.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "Four schools have football programs that compete in the second level of Division I football, the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS). The Illinois State Redbirds (Normal, adjacent to Bloomington) and Southern Illinois Salukis (representing Southern Illinois University's main campus in Carbondale) are members of the Missouri Valley Conference (MVC) for non-football sports and the Missouri Valley Football Conference (MVFC). The Western Illinois Leathernecks (Macomb) are full members of the Summit League, which does not sponsor football, and also compete in the MVFC. The Eastern Illinois Panthers (Charleston) are members of the Ohio Valley Conference (OVC).",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "The city of Chicago is home to four Division I programs that do not sponsor football. The DePaul Blue Demons, with main campuses in Lincoln Park and the Loop, are members of the Big East Conference. The Loyola Ramblers, with their main campus straddling the Edgewater and Rogers Park community areas on the city's far north side, compete in the Atlantic 10 Conference. The UIC Flames, from the Near West Side next to the Loop, are in the MVC. The Chicago State Cougars, from the city's south side, are one of only two all-sports independents in Division I after leaving the Western Athletic Conference in 2022.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "Finally, two non-football Division I programs are located downstate. The Bradley Braves (Peoria) are MVC members, and the SIU Edwardsville Cougars (in the Metro East region across the Mississippi River from St. Louis) compete in the OVC.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "The city was formerly home to several other teams that either failed to survive or belonged to leagues that folded.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "The NFL's Arizona Cardinals, who currently play in the Phoenix suburb of Glendale, Arizona, played in Chicago as the Chicago Cardinals, until moving to St. Louis, Missouri after the 1959 season. An NBA expansion team known as the Chicago Packers in 1961–1962, and as the Chicago Zephyrs the following year, moved to Baltimore after the 1962–1963 season. The franchise is now known as the Washington Wizards.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "The Peoria Chiefs are a High-A minor league baseball team affiliated with the St. Louis Cardinals. The Schaumburg Boomers, Southern Illinois Miners, Gateway Grizzlies, Joliet Slammers and Windy City ThunderBolts all belong to the independent Frontier League. Additionally, the Kane County Cougars play in the American Association and the Lake County Fielders were members of the former North American League.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "In addition to the Chicago Wolves, the AHL also has the Rockford IceHogs serving as the AHL affiliate of the Chicago Blackhawks. The second incarnation of the Peoria Rivermen plays in the SPHL.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "Motor racing oval tracks at the Chicagoland Speedway in Joliet, the Chicago Motor Speedway in Cicero and the Gateway International Raceway in Madison, near St. Louis, have hosted NASCAR, CART, and IRL races, whereas the Sports Car Club of America, among other national and regional road racing clubs, have visited the Autobahn Country Club in Joliet, the Blackhawk Farms Raceway in South Beloit and the former Meadowdale International Raceway in Carpentersville. Illinois also has several short tracks and dragstrips. The dragstrip at Gateway International Raceway and the Route 66 Raceway, which sits on the same property as the Chicagoland Speedway, both host NHRA drag races.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "Illinois features several golf courses, such as Olympia Fields, Medinah, Midlothian, Cog Hill, and Conway Farms, which have often hosted the BMW Championship, Western Open, and Women's Western Open.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "Also, the state has hosted 13 editions of the U.S. Open (latest at Olympia Fields in 2003), six editions of the PGA Championship (latest at Medinah in 2006), three editions of the U.S. Women's Open (latest at The Merit Club), the 2009 Solheim Cup (at Rich Harvest Farms), and the 2012 Ryder Cup (at Medinah).",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "The John Deere Classic is a regular PGA Tour event played in the Quad Cities since 1971, whereas the Encompass Championship is a Champions Tour event since 2013. Previously, the LPGA State Farm Classic was an LPGA Tour event from 1976 to 2011.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "The Illinois state parks system began in 1908 with what is now Fort Massac State Park, becoming the first park in a system encompassing more than 60 parks and about the same number of recreational and wildlife areas.",
"title": "Parks and recreation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "Areas under the protection of the National Park Service include: the Illinois and Michigan Canal National Heritage Corridor near Lockport, the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail, the Lincoln Home National Historic Site in Springfield, the Mormon Pioneer National Historic Trail, the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, the American Discovery Trail, the Pullman National Monument, and New Philadelphia Town Site. The federal government also manages the Shawnee National Forest and the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie.",
"title": "Parks and recreation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "In a 2020 study, Illinois was ranked as the 4th easiest state for citizens to vote in.",
"title": "Law and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "The government of Illinois, under the Constitution of Illinois, has three branches of government: executive, legislative and judicial. The executive branch is split into several statewide elected offices, with the governor as chief executive. Legislative functions are granted to the Illinois General Assembly. The judiciary is composed of the Supreme Court and lower courts.",
"title": "Law and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "The Illinois General Assembly is the state legislature, composed of the 118-member Illinois House of Representatives and the 59-member Illinois Senate. The members of the General Assembly are elected at the beginning of each even-numbered year. The Illinois Compiled Statutes (ILCS) are the codified statutes of a general and permanent nature.",
"title": "Law and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "The executive branch is composed of six elected officers and their offices as well as numerous other departments. The six elected officers are: Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State, Comptroller, and Treasurer. The government of Illinois has numerous departments, agencies, boards and commissions, but the so-called code departments provide most of the state's services.",
"title": "Law and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "The Judiciary of Illinois is the unified court system of Illinois. It consists of the Supreme Court, Appellate Court, and Circuit Courts. The Supreme Court oversees the administration of the court system.",
"title": "Law and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "The administrative divisions of Illinois are counties, townships, precincts, cities, towns, villages, and special-purpose districts. The basic subdivision of Illinois are the 102 counties. Eighty-five of the 102 counties are in turn divided into townships and precincts. Municipal governments are the cities, villages, and incorporated towns. Some localities possess home rule, which allows them to govern themselves to a certain extent.",
"title": "Law and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "Illinois is a Democratic stronghold. Historically, Illinois was a political swing state, with near-parity existing between the Republican and the Democratic parties. However, in recent elections, the Democratic Party has gained ground, and Illinois has come to be seen as a solid \"blue\" state in presidential campaigns. Votes from Chicago and most of Cook County have long been strongly Democratic. However, the \"collar counties\" (the suburban counties surrounding Cook County) can be seen as moderate voting districts. College towns like Carbondale, Champaign, and Normal also lean Democratic.",
"title": "Law and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "Republicans continue to prevail in the rural areas of northern and central Illinois, as well as southern Illinois outside of East St. Louis. From 1920 until 1972, Illinois was carried by the victor of each of these 14 presidential elections. In fact, the state was long seen as a national bellwether, supporting the winner in every election in the 20th century, except for 1916 and 1976. By contrast, Illinois has trended more toward the Democratic party, and has voted for their presidential candidates in the last six elections; in 2000, George W. Bush became the first Republican to win the presidency without carrying either Illinois or Vermont. Local politician and Chicago resident Barack Obama easily won the state's 21 electoral votes in 2008, with 61.9% of the vote. In 2010, incumbent governor Pat Quinn was re-elected with 47% of the vote, while Republican Mark Kirk was elected to the Senate with 48% of the vote. In 2012, President Obama easily carried Illinois again, with 58% to Republican candidate Mitt Romney's 41%. In 2014, Republican Bruce Rauner defeated Governor Quinn 50% to 46% to become Illinois's first Republican governor in 12 years after being sworn in on January 12, 2015, while Democratic senator Dick Durbin was re-elected with 53% of the vote. In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried Illinois with 55% of the vote, and Tammy Duckworth defeated incumbent Mark Kirk 54% to 40%. George W. Bush and Donald Trump are the only Republican presidential candidates to win without carrying either Illinois or Vermont. In 2018, Democrat J. B. Pritzker defeated the incumbent Bruce Rauner for the governorship with 54% of the vote.",
"title": "Law and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 123,
"text": "Politics in the state have been infamous for highly visible corruption cases, as well as for crusading reformers, such as governors Adlai Stevenson and James R. Thompson. In 2006, former governor George Ryan was convicted of racketeering and bribery, leading to a six-and-a-half-year prison sentence. On December 7, 2011, former governor Rod Blagojevich was sentenced to 14 years in prison for allegations that he conspired to sell the vacated Senate seat left by President Barack Obama to the highest bidder. Blagojevich had earlier been impeached and convicted by the legislature, resulting in his removal from office. In the late 20th century, Congressman Dan Rostenkowski was imprisoned for mail fraud; former governor and federal judge Otto Kerner, Jr. was imprisoned for bribery; Secretary of State Paul Powell was investigated and found to have gained great wealth through bribes, and State Auditor of Public Accounts (Comptroller) Orville Hodge was imprisoned for embezzlement. In 1912, William Lorimer, the GOP boss of Chicago, was expelled from the U.S. Senate for bribery and in 1921, Governor Len Small was found to have defrauded the state of a million dollars.",
"title": "Law and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 124,
"text": "Illinois has shown a strong presence in presidential elections. Three presidents have claimed Illinois as their political base when running for president: Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and most recently Barack Obama. Lincoln was born in Kentucky, but he moved to Illinois at age 21. He served in the General Assembly and represented the 7th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives before his election to the presidency in 1860. Ulysses S. Grant was born in Ohio and had a military career that precluded settling down, but on the eve of the Civil War and approaching middle age, he moved to Illinois and thus utilized the state as his home and political base when running for president. Barack Obama was born in Hawaii and made Illinois his home after graduating from law school, and later represented Illinois in the U.S. Senate. He then became president in 2008, running as a candidate from his Illinois base.",
"title": "Law and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 125,
"text": "Ronald Reagan was born in Illinois, in the city of Tampico, raised in Dixon, Illinois, and educated at Eureka College, outside Peoria. Reagan later moved to California during his young adulthood. He then became an actor, and later became California's Governor before being elected president.",
"title": "Law and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 126,
"text": "Hillary Clinton was born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago and became the first woman to represent a major political party in the general election of the U.S. presidency. Clinton ran from a platform based in New York State.",
"title": "Law and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 127,
"text": "Eleven African-Americans have served as members of the United States Senate. Of which three have represented Illinois, the most of any single state: Carol Moseley-Braun, Barack Obama, and Roland Burris, who was appointed to replace Obama after his election to the presidency. Moseley-Braun was the first African-American woman to become a U.S. Senator.",
"title": "Law and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 128,
"text": "Three families from Illinois have played particularly prominent roles in the Democratic Party, gaining both statewide and national fame.",
"title": "Law and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 129,
"text": "The Stevenson family, initially rooted in central Illinois and later based in the Chicago metropolitan area, has provided four generations of Illinois officeholders.",
"title": "Law and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 130,
"text": "The Daley family's powerbase was in Chicago.",
"title": "Law and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 131,
"text": "The Pritzker family is based in Chicago and have played important roles in both the private and the public sectors.",
"title": "Law and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 132,
"text": "The Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) is autonomous of the governor and the state legislature, and administers public education in the state. Local municipalities and their respective school districts operate individual public schools, but the ISBE audits performance of public schools with the Illinois School Report Card. The ISBE also makes recommendations to state leaders concerning education spending and policies.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 133,
"text": "Education is compulsory for ages 7–17 in Illinois. Schools are commonly, but not exclusively, divided into three tiers of primary and secondary education: elementary school, middle school or junior high school, and high school. District territories are often complex in structure. Many areas in the state are actually located in two school districts—one for high school, the other for elementary and middle schools. And such districts do not necessarily share boundaries. A given high school may have several elementary districts that feed into it, yet some of those feeder districts may themselves feed into multiple high school districts.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 134,
"text": "Using the criterion established by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, there are eleven \"National Universities\" in the state.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 135,
"text": "The University of Chicago is continuously ranked as one of the world's top ten universities on various independent university rankings, and its Booth School of Business, along with Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management consistently rank within the top five graduate business schools in the country and top ten globally. The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is often ranked among the best engineering schools in the world and in United States.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 136,
"text": "As of 19 August 2010, six of these rank in the \"first tier\" among the top 500 National Universities in the nation, as determined by the U.S. News & World Report rankings: the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Loyola University Chicago, the Illinois Institute of Technology, DePaul University, University of Illinois Chicago, Illinois State University, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and Northern Illinois University.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 137,
"text": "Illinois also has more than twenty additional accredited four-year universities, both public and private, and dozens of small liberal arts colleges across the state. Additionally, Illinois supports 49 public community colleges in the Illinois Community College System.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 138,
"text": "Schools in Illinois are funded primarily by property taxes, based on state assessment of property values, rather than direct state contributions. Scholar Tracy Steffes has described Illinois public education as historically \"inequitable\", a system where one of \"the wealthiest of states\" is \"the stingiest in its support for education\". There have been several attempts to reform school funding in Illinois. The most notable attempt came in 1973 with the adoption of the Illinois Resource Equalizer Formula, a measure through which it was hoped funding could be collected and distributed to Illinois schools more equitably. However, opposition from affluent Illinois communities who objected to having to pay for the less well-off school districts (many of them Black majority communities, produced by redlining, white flight, and other \"soft\" segregation methods) resulted in the formula's abolition in the late 1980s.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 139,
"text": "Because of its central location and its proximity to the Rust Belt and Grain Belt, Illinois is a national crossroads for air, auto, rail, and truck traffic.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 140,
"text": "From 1962 until 1998, Chicago's O'Hare International Airport (ORD) was the busiest airport in the world, measured both in terms of total flights and passengers. While it was surpassed by Atlanta's Hartsfield in 1998 (as Chicago splits its air traffic between O'Hare and Midway airports, while Atlanta uses only one airport), with 59.3 million domestic passengers annually, along with 11.4 million international passengers in 2008, O'Hare consistently remains one of the two or three busiest airports globally, and in some years still ranks number one in total flights. It is a major hub for both United Airlines and American Airlines, and a major airport expansion project is currently underway. Midway Airport (MDW), which had been the busiest airport in the world at one point until it was supplanted by O'Hare as the busiest airport in 1962, is now the secondary airport in the Chicago metropolitan area and still ranks as one of the nation's busiest airports. Midway is a major hub for Southwest Airlines and services many other carriers as well. Midway served 17.3 million domestic and international passengers in 2008.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 141,
"text": "Illinois has an extensive passenger and freight rail transportation network. Chicago is a national Amtrak hub and in-state passengers are served by Amtrak's Illinois Service, featuring the Chicago to Carbondale Illini and Saluki, the Chicago to Quincy Carl Sandburg and Illinois Zephyr, and the Chicago to St. Louis Lincoln Service. Currently there is trackwork on the Chicago–St. Louis line to bring the maximum speed up to 110 mph (180 km/h), which would reduce the trip time by an hour and a half. Nearly every North American railway meets at Chicago, making it the largest and most active rail hub in the country. Extensive heavy rail service is provided in the city proper and some immediate suburbs by the Chicago Transit Authority's 'L' system. One of the largest suburban commuter rail system in the United States, operated by Metra, uses existing rail lines to provide direct commuter rail access for hundreds of suburbs to the city and beyond.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 142,
"text": "In addition to the state's rail lines, the Mississippi River and Illinois River provide major transportation routes for the state's agricultural interests. Lake Michigan gives Illinois access to the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Saint Lawrence Seaway.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 143,
"text": "The Interstate Highways in Illinois are all segments of the Interstate Highway System that are owned and maintained by the state.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 144,
"text": "Illinois has the distinction of having the most primary (two-digit) interstates pass through it among all the 50 states with 13. Illinois also ranks third among the fifty states with the most interstate mileage, coming in after California and Texas, which are much bigger states in area.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 145,
"text": "Major U.S. Interstate highways crossing the state include: Interstate 24 (I-24), I-39, I-41, I-55, I-57, I-64, I-70, I-72, I-74, I-80, I-88, I-90, and I-94.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 146,
"text": "The Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) is responsible for maintaining the U.S Highways in Illinois. The system in Illinois consists of 21 primary highways.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 147,
"text": "Among the U.S. highways that pass through the state, the primary ones are: US 6, US 12, US 14, US 20, US 24, US 30, US 34, US 36, US 40, US 41, US 45, US 50, US 51, US 52, US 54, US 60, US 62, and US 67.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 148,
"text": "Due to its central location, Illinois sees numerous intercity bus services primarily connecting east and west. The Chicago Bus Station is the busiest intercity bus station in the state. The following carriers provide scheduled service: Amtrak Thruway, Barons Bus Lines, Burlington Trailways, Flixbus, Greyhound Lines, Indian Trails, Miller Transportation (Hoosier Ride), Peoria Charter Coach Company, Van Galder Bus Company, and Wisconsin Coach Lines.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 149,
"text": "40°N 89°W / 40°N 89°W / 40; -89 (State of Illinois)",
"title": "External links"
}
]
| Illinois is a state in the Midwestern United States. The Great Lakes are to its northeast, the Mississippi River to its west, and the Wabash and Ohio rivers to its south. Its largest metropolitan areas are Chicago and the Metro East region of Greater St. Louis. Other metropolitan areas include Peoria and Rockford, as well as Springfield, its capital, and Champaign-Urbana, home to the main campus of the state's flagship university. Of the fifty U.S. states, Illinois has the fifth-largest gross domestic product (GDP), the sixth-largest population, and the 25th-largest land area. Illinois has a highly diverse economy, with the global city of Chicago in the northeast, major industrial and agricultural hubs in the north and center, and natural resources such as coal, timber, and petroleum in the south. Owing to its central location and favorable geography, the state is a major transportation hub: the Port of Chicago has access to the Atlantic Ocean through the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence Seaway and to the Gulf of Mexico from the Mississippi River via the Illinois Waterway. Chicago has been the nation's railroad hub since the 1860s, and its O'Hare International Airport has been among the world's busiest airports for decades. Illinois has long been considered a microcosm of the United States and a bellwether in American culture, exemplified by the phrase Will it play in Peoria?. What is now Illinois was inhabited for thousands of years by various indigenous cultures, including the advanced civilization centered in the Cahokia region. The French were the first Europeans to arrive, settling near the Mississippi River in the 17th century in the region they called Illinois Country, as part of the sprawling colony of New France. Following U.S. independence in 1783, American settlers began arriving from Kentucky via the Ohio River, and the population grew from south to north. Illinois was part of the United States' oldest territory, the Northwest Territory, and in 1818 it achieved statehood. The Erie Canal brought increased commercial activity in the Great Lakes, and the small settlement of Chicago became one of the fastest growing cities in the world, benefiting from its location as one of the few natural harbors in southwestern Lake Michigan. The invention of the self-scouring steel plow by Illinoisan John Deere turned the state's rich prairie into some of the world's most productive and valuable farmland, attracting immigrant farmers from Germany and Sweden. In the mid-19th century, the Illinois and Michigan Canal and a sprawling railroad network greatly facilitated trade, commerce, and settlement, making the state a transportation hub for the nation. By 1900, the growth of industrial jobs in the northern cities and coal mining in the central and southern areas attracted immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. Illinois became one of America's most industrialized states and remains a major manufacturing center. The Great Migration from the South established a large community of African Americans, particularly in Chicago, who founded the city's famous jazz and blues cultures. Chicago became a leading cultural, economic, and population center and is today one of the world's major commercial centers; its metropolitan area, informally referred to as Chicagoland, holds about 65% of the state's 12.8 million residents. Two World Heritage Sites are in Illinois, the ancient Cahokia Mounds, and part of the Wright architecture site. Major centers of learning include the University of Chicago, University of Illinois, and Northwestern University. A wide variety of protected areas seek to conserve Illinois' natural and cultural resources. Historically, three U.S. presidents have been elected while residents of Illinois: Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and Barack Obama; additionally, Ronald Reagan was born and raised in the state. Today, Illinois honors Lincoln with its official state slogan Land of Lincoln. The state is the site of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield and the future home of the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. | 2001-08-10T05:24:49Z | 2023-12-16T21:10:43Z | [
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14,851 | Ian Murdock | Ian Ashley Murdock (April 28, 1973 – December 28, 2015) was an American software engineer, known for being the founder of the Debian project and Progeny Linux Systems, a commercial Linux company.
Although Murdock's parents were both from Southern Indiana, he was born in Konstanz, West Germany, on April 28, 1973, where his father was pursuing postdoctoral research. The family returned to the United States in 1975, and Murdock grew up in Lafayette, Indiana, beginning in 1977 when his father became a professor of entomology at Purdue University. Murdock graduated from Harrison High School in 1991, and then earned his bachelor's degree in computer science from Purdue in 1996.
While a college student, Murdock founded the Debian project in August 1993, and wrote the Debian Manifesto in January 1994. Murdock conceived Debian as a Linux distribution that embraced open design, contributions, and support from the free software community. He named Debian after his then-girlfriend (later wife) Debra Lynn, and himself. They later married, had three children, and divorced in January 2008.
In January 2006, Murdock was appointed Chief Technology Officer of the Free Standards Group and elected chair of the Linux Standard Base workgroup. He continued as CTO of the Linux Foundation when the group was formed from the merger of the Free Standards Group and Open Source Development Labs.
Murdock left the Linux Foundation to join Sun Microsystems in March 2007 to lead Project Indiana, which he described as "taking the lesson that Linux has brought to the operating system and providing that for Solaris", making a full OpenSolaris distribution with GNOME and userland tools from GNU plus a network-based package management system. From March 2007 to February 2010, he was Vice President of Emerging Platforms at Sun, until the company merged with Oracle and he resigned his position with the company.
From 2011 until 2015 Murdock was Vice President of Platform and Developer Community at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, based in Indianapolis.
From November 2015 until his death Murdock was working for Docker, Inc.
Murdock died on December 28, 2015, in San Francisco. Though initially no cause of death was released, in July 2016 it was announced his death had been ruled a suicide. The police confirmed that the cause of death was due to asphyxiation caused by hanging himself with a vacuum cleaner electrical cord.
The last tweets from Murdock's Twitter account first announced that he would commit suicide, then said he would not. He reported having been accused of assault on a police officer after having been himself assaulted and sexually humiliated by the police, then declared an intent to devote his life to opposing police abuse. His Twitter account was taken down shortly afterwards.
The San Francisco police confirmed he was detained, saying he matched the description in a reported attempted break-in and that he appeared to be drunk. The police stated that he became violent and was ultimately taken to jail on suspicion of four misdemeanor counts. They added that he did not appear to be suicidal and was medically examined prior to release. Later, police returned on reports of a possible suicide. The city medical examiner's office confirmed Murdock was found dead. | [
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"text": "Although Murdock's parents were both from Southern Indiana, he was born in Konstanz, West Germany, on April 28, 1973, where his father was pursuing postdoctoral research. The family returned to the United States in 1975, and Murdock grew up in Lafayette, Indiana, beginning in 1977 when his father became a professor of entomology at Purdue University. Murdock graduated from Harrison High School in 1991, and then earned his bachelor's degree in computer science from Purdue in 1996.",
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"text": "While a college student, Murdock founded the Debian project in August 1993, and wrote the Debian Manifesto in January 1994. Murdock conceived Debian as a Linux distribution that embraced open design, contributions, and support from the free software community. He named Debian after his then-girlfriend (later wife) Debra Lynn, and himself. They later married, had three children, and divorced in January 2008.",
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"text": "In January 2006, Murdock was appointed Chief Technology Officer of the Free Standards Group and elected chair of the Linux Standard Base workgroup. He continued as CTO of the Linux Foundation when the group was formed from the merger of the Free Standards Group and Open Source Development Labs.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
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"text": "Murdock left the Linux Foundation to join Sun Microsystems in March 2007 to lead Project Indiana, which he described as \"taking the lesson that Linux has brought to the operating system and providing that for Solaris\", making a full OpenSolaris distribution with GNOME and userland tools from GNU plus a network-based package management system. From March 2007 to February 2010, he was Vice President of Emerging Platforms at Sun, until the company merged with Oracle and he resigned his position with the company.",
"title": "Life and career"
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"text": "From November 2015 until his death Murdock was working for Docker, Inc.",
"title": "Life and career"
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"text": "Murdock died on December 28, 2015, in San Francisco. Though initially no cause of death was released, in July 2016 it was announced his death had been ruled a suicide. The police confirmed that the cause of death was due to asphyxiation caused by hanging himself with a vacuum cleaner electrical cord.",
"title": "Death"
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"text": "The last tweets from Murdock's Twitter account first announced that he would commit suicide, then said he would not. He reported having been accused of assault on a police officer after having been himself assaulted and sexually humiliated by the police, then declared an intent to devote his life to opposing police abuse. His Twitter account was taken down shortly afterwards.",
"title": "Death"
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"text": "The San Francisco police confirmed he was detained, saying he matched the description in a reported attempted break-in and that he appeared to be drunk. The police stated that he became violent and was ultimately taken to jail on suspicion of four misdemeanor counts. They added that he did not appear to be suicidal and was medically examined prior to release. Later, police returned on reports of a possible suicide. The city medical examiner's office confirmed Murdock was found dead.",
"title": "Death"
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| Ian Ashley Murdock was an American software engineer, known for being the founder of the Debian project and Progeny Linux Systems, a commercial Linux company. | 2001-07-27T20:33:10Z | 2023-08-16T16:32:29Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Murdock |
14,856 | Inner product space | In mathematics, an inner product space (or, rarely, a Hausdorff pre-Hilbert space) is a real vector space or a complex vector space with an operation called an inner product. The inner product of two vectors in the space is a scalar, often denoted with angle brackets such as in ⟨ a , b ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle a,b\rangle } . Inner products allow formal definitions of intuitive geometric notions, such as lengths, angles, and orthogonality (zero inner product) of vectors. Inner product spaces generalize Euclidean vector spaces, in which the inner product is the dot product or scalar product of Cartesian coordinates. Inner product spaces of infinite dimension are widely used in functional analysis. Inner product spaces over the field of complex numbers are sometimes referred to as unitary spaces. The first usage of the concept of a vector space with an inner product is due to Giuseppe Peano, in 1898.
An inner product naturally induces an associated norm, (denoted | x | {\displaystyle |x|} and | y | {\displaystyle |y|} in the picture); so, every inner product space is a normed vector space. If this normed space is also complete (that is, a Banach space) then the inner product space is a Hilbert space. If an inner product space H is not a Hilbert space, it can be extended by completion to a Hilbert space H ¯ . {\displaystyle {\overline {H}}.} This means that H {\displaystyle H} is a linear subspace of H ¯ , {\displaystyle {\overline {H}},} the inner product of H {\displaystyle H} is the restriction of that of H ¯ , {\displaystyle {\overline {H}},} and H {\displaystyle H} is dense in H ¯ {\displaystyle {\overline {H}}} for the topology defined by the norm.
In this article, F denotes a field that is either the real numbers R , {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ,} or the complex numbers C . {\displaystyle \mathbb {C} .} A scalar is thus an element of F. A bar over an expression representing a scalar denotes the complex conjugate of this scalar. A zero vector is denoted 0 {\displaystyle \mathbf {0} } for distinguishing it from the scalar 0.
An inner product space is a vector space V over the field F together with an inner product, that is, a map
that satisfies the following three properties for all vectors x , y , z ∈ V {\displaystyle x,y,z\in V} and all scalars a , b ∈ F {\displaystyle a,b\in F} .
If the positive-definiteness condition is replaced by merely requiring that ⟨ x , x ⟩ ≥ 0 {\displaystyle \langle x,x\rangle \geq 0} for all x {\displaystyle x} , then one obtains the definition of positive semi-definite Hermitian form. A positive semi-definite Hermitian form ⟨ ⋅ , ⋅ ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle \cdot ,\cdot \rangle } is an inner product if and only if for all x {\displaystyle x} , if ⟨ x , x ⟩ = 0 {\displaystyle \langle x,x\rangle =0} then x = 0 {\displaystyle x=\mathbf {0} } .
In the following properties, which result almost immediately from the definition of an inner product, x, y and z are arbitrary vectors, and a and b are arbitrary scalars.
Over R {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} } , conjugate-symmetry reduces to symmetry, and sesquilinearity reduces to bilinearity. Hence an inner product on a real vector space is a positive-definite symmetric bilinear form. The binomial expansion of a square becomes
Some authors, especially in physics and matrix algebra, prefer to define inner products and sesquilinear forms with linearity in the second argument rather than the first. Then the first argument becomes conjugate linear, rather than the second. Bra-ket notation in quantum mechanics also uses slightly different notation, i.e. ⟨ ⋅ | ⋅ ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle \cdot |\cdot \rangle } , where ⟨ x | y ⟩ := ( y , x ) {\displaystyle \langle x|y\rangle :=\left(y,x\right)} .
Several notations are used for inner products, including ⟨ ⋅ , ⋅ ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle \cdot ,\cdot \rangle } , ( ⋅ , ⋅ ) {\displaystyle \left(\cdot ,\cdot \right)} , ⟨ ⋅ | ⋅ ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle \cdot |\cdot \rangle } and ( ⋅ | ⋅ ) {\displaystyle \left(\cdot |\cdot \right)} , as well as the usual dot product.
Among the simplest examples of inner product spaces are R {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} } and C . {\displaystyle \mathbb {C} .} The real numbers R {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} } are a vector space over R {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} } that becomes an inner product space with arithmetic multiplication as its inner product:
The complex numbers C {\displaystyle \mathbb {C} } are a vector space over C {\displaystyle \mathbb {C} } that becomes an inner product space with the inner product
Unlike with the real numbers, the assignment ( x , y ) ↦ x y {\displaystyle (x,y)\mapsto xy} does not define a complex inner product on C . {\displaystyle \mathbb {C} .}
More generally, the real n {\displaystyle n} -space R n {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{n}} with the dot product is an inner product space, an example of a Euclidean vector space.
where x T {\displaystyle x^{\operatorname {T} }} is the transpose of x . {\displaystyle x.}
A function ⟨ ⋅ , ⋅ ⟩ : R n × R n → R {\displaystyle \langle \,\cdot ,\cdot \,\rangle :\mathbb {R} ^{n}\times \mathbb {R} ^{n}\to \mathbb {R} } is an inner product on R n {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{n}} if and only if there exists a symmetric positive-definite matrix M {\displaystyle \mathbf {M} } such that ⟨ x , y ⟩ = x T M y {\displaystyle \langle x,y\rangle =x^{\operatorname {T} }\mathbf {M} y} for all x , y ∈ R n . {\displaystyle x,y\in \mathbb {R} ^{n}.} If M {\displaystyle \mathbf {M} } is the identity matrix then ⟨ x , y ⟩ = x T M y {\displaystyle \langle x,y\rangle =x^{\operatorname {T} }\mathbf {M} y} is the dot product. For another example, if n = 2 {\displaystyle n=2} and M = [ a b b d ] {\displaystyle \mathbf {M} ={\begin{bmatrix}a&b\\b&d\end{bmatrix}}} is positive-definite (which happens if and only if det M = a d − b 2 > 0 {\displaystyle \det \mathbf {M} =ad-b^{2}>0} and one/both diagonal elements are positive) then for any x := [ x 1 , x 2 ] T , y := [ y 1 , y 2 ] T ∈ R 2 , {\displaystyle x:=\left[x_{1},x_{2}\right]^{\operatorname {T} },y:=\left[y_{1},y_{2}\right]^{\operatorname {T} }\in \mathbb {R} ^{2},}
As mentioned earlier, every inner product on R 2 {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{2}} is of this form (where b ∈ R , a > 0 {\displaystyle b\in \mathbb {R} ,a>0} and d > 0 {\displaystyle d>0} satisfy a d > b 2 {\displaystyle ad>b^{2}} ).
The general form of an inner product on C n {\displaystyle \mathbb {C} ^{n}} is known as the Hermitian form and is given by
where M {\displaystyle M} is any Hermitian positive-definite matrix and y † {\displaystyle y^{\dagger }} is the conjugate transpose of y . {\displaystyle y.} For the real case, this corresponds to the dot product of the results of directionally-different scaling of the two vectors, with positive scale factors and orthogonal directions of scaling. It is a weighted-sum version of the dot product with positive weights—up to an orthogonal transformation.
The article on Hilbert spaces has several examples of inner product spaces, wherein the metric induced by the inner product yields a complete metric space. An example of an inner product space which induces an incomplete metric is the space C ( [ a , b ] ) {\displaystyle C([a,b])} of continuous complex valued functions f {\displaystyle f} and g {\displaystyle g} on the interval [ a , b ] . {\displaystyle [a,b].} The inner product is
This space is not complete; consider for example, for the interval [−1, 1] the sequence of continuous "step" functions, { f k } k , {\displaystyle \{f_{k}\}_{k},} defined by:
This sequence is a Cauchy sequence for the norm induced by the preceding inner product, which does not converge to a continuous function.
For real random variables X {\displaystyle X} and Y , {\displaystyle Y,} the expected value of their product
is an inner product. In this case, ⟨ X , X ⟩ = 0 {\displaystyle \langle X,X\rangle =0} if and only if P [ X = 0 ] = 1 {\displaystyle \mathbb {P} [X=0]=1} (that is, X = 0 {\displaystyle X=0} almost surely), where P {\displaystyle \mathbb {P} } denotes the probability of the event. This definition of expectation as inner product can be extended to random vectors as well.
The inner product for complex square matrices of the same size is the Frobenius inner product ⟨ A , B ⟩ := tr ( A B H ) {\displaystyle \langle A,B\rangle :=\operatorname {tr} \left(AB^{\textsf {H}}\right)} . Since trace and transposition are linear and the conjugation is on the second matrix, it is a sesquilinear operator. We further get Hermitian symmetry by,
Finally, since for A {\displaystyle A} nonzero, ⟨ A , A ⟩ = ∑ i j | A i j | 2 > 0 {\displaystyle \langle A,A\rangle =\sum _{ij}\left|A_{ij}\right|^{2}>0} , we get that the Frobenius inner product is positive definite too, and so is an inner product.
On an inner product space, or more generally a vector space with a nondegenerate form (hence an isomorphism V → V ∗ {\displaystyle V\to V^{*}} ), vectors can be sent to covectors (in coordinates, via transpose), so that one can take the inner product and outer product of two vectors—not simply of a vector and a covector.
Every inner product space induces a norm, called its canonical norm, that is defined by
With this norm, every inner product space becomes a normed vector space.
So, every general property of normed vector spaces applies to inner product spaces. In particular, one has the following properties:
for every x ∈ V {\displaystyle x\in V} and a ∈ F {\displaystyle a\in F} (this results from ⟨ a x , a x ⟩ = a a ¯ ⟨ x , x ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle ax,ax\rangle =a{\overline {a}}\langle x,x\rangle } ).
for x , y ∈ V . {\displaystyle x,y\in V.}
for every x , y ∈ V , {\displaystyle x,y\in V,} with equality if and only if x {\displaystyle x} and y {\displaystyle y} are linearly dependent.
for every x , y ∈ V . {\displaystyle x,y\in V.}
The parallelogram law is a necessary and sufficient condition for a norm to be defined by an inner product.
for every x , y ∈ V . {\displaystyle x,y\in V.} The inner product can be retrieved from the norm by the polarization identity, since its imaginary part is the real part of ⟨ x , i y ⟩ . {\displaystyle \langle x,iy\rangle .}
for every x , y , z ∈ V . {\displaystyle x,y,z\in V.} Ptolemy's inequality is a necessary and sufficient condition for a seminorm to be the norm defined by an inner product.
This set C ⊥ {\displaystyle C^{\bot }} is always a closed vector subspace of V {\displaystyle V} and if the closure cl V C {\displaystyle \operatorname {cl} _{V}C} of C {\displaystyle C} in V {\displaystyle V} is a vector subspace then cl V C = ( C ⊥ ) ⊥ . {\displaystyle \operatorname {cl} _{V}C=\left(C^{\bot }\right)^{\bot }.}
This may be proved by expressing the squared norms in terms of the inner products, using additivity for expanding the right-hand side of the equation.
The name Pythagorean theorem arises from the geometric interpretation in Euclidean geometry.
Suppose that ⟨ ⋅ , ⋅ ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle \cdot ,\cdot \rangle } is an inner product on V {\displaystyle V} (so it is antilinear in its second argument). The polarization identity shows that the real part of the inner product is
If V {\displaystyle V} is a real vector space then
and the imaginary part (also called the complex part) of ⟨ ⋅ , ⋅ ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle \cdot ,\cdot \rangle } is always 0. {\displaystyle 0.}
Assume for the rest of this section that V {\displaystyle V} is a complex vector space. The polarization identity for complex vector spaces shows that
The map defined by ⟨ x ∣ y ⟩ = ⟨ y , x ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle x\mid y\rangle =\langle y,x\rangle } for all x , y ∈ V {\displaystyle x,y\in V} satisfies the axioms of the inner product except that it is antilinear in its first, rather than its second, argument. The real part of both ⟨ x ∣ y ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle x\mid y\rangle } and ⟨ x , y ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle x,y\rangle } are equal to Re ⟨ x , y ⟩ {\displaystyle \operatorname {Re} \langle x,y\rangle } but the inner products differ in their complex part:
The last equality is similar to the formula expressing a linear functional in terms of its real part.
These formulas show that every complex inner product is completely determined by its real part. Moreover, this real part defines an inner product on V , {\displaystyle V,} considered as a real vector space. There is thus a one-to-one correspondence between complex inner products on a complex vector space V , {\displaystyle V,} and real inner products on V . {\displaystyle V.}
For example, suppose that V = C n {\displaystyle V=\mathbb {C} ^{n}} for some integer n > 0. {\displaystyle n>0.} When V {\displaystyle V} is considered as a real vector space in the usual way (meaning that it is identified with the 2 n − {\displaystyle 2n-} dimensional real vector space R 2 n , {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{2n},} with each ( a 1 + i b 1 , … , a n + i b n ) ∈ C n {\displaystyle \left(a_{1}+ib_{1},\ldots ,a_{n}+ib_{n}\right)\in \mathbb {C} ^{n}} identified with ( a 1 , b 1 , … , a n , b n ) ∈ R 2 n {\displaystyle \left(a_{1},b_{1},\ldots ,a_{n},b_{n}\right)\in \mathbb {R} ^{2n}} ), then the dot product x ⋅ y = ( x 1 , … , x 2 n ) ⋅ ( y 1 , … , y 2 n ) := x 1 y 1 + ⋯ + x 2 n y 2 n {\displaystyle x\,\cdot \,y=\left(x_{1},\ldots ,x_{2n}\right)\,\cdot \,\left(y_{1},\ldots ,y_{2n}\right):=x_{1}y_{1}+\cdots +x_{2n}y_{2n}} defines a real inner product on this space. The unique complex inner product ⟨ ⋅ , ⋅ ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle \,\cdot ,\cdot \,\rangle } on V = C n {\displaystyle V=\mathbb {C} ^{n}} induced by the dot product is the map that sends c = ( c 1 , … , c n ) , d = ( d 1 , … , d n ) ∈ C n {\displaystyle c=\left(c_{1},\ldots ,c_{n}\right),d=\left(d_{1},\ldots ,d_{n}\right)\in \mathbb {C} ^{n}} to ⟨ c , d ⟩ := c 1 d 1 ¯ + ⋯ + c n d n ¯ {\displaystyle \langle c,d\rangle :=c_{1}{\overline {d_{1}}}+\cdots +c_{n}{\overline {d_{n}}}} (because the real part of this map ⟨ ⋅ , ⋅ ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle \,\cdot ,\cdot \,\rangle } is equal to the dot product).
Real vs. complex inner products
Let V R {\displaystyle V_{\mathbb {R} }} denote V {\displaystyle V} considered as a vector space over the real numbers rather than complex numbers. The real part of the complex inner product ⟨ x , y ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle x,y\rangle } is the map ⟨ x , y ⟩ R = Re ⟨ x , y ⟩ : V R × V R → R , {\displaystyle \langle x,y\rangle _{\mathbb {R} }=\operatorname {Re} \langle x,y\rangle ~:~V_{\mathbb {R} }\times V_{\mathbb {R} }\to \mathbb {R} ,} which necessarily forms a real inner product on the real vector space V R . {\displaystyle V_{\mathbb {R} }.} Every inner product on a real vector space is a bilinear and symmetric map.
For example, if V = C {\displaystyle V=\mathbb {C} } with inner product ⟨ x , y ⟩ = x y ¯ , {\displaystyle \langle x,y\rangle =x{\overline {y}},} where V {\displaystyle V} is a vector space over the field C , {\displaystyle \mathbb {C} ,} then V R = R 2 {\displaystyle V_{\mathbb {R} }=\mathbb {R} ^{2}} is a vector space over R {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} } and ⟨ x , y ⟩ R {\displaystyle \langle x,y\rangle _{\mathbb {R} }} is the dot product x ⋅ y , {\displaystyle x\cdot y,} where x = a + i b ∈ V = C {\displaystyle x=a+ib\in V=\mathbb {C} } is identified with the point ( a , b ) ∈ V R = R 2 {\displaystyle (a,b)\in V_{\mathbb {R} }=\mathbb {R} ^{2}} (and similarly for y {\displaystyle y} ); thus the standard inner product ⟨ x , y ⟩ = x y ¯ , {\displaystyle \langle x,y\rangle =x{\overline {y}},} on C {\displaystyle \mathbb {C} } is an "extension" the dot product . Also, had ⟨ x , y ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle x,y\rangle } been instead defined to be the symmetric map ⟨ x , y ⟩ = x y {\displaystyle \langle x,y\rangle =xy} (rather than the usual conjugate symmetric map ⟨ x , y ⟩ = x y ¯ {\displaystyle \langle x,y\rangle =x{\overline {y}}} ) then its real part ⟨ x , y ⟩ R {\displaystyle \langle x,y\rangle _{\mathbb {R} }} would not be the dot product; furthermore, without the complex conjugate, if x ∈ C {\displaystyle x\in \mathbb {C} } but x ∉ R {\displaystyle x\not \in \mathbb {R} } then ⟨ x , x ⟩ = x x = x 2 ∉ [ 0 , ∞ ) {\displaystyle \langle x,x\rangle =xx=x^{2}\not \in [0,\infty )} so the assignment x ↦ ⟨ x , x ⟩ {\displaystyle x\mapsto {\sqrt {\langle x,x\rangle }}} would not define a norm.
The next examples show that although real and complex inner products have many properties and results in common, they are not entirely interchangeable. For instance, if ⟨ x , y ⟩ = 0 {\displaystyle \langle x,y\rangle =0} then ⟨ x , y ⟩ R = 0 , {\displaystyle \langle x,y\rangle _{\mathbb {R} }=0,} but the next example shows that the converse is in general not true. Given any x ∈ V , {\displaystyle x\in V,} the vector i x {\displaystyle ix} (which is the vector x {\displaystyle x} rotated by 90°) belongs to V {\displaystyle V} and so also belongs to V R {\displaystyle V_{\mathbb {R} }} (although scalar multiplication of x {\displaystyle x} by i = − 1 {\displaystyle i={\sqrt {-1}}} is not defined in V R , {\displaystyle V_{\mathbb {R} },} the vector in V {\displaystyle V} denoted by i x {\displaystyle ix} is nevertheless still also an element of V R {\displaystyle V_{\mathbb {R} }} ). For the complex inner product, ⟨ x , i x ⟩ = − i ‖ x ‖ 2 , {\displaystyle \langle x,ix\rangle =-i\|x\|^{2},} whereas for the real inner product the value is always ⟨ x , i x ⟩ R = 0. {\displaystyle \langle x,ix\rangle _{\mathbb {R} }=0.}
If ⟨ ⋅ , ⋅ ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle \,\cdot ,\cdot \,\rangle } is a complex inner product and A : V → V {\displaystyle A:V\to V} is a continuous linear operator that satisfies ⟨ x , A x ⟩ = 0 {\displaystyle \langle x,Ax\rangle =0} for all x ∈ V , {\displaystyle x\in V,} then A = 0. {\displaystyle A=0.} This statement is no longer true if ⟨ ⋅ , ⋅ ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle \,\cdot ,\cdot \,\rangle } is instead a real inner product, as this next example shows. Suppose that V = C {\displaystyle V=\mathbb {C} } has the inner product ⟨ x , y ⟩ := x y ¯ {\displaystyle \langle x,y\rangle :=x{\overline {y}}} mentioned above. Then the map A : V → V {\displaystyle A:V\to V} defined by A x = i x {\displaystyle Ax=ix} is a linear map (linear for both V {\displaystyle V} and V R {\displaystyle V_{\mathbb {R} }} ) that denotes rotation by 90 ∘ {\displaystyle 90^{\circ }} in the plane. Because x {\displaystyle x} and A x {\displaystyle Ax} are perpendicular vectors and ⟨ x , A x ⟩ R {\displaystyle \langle x,Ax\rangle _{\mathbb {R} }} is just the dot product, ⟨ x , A x ⟩ R = 0 {\displaystyle \langle x,Ax\rangle _{\mathbb {R} }=0} for all vectors x ; {\displaystyle x;} nevertheless, this rotation map A {\displaystyle A} is certainly not identically 0. {\displaystyle 0.} In contrast, using the complex inner product gives ⟨ x , A x ⟩ = − i ‖ x ‖ 2 , {\displaystyle \langle x,Ax\rangle =-i\|x\|^{2},} which (as expected) is not identically zero.
Let V {\displaystyle V} be a finite dimensional inner product space of dimension n . {\displaystyle n.} Recall that every basis of V {\displaystyle V} consists of exactly n {\displaystyle n} linearly independent vectors. Using the Gram–Schmidt process we may start with an arbitrary basis and transform it into an orthonormal basis. That is, into a basis in which all the elements are orthogonal and have unit norm. In symbols, a basis { e 1 , … , e n } {\displaystyle \{e_{1},\ldots ,e_{n}\}} is orthonormal if ⟨ e i , e j ⟩ = 0 {\displaystyle \langle e_{i},e_{j}\rangle =0} for every i ≠ j {\displaystyle i\neq j} and ⟨ e i , e i ⟩ = ‖ e a ‖ 2 = 1 {\displaystyle \langle e_{i},e_{i}\rangle =\|e_{a}\|^{2}=1} for each index i . {\displaystyle i.}
This definition of orthonormal basis generalizes to the case of infinite-dimensional inner product spaces in the following way. Let V {\displaystyle V} be any inner product space. Then a collection
is a basis for V {\displaystyle V} if the subspace of V {\displaystyle V} generated by finite linear combinations of elements of E {\displaystyle E} is dense in V {\displaystyle V} (in the norm induced by the inner product). Say that E {\displaystyle E} is an orthonormal basis for V {\displaystyle V} if it is a basis and
if a ≠ b {\displaystyle a\neq b} and ⟨ e a , e a ⟩ = ‖ e a ‖ 2 = 1 {\displaystyle \langle e_{a},e_{a}\rangle =\|e_{a}\|^{2}=1} for all a , b ∈ A . {\displaystyle a,b\in A.}
Using an infinite-dimensional analog of the Gram-Schmidt process one may show:
Theorem. Any separable inner product space has an orthonormal basis.
Using the Hausdorff maximal principle and the fact that in a complete inner product space orthogonal projection onto linear subspaces is well-defined, one may also show that
Theorem. Any complete inner product space has an orthonormal basis.
The two previous theorems raise the question of whether all inner product spaces have an orthonormal basis. The answer, it turns out is negative. This is a non-trivial result, and is proved below. The following proof is taken from Halmos's A Hilbert Space Problem Book (see the references).
Parseval's identity leads immediately to the following theorem:
Theorem. Let V {\displaystyle V} be a separable inner product space and { e k } k {\displaystyle \left\{e_{k}\right\}_{k}} an orthonormal basis of V . {\displaystyle V.} Then the map
is an isometric linear map V ↦ ℓ 2 {\displaystyle V\mapsto \ell ^{2}} with a dense image.
This theorem can be regarded as an abstract form of Fourier series, in which an arbitrary orthonormal basis plays the role of the sequence of trigonometric polynomials. Note that the underlying index set can be taken to be any countable set (and in fact any set whatsoever, provided ℓ 2 {\displaystyle \ell ^{2}} is defined appropriately, as is explained in the article Hilbert space). In particular, we obtain the following result in the theory of Fourier series:
Theorem. Let V {\displaystyle V} be the inner product space C [ − π , π ] . {\displaystyle C[-\pi ,\pi ].} Then the sequence (indexed on set of all integers) of continuous functions
is an orthonormal basis of the space C [ − π , π ] {\displaystyle C[-\pi ,\pi ]} with the L 2 {\displaystyle L^{2}} inner product. The mapping
is an isometric linear map with dense image.
Orthogonality of the sequence { e k } k {\displaystyle \{e_{k}\}_{k}} follows immediately from the fact that if k ≠ j , {\displaystyle k\neq j,} then
Normality of the sequence is by design, that is, the coefficients are so chosen so that the norm comes out to 1. Finally the fact that the sequence has a dense algebraic span, in the inner product norm, follows from the fact that the sequence has a dense algebraic span, this time in the space of continuous periodic functions on [ − π , π ] {\displaystyle [-\pi ,\pi ]} with the uniform norm. This is the content of the Weierstrass theorem on the uniform density of trigonometric polynomials.
Several types of linear maps A : V → W {\displaystyle A:V\to W} between inner product spaces V {\displaystyle V} and W {\displaystyle W} are of relevance:
From the point of view of inner product space theory, there is no need to distinguish between two spaces which are isometrically isomorphic. The spectral theorem provides a canonical form for symmetric, unitary and more generally normal operators on finite dimensional inner product spaces. A generalization of the spectral theorem holds for continuous normal operators in Hilbert spaces.
Any of the axioms of an inner product may be weakened, yielding generalized notions. The generalizations that are closest to inner products occur where bilinearity and conjugate symmetry are retained, but positive-definiteness is weakened.
If V {\displaystyle V} is a vector space and ⟨ ⋅ , ⋅ ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle \,\cdot \,,\,\cdot \,\rangle } a semi-definite sesquilinear form, then the function:
makes sense and satisfies all the properties of norm except that ‖ x ‖ = 0 {\displaystyle \|x\|=0} does not imply x = 0 {\displaystyle x=0} (such a functional is then called a semi-norm). We can produce an inner product space by considering the quotient W = V / { x : ‖ x ‖ = 0 } . {\displaystyle W=V/\{x:\|x\|=0\}.} The sesquilinear form ⟨ ⋅ , ⋅ ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle \,\cdot \,,\,\cdot \,\rangle } factors through W . {\displaystyle W.}
This construction is used in numerous contexts. The Gelfand–Naimark–Segal construction is a particularly important example of the use of this technique. Another example is the representation of semi-definite kernels on arbitrary sets.
Alternatively, one may require that the pairing be a nondegenerate form, meaning that for all non-zero x ≠ 0 {\displaystyle x\neq 0} there exists some y {\displaystyle y} such that ⟨ x , y ⟩ ≠ 0 , {\displaystyle \langle x,y\rangle \neq 0,} though y {\displaystyle y} need not equal x {\displaystyle x} ; in other words, the induced map to the dual space V → V ∗ {\displaystyle V\to V^{*}} is injective. This generalization is important in differential geometry: a manifold whose tangent spaces have an inner product is a Riemannian manifold, while if this is related to nondegenerate conjugate symmetric form the manifold is a pseudo-Riemannian manifold. By Sylvester's law of inertia, just as every inner product is similar to the dot product with positive weights on a set of vectors, every nondegenerate conjugate symmetric form is similar to the dot product with nonzero weights on a set of vectors, and the number of positive and negative weights are called respectively the positive index and negative index. Product of vectors in Minkowski space is an example of indefinite inner product, although, technically speaking, it is not an inner product according to the standard definition above. Minkowski space has four dimensions and indices 3 and 1 (assignment of "+" and "−" to them differs depending on conventions).
Purely algebraic statements (ones that do not use positivity) usually only rely on the nondegeneracy (the injective homomorphism V → V ∗ {\displaystyle V\to V^{*}} ) and thus hold more generally.
The term "inner product" is opposed to outer product, which is a slightly more general opposite. Simply, in coordinates, the inner product is the product of a 1 × n {\displaystyle 1\times n} covector with an n × 1 {\displaystyle n\times 1} vector, yielding a 1 × 1 {\displaystyle 1\times 1} matrix (a scalar), while the outer product is the product of an m × 1 {\displaystyle m\times 1} vector with a 1 × n {\displaystyle 1\times n} covector, yielding an m × n {\displaystyle m\times n} matrix. The outer product is defined for different dimensions, while the inner product requires the same dimension. If the dimensions are the same, then the inner product is the trace of the outer product (trace only being properly defined for square matrices). In an informal summary: "inner is horizontal times vertical and shrinks down, outer is vertical times horizontal and expands out".
More abstractly, the outer product is the bilinear map W × V ∗ → hom ( V , W ) {\displaystyle W\times V^{*}\to \hom(V,W)} sending a vector and a covector to a rank 1 linear transformation (simple tensor of type (1, 1)), while the inner product is the bilinear evaluation map V ∗ × V → F {\displaystyle V^{*}\times V\to F} given by evaluating a covector on a vector; the order of the domain vector spaces here reflects the covector/vector distinction.
The inner product and outer product should not be confused with the interior product and exterior product, which are instead operations on vector fields and differential forms, or more generally on the exterior algebra.
As a further complication, in geometric algebra the inner product and the exterior (Grassmann) product are combined in the geometric product (the Clifford product in a Clifford algebra) – the inner product sends two vectors (1-vectors) to a scalar (a 0-vector), while the exterior product sends two vectors to a bivector (2-vector) – and in this context the exterior product is usually called the outer product (alternatively, wedge product). The inner product is more correctly called a scalar product in this context, as the nondegenerate quadratic form in question need not be positive definite (need not be an inner product). | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "In mathematics, an inner product space (or, rarely, a Hausdorff pre-Hilbert space) is a real vector space or a complex vector space with an operation called an inner product. The inner product of two vectors in the space is a scalar, often denoted with angle brackets such as in ⟨ a , b ⟩ {\\displaystyle \\langle a,b\\rangle } . Inner products allow formal definitions of intuitive geometric notions, such as lengths, angles, and orthogonality (zero inner product) of vectors. Inner product spaces generalize Euclidean vector spaces, in which the inner product is the dot product or scalar product of Cartesian coordinates. Inner product spaces of infinite dimension are widely used in functional analysis. Inner product spaces over the field of complex numbers are sometimes referred to as unitary spaces. The first usage of the concept of a vector space with an inner product is due to Giuseppe Peano, in 1898.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "An inner product naturally induces an associated norm, (denoted | x | {\\displaystyle |x|} and | y | {\\displaystyle |y|} in the picture); so, every inner product space is a normed vector space. If this normed space is also complete (that is, a Banach space) then the inner product space is a Hilbert space. If an inner product space H is not a Hilbert space, it can be extended by completion to a Hilbert space H ¯ . {\\displaystyle {\\overline {H}}.} This means that H {\\displaystyle H} is a linear subspace of H ¯ , {\\displaystyle {\\overline {H}},} the inner product of H {\\displaystyle H} is the restriction of that of H ¯ , {\\displaystyle {\\overline {H}},} and H {\\displaystyle H} is dense in H ¯ {\\displaystyle {\\overline {H}}} for the topology defined by the norm.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In this article, F denotes a field that is either the real numbers R , {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {R} ,} or the complex numbers C . {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {C} .} A scalar is thus an element of F. A bar over an expression representing a scalar denotes the complex conjugate of this scalar. A zero vector is denoted 0 {\\displaystyle \\mathbf {0} } for distinguishing it from the scalar 0.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "An inner product space is a vector space V over the field F together with an inner product, that is, a map",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "that satisfies the following three properties for all vectors x , y , z ∈ V {\\displaystyle x,y,z\\in V} and all scalars a , b ∈ F {\\displaystyle a,b\\in F} .",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "If the positive-definiteness condition is replaced by merely requiring that ⟨ x , x ⟩ ≥ 0 {\\displaystyle \\langle x,x\\rangle \\geq 0} for all x {\\displaystyle x} , then one obtains the definition of positive semi-definite Hermitian form. A positive semi-definite Hermitian form ⟨ ⋅ , ⋅ ⟩ {\\displaystyle \\langle \\cdot ,\\cdot \\rangle } is an inner product if and only if for all x {\\displaystyle x} , if ⟨ x , x ⟩ = 0 {\\displaystyle \\langle x,x\\rangle =0} then x = 0 {\\displaystyle x=\\mathbf {0} } .",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In the following properties, which result almost immediately from the definition of an inner product, x, y and z are arbitrary vectors, and a and b are arbitrary scalars.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Over R {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {R} } , conjugate-symmetry reduces to symmetry, and sesquilinearity reduces to bilinearity. Hence an inner product on a real vector space is a positive-definite symmetric bilinear form. The binomial expansion of a square becomes",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Some authors, especially in physics and matrix algebra, prefer to define inner products and sesquilinear forms with linearity in the second argument rather than the first. Then the first argument becomes conjugate linear, rather than the second. Bra-ket notation in quantum mechanics also uses slightly different notation, i.e. ⟨ ⋅ | ⋅ ⟩ {\\displaystyle \\langle \\cdot |\\cdot \\rangle } , where ⟨ x | y ⟩ := ( y , x ) {\\displaystyle \\langle x|y\\rangle :=\\left(y,x\\right)} .",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Several notations are used for inner products, including ⟨ ⋅ , ⋅ ⟩ {\\displaystyle \\langle \\cdot ,\\cdot \\rangle } , ( ⋅ , ⋅ ) {\\displaystyle \\left(\\cdot ,\\cdot \\right)} , ⟨ ⋅ | ⋅ ⟩ {\\displaystyle \\langle \\cdot |\\cdot \\rangle } and ( ⋅ | ⋅ ) {\\displaystyle \\left(\\cdot |\\cdot \\right)} , as well as the usual dot product.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Among the simplest examples of inner product spaces are R {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {R} } and C . {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {C} .} The real numbers R {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {R} } are a vector space over R {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {R} } that becomes an inner product space with arithmetic multiplication as its inner product:",
"title": "Some examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The complex numbers C {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {C} } are a vector space over C {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {C} } that becomes an inner product space with the inner product",
"title": "Some examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Unlike with the real numbers, the assignment ( x , y ) ↦ x y {\\displaystyle (x,y)\\mapsto xy} does not define a complex inner product on C . {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {C} .}",
"title": "Some examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "More generally, the real n {\\displaystyle n} -space R n {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {R} ^{n}} with the dot product is an inner product space, an example of a Euclidean vector space.",
"title": "Some examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "where x T {\\displaystyle x^{\\operatorname {T} }} is the transpose of x . {\\displaystyle x.}",
"title": "Some examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "A function ⟨ ⋅ , ⋅ ⟩ : R n × R n → R {\\displaystyle \\langle \\,\\cdot ,\\cdot \\,\\rangle :\\mathbb {R} ^{n}\\times \\mathbb {R} ^{n}\\to \\mathbb {R} } is an inner product on R n {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {R} ^{n}} if and only if there exists a symmetric positive-definite matrix M {\\displaystyle \\mathbf {M} } such that ⟨ x , y ⟩ = x T M y {\\displaystyle \\langle x,y\\rangle =x^{\\operatorname {T} }\\mathbf {M} y} for all x , y ∈ R n . {\\displaystyle x,y\\in \\mathbb {R} ^{n}.} If M {\\displaystyle \\mathbf {M} } is the identity matrix then ⟨ x , y ⟩ = x T M y {\\displaystyle \\langle x,y\\rangle =x^{\\operatorname {T} }\\mathbf {M} y} is the dot product. For another example, if n = 2 {\\displaystyle n=2} and M = [ a b b d ] {\\displaystyle \\mathbf {M} ={\\begin{bmatrix}a&b\\\\b&d\\end{bmatrix}}} is positive-definite (which happens if and only if det M = a d − b 2 > 0 {\\displaystyle \\det \\mathbf {M} =ad-b^{2}>0} and one/both diagonal elements are positive) then for any x := [ x 1 , x 2 ] T , y := [ y 1 , y 2 ] T ∈ R 2 , {\\displaystyle x:=\\left[x_{1},x_{2}\\right]^{\\operatorname {T} },y:=\\left[y_{1},y_{2}\\right]^{\\operatorname {T} }\\in \\mathbb {R} ^{2},}",
"title": "Some examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "As mentioned earlier, every inner product on R 2 {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {R} ^{2}} is of this form (where b ∈ R , a > 0 {\\displaystyle b\\in \\mathbb {R} ,a>0} and d > 0 {\\displaystyle d>0} satisfy a d > b 2 {\\displaystyle ad>b^{2}} ).",
"title": "Some examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The general form of an inner product on C n {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {C} ^{n}} is known as the Hermitian form and is given by",
"title": "Some examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "where M {\\displaystyle M} is any Hermitian positive-definite matrix and y † {\\displaystyle y^{\\dagger }} is the conjugate transpose of y . {\\displaystyle y.} For the real case, this corresponds to the dot product of the results of directionally-different scaling of the two vectors, with positive scale factors and orthogonal directions of scaling. It is a weighted-sum version of the dot product with positive weights—up to an orthogonal transformation.",
"title": "Some examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The article on Hilbert spaces has several examples of inner product spaces, wherein the metric induced by the inner product yields a complete metric space. An example of an inner product space which induces an incomplete metric is the space C ( [ a , b ] ) {\\displaystyle C([a,b])} of continuous complex valued functions f {\\displaystyle f} and g {\\displaystyle g} on the interval [ a , b ] . {\\displaystyle [a,b].} The inner product is",
"title": "Some examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "This space is not complete; consider for example, for the interval [−1, 1] the sequence of continuous \"step\" functions, { f k } k , {\\displaystyle \\{f_{k}\\}_{k},} defined by:",
"title": "Some examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "This sequence is a Cauchy sequence for the norm induced by the preceding inner product, which does not converge to a continuous function.",
"title": "Some examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "For real random variables X {\\displaystyle X} and Y , {\\displaystyle Y,} the expected value of their product",
"title": "Some examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "is an inner product. In this case, ⟨ X , X ⟩ = 0 {\\displaystyle \\langle X,X\\rangle =0} if and only if P [ X = 0 ] = 1 {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {P} [X=0]=1} (that is, X = 0 {\\displaystyle X=0} almost surely), where P {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {P} } denotes the probability of the event. This definition of expectation as inner product can be extended to random vectors as well.",
"title": "Some examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The inner product for complex square matrices of the same size is the Frobenius inner product ⟨ A , B ⟩ := tr ( A B H ) {\\displaystyle \\langle A,B\\rangle :=\\operatorname {tr} \\left(AB^{\\textsf {H}}\\right)} . Since trace and transposition are linear and the conjugation is on the second matrix, it is a sesquilinear operator. We further get Hermitian symmetry by,",
"title": "Some examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Finally, since for A {\\displaystyle A} nonzero, ⟨ A , A ⟩ = ∑ i j | A i j | 2 > 0 {\\displaystyle \\langle A,A\\rangle =\\sum _{ij}\\left|A_{ij}\\right|^{2}>0} , we get that the Frobenius inner product is positive definite too, and so is an inner product.",
"title": "Some examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "On an inner product space, or more generally a vector space with a nondegenerate form (hence an isomorphism V → V ∗ {\\displaystyle V\\to V^{*}} ), vectors can be sent to covectors (in coordinates, via transpose), so that one can take the inner product and outer product of two vectors—not simply of a vector and a covector.",
"title": "Some examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Every inner product space induces a norm, called its canonical norm, that is defined by",
"title": "Basic results, terminology, and definitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "With this norm, every inner product space becomes a normed vector space.",
"title": "Basic results, terminology, and definitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "So, every general property of normed vector spaces applies to inner product spaces. In particular, one has the following properties:",
"title": "Basic results, terminology, and definitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "for every x ∈ V {\\displaystyle x\\in V} and a ∈ F {\\displaystyle a\\in F} (this results from ⟨ a x , a x ⟩ = a a ¯ ⟨ x , x ⟩ {\\displaystyle \\langle ax,ax\\rangle =a{\\overline {a}}\\langle x,x\\rangle } ).",
"title": "Basic results, terminology, and definitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "for x , y ∈ V . {\\displaystyle x,y\\in V.}",
"title": "Basic results, terminology, and definitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "for every x , y ∈ V , {\\displaystyle x,y\\in V,} with equality if and only if x {\\displaystyle x} and y {\\displaystyle y} are linearly dependent.",
"title": "Basic results, terminology, and definitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "for every x , y ∈ V . {\\displaystyle x,y\\in V.}",
"title": "Basic results, terminology, and definitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The parallelogram law is a necessary and sufficient condition for a norm to be defined by an inner product.",
"title": "Basic results, terminology, and definitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "for every x , y ∈ V . {\\displaystyle x,y\\in V.} The inner product can be retrieved from the norm by the polarization identity, since its imaginary part is the real part of ⟨ x , i y ⟩ . {\\displaystyle \\langle x,iy\\rangle .}",
"title": "Basic results, terminology, and definitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "for every x , y , z ∈ V . {\\displaystyle x,y,z\\in V.} Ptolemy's inequality is a necessary and sufficient condition for a seminorm to be the norm defined by an inner product.",
"title": "Basic results, terminology, and definitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "This set C ⊥ {\\displaystyle C^{\\bot }} is always a closed vector subspace of V {\\displaystyle V} and if the closure cl V C {\\displaystyle \\operatorname {cl} _{V}C} of C {\\displaystyle C} in V {\\displaystyle V} is a vector subspace then cl V C = ( C ⊥ ) ⊥ . {\\displaystyle \\operatorname {cl} _{V}C=\\left(C^{\\bot }\\right)^{\\bot }.}",
"title": "Basic results, terminology, and definitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "This may be proved by expressing the squared norms in terms of the inner products, using additivity for expanding the right-hand side of the equation.",
"title": "Basic results, terminology, and definitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The name Pythagorean theorem arises from the geometric interpretation in Euclidean geometry.",
"title": "Basic results, terminology, and definitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Suppose that ⟨ ⋅ , ⋅ ⟩ {\\displaystyle \\langle \\cdot ,\\cdot \\rangle } is an inner product on V {\\displaystyle V} (so it is antilinear in its second argument). The polarization identity shows that the real part of the inner product is",
"title": "Basic results, terminology, and definitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "If V {\\displaystyle V} is a real vector space then",
"title": "Basic results, terminology, and definitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "and the imaginary part (also called the complex part) of ⟨ ⋅ , ⋅ ⟩ {\\displaystyle \\langle \\cdot ,\\cdot \\rangle } is always 0. {\\displaystyle 0.}",
"title": "Basic results, terminology, and definitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Assume for the rest of this section that V {\\displaystyle V} is a complex vector space. The polarization identity for complex vector spaces shows that",
"title": "Basic results, terminology, and definitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The map defined by ⟨ x ∣ y ⟩ = ⟨ y , x ⟩ {\\displaystyle \\langle x\\mid y\\rangle =\\langle y,x\\rangle } for all x , y ∈ V {\\displaystyle x,y\\in V} satisfies the axioms of the inner product except that it is antilinear in its first, rather than its second, argument. The real part of both ⟨ x ∣ y ⟩ {\\displaystyle \\langle x\\mid y\\rangle } and ⟨ x , y ⟩ {\\displaystyle \\langle x,y\\rangle } are equal to Re ⟨ x , y ⟩ {\\displaystyle \\operatorname {Re} \\langle x,y\\rangle } but the inner products differ in their complex part:",
"title": "Basic results, terminology, and definitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The last equality is similar to the formula expressing a linear functional in terms of its real part.",
"title": "Basic results, terminology, and definitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "These formulas show that every complex inner product is completely determined by its real part. Moreover, this real part defines an inner product on V , {\\displaystyle V,} considered as a real vector space. There is thus a one-to-one correspondence between complex inner products on a complex vector space V , {\\displaystyle V,} and real inner products on V . {\\displaystyle V.}",
"title": "Basic results, terminology, and definitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "For example, suppose that V = C n {\\displaystyle V=\\mathbb {C} ^{n}} for some integer n > 0. {\\displaystyle n>0.} When V {\\displaystyle V} is considered as a real vector space in the usual way (meaning that it is identified with the 2 n − {\\displaystyle 2n-} dimensional real vector space R 2 n , {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {R} ^{2n},} with each ( a 1 + i b 1 , … , a n + i b n ) ∈ C n {\\displaystyle \\left(a_{1}+ib_{1},\\ldots ,a_{n}+ib_{n}\\right)\\in \\mathbb {C} ^{n}} identified with ( a 1 , b 1 , … , a n , b n ) ∈ R 2 n {\\displaystyle \\left(a_{1},b_{1},\\ldots ,a_{n},b_{n}\\right)\\in \\mathbb {R} ^{2n}} ), then the dot product x ⋅ y = ( x 1 , … , x 2 n ) ⋅ ( y 1 , … , y 2 n ) := x 1 y 1 + ⋯ + x 2 n y 2 n {\\displaystyle x\\,\\cdot \\,y=\\left(x_{1},\\ldots ,x_{2n}\\right)\\,\\cdot \\,\\left(y_{1},\\ldots ,y_{2n}\\right):=x_{1}y_{1}+\\cdots +x_{2n}y_{2n}} defines a real inner product on this space. The unique complex inner product ⟨ ⋅ , ⋅ ⟩ {\\displaystyle \\langle \\,\\cdot ,\\cdot \\,\\rangle } on V = C n {\\displaystyle V=\\mathbb {C} ^{n}} induced by the dot product is the map that sends c = ( c 1 , … , c n ) , d = ( d 1 , … , d n ) ∈ C n {\\displaystyle c=\\left(c_{1},\\ldots ,c_{n}\\right),d=\\left(d_{1},\\ldots ,d_{n}\\right)\\in \\mathbb {C} ^{n}} to ⟨ c , d ⟩ := c 1 d 1 ¯ + ⋯ + c n d n ¯ {\\displaystyle \\langle c,d\\rangle :=c_{1}{\\overline {d_{1}}}+\\cdots +c_{n}{\\overline {d_{n}}}} (because the real part of this map ⟨ ⋅ , ⋅ ⟩ {\\displaystyle \\langle \\,\\cdot ,\\cdot \\,\\rangle } is equal to the dot product).",
"title": "Basic results, terminology, and definitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Real vs. complex inner products",
"title": "Basic results, terminology, and definitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Let V R {\\displaystyle V_{\\mathbb {R} }} denote V {\\displaystyle V} considered as a vector space over the real numbers rather than complex numbers. The real part of the complex inner product ⟨ x , y ⟩ {\\displaystyle \\langle x,y\\rangle } is the map ⟨ x , y ⟩ R = Re ⟨ x , y ⟩ : V R × V R → R , {\\displaystyle \\langle x,y\\rangle _{\\mathbb {R} }=\\operatorname {Re} \\langle x,y\\rangle ~:~V_{\\mathbb {R} }\\times V_{\\mathbb {R} }\\to \\mathbb {R} ,} which necessarily forms a real inner product on the real vector space V R . {\\displaystyle V_{\\mathbb {R} }.} Every inner product on a real vector space is a bilinear and symmetric map.",
"title": "Basic results, terminology, and definitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "For example, if V = C {\\displaystyle V=\\mathbb {C} } with inner product ⟨ x , y ⟩ = x y ¯ , {\\displaystyle \\langle x,y\\rangle =x{\\overline {y}},} where V {\\displaystyle V} is a vector space over the field C , {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {C} ,} then V R = R 2 {\\displaystyle V_{\\mathbb {R} }=\\mathbb {R} ^{2}} is a vector space over R {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {R} } and ⟨ x , y ⟩ R {\\displaystyle \\langle x,y\\rangle _{\\mathbb {R} }} is the dot product x ⋅ y , {\\displaystyle x\\cdot y,} where x = a + i b ∈ V = C {\\displaystyle x=a+ib\\in V=\\mathbb {C} } is identified with the point ( a , b ) ∈ V R = R 2 {\\displaystyle (a,b)\\in V_{\\mathbb {R} }=\\mathbb {R} ^{2}} (and similarly for y {\\displaystyle y} ); thus the standard inner product ⟨ x , y ⟩ = x y ¯ , {\\displaystyle \\langle x,y\\rangle =x{\\overline {y}},} on C {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {C} } is an \"extension\" the dot product . Also, had ⟨ x , y ⟩ {\\displaystyle \\langle x,y\\rangle } been instead defined to be the symmetric map ⟨ x , y ⟩ = x y {\\displaystyle \\langle x,y\\rangle =xy} (rather than the usual conjugate symmetric map ⟨ x , y ⟩ = x y ¯ {\\displaystyle \\langle x,y\\rangle =x{\\overline {y}}} ) then its real part ⟨ x , y ⟩ R {\\displaystyle \\langle x,y\\rangle _{\\mathbb {R} }} would not be the dot product; furthermore, without the complex conjugate, if x ∈ C {\\displaystyle x\\in \\mathbb {C} } but x ∉ R {\\displaystyle x\\not \\in \\mathbb {R} } then ⟨ x , x ⟩ = x x = x 2 ∉ [ 0 , ∞ ) {\\displaystyle \\langle x,x\\rangle =xx=x^{2}\\not \\in [0,\\infty )} so the assignment x ↦ ⟨ x , x ⟩ {\\displaystyle x\\mapsto {\\sqrt {\\langle x,x\\rangle }}} would not define a norm.",
"title": "Basic results, terminology, and definitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "The next examples show that although real and complex inner products have many properties and results in common, they are not entirely interchangeable. For instance, if ⟨ x , y ⟩ = 0 {\\displaystyle \\langle x,y\\rangle =0} then ⟨ x , y ⟩ R = 0 , {\\displaystyle \\langle x,y\\rangle _{\\mathbb {R} }=0,} but the next example shows that the converse is in general not true. Given any x ∈ V , {\\displaystyle x\\in V,} the vector i x {\\displaystyle ix} (which is the vector x {\\displaystyle x} rotated by 90°) belongs to V {\\displaystyle V} and so also belongs to V R {\\displaystyle V_{\\mathbb {R} }} (although scalar multiplication of x {\\displaystyle x} by i = − 1 {\\displaystyle i={\\sqrt {-1}}} is not defined in V R , {\\displaystyle V_{\\mathbb {R} },} the vector in V {\\displaystyle V} denoted by i x {\\displaystyle ix} is nevertheless still also an element of V R {\\displaystyle V_{\\mathbb {R} }} ). For the complex inner product, ⟨ x , i x ⟩ = − i ‖ x ‖ 2 , {\\displaystyle \\langle x,ix\\rangle =-i\\|x\\|^{2},} whereas for the real inner product the value is always ⟨ x , i x ⟩ R = 0. {\\displaystyle \\langle x,ix\\rangle _{\\mathbb {R} }=0.}",
"title": "Basic results, terminology, and definitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "If ⟨ ⋅ , ⋅ ⟩ {\\displaystyle \\langle \\,\\cdot ,\\cdot \\,\\rangle } is a complex inner product and A : V → V {\\displaystyle A:V\\to V} is a continuous linear operator that satisfies ⟨ x , A x ⟩ = 0 {\\displaystyle \\langle x,Ax\\rangle =0} for all x ∈ V , {\\displaystyle x\\in V,} then A = 0. {\\displaystyle A=0.} This statement is no longer true if ⟨ ⋅ , ⋅ ⟩ {\\displaystyle \\langle \\,\\cdot ,\\cdot \\,\\rangle } is instead a real inner product, as this next example shows. Suppose that V = C {\\displaystyle V=\\mathbb {C} } has the inner product ⟨ x , y ⟩ := x y ¯ {\\displaystyle \\langle x,y\\rangle :=x{\\overline {y}}} mentioned above. Then the map A : V → V {\\displaystyle A:V\\to V} defined by A x = i x {\\displaystyle Ax=ix} is a linear map (linear for both V {\\displaystyle V} and V R {\\displaystyle V_{\\mathbb {R} }} ) that denotes rotation by 90 ∘ {\\displaystyle 90^{\\circ }} in the plane. Because x {\\displaystyle x} and A x {\\displaystyle Ax} are perpendicular vectors and ⟨ x , A x ⟩ R {\\displaystyle \\langle x,Ax\\rangle _{\\mathbb {R} }} is just the dot product, ⟨ x , A x ⟩ R = 0 {\\displaystyle \\langle x,Ax\\rangle _{\\mathbb {R} }=0} for all vectors x ; {\\displaystyle x;} nevertheless, this rotation map A {\\displaystyle A} is certainly not identically 0. {\\displaystyle 0.} In contrast, using the complex inner product gives ⟨ x , A x ⟩ = − i ‖ x ‖ 2 , {\\displaystyle \\langle x,Ax\\rangle =-i\\|x\\|^{2},} which (as expected) is not identically zero.",
"title": "Basic results, terminology, and definitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Let V {\\displaystyle V} be a finite dimensional inner product space of dimension n . {\\displaystyle n.} Recall that every basis of V {\\displaystyle V} consists of exactly n {\\displaystyle n} linearly independent vectors. Using the Gram–Schmidt process we may start with an arbitrary basis and transform it into an orthonormal basis. That is, into a basis in which all the elements are orthogonal and have unit norm. In symbols, a basis { e 1 , … , e n } {\\displaystyle \\{e_{1},\\ldots ,e_{n}\\}} is orthonormal if ⟨ e i , e j ⟩ = 0 {\\displaystyle \\langle e_{i},e_{j}\\rangle =0} for every i ≠ j {\\displaystyle i\\neq j} and ⟨ e i , e i ⟩ = ‖ e a ‖ 2 = 1 {\\displaystyle \\langle e_{i},e_{i}\\rangle =\\|e_{a}\\|^{2}=1} for each index i . {\\displaystyle i.}",
"title": "Orthonormal sequences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "This definition of orthonormal basis generalizes to the case of infinite-dimensional inner product spaces in the following way. Let V {\\displaystyle V} be any inner product space. Then a collection",
"title": "Orthonormal sequences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "is a basis for V {\\displaystyle V} if the subspace of V {\\displaystyle V} generated by finite linear combinations of elements of E {\\displaystyle E} is dense in V {\\displaystyle V} (in the norm induced by the inner product). Say that E {\\displaystyle E} is an orthonormal basis for V {\\displaystyle V} if it is a basis and",
"title": "Orthonormal sequences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "if a ≠ b {\\displaystyle a\\neq b} and ⟨ e a , e a ⟩ = ‖ e a ‖ 2 = 1 {\\displaystyle \\langle e_{a},e_{a}\\rangle =\\|e_{a}\\|^{2}=1} for all a , b ∈ A . {\\displaystyle a,b\\in A.}",
"title": "Orthonormal sequences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Using an infinite-dimensional analog of the Gram-Schmidt process one may show:",
"title": "Orthonormal sequences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Theorem. Any separable inner product space has an orthonormal basis.",
"title": "Orthonormal sequences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Using the Hausdorff maximal principle and the fact that in a complete inner product space orthogonal projection onto linear subspaces is well-defined, one may also show that",
"title": "Orthonormal sequences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Theorem. Any complete inner product space has an orthonormal basis.",
"title": "Orthonormal sequences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "The two previous theorems raise the question of whether all inner product spaces have an orthonormal basis. The answer, it turns out is negative. This is a non-trivial result, and is proved below. The following proof is taken from Halmos's A Hilbert Space Problem Book (see the references).",
"title": "Orthonormal sequences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Parseval's identity leads immediately to the following theorem:",
"title": "Orthonormal sequences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Theorem. Let V {\\displaystyle V} be a separable inner product space and { e k } k {\\displaystyle \\left\\{e_{k}\\right\\}_{k}} an orthonormal basis of V . {\\displaystyle V.} Then the map",
"title": "Orthonormal sequences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "is an isometric linear map V ↦ ℓ 2 {\\displaystyle V\\mapsto \\ell ^{2}} with a dense image.",
"title": "Orthonormal sequences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "This theorem can be regarded as an abstract form of Fourier series, in which an arbitrary orthonormal basis plays the role of the sequence of trigonometric polynomials. Note that the underlying index set can be taken to be any countable set (and in fact any set whatsoever, provided ℓ 2 {\\displaystyle \\ell ^{2}} is defined appropriately, as is explained in the article Hilbert space). In particular, we obtain the following result in the theory of Fourier series:",
"title": "Orthonormal sequences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Theorem. Let V {\\displaystyle V} be the inner product space C [ − π , π ] . {\\displaystyle C[-\\pi ,\\pi ].} Then the sequence (indexed on set of all integers) of continuous functions",
"title": "Orthonormal sequences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "is an orthonormal basis of the space C [ − π , π ] {\\displaystyle C[-\\pi ,\\pi ]} with the L 2 {\\displaystyle L^{2}} inner product. The mapping",
"title": "Orthonormal sequences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "is an isometric linear map with dense image.",
"title": "Orthonormal sequences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Orthogonality of the sequence { e k } k {\\displaystyle \\{e_{k}\\}_{k}} follows immediately from the fact that if k ≠ j , {\\displaystyle k\\neq j,} then",
"title": "Orthonormal sequences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Normality of the sequence is by design, that is, the coefficients are so chosen so that the norm comes out to 1. Finally the fact that the sequence has a dense algebraic span, in the inner product norm, follows from the fact that the sequence has a dense algebraic span, this time in the space of continuous periodic functions on [ − π , π ] {\\displaystyle [-\\pi ,\\pi ]} with the uniform norm. This is the content of the Weierstrass theorem on the uniform density of trigonometric polynomials.",
"title": "Orthonormal sequences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Several types of linear maps A : V → W {\\displaystyle A:V\\to W} between inner product spaces V {\\displaystyle V} and W {\\displaystyle W} are of relevance:",
"title": "Operators on inner product spaces"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "From the point of view of inner product space theory, there is no need to distinguish between two spaces which are isometrically isomorphic. The spectral theorem provides a canonical form for symmetric, unitary and more generally normal operators on finite dimensional inner product spaces. A generalization of the spectral theorem holds for continuous normal operators in Hilbert spaces.",
"title": "Operators on inner product spaces"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Any of the axioms of an inner product may be weakened, yielding generalized notions. The generalizations that are closest to inner products occur where bilinearity and conjugate symmetry are retained, but positive-definiteness is weakened.",
"title": "Generalizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "If V {\\displaystyle V} is a vector space and ⟨ ⋅ , ⋅ ⟩ {\\displaystyle \\langle \\,\\cdot \\,,\\,\\cdot \\,\\rangle } a semi-definite sesquilinear form, then the function:",
"title": "Generalizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "makes sense and satisfies all the properties of norm except that ‖ x ‖ = 0 {\\displaystyle \\|x\\|=0} does not imply x = 0 {\\displaystyle x=0} (such a functional is then called a semi-norm). We can produce an inner product space by considering the quotient W = V / { x : ‖ x ‖ = 0 } . {\\displaystyle W=V/\\{x:\\|x\\|=0\\}.} The sesquilinear form ⟨ ⋅ , ⋅ ⟩ {\\displaystyle \\langle \\,\\cdot \\,,\\,\\cdot \\,\\rangle } factors through W . {\\displaystyle W.}",
"title": "Generalizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "This construction is used in numerous contexts. The Gelfand–Naimark–Segal construction is a particularly important example of the use of this technique. Another example is the representation of semi-definite kernels on arbitrary sets.",
"title": "Generalizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Alternatively, one may require that the pairing be a nondegenerate form, meaning that for all non-zero x ≠ 0 {\\displaystyle x\\neq 0} there exists some y {\\displaystyle y} such that ⟨ x , y ⟩ ≠ 0 , {\\displaystyle \\langle x,y\\rangle \\neq 0,} though y {\\displaystyle y} need not equal x {\\displaystyle x} ; in other words, the induced map to the dual space V → V ∗ {\\displaystyle V\\to V^{*}} is injective. This generalization is important in differential geometry: a manifold whose tangent spaces have an inner product is a Riemannian manifold, while if this is related to nondegenerate conjugate symmetric form the manifold is a pseudo-Riemannian manifold. By Sylvester's law of inertia, just as every inner product is similar to the dot product with positive weights on a set of vectors, every nondegenerate conjugate symmetric form is similar to the dot product with nonzero weights on a set of vectors, and the number of positive and negative weights are called respectively the positive index and negative index. Product of vectors in Minkowski space is an example of indefinite inner product, although, technically speaking, it is not an inner product according to the standard definition above. Minkowski space has four dimensions and indices 3 and 1 (assignment of \"+\" and \"−\" to them differs depending on conventions).",
"title": "Generalizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Purely algebraic statements (ones that do not use positivity) usually only rely on the nondegeneracy (the injective homomorphism V → V ∗ {\\displaystyle V\\to V^{*}} ) and thus hold more generally.",
"title": "Generalizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "The term \"inner product\" is opposed to outer product, which is a slightly more general opposite. Simply, in coordinates, the inner product is the product of a 1 × n {\\displaystyle 1\\times n} covector with an n × 1 {\\displaystyle n\\times 1} vector, yielding a 1 × 1 {\\displaystyle 1\\times 1} matrix (a scalar), while the outer product is the product of an m × 1 {\\displaystyle m\\times 1} vector with a 1 × n {\\displaystyle 1\\times n} covector, yielding an m × n {\\displaystyle m\\times n} matrix. The outer product is defined for different dimensions, while the inner product requires the same dimension. If the dimensions are the same, then the inner product is the trace of the outer product (trace only being properly defined for square matrices). In an informal summary: \"inner is horizontal times vertical and shrinks down, outer is vertical times horizontal and expands out\".",
"title": "Related products"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "More abstractly, the outer product is the bilinear map W × V ∗ → hom ( V , W ) {\\displaystyle W\\times V^{*}\\to \\hom(V,W)} sending a vector and a covector to a rank 1 linear transformation (simple tensor of type (1, 1)), while the inner product is the bilinear evaluation map V ∗ × V → F {\\displaystyle V^{*}\\times V\\to F} given by evaluating a covector on a vector; the order of the domain vector spaces here reflects the covector/vector distinction.",
"title": "Related products"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "The inner product and outer product should not be confused with the interior product and exterior product, which are instead operations on vector fields and differential forms, or more generally on the exterior algebra.",
"title": "Related products"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "As a further complication, in geometric algebra the inner product and the exterior (Grassmann) product are combined in the geometric product (the Clifford product in a Clifford algebra) – the inner product sends two vectors (1-vectors) to a scalar (a 0-vector), while the exterior product sends two vectors to a bivector (2-vector) – and in this context the exterior product is usually called the outer product (alternatively, wedge product). The inner product is more correctly called a scalar product in this context, as the nondegenerate quadratic form in question need not be positive definite (need not be an inner product).",
"title": "Related products"
}
]
| In mathematics, an inner product space is a real vector space or a complex vector space with an operation called an inner product. The inner product of two vectors in the space is a scalar, often denoted with angle brackets such as in ⟨ a , b ⟩ . Inner products allow formal definitions of intuitive geometric notions, such as lengths, angles, and orthogonality of vectors. Inner product spaces generalize Euclidean vector spaces, in which the inner product is the dot product or scalar product of Cartesian coordinates. Inner product spaces of infinite dimension are widely used in functional analysis. Inner product spaces over the field of complex numbers are sometimes referred to as unitary spaces. The first usage of the concept of a vector space with an inner product is due to Giuseppe Peano, in 1898. An inner product naturally induces an associated norm,; so, every inner product space is a normed vector space. If this normed space is also complete then the inner product space is a Hilbert space. If an inner product space H is not a Hilbert space, it can be extended by completion to a Hilbert space H ¯ . This means that H is a linear subspace of H ¯ , the inner product of H is the restriction of that of H ¯ , and H is dense in H ¯ for the topology defined by the norm. | 2001-09-29T21:48:24Z | 2023-12-19T15:22:07Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_product_space |
14,858 | Iain Banks | Iain Banks (16 February 1954 – 9 June 2013) was a Scottish author, writing mainstream fiction as Iain Banks and science fiction as Iain M. Banks, adding the initial of his adopted middle name Menzies (/ˈmɪŋɪz/ ). After the success of The Wasp Factory (1984), he began to write full time. His first science fiction book, Consider Phlebas, appeared in 1987, marking the start of the Culture series. His books have been adapted for theatre, radio, and television. In 2008, The Times named Banks in their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
In April 2013, Banks announced he had inoperable cancer and was unlikely to live beyond a year. He died on 9 June 2013.
Banks was born in Dunfermline, Fife, to a mother who was a professional ice skater and a father who was an officer in the Admiralty. An only child, he lived in North Queensferry until the age of nine, near the naval dockyards in Rosyth, where his father was based. The family then moved to Gourock due to his father's work. When someone introduced him to science fiction by giving him Kemlo and the Zones of Silence by Reginald Alec Martin, he continued reading the series, which encouraged him to write science fiction himself. After attending Gourock and Greenock High Schools, Banks studied English, philosophy, and psychology at the University of Stirling (1972–1975).
After graduation, Banks took a succession of jobs that left him free to write in the evenings. These supported his writing throughout his twenties and allowed him to take long breaks between contracts, during which time he travelled through Europe and North America. During this period he worked as an IBM 'Expediter Analyser' (a kind of procurement clerk), a testing technician for the British Steel Corporation, and a costing clerk for a law firm in London's Chancery Lane.
Banks took up writing at the age of 11. He completed a first novel, The Hungarian Lift-Jet, at 16 and a second, TTR (also entitled The Tashkent Rambler) in his first year at Stirling University in 1972. Though he saw himself mainly as a science fiction author, his publishing problems led him to pursue mainstream fiction. His first published novel The Wasp Factory, appeared in 1984, when he was thirty. After the success of The Wasp Factory, Banks began to write full time. His editor at Macmillan, James Hale, advised him to write a book a year, which he agreed to do.
His second novel Walking on Glass followed in 1985, then The Bridge in 1986, and in 1987 Espedair Street, which was later broadcast as a series on BBC Radio 4. His first published science fiction book, Consider Phlebas, emerged in 1987 and was the first of several in the acclaimed Culture series. Banks cited Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, M. John Harrison and Dan Simmons as influences. The Crow Road, published in 1992, was adapted as a BBC television series. Banks continued to write both science fiction and mainstream. His final novel The Quarry appeared in June 2013, the month of his death.
Banks published work under two names. His parents had meant to name him "Iain Menzies Banks", but his father mistakenly registered him as "Iain Banks". Banks still used the middle name and submitted The Wasp Factory for publication as "Iain M. Banks". Banks's editor inquired about the possibility of omitting the 'M' as it appeared "too fussy" and the potential existed for confusion with Rosie M. Banks, a romantic novelist in the Jeeves novels by P. G. Wodehouse; Banks agreed to the omission. After three mainstream novels, Banks's publishers agreed to publish his first science fiction (SF) novel Consider Phlebas. To create a distinction between the mainstream and the SF, Banks suggested returning the 'M' to his name, which was then used in all of his science fiction works.
By his death in June 2013, Banks had published 26 novels. A 27th novel The Quarry was published posthumously. His final work, a poetry collection, appeared in February 2015. In an interview in January 2013, he also mentioned he had the plot idea for another novel in the Culture series, which would most likely have been his next book and was planned for publication in 2014. A project to publish Banks's unseen early drawings, maps and sketches from the Culture universe alongs with his writings and notes on the setting was underway in February 2018. In 2021, the delayed single volume of The Culture: Notes and Drawings was cancelled and replaced with two separate volumes: a landscape artbook of The Culture: The Drawings and a companion volume containing notes, excerpts and new text from Ken MacLeod. The Culture: The Drawings was released on 7 November 2023, while the still-untitled companion volume was scheduled for late 2024.
Banks wrote in various categories, but enjoyed science fiction most.
In September 2012 Banks became a Guest of Honour at the 2014 World Science Fiction Convention, Loncon 3.
Banks was the subject of The Strange Worlds of Iain Banks South Bank Show (1997), a TV documentary that examined his mainstream writing, and was an in-studio guest for the final episode of Marc Riley's Rocket Science radio show, broadcast on BBC Radio 6 Music. An audio version of The Business, set to contemporary music, arranged by Paul Oakenfold, was broadcast in October 1999 on Galaxy Fm as the tenth Urban Soundtracks. Banks's The State of the Art, adapted for radio by Paul Cornell, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2009 with Nadia Molinari producing and directing. In 1998 Espedair Street was dramatised as a serial for Radio 4, presented by Paul Gambaccini in the style of a Radio 1 documentary.
In 2011 Banks featured on the BBC Radio 4 programme Saturday Live. Banks reaffirmed his atheism in this appearance, explaining death as an important "part of the totality of life" that should be treated realistically instead of feared.
Banks appeared on the BBC television programme Question Time, a show that features political discussion. In 2006 he captained a team of writers to victory in a special series of BBC Two's University Challenge. Banks also won a 2006 edition of BBC One's Celebrity Mastermind; the author selected "Malt whisky and the distilleries of Scotland" as his specialist subject.
His final interview was with Kirsty Wark, broadcast on BBC2 Scotland as Iain Banks: Raw Spirit 12 June 2013.
BBC One Scotland and BBC2 broadcast an adaptation of his novel Stonemouth in June 2015.
Banks was involved in the stage production The Curse of Iain Banks, written by Maxton Walker and performed at the Edinburgh Fringe festival in 1999. Banks collaborated frequently with its soundtrack composer Gary Lloyd, for instance on a song collection they co-composed as a tribute to the fictional band Frozen Gold from Banks's novel Espedair Street. Lloyd also scored for a spoken word and music production of his novel The Bridge, which Banks himself voiced and which featured a cast of 40 musicians, released on CD by Codex Records in 1996. Lloyd recorded Banks for including in the play as a disembodied voice of himself in one of the cast member's dreams. Lloyd explained his collaboration with Banks on their first versions of Espedair Street (later versions being dated between 2005 and 2013) in a Guardian article prior to the opening of The Curse of Iain Banks:
When he [Banks] first played them to me, I think he was worried that they might not be up to scratch (some of them dated back to 1973 and had never been heard). He needn't have worried. They're fantastic. We're slaving away to get the songs to the stage where we can go into the studio and make a demo. Iain bashes out melodies on his state-of-the-art Apple Mac in Edinburgh and sends them down to me in Chester where I put them onto my Atari.
Banks's political stance has been termed "left of centre" and in 2002 endorsed the Scottish Socialist Party.
He was an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society and a Distinguished Supporter of the Humanist Society Scotland. As a signatory to the Declaration of Calton Hill, he supported Scottish independence. In November 2012, Banks backed the campaign group emerging from the Radical Independence Conference held in that month. He opined that the independence movement was marked by cooperation: "Scots just seem to be more communitarian than the consensus expressed by the UK population as a whole."
In late 2004, Banks joined a group of UK politicians and media figures campaigning to have Prime Minister Tony Blair impeached after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In protest, he cut up his passport and posted it to 10 Downing Street. In a Socialist Review interview, Banks explained that his passport protest occurred after he had "abandoned the idea of crashing my Land Rover through the gates of Fife dockyard, after spotting the guys armed with machine guns." Banks relayed his concerns about the Iraq invasion in his book Raw Spirit and through the protagonist Alban McGill in the novel The Steep Approach to Garbadale, who confronts another character with arguments of a similar kind.
In 2010, Banks called for a cultural and educational boycott of Israel after the Gaza flotilla raid incident. In a letter to The Guardian newspaper, Banks said he had instructed his agent to turn down any further book translation deals with Israeli publishers:
Appeals to reason, international law, U. N. resolutions and simple human decency mean – it is now obvious – nothing to Israel... I would urge all writers, artists and others in the creative arts, as well as those academics engaging in joint educational projects with Israeli institutions, to consider doing everything they can to convince Israel of its moral degradation and ethical isolation, preferably by simply having nothing more to do with this outlaw state.
An extract from Banks's contribution to the written collection Generation Palestine: Voices from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement, entitled "Our People", appeared in The Guardian in the wake of the author's cancer revelation. The extract conveys the author's support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign issued by a Palestinian civil society against Israel until the country complies with what it holds are international law and Palestinian rights. This commenced in 2005 and applies lessons from Banks's experience with South Africa's apartheid era. The continuation of Banks's boycott of Israeli publishers for the sale of rights to his novels was confirmed in the extract and Banks further explained, "I don't buy Israeli-sourced products or food, and my partner and I try to support Palestinian-sourced products wherever possible."
Banks met his first wife Annie in London before the 1984 release of his first book. They lived in Faversham in the south of England, then split up in 1988. Banks returned to Edinburgh and dated another woman for two years. Iain and Annie were reconciled a year later and they moved to Fife. They were married in Hawaii in 1992, but in 2007, after 15 years of marriage, they announced their separation.
In 1998 Banks was in a near-fatal accident when his car rolled off the road. In February 2007, Banks sold his extensive car collection, including a 3.2-litre Porsche Boxster, a Porsche 911 Turbo, a 3.8-litre Jaguar Mark II, a 5-litre BMW M5 and a daily-use diesel Land Rover Defender, whose power he had boosted by about 50 per cent. All these Banks exchanged for a Lexus RX 400h hybrid – later replaced by a diesel Toyota Yaris, and said in future he would fly only in emergencies.
In April 2012 Banks became the "Acting Honorary Non-Executive Figurehead President Elect pro tem (trainee)" of the Science Fiction Book Club based in London. The title was his creation and on 3 October 2012 Banks accepted a T-shirt inscribed with it.
From 2007 Banks lived in North Queensferry on the north side of the Firth of Forth, with his girlfriend Adele Hartley, an author and founder of the Dead by Dawn film festival. She and Banks had been friends since the early 1990s, but commenced romantic relations in 2006 and married on 29 March 2013 after he asked her to "do me the honour of becoming my widow."
On 3 April 2013, Banks announced on his website and on one set up by him and some friends that he had been diagnosed with terminal gallbladder cancer and was unlikely to live beyond a year. He stated he would be withdrawing from all public engagements and that The Quarry would be his last novel. The dates of publication of The Quarry were brought forward at Banks's request, to 20 June 2013 in the UK and 25 June 2013 in the US and Canada. He died on 9 June 2013.
Banks's publisher called him "an irreplaceable part of the literary world". This was reaffirmed by a fellow Scottish author and friend since secondary school Ken MacLeod: his death "left a large gap in the Scottish literary scene as well as the wider English-speaking world." British author Charles Stross wrote, "One of the giants of 20th and 21st century Scottish literature has left the building." Authors, including Neil Gaiman, Ian Rankin, Alastair Reynolds and David Brin also paid tribute in blogs and elsewhere.
The asteroid 5099 Iainbanks was named after him shortly after his death. On 23 January 2015, SpaceX's CEO Elon Musk named two of the firm's autonomous spaceport drone ships Just Read The Instructions and Of Course I Still Love You, after ships in Banks's novel The Player of Games. Another, A Shortfall of Gravitas, began construction in 2018. This refers to the ship Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall, first mentioned in Look to Windward.
The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia, the 2016 graphic biography of Louise Michel by Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot, is "Dedicated to the memory of Iain (M) Banks, friend and sorely missed creator of socialist utopias."
Empire Games, the seventh book in The Merchant Princes series by Charles Stross published in 2017, is dedicated "For Iain M. Banks, who painted a picture of a better way."
On 13 May 2019, the Five Deeps Expedition broke the deepest ocean dive record in the DSV Limiting Factor. The support ship was named DSSV Pressure Drop. Both vessels were named after ships in the Culture series, which is much admired by the explorer Victor Vescovo, also the financial sponsor behind Limiting Factor's design and construction. They also have landers named "Flere," "Skaff," and "Closp," named after Culture drones.
Iain Banks received the following literary awards and nominations:
Banks's non-SF work comprises fourteen novels and one non-fiction book. Many of his novels contain elements of autobiography, and feature various locations in his native Scotland. Raw Spirit (subtitled In Search of the Perfect Dram) is a travel book of Banks's visits to the distilleries of Scotland in search of the finest whisky, including his musings on other subjects such as cars and politics.
Banks wrote thirteen SF novels, nine of which were part of the Culture series, and a short story collection called The State of the Art (1991), which includes some stories set in the same universe. These works focus upon characters that are usually on the margins of the Culture, a post-scarcity anarchist utopia. In the same universe are other civilizations, which the Culture sometimes attempts to influence or "contact", occasionally resulting in conflict. The culture has achieved utopia by handing control of all of their worlds and ships over to sentient artificial intelligences referred to as "Minds".
Banks wrote introductions for works by other writers including: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Iain Banks (16 February 1954 – 9 June 2013) was a Scottish author, writing mainstream fiction as Iain Banks and science fiction as Iain M. Banks, adding the initial of his adopted middle name Menzies (/ˈmɪŋɪz/ ). After the success of The Wasp Factory (1984), he began to write full time. His first science fiction book, Consider Phlebas, appeared in 1987, marking the start of the Culture series. His books have been adapted for theatre, radio, and television. In 2008, The Times named Banks in their list of \"The 50 greatest British writers since 1945\".",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In April 2013, Banks announced he had inoperable cancer and was unlikely to live beyond a year. He died on 9 June 2013.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Banks was born in Dunfermline, Fife, to a mother who was a professional ice skater and a father who was an officer in the Admiralty. An only child, he lived in North Queensferry until the age of nine, near the naval dockyards in Rosyth, where his father was based. The family then moved to Gourock due to his father's work. When someone introduced him to science fiction by giving him Kemlo and the Zones of Silence by Reginald Alec Martin, he continued reading the series, which encouraged him to write science fiction himself. After attending Gourock and Greenock High Schools, Banks studied English, philosophy, and psychology at the University of Stirling (1972–1975).",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "After graduation, Banks took a succession of jobs that left him free to write in the evenings. These supported his writing throughout his twenties and allowed him to take long breaks between contracts, during which time he travelled through Europe and North America. During this period he worked as an IBM 'Expediter Analyser' (a kind of procurement clerk), a testing technician for the British Steel Corporation, and a costing clerk for a law firm in London's Chancery Lane.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Banks took up writing at the age of 11. He completed a first novel, The Hungarian Lift-Jet, at 16 and a second, TTR (also entitled The Tashkent Rambler) in his first year at Stirling University in 1972. Though he saw himself mainly as a science fiction author, his publishing problems led him to pursue mainstream fiction. His first published novel The Wasp Factory, appeared in 1984, when he was thirty. After the success of The Wasp Factory, Banks began to write full time. His editor at Macmillan, James Hale, advised him to write a book a year, which he agreed to do.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "His second novel Walking on Glass followed in 1985, then The Bridge in 1986, and in 1987 Espedair Street, which was later broadcast as a series on BBC Radio 4. His first published science fiction book, Consider Phlebas, emerged in 1987 and was the first of several in the acclaimed Culture series. Banks cited Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, M. John Harrison and Dan Simmons as influences. The Crow Road, published in 1992, was adapted as a BBC television series. Banks continued to write both science fiction and mainstream. His final novel The Quarry appeared in June 2013, the month of his death.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Banks published work under two names. His parents had meant to name him \"Iain Menzies Banks\", but his father mistakenly registered him as \"Iain Banks\". Banks still used the middle name and submitted The Wasp Factory for publication as \"Iain M. Banks\". Banks's editor inquired about the possibility of omitting the 'M' as it appeared \"too fussy\" and the potential existed for confusion with Rosie M. Banks, a romantic novelist in the Jeeves novels by P. G. Wodehouse; Banks agreed to the omission. After three mainstream novels, Banks's publishers agreed to publish his first science fiction (SF) novel Consider Phlebas. To create a distinction between the mainstream and the SF, Banks suggested returning the 'M' to his name, which was then used in all of his science fiction works.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "By his death in June 2013, Banks had published 26 novels. A 27th novel The Quarry was published posthumously. His final work, a poetry collection, appeared in February 2015. In an interview in January 2013, he also mentioned he had the plot idea for another novel in the Culture series, which would most likely have been his next book and was planned for publication in 2014. A project to publish Banks's unseen early drawings, maps and sketches from the Culture universe alongs with his writings and notes on the setting was underway in February 2018. In 2021, the delayed single volume of The Culture: Notes and Drawings was cancelled and replaced with two separate volumes: a landscape artbook of The Culture: The Drawings and a companion volume containing notes, excerpts and new text from Ken MacLeod. The Culture: The Drawings was released on 7 November 2023, while the still-untitled companion volume was scheduled for late 2024.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Banks wrote in various categories, but enjoyed science fiction most.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In September 2012 Banks became a Guest of Honour at the 2014 World Science Fiction Convention, Loncon 3.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Banks was the subject of The Strange Worlds of Iain Banks South Bank Show (1997), a TV documentary that examined his mainstream writing, and was an in-studio guest for the final episode of Marc Riley's Rocket Science radio show, broadcast on BBC Radio 6 Music. An audio version of The Business, set to contemporary music, arranged by Paul Oakenfold, was broadcast in October 1999 on Galaxy Fm as the tenth Urban Soundtracks. Banks's The State of the Art, adapted for radio by Paul Cornell, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2009 with Nadia Molinari producing and directing. In 1998 Espedair Street was dramatised as a serial for Radio 4, presented by Paul Gambaccini in the style of a Radio 1 documentary.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In 2011 Banks featured on the BBC Radio 4 programme Saturday Live. Banks reaffirmed his atheism in this appearance, explaining death as an important \"part of the totality of life\" that should be treated realistically instead of feared.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Banks appeared on the BBC television programme Question Time, a show that features political discussion. In 2006 he captained a team of writers to victory in a special series of BBC Two's University Challenge. Banks also won a 2006 edition of BBC One's Celebrity Mastermind; the author selected \"Malt whisky and the distilleries of Scotland\" as his specialist subject.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "His final interview was with Kirsty Wark, broadcast on BBC2 Scotland as Iain Banks: Raw Spirit 12 June 2013.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "BBC One Scotland and BBC2 broadcast an adaptation of his novel Stonemouth in June 2015.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Banks was involved in the stage production The Curse of Iain Banks, written by Maxton Walker and performed at the Edinburgh Fringe festival in 1999. Banks collaborated frequently with its soundtrack composer Gary Lloyd, for instance on a song collection they co-composed as a tribute to the fictional band Frozen Gold from Banks's novel Espedair Street. Lloyd also scored for a spoken word and music production of his novel The Bridge, which Banks himself voiced and which featured a cast of 40 musicians, released on CD by Codex Records in 1996. Lloyd recorded Banks for including in the play as a disembodied voice of himself in one of the cast member's dreams. Lloyd explained his collaboration with Banks on their first versions of Espedair Street (later versions being dated between 2005 and 2013) in a Guardian article prior to the opening of The Curse of Iain Banks:",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "When he [Banks] first played them to me, I think he was worried that they might not be up to scratch (some of them dated back to 1973 and had never been heard). He needn't have worried. They're fantastic. We're slaving away to get the songs to the stage where we can go into the studio and make a demo. Iain bashes out melodies on his state-of-the-art Apple Mac in Edinburgh and sends them down to me in Chester where I put them onto my Atari.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Banks's political stance has been termed \"left of centre\" and in 2002 endorsed the Scottish Socialist Party.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "He was an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society and a Distinguished Supporter of the Humanist Society Scotland. As a signatory to the Declaration of Calton Hill, he supported Scottish independence. In November 2012, Banks backed the campaign group emerging from the Radical Independence Conference held in that month. He opined that the independence movement was marked by cooperation: \"Scots just seem to be more communitarian than the consensus expressed by the UK population as a whole.\"",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In late 2004, Banks joined a group of UK politicians and media figures campaigning to have Prime Minister Tony Blair impeached after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In protest, he cut up his passport and posted it to 10 Downing Street. In a Socialist Review interview, Banks explained that his passport protest occurred after he had \"abandoned the idea of crashing my Land Rover through the gates of Fife dockyard, after spotting the guys armed with machine guns.\" Banks relayed his concerns about the Iraq invasion in his book Raw Spirit and through the protagonist Alban McGill in the novel The Steep Approach to Garbadale, who confronts another character with arguments of a similar kind.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In 2010, Banks called for a cultural and educational boycott of Israel after the Gaza flotilla raid incident. In a letter to The Guardian newspaper, Banks said he had instructed his agent to turn down any further book translation deals with Israeli publishers:",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Appeals to reason, international law, U. N. resolutions and simple human decency mean – it is now obvious – nothing to Israel... I would urge all writers, artists and others in the creative arts, as well as those academics engaging in joint educational projects with Israeli institutions, to consider doing everything they can to convince Israel of its moral degradation and ethical isolation, preferably by simply having nothing more to do with this outlaw state.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "An extract from Banks's contribution to the written collection Generation Palestine: Voices from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement, entitled \"Our People\", appeared in The Guardian in the wake of the author's cancer revelation. The extract conveys the author's support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign issued by a Palestinian civil society against Israel until the country complies with what it holds are international law and Palestinian rights. This commenced in 2005 and applies lessons from Banks's experience with South Africa's apartheid era. The continuation of Banks's boycott of Israeli publishers for the sale of rights to his novels was confirmed in the extract and Banks further explained, \"I don't buy Israeli-sourced products or food, and my partner and I try to support Palestinian-sourced products wherever possible.\"",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Banks met his first wife Annie in London before the 1984 release of his first book. They lived in Faversham in the south of England, then split up in 1988. Banks returned to Edinburgh and dated another woman for two years. Iain and Annie were reconciled a year later and they moved to Fife. They were married in Hawaii in 1992, but in 2007, after 15 years of marriage, they announced their separation.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In 1998 Banks was in a near-fatal accident when his car rolled off the road. In February 2007, Banks sold his extensive car collection, including a 3.2-litre Porsche Boxster, a Porsche 911 Turbo, a 3.8-litre Jaguar Mark II, a 5-litre BMW M5 and a daily-use diesel Land Rover Defender, whose power he had boosted by about 50 per cent. All these Banks exchanged for a Lexus RX 400h hybrid – later replaced by a diesel Toyota Yaris, and said in future he would fly only in emergencies.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In April 2012 Banks became the \"Acting Honorary Non-Executive Figurehead President Elect pro tem (trainee)\" of the Science Fiction Book Club based in London. The title was his creation and on 3 October 2012 Banks accepted a T-shirt inscribed with it.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "From 2007 Banks lived in North Queensferry on the north side of the Firth of Forth, with his girlfriend Adele Hartley, an author and founder of the Dead by Dawn film festival. She and Banks had been friends since the early 1990s, but commenced romantic relations in 2006 and married on 29 March 2013 after he asked her to \"do me the honour of becoming my widow.\"",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "On 3 April 2013, Banks announced on his website and on one set up by him and some friends that he had been diagnosed with terminal gallbladder cancer and was unlikely to live beyond a year. He stated he would be withdrawing from all public engagements and that The Quarry would be his last novel. The dates of publication of The Quarry were brought forward at Banks's request, to 20 June 2013 in the UK and 25 June 2013 in the US and Canada. He died on 9 June 2013.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Banks's publisher called him \"an irreplaceable part of the literary world\". This was reaffirmed by a fellow Scottish author and friend since secondary school Ken MacLeod: his death \"left a large gap in the Scottish literary scene as well as the wider English-speaking world.\" British author Charles Stross wrote, \"One of the giants of 20th and 21st century Scottish literature has left the building.\" Authors, including Neil Gaiman, Ian Rankin, Alastair Reynolds and David Brin also paid tribute in blogs and elsewhere.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The asteroid 5099 Iainbanks was named after him shortly after his death. On 23 January 2015, SpaceX's CEO Elon Musk named two of the firm's autonomous spaceport drone ships Just Read The Instructions and Of Course I Still Love You, after ships in Banks's novel The Player of Games. Another, A Shortfall of Gravitas, began construction in 2018. This refers to the ship Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall, first mentioned in Look to Windward.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia, the 2016 graphic biography of Louise Michel by Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot, is \"Dedicated to the memory of Iain (M) Banks, friend and sorely missed creator of socialist utopias.\"",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Empire Games, the seventh book in The Merchant Princes series by Charles Stross published in 2017, is dedicated \"For Iain M. Banks, who painted a picture of a better way.\"",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "On 13 May 2019, the Five Deeps Expedition broke the deepest ocean dive record in the DSV Limiting Factor. The support ship was named DSSV Pressure Drop. Both vessels were named after ships in the Culture series, which is much admired by the explorer Victor Vescovo, also the financial sponsor behind Limiting Factor's design and construction. They also have landers named \"Flere,\" \"Skaff,\" and \"Closp,\" named after Culture drones.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Iain Banks received the following literary awards and nominations:",
"title": "Awards and nominations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Banks's non-SF work comprises fourteen novels and one non-fiction book. Many of his novels contain elements of autobiography, and feature various locations in his native Scotland. Raw Spirit (subtitled In Search of the Perfect Dram) is a travel book of Banks's visits to the distilleries of Scotland in search of the finest whisky, including his musings on other subjects such as cars and politics.",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Banks wrote thirteen SF novels, nine of which were part of the Culture series, and a short story collection called The State of the Art (1991), which includes some stories set in the same universe. These works focus upon characters that are usually on the margins of the Culture, a post-scarcity anarchist utopia. In the same universe are other civilizations, which the Culture sometimes attempts to influence or \"contact\", occasionally resulting in conflict. The culture has achieved utopia by handing control of all of their worlds and ships over to sentient artificial intelligences referred to as \"Minds\".",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Banks wrote introductions for works by other writers including:",
"title": "Bibliography"
}
]
| Iain Banks was a Scottish author, writing mainstream fiction as Iain Banks and science fiction as Iain M. Banks, adding the initial of his adopted middle name Menzies. After the success of The Wasp Factory (1984), he began to write full time. His first science fiction book, Consider Phlebas, appeared in 1987, marking the start of the Culture series. His books have been adapted for theatre, radio, and television. In 2008, The Times named Banks in their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". In April 2013, Banks announced he had inoperable cancer and was unlikely to live beyond a year. He died on 9 June 2013. | 2001-07-30T09:32:57Z | 2023-12-17T23:26:24Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iain_Banks |
14,863 | Incunable | In the history of printing, an incunable or incunabulum (plural incunables or incunabula, respectively) is a book, pamphlet, or broadside that was printed in the earliest stages of printing in Europe, up to the year 1500. Incunabula were produced before the printing press became widespread on the continent and are distinct from manuscripts, which are documents written by hand. Some authorities include block books from the same time period as incunabula, whereas others limit the term to works printed using movable type.
As of 2021, there are about 30,000 distinct incunable editions known. The probable number of surviving individual copies is much higher, estimated at 125,000 in Germany alone. Through statistical analysis, it is estimated that the number of lost editions is at least 20,000. Around 550,000 copies of around 27,500 different works have been preserved worldwide.
Incunable is the anglicised form of incunabulum, reconstructed singular of Latin incunabula, which meant "swaddling clothes", or "cradle", which could metaphorically refer to "the earliest stages or first traces in the development". A former term for incunable is fifteener, meaning "fifteenth-century edition".
The term incunabula was first used in the context of printing by the Dutch physician and humanist Hadrianus Junius (Adriaen de Jonghe, 1511–1575), in a passage in his work Batavia (written in 1569; published posthumously in 1588). He referred to a period "inter prima artis [typographicae] incunabula" ("in the first infancy of the typographic art"). The term has sometimes been incorrectly attributed to Bernhard von Mallinckrodt (1591–1664), in his Latin pamphlet De ortu ac progressu artis typographicae ("On the rise and progress of the typographic art"; 1640), but he was quoting Junius.
The term incunabula came to denote printed books themselves in the late 17th century. It is not found in English before the mid-19th century.
Junius set an end-date of 1500 to his era of incunabula, which remains the convention in modern bibliographical scholarship. This convenient but arbitrary end-date for identifying a printed book as an incunable does not reflect changes in the printing process, and many books printed for some years after 1500 are visually indistinguishable from incunables. The term "post-incunable" is now used to refer to books printed after 1500 up to 1520 or 1540, without general agreement. From around this period the dating of any edition becomes easier, as the practice of printing the place and year of publication using a colophon or on the title page became more widespread.
There are two types of printed incunabula: the block book, printed from a single carved or sculpted wooden block for each page (the same process as the woodcut in art, called xylographic); and the typographic book, made by individual cast-metal movable type pieces on a printing press. Many authors reserve the term "incunabula" for the latter.
The spread of printing to cities both in the North and in Italy ensured that there was great variety in the texts and the styles which appeared. Many early typefaces were modelled on local writing or derived from various European Gothic scripts, but there were also some derived from documentary scripts like Caxton's, and, particularly in Italy, types modelled on handwritten scripts and calligraphy used by humanists.
Printers congregated in urban centres where there were scholars, ecclesiastics, lawyers, and nobles and professionals who formed their major customer base. Standard works in Latin inherited from the medieval tradition formed the bulk of the earliest printed works, but as books became cheaper, vernacular works (or translations into vernaculars of standard works) began to appear.
Famous incunabula include two from Mainz, the Gutenberg Bible of 1455 and the Peregrinatio in terram sanctam of 1486, printed and illustrated by Erhard Reuwich; the Nuremberg Chronicle written by Hartmann Schedel and printed by Anton Koberger in 1493; and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili printed by Aldus Manutius with important illustrations by an unknown artist.
Other printers of incunabula were Günther Zainer of Augsburg, Johannes Mentelin and Heinrich Eggestein of Strasbourg, Heinrich Gran of Haguenau, Johann Amerbach of Basel, William Caxton of Bruges and London, and Nicolas Jenson of Venice. The first incunable to have woodcut illustrations was Ulrich Boner's Der Edelstein, printed by Albrecht Pfister in Bamberg in 1461.
A finding in 2015 brought evidence of quires, as claimed by extensive research, printed in 1444–1446, possibly assigned to Procopius Waldvogel in Avignon, France.
Many incunabula are undated, needing complex bibliographical analysis to place them correctly. The post-incunabula period marks a time of development during which the printed book evolved fully as a mature artefact with a standard format. After about 1540 books tended to conform to a template that included the author, title-page, date, seller, and place of printing. This makes it much easier to identify any particular edition.
As noted above, the end date for identifying a printed book as an incunable is convenient but was chosen arbitrarily; it does not reflect any notable developments in the printing process around the year 1500. Books printed for a number of years after 1500 continued to look much like incunables, with the notable exception of the small format books printed in italic type introduced by Aldus Manutius in 1501. The term post-incunable is sometimes used to refer to books printed "after 1500—how long after, the experts have not yet agreed." For books printed in the UK, the term generally covers 1501–1520, and for books printed in mainland Europe, 1501–1540.
The data in this section were derived from the Incunabula Short-Title Catalogue (ISTC).
The number of printing towns and cities stands at 282. These are situated in some 18 countries in terms of present-day boundaries. In descending order of the number of editions printed in each, these are: Italy, Germany, France, Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, Belgium, England, Austria, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Turkey, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Hungary (see diagram).
The following table shows the 20 main 15th century printing locations; as with all data in this section, exact figures are given, but should be treated as close estimates (the total editions recorded in ISTC at August 2016 is 30,518):
The 18 languages that incunabula are printed in, in descending order, are: Latin, German, Italian, French, Dutch, Spanish, English, Hebrew, Catalan, Czech, Greek, Church Slavonic, Portuguese, Swedish, Breton, Danish, Frisian and Sardinian (see diagram).
Only about one edition in ten (i.e. just over 3,000) has any illustrations, woodcuts or metalcuts.
The "commonest" incunable is Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle ("Liber Chronicarum") of 1493, with about 1,250 surviving copies (which is also the most heavily illustrated). Many incunabula are unique, but on average about 18 copies survive of each. This makes the Gutenberg Bible, at 48 or 49 known copies, a relatively common (though extremely valuable) edition. Counting extant incunabula is complicated by the fact that most libraries consider a single volume of a multi-volume work as a separate item, as well as fragments or copies lacking more than half the total leaves. A complete incunable may consist of a slip, or up to ten volumes.
In terms of format, the 30,000-odd editions comprise: 2,000 broadsides, 9,000 folios, 15,000 quartos, 3,000 octavos, 18 12mos, 230 16mos, 20 32mos, and 3 64mos.
ISTC at present cites 528 extant copies of books printed by Caxton, which together with 128 fragments makes 656 in total, though many are broadsides or very imperfect (incomplete).
Apart from migration to mainly North American and Japanese universities, there has been little movement of incunabula in the last five centuries. None were printed in the Southern Hemisphere, and the latter appears to possess less than 2,000 copies, about 97.75% remain north of the equator. However, many incunabula are sold at auction or through the rare book trade every year.
The British Library's Incunabula Short Title Catalogue now records over 29,000 titles, of which around 27,400 are incunabula editions (not all unique works). Studies of incunabula began in the 17th century. Michel Maittaire (1667–1747) and Georg Wolfgang Panzer (1729–1805) arranged printed material chronologically in annals format, and in the first half of the 19th century, Ludwig Hain published the Repertorium bibliographicum— a checklist of incunabula arranged alphabetically by author: "Hain numbers" are still a reference point. Hain was expanded in subsequent editions, by Walter A. Copinger and Dietrich Reichling, but it is being superseded by the authoritative modern listing, a German catalogue, the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke, which has been under way since 1925 and is still being compiled at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. North American holdings were listed by Frederick R. Goff and a worldwide union catalogue is provided by the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue.
Notable collections with more than 1,000 incunabula include: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "In the history of printing, an incunable or incunabulum (plural incunables or incunabula, respectively) is a book, pamphlet, or broadside that was printed in the earliest stages of printing in Europe, up to the year 1500. Incunabula were produced before the printing press became widespread on the continent and are distinct from manuscripts, which are documents written by hand. Some authorities include block books from the same time period as incunabula, whereas others limit the term to works printed using movable type.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "As of 2021, there are about 30,000 distinct incunable editions known. The probable number of surviving individual copies is much higher, estimated at 125,000 in Germany alone. Through statistical analysis, it is estimated that the number of lost editions is at least 20,000. Around 550,000 copies of around 27,500 different works have been preserved worldwide.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Incunable is the anglicised form of incunabulum, reconstructed singular of Latin incunabula, which meant \"swaddling clothes\", or \"cradle\", which could metaphorically refer to \"the earliest stages or first traces in the development\". A former term for incunable is fifteener, meaning \"fifteenth-century edition\".",
"title": "Terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The term incunabula was first used in the context of printing by the Dutch physician and humanist Hadrianus Junius (Adriaen de Jonghe, 1511–1575), in a passage in his work Batavia (written in 1569; published posthumously in 1588). He referred to a period \"inter prima artis [typographicae] incunabula\" (\"in the first infancy of the typographic art\"). The term has sometimes been incorrectly attributed to Bernhard von Mallinckrodt (1591–1664), in his Latin pamphlet De ortu ac progressu artis typographicae (\"On the rise and progress of the typographic art\"; 1640), but he was quoting Junius.",
"title": "Terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The term incunabula came to denote printed books themselves in the late 17th century. It is not found in English before the mid-19th century.",
"title": "Terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Junius set an end-date of 1500 to his era of incunabula, which remains the convention in modern bibliographical scholarship. This convenient but arbitrary end-date for identifying a printed book as an incunable does not reflect changes in the printing process, and many books printed for some years after 1500 are visually indistinguishable from incunables. The term \"post-incunable\" is now used to refer to books printed after 1500 up to 1520 or 1540, without general agreement. From around this period the dating of any edition becomes easier, as the practice of printing the place and year of publication using a colophon or on the title page became more widespread.",
"title": "Terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "There are two types of printed incunabula: the block book, printed from a single carved or sculpted wooden block for each page (the same process as the woodcut in art, called xylographic); and the typographic book, made by individual cast-metal movable type pieces on a printing press. Many authors reserve the term \"incunabula\" for the latter.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The spread of printing to cities both in the North and in Italy ensured that there was great variety in the texts and the styles which appeared. Many early typefaces were modelled on local writing or derived from various European Gothic scripts, but there were also some derived from documentary scripts like Caxton's, and, particularly in Italy, types modelled on handwritten scripts and calligraphy used by humanists.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Printers congregated in urban centres where there were scholars, ecclesiastics, lawyers, and nobles and professionals who formed their major customer base. Standard works in Latin inherited from the medieval tradition formed the bulk of the earliest printed works, but as books became cheaper, vernacular works (or translations into vernaculars of standard works) began to appear.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Famous incunabula include two from Mainz, the Gutenberg Bible of 1455 and the Peregrinatio in terram sanctam of 1486, printed and illustrated by Erhard Reuwich; the Nuremberg Chronicle written by Hartmann Schedel and printed by Anton Koberger in 1493; and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili printed by Aldus Manutius with important illustrations by an unknown artist.",
"title": "Famous examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Other printers of incunabula were Günther Zainer of Augsburg, Johannes Mentelin and Heinrich Eggestein of Strasbourg, Heinrich Gran of Haguenau, Johann Amerbach of Basel, William Caxton of Bruges and London, and Nicolas Jenson of Venice. The first incunable to have woodcut illustrations was Ulrich Boner's Der Edelstein, printed by Albrecht Pfister in Bamberg in 1461.",
"title": "Famous examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "A finding in 2015 brought evidence of quires, as claimed by extensive research, printed in 1444–1446, possibly assigned to Procopius Waldvogel in Avignon, France.",
"title": "Famous examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Many incunabula are undated, needing complex bibliographical analysis to place them correctly. The post-incunabula period marks a time of development during which the printed book evolved fully as a mature artefact with a standard format. After about 1540 books tended to conform to a template that included the author, title-page, date, seller, and place of printing. This makes it much easier to identify any particular edition.",
"title": "Post-incunable"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "As noted above, the end date for identifying a printed book as an incunable is convenient but was chosen arbitrarily; it does not reflect any notable developments in the printing process around the year 1500. Books printed for a number of years after 1500 continued to look much like incunables, with the notable exception of the small format books printed in italic type introduced by Aldus Manutius in 1501. The term post-incunable is sometimes used to refer to books printed \"after 1500—how long after, the experts have not yet agreed.\" For books printed in the UK, the term generally covers 1501–1520, and for books printed in mainland Europe, 1501–1540.",
"title": "Post-incunable"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The data in this section were derived from the Incunabula Short-Title Catalogue (ISTC).",
"title": "Statistical data"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The number of printing towns and cities stands at 282. These are situated in some 18 countries in terms of present-day boundaries. In descending order of the number of editions printed in each, these are: Italy, Germany, France, Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, Belgium, England, Austria, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Turkey, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Hungary (see diagram).",
"title": "Statistical data"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The following table shows the 20 main 15th century printing locations; as with all data in this section, exact figures are given, but should be treated as close estimates (the total editions recorded in ISTC at August 2016 is 30,518):",
"title": "Statistical data"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The 18 languages that incunabula are printed in, in descending order, are: Latin, German, Italian, French, Dutch, Spanish, English, Hebrew, Catalan, Czech, Greek, Church Slavonic, Portuguese, Swedish, Breton, Danish, Frisian and Sardinian (see diagram).",
"title": "Statistical data"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Only about one edition in ten (i.e. just over 3,000) has any illustrations, woodcuts or metalcuts.",
"title": "Statistical data"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The \"commonest\" incunable is Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle (\"Liber Chronicarum\") of 1493, with about 1,250 surviving copies (which is also the most heavily illustrated). Many incunabula are unique, but on average about 18 copies survive of each. This makes the Gutenberg Bible, at 48 or 49 known copies, a relatively common (though extremely valuable) edition. Counting extant incunabula is complicated by the fact that most libraries consider a single volume of a multi-volume work as a separate item, as well as fragments or copies lacking more than half the total leaves. A complete incunable may consist of a slip, or up to ten volumes.",
"title": "Statistical data"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In terms of format, the 30,000-odd editions comprise: 2,000 broadsides, 9,000 folios, 15,000 quartos, 3,000 octavos, 18 12mos, 230 16mos, 20 32mos, and 3 64mos.",
"title": "Statistical data"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "ISTC at present cites 528 extant copies of books printed by Caxton, which together with 128 fragments makes 656 in total, though many are broadsides or very imperfect (incomplete).",
"title": "Statistical data"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Apart from migration to mainly North American and Japanese universities, there has been little movement of incunabula in the last five centuries. None were printed in the Southern Hemisphere, and the latter appears to possess less than 2,000 copies, about 97.75% remain north of the equator. However, many incunabula are sold at auction or through the rare book trade every year.",
"title": "Statistical data"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The British Library's Incunabula Short Title Catalogue now records over 29,000 titles, of which around 27,400 are incunabula editions (not all unique works). Studies of incunabula began in the 17th century. Michel Maittaire (1667–1747) and Georg Wolfgang Panzer (1729–1805) arranged printed material chronologically in annals format, and in the first half of the 19th century, Ludwig Hain published the Repertorium bibliographicum— a checklist of incunabula arranged alphabetically by author: \"Hain numbers\" are still a reference point. Hain was expanded in subsequent editions, by Walter A. Copinger and Dietrich Reichling, but it is being superseded by the authoritative modern listing, a German catalogue, the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke, which has been under way since 1925 and is still being compiled at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. North American holdings were listed by Frederick R. Goff and a worldwide union catalogue is provided by the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue.",
"title": "Major collections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Notable collections with more than 1,000 incunabula include:",
"title": "Major collections"
}
]
| In the history of printing, an incunable or incunabulum is a book, pamphlet, or broadside that was printed in the earliest stages of printing in Europe, up to the year 1500. Incunabula were produced before the printing press became widespread on the continent and are distinct from manuscripts, which are documents written by hand. Some authorities include block books from the same time period as incunabula, whereas others limit the term to works printed using movable type. As of 2021, there are about 30,000 distinct incunable editions known. The probable number of surviving individual copies is much higher, estimated at 125,000 in Germany alone. Through statistical analysis, it is estimated that the number of lost editions is at least 20,000. Around 550,000 copies of around 27,500 different works have been preserved worldwide. | 2001-07-30T18:54:06Z | 2023-11-17T12:32:31Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incunable |
14,865 | Isotropy | In physics and geometry, isotropy (from Ancient Greek ἴσος (ísos) 'equal', and τρόπος (trópos) 'turn, way') is uniformity in all orientations. Precise definitions depend on the subject area. Exceptions, or inequalities, are frequently indicated by the prefix a- or an-, hence anisotropy. Anisotropy is also used to describe situations where properties vary systematically, dependent on direction. Isotropic radiation has the same intensity regardless of the direction of measurement, and an isotropic field exerts the same action regardless of how the test particle is oriented.
Within mathematics, isotropy has a few different meanings:
In the study of mechanical properties of materials, "isotropic" means having identical values of a property in all directions. This definition is also used in geology and mineralogy. Glass and metals are examples of isotropic materials. Common anisotropic materials include wood, because its material properties are different parallel and perpendicular to the grain, and layered rocks such as slate.
Isotropic materials are useful since they are easier to shape, and their behavior is easier to predict. Anisotropic materials can be tailored to the forces an object is expected to experience. For example, the fibers in carbon fiber materials and rebars in reinforced concrete are oriented to withstand tension.
In industrial processes, such as etching steps, isotropic means that the process proceeds at the same rate, regardless of direction. Simple chemical reaction and removal of a substrate by an acid, a solvent or a reactive gas is often very close to isotropic. Conversely, anisotropic means that the attack rate of the substrate is higher in a certain direction. Anisotropic etch processes, where vertical etch-rate is high, but lateral etch-rate is very small are essential processes in microfabrication of integrated circuits and MEMS devices.
An isotropic antenna is an idealized "radiating element" used as a reference; an antenna that broadcasts power equally (calculated by the Poynting vector) in all directions. The gain of an arbitrary antenna is usually reported in decibels relative to an isotropic antenna, and is expressed as dBi or dB(i).
In cells (a.k.a. muscle fibers), the term "isotropic" refers to the light bands (I bands) that contribute to the striated pattern of the cells. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "In physics and geometry, isotropy (from Ancient Greek ἴσος (ísos) 'equal', and τρόπος (trópos) 'turn, way') is uniformity in all orientations. Precise definitions depend on the subject area. Exceptions, or inequalities, are frequently indicated by the prefix a- or an-, hence anisotropy. Anisotropy is also used to describe situations where properties vary systematically, dependent on direction. Isotropic radiation has the same intensity regardless of the direction of measurement, and an isotropic field exerts the same action regardless of how the test particle is oriented.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Within mathematics, isotropy has a few different meanings:",
"title": "Mathematics"
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{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In the study of mechanical properties of materials, \"isotropic\" means having identical values of a property in all directions. This definition is also used in geology and mineralogy. Glass and metals are examples of isotropic materials. Common anisotropic materials include wood, because its material properties are different parallel and perpendicular to the grain, and layered rocks such as slate.",
"title": "Physics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Isotropic materials are useful since they are easier to shape, and their behavior is easier to predict. Anisotropic materials can be tailored to the forces an object is expected to experience. For example, the fibers in carbon fiber materials and rebars in reinforced concrete are oriented to withstand tension.",
"title": "Physics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In industrial processes, such as etching steps, isotropic means that the process proceeds at the same rate, regardless of direction. Simple chemical reaction and removal of a substrate by an acid, a solvent or a reactive gas is often very close to isotropic. Conversely, anisotropic means that the attack rate of the substrate is higher in a certain direction. Anisotropic etch processes, where vertical etch-rate is high, but lateral etch-rate is very small are essential processes in microfabrication of integrated circuits and MEMS devices.",
"title": "Physics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "An isotropic antenna is an idealized \"radiating element\" used as a reference; an antenna that broadcasts power equally (calculated by the Poynting vector) in all directions. The gain of an arbitrary antenna is usually reported in decibels relative to an isotropic antenna, and is expressed as dBi or dB(i).",
"title": "Physics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In cells (a.k.a. muscle fibers), the term \"isotropic\" refers to the light bands (I bands) that contribute to the striated pattern of the cells.",
"title": "Physics"
}
]
| In physics and geometry, isotropy is uniformity in all orientations. Precise definitions depend on the subject area. Exceptions, or inequalities, are frequently indicated by the prefix a- or an-, hence anisotropy. Anisotropy is also used to describe situations where properties vary systematically, dependent on direction. Isotropic radiation has the same intensity regardless of the direction of measurement, and an isotropic field exerts the same action regardless of how the test particle is oriented. | 2001-08-01T18:36:58Z | 2023-08-24T02:12:20Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotropy |
14,868 | International Mathematical Union | The International Mathematical Union (IMU) is an international non-governmental organization devoted to international cooperation in the field of mathematics across the world. It is a member of the International Science Council (ISC) and supports the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM). Its members are national mathematics organizations from more than 80 countries.
The objectives of the International Mathematical Union are: promoting international cooperation in mathematics, supporting and assisting the International Congress of Mathematicians and other international scientific meetings/conferences, acknowledging outstanding research contributions to mathematics through the awarding of scientific prizes, and encouraging and supporting other international mathematical activities, considered likely to contribute to the development of mathematical science in any of its aspects, whether pure, applied, or educational.
The IMU was established in 1920, but dissolved in September 1932 and then re-established in 1950 de facto at the Constitutive Convention in New York, de jure on September 10, 1951, when ten countries had become members. The last milestone was the General Assembly in March 1952, in Rome, Italy where the activities of the new IMU were inaugurated and the first Executive Committee, President and various commissions were elected. In 1952 the IMU was also readmitted to the ICSU. The past president of the Union is Carlos Kenig (2019–2022). The current president is Hiraku Nakajima.
At the 16th meeting of the IMU General Assembly in Bangalore, India, in August 2010, Berlin was chosen as the location of the permanent office of the IMU, which was opened on January 1, 2011, and is hosted by the Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics (WIAS), an institute of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Scientific Community, with about 120 scientists engaging in mathematical research applied to complex problems in industry and commerce.
IMU has a close relationship to mathematics education through its International Commission on Mathematical Instruction (ICMI). This commission is organized similarly to IMU with its own Executive Committee and General Assembly.
Developing countries are a high priority for the IMU and a significant percentage of its budget, including grants received from individuals, mathematical societies, foundations, and funding agencies, is spent on activities for developing countries. Since 2011 this has been coordinated by the Commission for Developing Countries (CDC).
The Committee for Women in Mathematics (CWM) is concerned with issues related to women in mathematics worldwide. It organizes the World Meeting for Women in Mathematics ( ( W M ) 2 ) {\textstyle ((\mathrm {WM} )^{2})} as a satellite event of ICM.
The International Commission on the History of Mathematics (ICHM) is operated jointly by the IMU and the Division of the History of Science (DHS) of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science (IUHPS).
The Committee on Electronic Information and Communication (CEIC) advises IMU on matters concerning mathematical information, communication, and publishing.
The scientific prizes awarded by the IMU, in the quadrennial International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), are deemed to be some of the highest distinctions in the mathematical world. These are:
The IMU's members are Member Countries and each Member country is represented through an Adhering Organization, which may be its principal academy, a mathematical society, its research council or some other institution or association of institutions, or an appropriate agency of its government. A country starting to develop its mathematical culture and interested in building links with mathematicians all over the world is invited to join IMU as an Associate Member. For the purpose of facilitating jointly sponsored activities and jointly pursuing the objectives of the IMU, multinational mathematical societies and professional societies can join IMU as an Affiliate Member. Every four years the IMU membership gathers in a General Assembly (GA) which consists of delegates appointed by the Adhering Organizations, together with the members of the executive committee. All important decisions are made at the GA, including the election of the officers, establishment of commissions, the approval of the budget, and any changes to the statutes and by-laws.
The IMU has 83 (full) Member countries and two Associate Members (Bangladesh and Paraguay, marked below by light grey background).
The IMU has five affiliate members:
The International Mathematical Union is administered by an executive committee (EC) which conducts the business of the Union. The EC consists of the President, two vice-presidents, the Secretary, six Members-at-Large, all elected for a term of four years, and the Past President. The EC is responsible for all policy matters and for tasks, such as choosing the members of the ICM Program Committee and various prize committees.
Every two months IMU publishes an electronic newsletter, IMU-Net, that aims to improve communication between IMU and the worldwide mathematical community by reporting on decisions and recommendations of the Union, major international mathematical events and developments, and on other topics of general mathematical interest. IMU Bulletins are published annually with the aim to inform IMU's members about the Union's current activities. In 2009 IMU published the document Best Current Practices for Journals.
The IMU took its first organized steps towards the promotion of mathematics in developing countries in the early 1970s and has, since then supported various activities. In 2010 IMU formed the Commission for Developing Countries (CDC) which brings together all of the past and current initiatives in support of mathematics and mathematicians in the developing world.
Some IMU Supported Initiatives:
IMU also supports the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction (ICMI) with its programmes, exhibits and workshops in emerging countries, especially in Asia and Africa.
IMU released a report in 2008, Mathematics in Africa: Challenges and Opportunities, on the current state of mathematics in Africa and on opportunities for new initiatives to support mathematical development. In 2014, the IMU's Commission for Developing Countries CDC released an update of the report.
Additionally, reports about Mathematics in Latin America and the Caribbean and South East Asia. were published.
In July 2014 IMU released the report: The International Mathematical Union in the Developing World: Past, Present and Future (July 2014).
In 2014, the IMU held a day-long symposium prior to the opening of the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), entitled Mathematics in Emerging Nations: Achievements and Opportunities (MENAO). Approximately 260 participants from around the world, including representatives of embassies, scientific institutions, private business and foundations attended this session. Attendees heard inspiring stories of individual mathematicians and specific developing nations.
List of presidents of the International Mathematical Union from 1952 to the present:
1952–1954: Marshall Harvey Stone (vice: Émile Borel, Erich Kamke)
1955–1958: Heinz Hopf (vice: Arnaud Denjoy, W. V. D. Hodge)
1959–1962: Rolf Nevanlinna (vice: Pavel Alexandrov, Marston Morse)
1963–1966: Georges de Rham (vice: Henri Cartan, Kazimierz Kuratowski)
1967–1970: Henri Cartan (vice: Mikhail Lavrentyev, Deane Montgomery)
1971–1974: K. S. Chandrasekharan (vice: Abraham Adrian Albert, Lev Pontryagin)
1975–1978: Deane Montgomery (vice: J. W. S. Cassels, Miron Nicolescu, Gheorghe Vrânceanu)
1979–1982: Lennart Carleson (vice: Masayoshi Nagata, Yuri Vasilyevich Prokhorov)
1983–1986: Jürgen Moser (vice: Ludvig Faddeev, Jean-Pierre Serre)
1987–1990: Ludvig Faddeev (vice: Walter Feit, Lars Hörmander)
1991–1994: Jacques-Louis Lions (vice: John H. Coates, David Mumford)
1995–1998: David Mumford (vice: Vladimir Arnold, Albrecht Dold)
1999–2002: Jacob Palis (vice: Simon Donaldson, Shigefumi Mori)
2003–2006: John M. Ball (vice: Jean-Michel Bismut, Masaki Kashiwara)
2007–2010: László Lovász (vice: Zhi-Ming Ma, Claudio Procesi)
2011–2014: Ingrid Daubechies (vice: Christiane Rousseau, Marcelo Viana)
2015–2018: Shigefumi Mori (vice: Alicia Dickenstein, Vaughan Jones)
2019–2022: Carlos Kenig (vice: Nalini Joshi, Loyiso Nongxa)
2023–2026: Hiraku Nakajima (vice: Ulrike Tillmann, Tatiana Toro) | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The International Mathematical Union (IMU) is an international non-governmental organization devoted to international cooperation in the field of mathematics across the world. It is a member of the International Science Council (ISC) and supports the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM). Its members are national mathematics organizations from more than 80 countries.",
"title": ""
},
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"text": "The objectives of the International Mathematical Union are: promoting international cooperation in mathematics, supporting and assisting the International Congress of Mathematicians and other international scientific meetings/conferences, acknowledging outstanding research contributions to mathematics through the awarding of scientific prizes, and encouraging and supporting other international mathematical activities, considered likely to contribute to the development of mathematical science in any of its aspects, whether pure, applied, or educational.",
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"text": "The IMU was established in 1920, but dissolved in September 1932 and then re-established in 1950 de facto at the Constitutive Convention in New York, de jure on September 10, 1951, when ten countries had become members. The last milestone was the General Assembly in March 1952, in Rome, Italy where the activities of the new IMU were inaugurated and the first Executive Committee, President and various commissions were elected. In 1952 the IMU was also readmitted to the ICSU. The past president of the Union is Carlos Kenig (2019–2022). The current president is Hiraku Nakajima.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "At the 16th meeting of the IMU General Assembly in Bangalore, India, in August 2010, Berlin was chosen as the location of the permanent office of the IMU, which was opened on January 1, 2011, and is hosted by the Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics (WIAS), an institute of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Scientific Community, with about 120 scientists engaging in mathematical research applied to complex problems in industry and commerce.",
"title": "History"
},
{
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"text": "IMU has a close relationship to mathematics education through its International Commission on Mathematical Instruction (ICMI). This commission is organized similarly to IMU with its own Executive Committee and General Assembly.",
"title": "Commissions and committees"
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"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Developing countries are a high priority for the IMU and a significant percentage of its budget, including grants received from individuals, mathematical societies, foundations, and funding agencies, is spent on activities for developing countries. Since 2011 this has been coordinated by the Commission for Developing Countries (CDC).",
"title": "Commissions and committees"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The Committee for Women in Mathematics (CWM) is concerned with issues related to women in mathematics worldwide. It organizes the World Meeting for Women in Mathematics ( ( W M ) 2 ) {\\textstyle ((\\mathrm {WM} )^{2})} as a satellite event of ICM.",
"title": "Commissions and committees"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The International Commission on the History of Mathematics (ICHM) is operated jointly by the IMU and the Division of the History of Science (DHS) of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science (IUHPS).",
"title": "Commissions and committees"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The Committee on Electronic Information and Communication (CEIC) advises IMU on matters concerning mathematical information, communication, and publishing.",
"title": "Commissions and committees"
},
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"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The scientific prizes awarded by the IMU, in the quadrennial International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), are deemed to be some of the highest distinctions in the mathematical world. These are:",
"title": "Prizes"
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{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The IMU's members are Member Countries and each Member country is represented through an Adhering Organization, which may be its principal academy, a mathematical society, its research council or some other institution or association of institutions, or an appropriate agency of its government. A country starting to develop its mathematical culture and interested in building links with mathematicians all over the world is invited to join IMU as an Associate Member. For the purpose of facilitating jointly sponsored activities and jointly pursuing the objectives of the IMU, multinational mathematical societies and professional societies can join IMU as an Affiliate Member. Every four years the IMU membership gathers in a General Assembly (GA) which consists of delegates appointed by the Adhering Organizations, together with the members of the executive committee. All important decisions are made at the GA, including the election of the officers, establishment of commissions, the approval of the budget, and any changes to the statutes and by-laws.",
"title": "Membership and General Assembly"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The IMU has 83 (full) Member countries and two Associate Members (Bangladesh and Paraguay, marked below by light grey background).",
"title": "Membership and General Assembly"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The IMU has five affiliate members:",
"title": "Membership and General Assembly"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The International Mathematical Union is administered by an executive committee (EC) which conducts the business of the Union. The EC consists of the President, two vice-presidents, the Secretary, six Members-at-Large, all elected for a term of four years, and the Past President. The EC is responsible for all policy matters and for tasks, such as choosing the members of the ICM Program Committee and various prize committees.",
"title": "Organization and Executive Committee"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Every two months IMU publishes an electronic newsletter, IMU-Net, that aims to improve communication between IMU and the worldwide mathematical community by reporting on decisions and recommendations of the Union, major international mathematical events and developments, and on other topics of general mathematical interest. IMU Bulletins are published annually with the aim to inform IMU's members about the Union's current activities. In 2009 IMU published the document Best Current Practices for Journals.",
"title": "Publications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The IMU took its first organized steps towards the promotion of mathematics in developing countries in the early 1970s and has, since then supported various activities. In 2010 IMU formed the Commission for Developing Countries (CDC) which brings together all of the past and current initiatives in support of mathematics and mathematicians in the developing world.",
"title": "IMU’s Involvement in developing countries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Some IMU Supported Initiatives:",
"title": "IMU’s Involvement in developing countries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "IMU also supports the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction (ICMI) with its programmes, exhibits and workshops in emerging countries, especially in Asia and Africa.",
"title": "IMU’s Involvement in developing countries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "IMU released a report in 2008, Mathematics in Africa: Challenges and Opportunities, on the current state of mathematics in Africa and on opportunities for new initiatives to support mathematical development. In 2014, the IMU's Commission for Developing Countries CDC released an update of the report.",
"title": "IMU’s Involvement in developing countries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Additionally, reports about Mathematics in Latin America and the Caribbean and South East Asia. were published.",
"title": "IMU’s Involvement in developing countries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In July 2014 IMU released the report: The International Mathematical Union in the Developing World: Past, Present and Future (July 2014).",
"title": "IMU’s Involvement in developing countries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In 2014, the IMU held a day-long symposium prior to the opening of the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), entitled Mathematics in Emerging Nations: Achievements and Opportunities (MENAO). Approximately 260 participants from around the world, including representatives of embassies, scientific institutions, private business and foundations attended this session. Attendees heard inspiring stories of individual mathematicians and specific developing nations.",
"title": "MENAO Symposium at the ICM"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "List of presidents of the International Mathematical Union from 1952 to the present:",
"title": "Presidents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "1952–1954: Marshall Harvey Stone (vice: Émile Borel, Erich Kamke)",
"title": "Presidents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "1955–1958: Heinz Hopf (vice: Arnaud Denjoy, W. V. D. Hodge)",
"title": "Presidents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "1959–1962: Rolf Nevanlinna (vice: Pavel Alexandrov, Marston Morse)",
"title": "Presidents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "1963–1966: Georges de Rham (vice: Henri Cartan, Kazimierz Kuratowski)",
"title": "Presidents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "1967–1970: Henri Cartan (vice: Mikhail Lavrentyev, Deane Montgomery)",
"title": "Presidents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "1971–1974: K. S. Chandrasekharan (vice: Abraham Adrian Albert, Lev Pontryagin)",
"title": "Presidents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "1975–1978: Deane Montgomery (vice: J. W. S. Cassels, Miron Nicolescu, Gheorghe Vrânceanu)",
"title": "Presidents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "1979–1982: Lennart Carleson (vice: Masayoshi Nagata, Yuri Vasilyevich Prokhorov)",
"title": "Presidents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "1983–1986: Jürgen Moser (vice: Ludvig Faddeev, Jean-Pierre Serre)",
"title": "Presidents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "1987–1990: Ludvig Faddeev (vice: Walter Feit, Lars Hörmander)",
"title": "Presidents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "1991–1994: Jacques-Louis Lions (vice: John H. Coates, David Mumford)",
"title": "Presidents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "1995–1998: David Mumford (vice: Vladimir Arnold, Albrecht Dold)",
"title": "Presidents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "1999–2002: Jacob Palis (vice: Simon Donaldson, Shigefumi Mori)",
"title": "Presidents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "2003–2006: John M. Ball (vice: Jean-Michel Bismut, Masaki Kashiwara)",
"title": "Presidents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "2007–2010: László Lovász (vice: Zhi-Ming Ma, Claudio Procesi)",
"title": "Presidents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "2011–2014: Ingrid Daubechies (vice: Christiane Rousseau, Marcelo Viana)",
"title": "Presidents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "2015–2018: Shigefumi Mori (vice: Alicia Dickenstein, Vaughan Jones)",
"title": "Presidents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "2019–2022: Carlos Kenig (vice: Nalini Joshi, Loyiso Nongxa)",
"title": "Presidents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "2023–2026: Hiraku Nakajima (vice: Ulrike Tillmann, Tatiana Toro)",
"title": "Presidents"
}
]
| The International Mathematical Union (IMU) is an international non-governmental organization devoted to international cooperation in the field of mathematics across the world. It is a member of the International Science Council (ISC) and supports the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM). Its members are national mathematics organizations from more than 80 countries. The objectives of the International Mathematical Union are: promoting international cooperation in mathematics, supporting and assisting the International Congress of Mathematicians and other international scientific meetings/conferences, acknowledging outstanding research contributions to mathematics through the awarding of scientific prizes, and encouraging and supporting other international mathematical activities, considered likely to contribute to the development of mathematical science in any of its aspects, whether pure, applied, or educational. | 2001-08-04T10:09:53Z | 2023-12-03T15:27:20Z | [
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14,869 | International Council for Science | The International Council for Science (ICSU, after its former name, International Council of Scientific Unions) was an international non-governmental organization devoted to international cooperation in the advancement of science. Its members were national scientific bodies and international scientific unions.
In July 2018, the ICSU merged with the International Social Science Council (ISSC) to form the International Science Council (ISC).
In 2017, the ICSU comprised 122 multi-disciplinary National Scientific Members, Associates and Observers representing 142 countries and 31 international, disciplinary Scientific Unions. ICSU also had 22 Scientific Associates. In July 2018, ICSU merged with the International Social Science Council (ISSC) to form the International Science Council (ISC) at a constituent general assembly in Paris.
The ICSU's mission was to strengthen international science for the benefit of society. To do this, the ICSU mobilized the knowledge and resources of the international scientific community to:
Activities focused on three areas: International Research Collaboration, Science for Policy, and Universality of Science.
In July 2018, the ICSU became the International Science Council (ISC).
The ICSU itself was one of the oldest non-governmental organizations in the world, representing the evolution and expansion of two earlier bodies known as the International Association of Academies (IAA; 1899–1914) and the International Research Council (IRC; 1919–1931). In 1998, Members agreed that the Council's current composition and activities would be better reflected by modifying the name from the International Council of Scientific Unions to the International Council for Science, while its rich history and strong identity would be well served by retaining the existing acronym, ICSU.
The Principle of Freedom and Responsibility in Science: the free and responsible practice of science is fundamental to scientific advancement and human and environmental well-being. Such practice, in all its aspects, requires freedom of movement, association, expression and communication for scientists, as well as equitable access to data, information, and other resources for research. It requires responsibility at all levels to carry out and communicate scientific work with integrity, respect, fairness, trustworthiness, and transparency, recognizing its benefits and possible harms. In advocating the free and responsible practice of science, the council promotes equitable opportunities for access to science and its benefits, and opposes discrimination based on such factors as ethnic origin, religion, citizenship, language, political or other opinion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, or age.
The International Science Council's Committee on Freedom and Responsibility in Science (CFRS) "oversees this commitment and is the guardian of this work."
The ICSU Secretariat (20 staff in 2012) in Paris ensured the day-to-day planning and operations under the guidance of an elected executive board. Three Policy Committees − Committee on Scientific Planning and Review (CSPR), Committee on Freedom and Responsibility in the conduct of Science (CFRS) and Committee on Finance − assisted the executive board in its work and a General Assembly of all Members was convened every three years. ICSU has three Regional Offices − Africa, Asia and the Pacific as well as Latin America and the Caribbean.
The principal source of ICSU's finances was the contributions it receives from its members. Other sources of income are the framework contracts from UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and grants and contracts from United Nations bodies, foundations and agencies, which are used to support the scientific activities of the ICSU Unions and interdisciplinary bodies. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The International Council for Science (ICSU, after its former name, International Council of Scientific Unions) was an international non-governmental organization devoted to international cooperation in the advancement of science. Its members were national scientific bodies and international scientific unions.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In July 2018, the ICSU merged with the International Social Science Council (ISSC) to form the International Science Council (ISC).",
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},
{
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"text": "In 2017, the ICSU comprised 122 multi-disciplinary National Scientific Members, Associates and Observers representing 142 countries and 31 international, disciplinary Scientific Unions. ICSU also had 22 Scientific Associates. In July 2018, ICSU merged with the International Social Science Council (ISSC) to form the International Science Council (ISC) at a constituent general assembly in Paris.",
"title": ""
},
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"text": "The ICSU's mission was to strengthen international science for the benefit of society. To do this, the ICSU mobilized the knowledge and resources of the international scientific community to:",
"title": "Mission and principles"
},
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"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Activities focused on three areas: International Research Collaboration, Science for Policy, and Universality of Science.",
"title": "Mission and principles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In July 2018, the ICSU became the International Science Council (ISC).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The ICSU itself was one of the oldest non-governmental organizations in the world, representing the evolution and expansion of two earlier bodies known as the International Association of Academies (IAA; 1899–1914) and the International Research Council (IRC; 1919–1931). In 1998, Members agreed that the Council's current composition and activities would be better reflected by modifying the name from the International Council of Scientific Unions to the International Council for Science, while its rich history and strong identity would be well served by retaining the existing acronym, ICSU.",
"title": "History"
},
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"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The Principle of Freedom and Responsibility in Science: the free and responsible practice of science is fundamental to scientific advancement and human and environmental well-being. Such practice, in all its aspects, requires freedom of movement, association, expression and communication for scientists, as well as equitable access to data, information, and other resources for research. It requires responsibility at all levels to carry out and communicate scientific work with integrity, respect, fairness, trustworthiness, and transparency, recognizing its benefits and possible harms. In advocating the free and responsible practice of science, the council promotes equitable opportunities for access to science and its benefits, and opposes discrimination based on such factors as ethnic origin, religion, citizenship, language, political or other opinion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, or age.",
"title": "Universality of science"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The International Science Council's Committee on Freedom and Responsibility in Science (CFRS) \"oversees this commitment and is the guardian of this work.\"",
"title": "Universality of science"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The ICSU Secretariat (20 staff in 2012) in Paris ensured the day-to-day planning and operations under the guidance of an elected executive board. Three Policy Committees − Committee on Scientific Planning and Review (CSPR), Committee on Freedom and Responsibility in the conduct of Science (CFRS) and Committee on Finance − assisted the executive board in its work and a General Assembly of all Members was convened every three years. ICSU has three Regional Offices − Africa, Asia and the Pacific as well as Latin America and the Caribbean.",
"title": "Structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The principal source of ICSU's finances was the contributions it receives from its members. Other sources of income are the framework contracts from UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and grants and contracts from United Nations bodies, foundations and agencies, which are used to support the scientific activities of the ICSU Unions and interdisciplinary bodies.",
"title": "Finances"
}
]
| The International Council for Science was an international non-governmental organization devoted to international cooperation in the advancement of science. Its members were national scientific bodies and international scientific unions. In July 2018, the ICSU merged with the International Social Science Council (ISSC) to form the International Science Council (ISC). In 2017, the ICSU comprised 122 multi-disciplinary National Scientific Members, Associates and Observers representing 142 countries and 31 international, disciplinary Scientific Unions. ICSU also had 22 Scientific Associates. In July 2018, ICSU merged with the International Social Science Council (ISSC) to form the International Science Council (ISC) at a constituent general assembly in Paris. | 2001-08-04T10:22:22Z | 2023-12-26T01:23:25Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Council_for_Science |
14,870 | International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry | The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC /ˈaɪjuːpæk, ˈjuː-/) is an international federation of National Adhering Organizations working for the advancement of the chemical sciences, especially by developing nomenclature and terminology. It is a member of the International Science Council (ISC). IUPAC is registered in Zürich, Switzerland, and the administrative office, known as the "IUPAC Secretariat", is in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, United States. This administrative office is headed by IUPAC's executive director, currently Greta Heydenrych.
IUPAC was established in 1919 as the successor of the International Congress of Applied Chemistry for the advancement of chemistry. Its members, the National Adhering Organizations, can be national chemistry societies, national academies of sciences, or other bodies representing chemists. There are fifty-four National Adhering Organizations and three Associate National Adhering Organizations. IUPAC's Inter-divisional Committee on Nomenclature and Symbols (IUPAC nomenclature) is the recognized world authority in developing standards for the naming of the chemical elements and compounds. Since its creation, IUPAC has been run by many different committees with different responsibilities. These committees run different projects which include standardizing nomenclature, finding ways to bring chemistry to the world, and publishing works.
IUPAC is best known for its works standardizing nomenclature in chemistry, but IUPAC has publications in many science fields including chemistry, biology and physics. Some important work IUPAC has done in these fields includes standardizing nucleotide base sequence code names; publishing books for environmental scientists, chemists, and physicists; and improving education in science. IUPAC is also known for standardizing the atomic weights of the elements through one of its oldest standing committees, the Commission on Isotopic Abundances and Atomic Weights (CIAAW).
The need for an international standard for chemistry was first addressed in 1860 by a committee headed by German scientist Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz. This committee was the first international conference to create an international naming system for organic compounds. The ideas that were formulated in that conference evolved into the official IUPAC nomenclature of organic chemistry. IUPAC stands as a legacy of this meeting, making it one of the most important historical international collaborations of chemistry societies. Since this time, IUPAC has been the official organization held with the responsibility of updating and maintaining official organic nomenclature. IUPAC as such was established in 1919. One notable country excluded from this early IUPAC is Germany. Germany's exclusion was a result of prejudice towards Germans by the Allied powers after World War I. Germany was finally admitted into IUPAC during 1929. However, Nazi Germany was removed from IUPAC during World War II.
During World War II, IUPAC was affiliated with the Allied powers, but had little involvement during the war effort itself. After the war, East and West Germany were readmitted to IUPAC in 1973. Since World War II, IUPAC has been focused on standardizing nomenclature and methods in science without interruption.
In 2016, IUPAC denounced the use of chlorine as a chemical weapon. The organization pointed out their concerns in a letter to Ahmet Üzümcü, the director of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), in regards to the practice of utilizing chlorine for weapon usage in Syria among other locations. The letter stated, "Our organizations deplore the use of chlorine in this manner. The indiscriminate attacks, possibly carried out by a member state of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), is of concern to chemical scientists and engineers around the globe and we stand ready to support your mission of implementing the CWC." According to the CWC, "the use, stockpiling, distribution, development or storage of any chemical weapons is forbidden by any of the 192 state party signatories."
IUPAC is governed by several committees that all have different responsibilities. The committees are as follows: Bureau, CHEMRAWN (Chem Research Applied to World Needs) Committee, Committee on Chemistry Education, Committee on Chemistry and Industry, Committee on Printed and Electronic Publications, Evaluation Committee, Executive Committee, Finance Committee, Interdivisional Committee on Terminology, Nomenclature and Symbols, Project Committee, and Pure and Applied Chemistry Editorial Advisory Board. Each committee is made up of members of different National Adhering Organizations from different countries.
The steering committee hierarchy for IUPAC is as follows:
Scientists framed a systematic method for naming the organic compounds based on the structures. hence as it of rules was formalted by IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry)
IUPAC establishes rules for harmonized spelling of some chemicals to reduce variation among different local English-language variants. For example, they recommend "aluminium" rather than "aluminum", "sulfur" rather than "sulphur", and "caesium" rather than "cesium".
IUPAC organic nomenclature has three basic parts: the substituents, carbon chain length, and chemical affix. The substituents are any functional groups attached to the main carbon chain. The main carbon chain is the longest possible continuous chain. The chemical affix denotes what type of molecule it is. For example, the ending ane denotes a single bonded carbon chain, as in "hexane" (C6H14).
Another example of IUPAC organic nomenclature is cyclohexanol:
Basic IUPAC inorganic nomenclature has two main parts: the cation and the anion. The cation is the name for the positively charged ion and the anion is the name for the negatively charged ion.
An example of IUPAC nomenclature of inorganic chemistry is potassium chlorate (KClO3):
IUPAC also has a system for giving codes to identify amino acids and nucleotide bases. IUPAC needed a coding system that represented long sequences of amino acids. This would allow for these sequences to be compared to try to find homologies. These codes can consist of either a one-letter code or a three-letter code.
These codes make it easier and shorter to write down the amino acid sequences that make up proteins. The nucleotide bases are made up of purines (adenine and guanine) and pyrimidines (cytosine and thymine or uracil). These nucleotide bases make up DNA and RNA. These nucleotide base codes make the genome of an organism much smaller and easier to read.
The codes for amino acids (24 amino acids and three special codes) are:
The Experimental Thermodynamics books series covers many topics in the fields of thermodynamics.
IUPAC color code their books in order to make each publication distinguishable.
IUPAC and UNESCO were the lead organizations coordinating events for the International Year of Chemistry, which took place in 2011. The International Year of Chemistry was originally proposed by IUPAC at the general assembly in Turin, Italy. This motion was adopted by UNESCO at a meeting in 2008. The main objectives of the International Year of Chemistry were to increase public appreciation of chemistry and gain more interest in the world of chemistry. This event is also being held to encourage young people to get involved and contribute to chemistry. A further reason for this event being held is to honour how chemistry has made improvements to everyone's way of life.
IUPAC Presidents are elected by the IUPAC Council during the General Assembly. Below is the list of IUPAC Presidents since its inception in 1919. | [
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"text": "The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC /ˈaɪjuːpæk, ˈjuː-/) is an international federation of National Adhering Organizations working for the advancement of the chemical sciences, especially by developing nomenclature and terminology. It is a member of the International Science Council (ISC). IUPAC is registered in Zürich, Switzerland, and the administrative office, known as the \"IUPAC Secretariat\", is in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, United States. This administrative office is headed by IUPAC's executive director, currently Greta Heydenrych.",
"title": ""
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"text": "IUPAC was established in 1919 as the successor of the International Congress of Applied Chemistry for the advancement of chemistry. Its members, the National Adhering Organizations, can be national chemistry societies, national academies of sciences, or other bodies representing chemists. There are fifty-four National Adhering Organizations and three Associate National Adhering Organizations. IUPAC's Inter-divisional Committee on Nomenclature and Symbols (IUPAC nomenclature) is the recognized world authority in developing standards for the naming of the chemical elements and compounds. Since its creation, IUPAC has been run by many different committees with different responsibilities. These committees run different projects which include standardizing nomenclature, finding ways to bring chemistry to the world, and publishing works.",
"title": ""
},
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"text": "IUPAC is best known for its works standardizing nomenclature in chemistry, but IUPAC has publications in many science fields including chemistry, biology and physics. Some important work IUPAC has done in these fields includes standardizing nucleotide base sequence code names; publishing books for environmental scientists, chemists, and physicists; and improving education in science. IUPAC is also known for standardizing the atomic weights of the elements through one of its oldest standing committees, the Commission on Isotopic Abundances and Atomic Weights (CIAAW).",
"title": ""
},
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"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The need for an international standard for chemistry was first addressed in 1860 by a committee headed by German scientist Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz. This committee was the first international conference to create an international naming system for organic compounds. The ideas that were formulated in that conference evolved into the official IUPAC nomenclature of organic chemistry. IUPAC stands as a legacy of this meeting, making it one of the most important historical international collaborations of chemistry societies. Since this time, IUPAC has been the official organization held with the responsibility of updating and maintaining official organic nomenclature. IUPAC as such was established in 1919. One notable country excluded from this early IUPAC is Germany. Germany's exclusion was a result of prejudice towards Germans by the Allied powers after World War I. Germany was finally admitted into IUPAC during 1929. However, Nazi Germany was removed from IUPAC during World War II.",
"title": "Creation and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "During World War II, IUPAC was affiliated with the Allied powers, but had little involvement during the war effort itself. After the war, East and West Germany were readmitted to IUPAC in 1973. Since World War II, IUPAC has been focused on standardizing nomenclature and methods in science without interruption.",
"title": "Creation and history"
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"text": "In 2016, IUPAC denounced the use of chlorine as a chemical weapon. The organization pointed out their concerns in a letter to Ahmet Üzümcü, the director of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), in regards to the practice of utilizing chlorine for weapon usage in Syria among other locations. The letter stated, \"Our organizations deplore the use of chlorine in this manner. The indiscriminate attacks, possibly carried out by a member state of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), is of concern to chemical scientists and engineers around the globe and we stand ready to support your mission of implementing the CWC.\" According to the CWC, \"the use, stockpiling, distribution, development or storage of any chemical weapons is forbidden by any of the 192 state party signatories.\"",
"title": "Creation and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "IUPAC is governed by several committees that all have different responsibilities. The committees are as follows: Bureau, CHEMRAWN (Chem Research Applied to World Needs) Committee, Committee on Chemistry Education, Committee on Chemistry and Industry, Committee on Printed and Electronic Publications, Evaluation Committee, Executive Committee, Finance Committee, Interdivisional Committee on Terminology, Nomenclature and Symbols, Project Committee, and Pure and Applied Chemistry Editorial Advisory Board. Each committee is made up of members of different National Adhering Organizations from different countries.",
"title": "Committees and governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The steering committee hierarchy for IUPAC is as follows:",
"title": "Committees and governance"
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"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Scientists framed a systematic method for naming the organic compounds based on the structures. hence as it of rules was formalted by IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry)",
"title": "Nomenclature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "IUPAC establishes rules for harmonized spelling of some chemicals to reduce variation among different local English-language variants. For example, they recommend \"aluminium\" rather than \"aluminum\", \"sulfur\" rather than \"sulphur\", and \"caesium\" rather than \"cesium\".",
"title": "Nomenclature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "IUPAC organic nomenclature has three basic parts: the substituents, carbon chain length, and chemical affix. The substituents are any functional groups attached to the main carbon chain. The main carbon chain is the longest possible continuous chain. The chemical affix denotes what type of molecule it is. For example, the ending ane denotes a single bonded carbon chain, as in \"hexane\" (C6H14).",
"title": "Nomenclature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Another example of IUPAC organic nomenclature is cyclohexanol:",
"title": "Nomenclature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Basic IUPAC inorganic nomenclature has two main parts: the cation and the anion. The cation is the name for the positively charged ion and the anion is the name for the negatively charged ion.",
"title": "Nomenclature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "An example of IUPAC nomenclature of inorganic chemistry is potassium chlorate (KClO3):",
"title": "Nomenclature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "IUPAC also has a system for giving codes to identify amino acids and nucleotide bases. IUPAC needed a coding system that represented long sequences of amino acids. This would allow for these sequences to be compared to try to find homologies. These codes can consist of either a one-letter code or a three-letter code.",
"title": "Amino acid and nucleotide base codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "These codes make it easier and shorter to write down the amino acid sequences that make up proteins. The nucleotide bases are made up of purines (adenine and guanine) and pyrimidines (cytosine and thymine or uracil). These nucleotide bases make up DNA and RNA. These nucleotide base codes make the genome of an organism much smaller and easier to read.",
"title": "Amino acid and nucleotide base codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The codes for amino acids (24 amino acids and three special codes) are:",
"title": "Amino acid and nucleotide base codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The Experimental Thermodynamics books series covers many topics in the fields of thermodynamics.",
"title": "Publications"
},
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"text": "IUPAC color code their books in order to make each publication distinguishable.",
"title": "Publications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "IUPAC and UNESCO were the lead organizations coordinating events for the International Year of Chemistry, which took place in 2011. The International Year of Chemistry was originally proposed by IUPAC at the general assembly in Turin, Italy. This motion was adopted by UNESCO at a meeting in 2008. The main objectives of the International Year of Chemistry were to increase public appreciation of chemistry and gain more interest in the world of chemistry. This event is also being held to encourage young people to get involved and contribute to chemistry. A further reason for this event being held is to honour how chemistry has made improvements to everyone's way of life.",
"title": "International Year of Chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "IUPAC Presidents are elected by the IUPAC Council during the General Assembly. Below is the list of IUPAC Presidents since its inception in 1919.",
"title": "IUPAC Presidents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "",
"title": "External links"
}
]
| The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry is an international federation of National Adhering Organizations working for the advancement of the chemical sciences, especially by developing nomenclature and terminology. It is a member of the International Science Council (ISC). IUPAC is registered in Zürich, Switzerland, and the administrative office, known as the "IUPAC Secretariat", is in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, United States. This administrative office is headed by IUPAC's executive director, currently Greta Heydenrych. IUPAC was established in 1919 as the successor of the International Congress of Applied Chemistry for the advancement of chemistry. Its members, the National Adhering Organizations, can be national chemistry societies, national academies of sciences, or other bodies representing chemists. There are fifty-four National Adhering Organizations and three Associate National Adhering Organizations. IUPAC's Inter-divisional Committee on Nomenclature and Symbols is the recognized world authority in developing standards for the naming of the chemical elements and compounds. Since its creation, IUPAC has been run by many different committees with different responsibilities. These committees run different projects which include standardizing nomenclature, finding ways to bring chemistry to the world, and publishing works. IUPAC is best known for its works standardizing nomenclature in chemistry, but IUPAC has publications in many science fields including chemistry, biology and physics. Some important work IUPAC has done in these fields includes standardizing nucleotide base sequence code names; publishing books for environmental scientists, chemists, and physicists; and improving education in science. IUPAC is also known for standardizing the atomic weights of the elements through one of its oldest standing committees, the Commission on Isotopic Abundances and Atomic Weights (CIAAW). | 2001-08-04T10:34:27Z | 2023-12-31T20:15:08Z | [
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14,871 | International Hydrographic Organization | The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) (French: Organisation hydrographique internationale) is an intergovernmental organisation representing hydrography. As of May 2022, the IHO comprised 98 Member States.
A principal aim of the IHO is to ensure that the world's seas, oceans and navigable waters are properly surveyed and charted. It does this through the setting of international standards, the co-ordination of the endeavours of the world's national hydrographic offices, and through its capacity building program.
The IHO enjoys observer status at the United Nations, where it is the recognised competent authority on hydrographic surveying and nautical charting. When referring to hydrography and nautical charting in Conventions and similar Instruments, it is the IHO standards and specifications that are normally used.
The IHO was established in 1921 as the International Hydrographic Bureau (IHB). The present name was adopted in 1970, as part of a new international Convention on the IHO adopted by the then member nations. The former name International Hydrographic Bureau was retained to describe the IHO secretariat until 8 November 2016, when a significant revision to the Convention on the IHO entered into force. Thereafter the IHB became known as the "IHO Secretariat", comprising an elected Secretary-General and two supporting Directors, together with a small permanent staff (18 in 2020), at the Organization's headquarters in Monaco.
During the 19th century, many maritime nations established hydrographic offices to provide means for improving the navigation of naval and merchant vessels by providing nautical publications, nautical charts, and other navigational services. There were substantial differences in hydrographic procedures charts, and publications. In 1889, an International Maritime Conference was held at Washington, D.C., and it was proposed to establish a "permanent international commission." Similar proposals were made at the sessions of the International Congress of Navigation held at Saint Petersburg in 1908 and the International Maritime Conference held at Saint Petersburg in 1912.
In 1919, the national Hydrographers of Great Britain and France cooperated in taking the necessary steps to convene an international conference of Hydrographers. London was selected as the most suitable place for this conference, and on 24 July 1919, the First International Conference opened, attended by the Hydrographers of 24 nations. The object of the conference was "To consider the advisability of all maritime nations adopting similar methods in preparation, construction, and production of their charts and all hydrographic publications; of rendering the results in the most convenient form to enable them to be readily used; of instituting a prompt system of mutual exchange of hydrographic information between all countries; and of providing an opportunity to consultations and discussions to be carried out on hydrographic subjects generally by the hydrographic experts of the world." This is still the major purpose of the IHO.
As a result of the 1919 Conference, a permanent organization was formed and statutes for its operations were prepared. The IHB, now the IHO, began its activities in 1921 with 18 nations as members. The Principality of Monaco was selected as the seat of the Organization as a result of the offer of Albert I of Monaco to provide suitable accommodation for the Bureau in the Principality.
The IHO develops hydrographic and nautical charting standards. These standards are subsequently adopted and used by its member countries and others in their surveys, nautical charts, and publications. The almost universal use of the IHO standards means that the products and services provided by the world's national hydrographic and oceanographic offices are consistent and recognizable by all seafarers and for other users. Much has been done in the field of standardization since the IHO was founded.
The IHO has encouraged the formation of Regional Hydrographic Commissions (RHCs). Each RHC coordinates the national surveying and charting activities of countries within each region and acts as a forum to address other matters of common hydrographic interest. The 15 RHCs plus the IHO Hydrographic Commission on Antarctica effectively cover the world. The IHO, in partnership with the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, directs the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans program.
Establishment of the Chart Specifications Committee and International Charts:
Most IHO publications, including the standards, guidelines and associated documents such as the International Hydrographic Review, International Hydrographic Bulletin, the Hydrographic Dictionary and the Year Book are available to the general public free of charge from the IHO website. The IHO publishes the international standards related to charting and hydrography, including S-57, IHO Transfer Standard for Digital Hydrographic Data, the encoding standard that is used primarily for electronic navigational charts.
In 2010, the IHO introduced a new, contemporary hydrographic geospatial standard for modelling marine data and information, known as S-100. S-100 and any dependent product specifications are underpinned by an on-line registry accessible via the IHO website. S-100 is aligned with the ISO 19100 series of geographic standards, thereby making it fully compatible with contemporary geospatial data standards.
Because S-100 is based on ISO 19100, it can be used by other data providers for their maritime-related (non-hydrographic) data and information. Various data and information providers from both the government and private sector are now using S-100 as part of the implementation of the e-Navigation concept that has been endorsed by the UN International Maritime Organization (IMO).
Another in the series of publications of interest is S-23, Limits of Oceans and Seas. The 3rd edition dates back to 1953 while the potential 4th edition, started in 1986, has remained a draft since 2002. It was distributed to IHO members, but its official publication has been suspended pending agreement between South Korea and Japan regarding the international standard name of the sea called "Japan Sea" in the 1953 edition. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) (French: Organisation hydrographique internationale) is an intergovernmental organisation representing hydrography. As of May 2022, the IHO comprised 98 Member States.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "A principal aim of the IHO is to ensure that the world's seas, oceans and navigable waters are properly surveyed and charted. It does this through the setting of international standards, the co-ordination of the endeavours of the world's national hydrographic offices, and through its capacity building program.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The IHO enjoys observer status at the United Nations, where it is the recognised competent authority on hydrographic surveying and nautical charting. When referring to hydrography and nautical charting in Conventions and similar Instruments, it is the IHO standards and specifications that are normally used.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The IHO was established in 1921 as the International Hydrographic Bureau (IHB). The present name was adopted in 1970, as part of a new international Convention on the IHO adopted by the then member nations. The former name International Hydrographic Bureau was retained to describe the IHO secretariat until 8 November 2016, when a significant revision to the Convention on the IHO entered into force. Thereafter the IHB became known as the \"IHO Secretariat\", comprising an elected Secretary-General and two supporting Directors, together with a small permanent staff (18 in 2020), at the Organization's headquarters in Monaco.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "During the 19th century, many maritime nations established hydrographic offices to provide means for improving the navigation of naval and merchant vessels by providing nautical publications, nautical charts, and other navigational services. There were substantial differences in hydrographic procedures charts, and publications. In 1889, an International Maritime Conference was held at Washington, D.C., and it was proposed to establish a \"permanent international commission.\" Similar proposals were made at the sessions of the International Congress of Navigation held at Saint Petersburg in 1908 and the International Maritime Conference held at Saint Petersburg in 1912.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In 1919, the national Hydrographers of Great Britain and France cooperated in taking the necessary steps to convene an international conference of Hydrographers. London was selected as the most suitable place for this conference, and on 24 July 1919, the First International Conference opened, attended by the Hydrographers of 24 nations. The object of the conference was \"To consider the advisability of all maritime nations adopting similar methods in preparation, construction, and production of their charts and all hydrographic publications; of rendering the results in the most convenient form to enable them to be readily used; of instituting a prompt system of mutual exchange of hydrographic information between all countries; and of providing an opportunity to consultations and discussions to be carried out on hydrographic subjects generally by the hydrographic experts of the world.\" This is still the major purpose of the IHO.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "As a result of the 1919 Conference, a permanent organization was formed and statutes for its operations were prepared. The IHB, now the IHO, began its activities in 1921 with 18 nations as members. The Principality of Monaco was selected as the seat of the Organization as a result of the offer of Albert I of Monaco to provide suitable accommodation for the Bureau in the Principality.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The IHO develops hydrographic and nautical charting standards. These standards are subsequently adopted and used by its member countries and others in their surveys, nautical charts, and publications. The almost universal use of the IHO standards means that the products and services provided by the world's national hydrographic and oceanographic offices are consistent and recognizable by all seafarers and for other users. Much has been done in the field of standardization since the IHO was founded.",
"title": "Functions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The IHO has encouraged the formation of Regional Hydrographic Commissions (RHCs). Each RHC coordinates the national surveying and charting activities of countries within each region and acts as a forum to address other matters of common hydrographic interest. The 15 RHCs plus the IHO Hydrographic Commission on Antarctica effectively cover the world. The IHO, in partnership with the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, directs the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans program.",
"title": "Functions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Establishment of the Chart Specifications Committee and International Charts:",
"title": "Functions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Most IHO publications, including the standards, guidelines and associated documents such as the International Hydrographic Review, International Hydrographic Bulletin, the Hydrographic Dictionary and the Year Book are available to the general public free of charge from the IHO website. The IHO publishes the international standards related to charting and hydrography, including S-57, IHO Transfer Standard for Digital Hydrographic Data, the encoding standard that is used primarily for electronic navigational charts.",
"title": "Publications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In 2010, the IHO introduced a new, contemporary hydrographic geospatial standard for modelling marine data and information, known as S-100. S-100 and any dependent product specifications are underpinned by an on-line registry accessible via the IHO website. S-100 is aligned with the ISO 19100 series of geographic standards, thereby making it fully compatible with contemporary geospatial data standards.",
"title": "Publications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Because S-100 is based on ISO 19100, it can be used by other data providers for their maritime-related (non-hydrographic) data and information. Various data and information providers from both the government and private sector are now using S-100 as part of the implementation of the e-Navigation concept that has been endorsed by the UN International Maritime Organization (IMO).",
"title": "Publications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Another in the series of publications of interest is S-23, Limits of Oceans and Seas. The 3rd edition dates back to 1953 while the potential 4th edition, started in 1986, has remained a draft since 2002. It was distributed to IHO members, but its official publication has been suspended pending agreement between South Korea and Japan regarding the international standard name of the sea called \"Japan Sea\" in the 1953 edition.",
"title": "Publications"
}
]
| The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) is an intergovernmental organisation representing hydrography. As of May 2022, the IHO comprised 98 Member States. A principal aim of the IHO is to ensure that the world's seas, oceans and navigable waters are properly surveyed and charted. It does this through the setting of international standards, the co-ordination of the endeavours of the world's national hydrographic offices, and through its capacity building program. The IHO enjoys observer status at the United Nations, where it is the recognised competent authority on hydrographic surveying and nautical charting. When referring to hydrography and nautical charting in Conventions and similar Instruments, it is the IHO standards and specifications that are normally used. | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-11-25T12:15:35Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Hydrographic_Organization |
14,872 | IBM mainframe | IBM mainframes are large computer systems produced by IBM since 1952. During the 1960s and 1970s, IBM dominated the computer market with the 7000 series and the later System/360, followed by the System/370. Current mainframe computers in IBM's line of business computers are developments of the basic design of the System/360.
From 1952 into the late 1960s, IBM manufactured and marketed several large computer models, known as the IBM 700/7000 series. The first-generation 700s were based on vacuum tubes, while the later, second-generation 7000s used transistors. These machines established IBM's dominance in electronic data processing ("EDP"). IBM had two model categories: one (701, 704, 709, 7030, 7090, 7094, 7040, 7044) for engineering and scientific use, and one (702, 705, 705-II, 705-III, 7080, 7070, 7072, 7074, 7010) for commercial or data processing use. The two categories, scientific and commercial, generally used common peripherals but had completely different instruction sets, and there were incompatibilities even within each category.
IBM initially sold its computers without any software, expecting customers to write their own; programs were manually initiated, one at a time. Later, IBM provided compilers for the newly developed higher-level programming languages Fortran, COMTRAN and later COBOL. The first operating systems for IBM computers were written by IBM customers who did not wish to have their very expensive machines ($2M USD in the mid-1950s) sitting idle while operators set up jobs manually. These first operating systems were essentially scheduled work queues. It is generally thought the first operating system used for real work was GM-NAA I/O, produced by General Motors' Research division in 1956. IBM enhanced one of GM-NAA I/O's successors, the SHARE Operating System, and provided it to customers under the name IBSYS. As software became more complex and important, the cost of supporting it on so many different designs became burdensome, and this was one of the factors which led IBM to develop System/360 and its operating systems.
The second generation (transistor-based) products were a mainstay of IBM's business and IBM continued to make them for several years after the introduction of the System/360. (Some IBM 7094s remained in service into the 1980s.)
Prior to System/360, IBM also sold computers smaller in scale that were not considered mainframes, though they were still bulky and expensive by modern standards. These included:
IBM had difficulty getting customers to upgrade from the smaller machines to the mainframes because so much software had to be rewritten. The 7010 was introduced in 1962 as a mainframe-sized 1410. The later Systems 360 and 370 could emulate the 1400 machines. A desk-size machine with a different instruction set, the IBM 1130, was released concurrently with the System/360 to address the niche occupied by the 1620. It used the same EBCDIC character encoding as the 360 and was mostly programmed in Fortran, which was relatively easy to adapt to larger machines when necessary.
IBM also introduced smaller machines after S/360. These included:
Midrange computer is a designation used by IBM for a class of computer systems which fall in between mainframes and microcomputers.
IBM announced the System/360 (S/360) line of mainframes in April 1964. The System/360 was a single series of compatible models for both commercial and scientific use. The number "360" suggested a "360 degree," or "all-around" computer system. System/360 incorporated features which had previously been present on only either the commercial line (such as decimal arithmetic and byte addressing) or the engineering and scientific line (such as floating-point arithmetic). Some of the arithmetic units and addressing features were optional on some models of the System/360. However, models were upward compatible and most were also downward compatible. The System/360 was also the first computer in wide use to include dedicated hardware provisions for the use of operating systems. Among these were supervisor and application mode programs and instructions, as well as built-in memory protection facilities. Hardware memory protection was provided to protect the operating system from the user programs (tasks) and user tasks from each other. The new machine also had a larger address space than the older mainframes, 24 bits addressing 8-bit bytes vs. a typical 18 bits addressing 36-bit words.
The smaller models in the System/360 line (e.g. the 360/30) were intended to replace the 1400 series while providing an easier upgrade path to the larger 360s. To smooth the transition from the second generation to the new line, IBM used the 360's microprogramming capability to emulate the more popular older models. Thus 360/30s with this added cost feature could run 1401 programs and the larger 360/65s could run 7094 programs. To run old programs, the 360 had to be halted and restarted in emulation mode. Many customers kept using their old software and one of the features of the later System/370 was the ability to switch to emulation mode and back under operating system control.
Operating systems for the System/360 family included OS/360 (with PCP, MFT, and MVT), BOS/360, TOS/360, and DOS/360.
The System/360 later evolved into the System/370, the System/390, and the 64-bit zSeries, System z, and zEnterprise machines. System/370 introduced virtual memory capabilities in all models other than the very first System/370 models; the OS/VS1 variant of OS/360 MFT, the OS/VS2 (SVS) variant of OS/360 MVT, and the DOS/VS variant of DOS/360 were introduced to use the virtual memory capabilities, followed by MVS, which, unlike the earlier virtual-memory operating systems, ran separate programs in separate address spaces, rather than running all programs in a single virtual address space. The virtual memory capabilities also allowed the system to support virtual machines; the VM/370 hypervisor would run one or more virtual machines running either standard System/360 or System/370 operating systems or the single-user Conversational Monitor System (CMS). A time-sharing VM system could run multiple virtual machines, one per user, with each virtual machine running an instance of CMS.
The IBM Z family, introduced in 2000 with the z900, supports z/Architecture, which extends the architecture used by the System/390 mainframes to 64 bits.
The different processors on current IBM mainframes are:
These are essentially identical, but distinguished for software cost control: all but CP are slightly restricted such they cannot be used to run arbitrary operating systems, and thus do not count in software licensing costs (which are typically based on the number of CPs). There are other supporting processors typically installed inside mainframes such as cryptographic accelerators (CryptoExpress), the OSA-Express networking processor, and FICON Express disk I/O processors.
Software to allow users to run "traditional" workloads on zIIPs and zAAPs was briefly marketed by Neon Enterprise Software as "zPrime" but was withdrawn from the market in 2011 after a lawsuit by IBM.
The primary operating systems in use on current IBM mainframes include z/OS (which followed MVS/ESA and OS/390 in the OS/360 lineage), z/VM (which followed VM/ESA and VM/XA SP in the CP-40 lineage), z/VSE (which is in the DOS/360 lineage), z/TPF (a successor of Transaction Processing Facility in the Airlines Control Program lineage), and Linux on IBM Z (e.g., Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server). Some systems run MUSIC/SP, as well as UTS (Mainframe UNIX). In October 2008, Sine Nomine Associates introduced OpenSolaris on System z; it has since been discontinued.
Current IBM mainframes run all the major enterprise transaction processing environments and databases, including CICS, IMS, WebSphere Application Server, IBM Db2, and Oracle. In many cases these software subsystems can run on more than one mainframe operating system.
There are software-based emulators for the System/370, System/390, and System z hardware, including FLEX-ES, which runs under UnixWare or Linux, and the freely available Hercules, which runs under Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, macOS and Microsoft Windows. IBM offers an emulator called zPDT (System z Personal Development Tool) which runs on Linux on x86-64 machines. | [
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"title": ""
},
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"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "From 1952 into the late 1960s, IBM manufactured and marketed several large computer models, known as the IBM 700/7000 series. The first-generation 700s were based on vacuum tubes, while the later, second-generation 7000s used transistors. These machines established IBM's dominance in electronic data processing (\"EDP\"). IBM had two model categories: one (701, 704, 709, 7030, 7090, 7094, 7040, 7044) for engineering and scientific use, and one (702, 705, 705-II, 705-III, 7080, 7070, 7072, 7074, 7010) for commercial or data processing use. The two categories, scientific and commercial, generally used common peripherals but had completely different instruction sets, and there were incompatibilities even within each category.",
"title": "First and second generation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "IBM initially sold its computers without any software, expecting customers to write their own; programs were manually initiated, one at a time. Later, IBM provided compilers for the newly developed higher-level programming languages Fortran, COMTRAN and later COBOL. The first operating systems for IBM computers were written by IBM customers who did not wish to have their very expensive machines ($2M USD in the mid-1950s) sitting idle while operators set up jobs manually. These first operating systems were essentially scheduled work queues. It is generally thought the first operating system used for real work was GM-NAA I/O, produced by General Motors' Research division in 1956. IBM enhanced one of GM-NAA I/O's successors, the SHARE Operating System, and provided it to customers under the name IBSYS. As software became more complex and important, the cost of supporting it on so many different designs became burdensome, and this was one of the factors which led IBM to develop System/360 and its operating systems.",
"title": "First and second generation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The second generation (transistor-based) products were a mainstay of IBM's business and IBM continued to make them for several years after the introduction of the System/360. (Some IBM 7094s remained in service into the 1980s.)",
"title": "First and second generation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Prior to System/360, IBM also sold computers smaller in scale that were not considered mainframes, though they were still bulky and expensive by modern standards. These included:",
"title": "Smaller machines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "IBM had difficulty getting customers to upgrade from the smaller machines to the mainframes because so much software had to be rewritten. The 7010 was introduced in 1962 as a mainframe-sized 1410. The later Systems 360 and 370 could emulate the 1400 machines. A desk-size machine with a different instruction set, the IBM 1130, was released concurrently with the System/360 to address the niche occupied by the 1620. It used the same EBCDIC character encoding as the 360 and was mostly programmed in Fortran, which was relatively easy to adapt to larger machines when necessary.",
"title": "Smaller machines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "IBM also introduced smaller machines after S/360. These included:",
"title": "Smaller machines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Midrange computer is a designation used by IBM for a class of computer systems which fall in between mainframes and microcomputers.",
"title": "Smaller machines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "IBM announced the System/360 (S/360) line of mainframes in April 1964. The System/360 was a single series of compatible models for both commercial and scientific use. The number \"360\" suggested a \"360 degree,\" or \"all-around\" computer system. System/360 incorporated features which had previously been present on only either the commercial line (such as decimal arithmetic and byte addressing) or the engineering and scientific line (such as floating-point arithmetic). Some of the arithmetic units and addressing features were optional on some models of the System/360. However, models were upward compatible and most were also downward compatible. The System/360 was also the first computer in wide use to include dedicated hardware provisions for the use of operating systems. Among these were supervisor and application mode programs and instructions, as well as built-in memory protection facilities. Hardware memory protection was provided to protect the operating system from the user programs (tasks) and user tasks from each other. The new machine also had a larger address space than the older mainframes, 24 bits addressing 8-bit bytes vs. a typical 18 bits addressing 36-bit words.",
"title": "IBM System/360"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The smaller models in the System/360 line (e.g. the 360/30) were intended to replace the 1400 series while providing an easier upgrade path to the larger 360s. To smooth the transition from the second generation to the new line, IBM used the 360's microprogramming capability to emulate the more popular older models. Thus 360/30s with this added cost feature could run 1401 programs and the larger 360/65s could run 7094 programs. To run old programs, the 360 had to be halted and restarted in emulation mode. Many customers kept using their old software and one of the features of the later System/370 was the ability to switch to emulation mode and back under operating system control.",
"title": "IBM System/360"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Operating systems for the System/360 family included OS/360 (with PCP, MFT, and MVT), BOS/360, TOS/360, and DOS/360.",
"title": "IBM System/360"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The System/360 later evolved into the System/370, the System/390, and the 64-bit zSeries, System z, and zEnterprise machines. System/370 introduced virtual memory capabilities in all models other than the very first System/370 models; the OS/VS1 variant of OS/360 MFT, the OS/VS2 (SVS) variant of OS/360 MVT, and the DOS/VS variant of DOS/360 were introduced to use the virtual memory capabilities, followed by MVS, which, unlike the earlier virtual-memory operating systems, ran separate programs in separate address spaces, rather than running all programs in a single virtual address space. The virtual memory capabilities also allowed the system to support virtual machines; the VM/370 hypervisor would run one or more virtual machines running either standard System/360 or System/370 operating systems or the single-user Conversational Monitor System (CMS). A time-sharing VM system could run multiple virtual machines, one per user, with each virtual machine running an instance of CMS.",
"title": "IBM System/360"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The IBM Z family, introduced in 2000 with the z900, supports z/Architecture, which extends the architecture used by the System/390 mainframes to 64 bits.",
"title": "Today's systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The different processors on current IBM mainframes are:",
"title": "Today's systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "These are essentially identical, but distinguished for software cost control: all but CP are slightly restricted such they cannot be used to run arbitrary operating systems, and thus do not count in software licensing costs (which are typically based on the number of CPs). There are other supporting processors typically installed inside mainframes such as cryptographic accelerators (CryptoExpress), the OSA-Express networking processor, and FICON Express disk I/O processors.",
"title": "Today's systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Software to allow users to run \"traditional\" workloads on zIIPs and zAAPs was briefly marketed by Neon Enterprise Software as \"zPrime\" but was withdrawn from the market in 2011 after a lawsuit by IBM.",
"title": "Today's systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The primary operating systems in use on current IBM mainframes include z/OS (which followed MVS/ESA and OS/390 in the OS/360 lineage), z/VM (which followed VM/ESA and VM/XA SP in the CP-40 lineage), z/VSE (which is in the DOS/360 lineage), z/TPF (a successor of Transaction Processing Facility in the Airlines Control Program lineage), and Linux on IBM Z (e.g., Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server). Some systems run MUSIC/SP, as well as UTS (Mainframe UNIX). In October 2008, Sine Nomine Associates introduced OpenSolaris on System z; it has since been discontinued.",
"title": "Today's systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Current IBM mainframes run all the major enterprise transaction processing environments and databases, including CICS, IMS, WebSphere Application Server, IBM Db2, and Oracle. In many cases these software subsystems can run on more than one mainframe operating system.",
"title": "Today's systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "There are software-based emulators for the System/370, System/390, and System z hardware, including FLEX-ES, which runs under UnixWare or Linux, and the freely available Hercules, which runs under Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, macOS and Microsoft Windows. IBM offers an emulator called zPDT (System z Personal Development Tool) which runs on Linux on x86-64 machines.",
"title": "Today's systems"
}
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14,875 | Iowa State University | Iowa State University of Science and Technology (Iowa State University, Iowa State, or ISU) is a public land-grant research university in Ames, Iowa. Founded in 1858 as the Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm, Iowa State became one of the nation's first designated land-grant institutions when the Iowa Legislature accepted the provisions of the 1862 Morrill Act on September 11, 1862, making Iowa the first state in the nation to do so. On July 4, 1959, the college was officially renamed Iowa State University of Science and Technology.
Iowa State is the largest university in the State of Iowa by total enrollment. The university's academic offerings are administered through eight colleges, including the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the College of Veterinary Medicine, the College of Engineering, the Graduate College, the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, the College of Design, Debbie and Jerry Ivy College of Business, and the College of Human Sciences. They offer over 100 bachelor's degree programs, 112 master's degree programs, and 83 doctoral degree programs, plus a professional degree program in Veterinary Medicine.
Iowa State is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity". The university is home to the Ames Laboratory, one of ten national U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science research laboratories, the Biorenewables Research Laboratory, the Plant Sciences Institute, and various other research institutes. Iowa State University's athletic teams, the Cyclones, compete in Division I of the NCAA and are a founding member of the Big 12.
In 1856, the Iowa General Assembly enacted legislation to establish the Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm. This institution (now Iowa State University) was officially established on March 22, 1858, by the General Assembly. Story County was chosen as the location on June 21, 1859, beating proposals from Johnson, Kossuth, Marshall and Polk counties. The original farm of 648 acres (2.62 km) was purchased for a cost of $5,379.
Iowa was the first state in the nation to accept the provisions of the Morrill Act of 1862. The state subsequently designated Iowa State as the land-grant college on March 29, 1864. Iowa State University is one of four universities that claims to be the first land-grant institution in the United States, the others being Kansas State University, Michigan State University, and the Pennsylvania State University.
From the start, Iowa Agricultural College focused on the ideals that higher education should be accessible to all and that the university should teach liberal and practical subjects. These ideals are integral to the land-grant university.
The institution has been coeducational since the first class admitted in 1868. Formal admissions began the following year, and the first graduating class of 1872 consisted of 24 men and two women.
The Farm House, the first building on the Iowa State campus, was completed in 1861 before the campus was occupied by students or classrooms. It became the home of the superintendent of the Model Farm and in later years, the deans of Agriculture, including Seaman Knapp and "Tama Jim" Wilson. Iowa State's first president, Adonijah Welch, briefly stayed at the Farm House and penned his inaugural speech in a second floor bedroom.
The Iowa Experiment Station was one of the university's prominent features. Practical courses of instruction were taught, including one designed to give a general training for the career of a farmer. Courses in mechanical, civil, electrical, and mining engineering were also part of the curriculum.
In 1870, President Welch and I. P. Roberts, professor of agriculture, held three-day farmers' institutes at Cedar Falls, Council Bluffs, Washington, and Muscatine. These became the earliest institutes held off-campus by a land grant institution and were the forerunners of 20th century extension.
In 1872, the first courses were given in domestic economy (home economics, family and consumer sciences) and were taught by Mary B. Welch, the president's wife. Iowa State became the first land grant university to offer training in domestic economy for college credit.
In 1879, the School of Veterinary Science was organized, becoming the first state veterinary college in the United States. This was originally a two-year course leading to a diploma. The veterinary course of study contained classes in zoology, botany, anatomy of domestic animals, veterinary obstetrics, and sanitary science.
William M. Beardshear was appointed President of Iowa State in 1891. During his tenure, Iowa Agricultural College truly came of age. Beardshear developed new agricultural programs and was instrumental in hiring premier faculty members such as Anson Marston, Louis B. Spinney, J.B. Weems, Perry G. Holden, and Maria Roberts. He also expanded the university administration, and added Morrill Hall (1891), the Campanile (1899), Old Botany (now Carrie Chapman Catt Hall) (1892), and Margaret Hall (1895) to the campus, all of which stand today except for Margaret Hall, which was destroyed by a fire in 1938. In his honor, Iowa State named its central administrative building (Central Building) after Beardshear in 1925. In 1898, reflecting the school's growth during his tenure, it was renamed Iowa State College of Agricultural and Mechanic Arts, or Iowa State for short.
Today, Beardshear Hall holds the offices of the President, Vice-President, Treasurer, Secretary, Registrar, Provost, and student financial aid. Catt Hall is named after alumna and famed suffragette Carrie Chapman Catt, and is the home of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
In 1912, Iowa State had its first Homecoming celebration. The idea was first proposed by Professor Samuel Beyer, the college's "patron saint of athletics", who suggested that Iowa State inaugurate a celebration for alumni during the annual football game against rival University of Iowa. Iowa State's new president, Raymond A. Pearson, liked the idea and issued a special invitation to alumni two weeks prior to the event: "We need you, we must have you. Come and see what a school you have made in Iowa State College. Find a way." In October 2012 Iowa State marked its 100th Homecoming with a "CYtennial" Celebration.
Iowa State celebrated its first VEISHEA on May 11–13, 1922. Wallace McKee (class of 1922) served as the first chairman of the Central Committee and Frank D. Paine (professor of electrical engineering) chose the name, based on the first letters of Iowa State's colleges: Veterinary Medicine, Engineering, Industrial Science, Home Economics, and Agriculture. VEISHEA grew to become the largest student-run festival in the nation.
The Statistical Laboratory was established in 1933, with George W. Snedecor, professor of mathematics, as the first director. It was and is the first research and consulting institute of its kind in the country.
While attempting to develop a faster method of computation, mathematics and physics professor John Vincent Atanasoff conceptualized the basic tenets of what would become the world's first electronic digital computer, the Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC), during a drive to Illinois in 1937. These included the use of a binary system of arithmetic, the separation of computer and memory functions, and regenerative drum memory, among others. The 1939 prototype was constructed with graduate student Clifford Berry in the basement of the Physics Building.
During World War II, Iowa State was one of 131 colleges and universities nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program which offered students a path to a Navy commission.
On July 4, 1959, the college was officially renamed Iowa State University of Science and Technology. However, the short-form name "Iowa State University" is used even in official documents, such as diplomas. Official names given to the university's divisions were the College of Agriculture, College of Engineering, College of Home Economics, College of Sciences and Humanities, and College of Veterinary Medicine.
Iowa State's eight colleges today offer more than 100 undergraduate majors and 200 fields of study leading to graduate and professional degrees. The academic program at ISU includes a liberal arts education and research in the biological and physical sciences. The focus on technology has led directly to many research patents and inventions including the first binary computer, the ABC, Maytag blue cheese, and the round hay baler.
Located on a 2,000 acres (8.1 km) campus, the university has grown considerably from its roots as an agricultural college and model farm and is recognized internationally today for its comprehensive research programs. It continues to grow and set a new record for enrollment in the fall of 2015 with 36,001 students.
Iowa State University is organized into eight colleges and two schools that offer 100 Bachelor's degree programs, 112 Masters programs, and 83 Ph.D programs, including one professional degree program in Veterinary Medicine.
ISU is home to the following schools:
Classified as one of Carnegie's "R1: Doctoral Universities - Very High Research Activity," Iowa State receives nearly $500 million in research grants annually.
In 2022, Iowa State ranks 401-500 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, and 501-600 in the Academic Ranking of World Universities. In 2017, the two same organizations ranked Iowa State 351-400 and 201-300, respectively. In 2012, these rankings were 184 and 151-200, respectively.
In 2016-17 Iowa State university became part of only fifty-four institutions in the U.S. to earn the "Innovation and Economic Prosperity University" designation by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities.
The agriculture and forestry programs were ranked 16th in the world by QS for 2020. The statistics program was tied for 20th in the U.S. according to U.S. News & World Report for 2018. In engineering specialties, at schools whose highest degree is a doctorate, Iowa State's biological/agricultural engineering program is ranked first, the mechanical and civil are ranked 9th and 16th nationally in the U.S. by U.S. News & World Report. Almost all of the engineering specialities at ISU are ranked in the top 30 nationally. ISU's chemistry and physics programs are considered to be some of the best in the world and are ranked in the Top 100 globally and in Top 50 nationally. ISU's Greenlee School of Journalism and Mass Communication is one of the top journalism schools in the country and is notable for being among the first group of accredited journalism and mass communication programs. Greenlee is also cited as one of the leading JMC research programs in the nation, ranked 23rd in a publication by the AEJMC.
The National Science Foundation ranks ISU 71st in the nation in total research and development expenditures and 94th in research and development expenditures for science and engineering. Currently, ISU ranks second nationally in license and options executed on its intellectual property and #2 nationally in license and options that yield income.
In 2016, ISU's landscape architecture program was ranked as the 10th best undergraduate program in the nation, and architecture as the 18th best.
The W. Robert and Ellen Sorge Parks Library contains over 2.6 million books and subscribes to more than 98,600 journal titles. Named for W. Robert Parks (1915–2003), the 11th president of Iowa State University, and his wife, Ellen Sorge Parks, the original library was built in 1925 with three subsequent additions made in 1961, 1969, and 1983. The library was dedicated and named after W. Robert and Ellen Sorge Parks in 1984.
Parks Library provides extensive research collections, services, and information literacy instruction/information for all students. Facilities consist of the main Parks Library, the Veterinary Medical Library, the Design Reading Room, and a remote library storage building.
The library's extensive collections include electronic and print resources that support research and study for all undergraduate and graduate programs. Nationally recognized collections support the basic and applied fields of biological and physical sciences. The Parks Library service points include the Main Desk, Tech Lending, IT Solution Center, and Special Collections (Archives). The Library's instruction program includes a required undergraduate information literacy course as well as a wide variety of subject-based seminars on the effective use of Library resources for undergraduate and graduate students.
The library's website provides access to local and Internet-based resources including electronic journals and books, local collections, online indexes, and a broad range of subject research guides. Electronic Course Reserves materials are accessed through the university's learning management system.
Surrounding the first floor lobby staircase in Parks Library are eight mural panels designed by Iowa artist Grant Wood. As with Breaking the Prairie Sod, Wood's other Iowa State University mural painted two years later, Wood borrowed his theme for When Tillage Begins Other Arts Follow from a speech on agriculture delivered by Daniel Webster in 1840 at the State House in Boston. Webster said, "When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers therefore are the founders of human civilization." Wood had planned to create seventeen mural panels for the library, but only the eleven devoted to agriculture and the practical arts were completed. The final six, which would have hung in the main reading room (now the Periodical Room) and were to have depicted the fine arts, were never begun.
The university has an IEOP for foreign students. Students whose native language is not English can take IEOP courses to improve their English proficiency to help them succeed at University-level study. IEOP course content also helps students prepare for English proficiency exams, like the TOEFL and IELTS. Classes included in the IEOP include Grammar, Reading, Writing, Oral Communication and Business and various bridge classes.
Iowa State is the birthplace of the first electronic digital computer, starting the world's computer technology revolution. Invented by mathematics and physics professor John Atanasoff and engineering graduate student Clifford Berry during 1937–42, the Atanasoff–Berry Computer pioneered important elements of modern computing.
On October 19, 1973, U.S. Federal Judge Earl R. Larson signed his decision following a lengthy court trial which declared the ENIAC patent of Mauchly and Eckert invalid and named Atanasoff the inventor of the electronic digital computer—the Atanasoff–Berry Computer or the ABC.
An ABC Team consisting of Ames Laboratory and Iowa State engineers, technicians, researchers and students unveiled a working replica of the Atanasoff–Berry Computer in 1997 which can be seen on display on campus in the Durham Computation Center.
The Extension Service traces its roots to farmers' institutes developed at Iowa State in the late 19th century. Committed to community, Iowa State pioneered the outreach mission of being a land-grant college through creation of the first Extension Service in 1902. In 1906, the Iowa Legislature enacted the Agricultural Extension Act making funds available for demonstration projects. It is believed this was the first specific legislation establishing state extension work, for which Iowa State assumed responsibility. The national extension program was created in 1914 based heavily on the Iowa State model.
Iowa State is widely known for VEISHEA, an annual education and entertainment festival that was held on campus each spring. The name VEISHEA was derived from the initials of ISU's five original colleges, forming an acronym as the university existed when the festival was founded in 1922:
VEISHEA was the largest student run festival in the nation, bringing in tens of thousands of visitors to the campus each year.
The celebration featured an annual parade and many open-house demonstrations of the university facilities and departments. Campus organizations exhibited products, technologies, and held fund raisers for various charity groups. In addition, VEISHEA brought speakers, lecturers, and entertainers to Iowa State, and throughout its over eight decade history, it has hosted such distinguished guests as Bob Hope, John Wayne, Presidents Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, and Lyndon Johnson, and performers Diana Ross, Billy Joel, Sonny and Cher, The Who, The Goo Goo Dolls, Bobby V, and The Black Eyed Peas.
The 2007 VEISHEA festivities marked the start of Iowa State's year-long sesquicentennial celebration.
On August 8, 2014, President Steven Leath announced that VEISHEA would no longer be an annual event at Iowa State and the name VEISHEA would be retired.
Iowa State played a role in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II as part of the Manhattan Project, a research and development program begun in 1942 under the Army Corps of Engineers.
The process to produce large quantities of high-purity uranium metal became known as the Ames process. One-third of the uranium metal used in the world's first controlled nuclear chain reaction was produced at Iowa State under the direction of Frank Spedding and Harley Wilhelm. The Ames Project received the Army/Navy E Award for Excellence in Production on October 12, 1945, for its work with metallic uranium as a vital war material. Today, ISU is the only university in the United States that has a U.S. Department of Energy research laboratory physically located on its campus.
Iowa State University is a member of the Universities Research Association, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. In 2020, Iowa State spent $363.1 million in R&D.
Iowa State was a member of the Association of American Universities from 1958 until April 2022. It departed claiming that AAU's internal ranking indicators unfairly favor institutions with high levels of NIH funding and noted that its strength is not in biomedical research because the school does not have a medical school.
Iowa State is the only university in the United States that has a U.S. Department of Energy research laboratory physically located on its campus. Operated by Iowa State, Ames National Laboratory is one of ten national DOE Office of Science research laboratories.
ISU research for the government provided Ames National Laboratory its start in the 1940s with the development of a highly efficient process for producing high-purity uranium for atomic energy. Today, Ames National Laboratory continues its leading status in current materials research and focuses diverse fundamental and applied research strengths upon issues of national concern, cultivates research talent, and develops and transfers technologies to improve industrial competitiveness and enhance U.S. economic security. Ames National Laboratory employs more than 430 full- and part-time employees, including more than 250 scientists and engineers. Students make up more than 20 percent of the paid workforce.
Ames National Laboratory is the U.S. home to 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner Dan Shechtman and is intensely engaged with the international scientific community, including hosting a large number of international visitors each year.
The ISU Research Park Corporation was established in 1987 as a not-for-profit, independent, corporation operating under a board of directors appointed by Iowa State University and the ISU Foundation. The corporation manages both the Research Park and incubator programs.
In 2010, the Biorenewables Research Laboratory opened in a LEED-Gold certified building that complements and helps replace labs and offices across Iowa State and promotes interdisciplinary, systems-level research and collaboration. The Lab houses the Bioeconomy Institute, the Biobased Industry Center, and the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Biorenewable Chemicals, a partnership of six universities as well as the Max Planck Society in Germany and the Technical University of Denmark.
The Engineering Teaching and Research Complex was built in 1999 and is home to Stanley and Helen Howe Hall and Gary and Donna Hoover Hall. The complex is occupied by the Virtual Reality Applications Center (VRAC), Center for Industrial Research and Service (CIRAS), Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Engineering Computer Support Services, Engineering Distance Education, and Iowa Space Grant Consortium. And the complex contains one of the world's only six-sided immersive virtual reality labs (C6), as well as the 240 seat 3D-capable Alliant Energy Lee Liu Auditorium, the Multimodal Experience Testbed and Laboratory (METaL), and the User Experience Lab (UX Lab). All of which supports the research of more than 50 faculty and 200 graduate, undergraduate, and postdoctoral students.
The Plant Sciences Institute was founded in 1999. PSI's research focus is to understand the effects of genotype (genetic makeup) and environment on phenotypes (traits) sufficiently well that it will be able to predict the phenotype of a given genotype in a given environment. The institute is housed in the Roy J. Carver Co-Laboratory and is home to the Plant Sciences Institute Faculty Scholars program.
There is also the Iowa State University Northeast Research Farm in Nashua.
Iowa State's campus contains over 160 buildings. Several buildings, as well as the Marston Water Tower, are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The central campus includes 490 acres (2.0 km) of trees, plants, and classically designed buildings. The landscape's most dominant feature is the 20-acre (81,000 m) central lawn, which was listed as a "medallion site" by the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1999.
Thomas Gaines, in The Campus As a Work of Art, claimed that the Iowa State campus was one of the twenty-five most beautiful campuses in the country.
The campanile was constructed during 1897-1898 as a memorial to Margaret MacDonald Stanton, Iowa State's first dean of women, who died on July 25, 1895. The tower is located on ISU's central campus, just north of the Memorial Union. The site was selected by Margaret's husband, Edgar W. Stanton, with the help of then-university president William M. Beardshear. The campanile stands 110 feet (34 m) tall on a 16 by 16 foot (5 by 5 m) base, and cost $6,510.20 to construct.
The campanile is widely seen as one of the major symbols of Iowa State University. It is featured prominently on the university's official ring and the university's mace, and is also the subject of the university's alma mater, The Bells of Iowa State.
Named for Dr. LaVerne W. Noyes, who also donated the funds to see that Alumni Hall could be completed after sitting unfinished and unused from 1905 to 1907. Dr. Noyes is an 1872 alumnus. Lake LaVerne is located west of the Memorial Union and south of Alumni Hall, Carver Hall, and Music Hall. The lake was a gift from Dr. Noyes in 1916.
Lake LaVerne is the home of two mute swans named Sir Lancelot and Elaine, donated to Iowa State by VEISHEA 1935. In 1944, 1970, and 1971 cygnets (baby swans) made their home on Lake LaVerne. Previously Sir Lancelot and Elaine were trumpeter swans but were too aggressive and in 1999 were replaced with two mute swans.
In early spring 2003, Lake LaVerne welcomed its newest and most current mute swan duo. In support of Iowa Department of Natural Resources efforts to re-establish the trumpeter swans in Iowa, university officials avoided bringing breeding pairs of male and female mute swans to Iowa State which means the current Sir Lancelot and Elaine are both female.
Iowa State has maintained a horticulture garden since 1914. Reiman Gardens is the third location for these gardens. Today's gardens began in 1993 with a gift from Bobbi and Roy Reiman. Construction began in 1994 and the Gardens' initial 5 acres (20,000 m) were officially dedicated on September 16, 1995.
Reiman Gardens has since grown to become a 14 acres (57,000 m) site consisting of a dozen distinct garden areas, an indoor conservatory and an indoor butterfly "wing", butterfly emergence cases, a gift shop, and several supporting greenhouses. Located immediately south of Jack Trice Stadium on the ISU campus, Reiman Gardens is a year-round facility that has become one of the most visited attractions in central Iowa.
The Gardens has received a number of national, state, and local awards since its opening, and its rose gardens are particularly noteworthy. It was honored with the President's Award in 2000 by All American Rose Selections, Inc., which is presented to one public garden in the United States each year for superior rose maintenance and display: "For contributing to the public interest in rose growing through its efforts in maintaining an outstanding public rose garden."
The university museums consist of the Brunnier Art Museum, Farm House Museum, the Art on Campus Program, the Christian Petersen Art Museum, and the Elizabeth and Byron Anderson Sculpture Garden. The Museums include a multitude of unique exhibits, each promoting the understanding and delight of the visual arts as well as attempt to incorporate a vast interaction between the arts, sciences, and technology.
The Brunnier Art Museum, Iowa's only accredited museum emphasizing a decorative arts collection, is one of the nation's few museums located within a performing arts and conference complex, the Iowa State Center. Founded in 1975, the museum is named after its benefactors, Iowa State alumnus Henry J. Brunnier and his wife Ann. The decorative arts collection they donated, called the Brunnier Collection, is extensive, consisting of ceramics, glass, dolls, ivory, jade, and enameled metals.
Other fine and decorative art objects from the University Art Collection include prints, paintings, sculptures, textiles, carpets, wood objects, lacquered pieces, silver, and furniture. About eight to 12 annual changing exhibitions and permanent collection exhibitions provide educational opportunities. Lectures, receptions, conferences, university classes, panel discussions, gallery walks, and gallery talks are presented to assist with further interpretation of objects.
Located near the center of the Iowa State campus, the Farm House Museum sits as a monument to early Iowa State history and culture as well as a National Historic Landmark. As the first building on campus, the Farm House was built in 1860 before campus was occupied by students or even classrooms. The college's first farm tenants primed the land for agricultural experimentation. This early practice lead to Iowa State Agricultural College and Model Farm opening its doors to Iowa students for free in 1869 under the Morrill Act (or Land-grant Act) of 1862.
Many prominent figures have made the Farm House their home throughout its 150 years of use. The first president of the college, Adonijah Welch, briefly stayed at the Farm House and even wrote his inaugural speech in a bedroom on the second floor. James "Tama Jim" Wilson resided for much of the 1890s with his family at the Farm House until he joined President William McKinley's cabinet as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture. Agriculture Dean Charles Curtiss and his young family replaced Wilson and became the longest resident of Farm House.
In 1976, over 110 years after the initial construction, the Farm House became a museum after much time and effort was put into restoring the early beauty of the modest farm home. Today, faculty, students, and community members can enjoy the museum while honoring its significance in shaping a nationally recognized land-grant university. Its collection boasts a large collection of 19th and early 20th century decorative arts, furnishings and material culture reflecting Iowa State and Iowa heritage. Objects include furnishings from Carrie Chapman Catt and Charles Curtiss, a wide variety of quilts, a modest collection of textiles and apparel, and various china and glassware items.
The Farm House Museum is an on-campus educational resource providing a changing environment of exhibitions among the historical permanent collection objects that are on display.
Iowa State is home to one of the largest campus public art programs in the United States. Over 2,000 works of public art, including 600 by significant national and international artists, are located across campus in buildings, courtyards, open spaces and offices.
The traditional public art program began during the Depression in the 1930s when Iowa State College's President Raymond Hughes envisioned that "the arts would enrich and provide substantial intellectual exploration into our college curricula." Hughes invited Grant Wood to create the Library's agricultural murals that speak to the founding of Iowa and Iowa State College and Model Farm. He also offered Christian Petersen a one-semester sculptor residency to design and build the fountain and bas relief at the Dairy Industry Building. In 1955, 21 years later, Petersen retired having created 12 major sculptures for the campus and hundreds of small studio sculptures.
The Art on Campus Collection is a campus-wide resource of over 2000 public works of art. Programs, receptions, dedications, university classes, Wednesday Walks, and educational tours are presented on a regular basis.
The Christian Petersen Art Museum in Morrill Hall is named for the nation's first permanent campus artist-in-residence, Christian Petersen, who sculpted and taught at Iowa State from 1934 through 1955, and is considered the founding artist of the Art on Campus Collection.
Named for Justin Smith Morrill who created the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act, Morrill Hall was completed in 1891. Originally constructed to fill the capacity of a library, museum, and chapel, its original uses are engraved in the exterior stonework on the east side. The building was vacated in 1996 when it was determined unsafe and was also listed in the National Register of Historic Places the same year. In 2005, $9 million was raised to renovate the building and convert it into a museum. Completed and reopened in March 2007, Morrill Hall is home to the Christian Petersen Art Museum.
As part of University Museums, the Christian Petersen Art Museum at Morrill Hall is the home of the Christian Petersen Art Collection, the Art on Campus Program, the University Museums's Visual Literacy and Learning Program, and Contemporary Changing Art Exhibitions Program.
Located within the Christian Petersen Art Museum are the Lyle and Nancy Campbell Art Gallery, the Roy and Bobbi Reiman Public Art Studio Gallery, the Margaret Davidson Center for the Study of the Art on Campus Collection, the Edith D. and Torsten E. Lagerstrom Loaned Collections Center, and the Neva M. Petersen Visual Learning Gallery. University Museums shares the James R. and Barbara R. Palmer Small Objects Classroom in Morrill Hall.
The Elizabeth and Byron Anderson Sculpture Garden is located by the Christian Petersen Art Museum at historic Morrill Hall. The sculpture garden design incorporates sculptures, a gathering arena, and sidewalks and pathways. Planted with perennials, ground cover, shrubs, and flowering trees, the landscape design provides a setting for works of 20th and 21st century sculpture, primarily American. Ranging from forty-four inches to nearly nine feet high and from bronze to other metals, these works of art represent both modern and contemporary sculpture.
The sculpture garden is adjacent to Iowa State's 22 acres (89,000 m) central campus.
Iowa State's composting facility is capable of processing over 10,000 tons of organic waste every year. The school's $3 million revolving loan fund loans money for energy efficiency and conservation projects on campus. In the 2011 College Sustainability Report Card issued by the Sustainable Endowments Institute, the university received a B grade.
Iowa State operates 20 on-campus residence halls. The residence halls are divided into geographical areas.
The Union Drive Association (UDA) consists of four residence halls located on the west side of campus, including Friley Hall, which has been declared one of the largest residence halls in the country.
The Richardson Court Association (RCA) consists of 12 residence halls on the east side of campus.
The Towers Residence Association (TRA) are located south of the main campus. Two of the four towers, Knapp and Storms Halls, were imploded in 2005; however, Wallace and Wilson Halls still stand.
Buchanan Hall and Geoffroy Hall are nominally considered part of the RCA, despite their distance from the other buildings.
ISU operates two apartment complexes for upperclassmen, Frederiksen Court and SUV Apartments.
The governing body for ISU students is ISU Student Government. The ISU Student Government is composed of a president, vice president, finance director, cabinet appointed by the president, a clerk appointed by the vice president, senators representing each college and residence area at the university, a nine-member judicial branch and an election commission.
ISU has over 900 student organizations on campus that represent a variety of interests. Organizations are supported by Iowa State's Student Engagement Office. Many student organization offices are housed in the Memorial Union.
The Memorial Union at Iowa State University opened in September 1928 and is currently home to a number of University departments and student organizations, The M-Shop, CyBowl & Billiards, the University Book Store, and the Workspace.
The original building was designed by architect, William T. Proudfoot. The building employs a classical style of architecture reflecting Greek and Roman influences. The building's design specifically complements the designs of the major buildings surrounding the University's Central Campus area, Beardshear Hall to the west, Curtiss Hall to the east, and MacKay Hall to the north. The style utilizes columns with Corinthian capitals, Palladian windows, triangular pediments, and formally balanced facades.
Designed to be a living memorial for ISU students lost in World War I, the building includes a solemn memorial hall, named the Gold Star Room, which honors the names of the dead World War I, World War II, Korean, Vietnam, and War on Terrorism veterans engraved in marble. Symbolically, the hall was built directly over a library (the Browsing Library) and a small chapel, the symbol being that no country would ever send its young men to die in a war for a noble cause without a solid foundation on both education (the library) and religion (the chapel). On Veterans Day in 2014, ISU's "Gold Star Hall" publicly honored Petty Officer Jerry Leroy Converse, a U.S. Navy sailor that was killed by Israel during the 1967 USS Liberty incident. Converse is buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Cherokee, Iowa. This ceremony came 47 years after the attack.
Renovations and additions have continued through the years to include: elevators, bowling lanes, a parking ramp, a book store, food court, and additional wings.
The Choral Division of the Department of Music and Theater at Iowa State University consists of over 400 choristers in four main ensembles – the Iowa State Singers, Cantamus, the Iowa Statesmen, and Lyrica – and multiple small ensembles including three a cappella groups, Count Me In (female), Shy of a Dozen (male), and "Hymn and Her" (co-ed).
ISU is home to an active Greek community. There are 50 chapters that involve 14.6 percent of undergraduate students. Collectively, fraternity and sorority members have raised over $82,000 for philanthropies and committed 31,416 hours to community service. In 2006, the ISU Greek community was named the best large Greek community in the Midwest.
The first fraternity, Delta Tau Delta, was established at Iowa State in 1875, six years after the first graduating class entered Iowa State. The first sorority, I.C. Sorocis, was established only two years later, in 1877. I.C. Sorocis later became a chapter of the first national sorority at Iowa State, Pi Beta Phi. Anti-Greek rioting occurred in 1888. As reported in The Des Moines Register, "The anti-secret society men of the college met in a mob last night about 11 o'clock in front of the society rooms in chemical and physical hall, determined to break up a joint meeting of three secret societies." In 1891, President William Beardshear banned students from joining secret college fraternities, resulting in the eventual closing of all formerly established fraternities. President Storms lifted the ban in 1904.
Following the lifting of the fraternity ban, the first thirteen national fraternities (IFC) installed on the Iowa State campus between 1904 and 1913 were, in order, Sigma Nu, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, Beta Theta Pi, Phi Gamma Delta, Alpha Tau Omega, Kappa Sigma, Theta Xi, Acacia, Phi Sigma Kappa, Delta Tau Delta, Pi Kappa Alpha, and Phi Delta Theta. Though some have suspended their chapters at various times, many are still active. Many of these chapters existed on campus as local fraternities before being reorganized as national fraternities, prior to 1904.
The Iowa State Daily is the university's student newspaper. The Daily has its roots from a news sheet titled the Clipper, which was started in the spring of 1890 by a group of students at Iowa Agricultural College led by F.E. Davidson. The Clipper soon led to the creation of the Iowa Agricultural College Student, and the beginnings of what would one day become the Iowa State Daily. It was awarded the 2016 Best All-Around Daily Student Newspaper by the Society of Professional Journalists.
88.5 KURE is the university's student-run radio station. Programming for KURE includes ISU sports coverage, talk shows, the annual quiz contest Kaleidoquiz, and various music genres.
ISUtv is the university's student-run television station. It is housed in the former WOI-TV station that was established in 1950. The student organization of ISUtv has many programs including Newswatch, a twice weekly news spot, Cyclone InCyders, the campus sports show, Fortnightly News, a satirical/comedy program, and Cy's Eyes on the Skies, a twice weekly weather show.
The "Cyclones" name dates back to 1895. That year, Iowa suffered an unusually high number of devastating cyclones (as tornadoes were called at the time). In September, Iowa Agricultural College's football team traveled to Northwestern University and defeated that team by a score of 36–0. The next day, the Chicago Tribune's headline read "Struck by a Cyclone: It Comes from Iowa and Devastates Evanston Town." The article began, "Northwestern might as well have tried to play football with an Iowa cyclone as with the Iowa team it met yesterday." The nickname stuck.
The school colors are cardinal and gold. The mascot is Cy the Cardinal, introduced in 1954. Since a cyclone was determined to be difficult to depict in costume, the cardinal was chosen in reference to the school colors. A contest was held to select a name for the mascot, with the name Cy being chosen as the winner.
The Iowa State Cyclones are a member of the Big 12 Conference and compete in NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), fielding 16 varsity teams in 12 sports. The Cyclones also compete in and are a founding member of the Central States Collegiate Hockey League of the American Collegiate Hockey Association.
Iowa State's intrastate archrival is the University of Iowa with whom it competes annually for the Iowa Corn Cy-Hawk Series trophy, an annual athletic competition between the two schools. Sponsored by the Iowa Corn Growers Association, the competition includes all head-to-head regular season competitions between the two rival universities in all sports.
Football first made its way onto the Iowa State campus in 1878 as a recreational sport, but it was not until 1892 that Iowa State organized its first team to represent the school in football. In 1894, college president William M. Beardshear spearheaded the foundation of an athletic association to officially sanction Iowa State football teams. The 1894 team finished with a 6–1 mark. The Cyclones compete each year for traveling trophies. Since 1977, Iowa State and Iowa compete annually for the Cy-Hawk Trophy. Iowa State competes in an annual rivalry game against Kansas State known as Farmageddon and against former conference foe Missouri for the Telephone Trophy. The Cyclones also compete against the Iowa Hawkeyes, their in-state rival.
The Cyclones play their home games at Jack Trice Stadium, named after Jack Trice, ISU's first African-American athlete and also the first and only Iowa State athlete to die from injuries sustained during athletic competition. Trice died three days after his first game playing for Iowa State against Minnesota in Minneapolis on October 6, 1923. Suffering from a broken collarbone early in the game, he continued to play until he was trampled by a group of Minnesota players. It is disputed whether he was trampled purposely or if it was by accident. The stadium was named in his honor in 1997 and is the only NCAA Division I-A stadium named after an African-American. Jack Trice Stadium, formerly known as Cyclone Stadium, opened on September 20, 1975, with a win against the United States Air Force Academy.
Hopes of "Hilton Magic" returning took a boost with the hiring of ISU alum, Ames native, and fan favorite Fred Hoiberg as coach of the men's basketball team in April 2010. Hoiberg ("The Mayor") played three seasons under legendary coach Johnny Orr and one season under future Chicago Bulls coach Tim Floyd during his standout collegiate career as a Cyclone (1991–95). Orr laid the foundation of success in men's basketball upon his arrival from Michigan in 1980 and is credited with building Hilton Magic. Besides Hoiberg, other Cyclone greats played for Orr and brought winning seasons, including Jeff Grayer, Barry Stevens, and walk-on Jeff Hornacek. The 1985-86 Cyclones were one of the most memorable. Orr coached the team to second place in the Big Eight and produced one of his greatest career wins, a victory over his former team and No. 2 seed Michigan in the second round of the NCAA tournament.
Under coaches Floyd (1995–98) and Larry Eustachy (1998–2003), Iowa State achieved even greater success. Floyd took the Cyclones to the Sweet Sixteen in 1997 and Eustachy led ISU to two consecutive Big 12 regular season conference titles in 1999-2000 and 2000–01, plus the conference tournament title in 2000. Seeded No. 2 in the 2000 NCAA tournament, Eustachy and the Cyclones defeated UCLA in the Sweet Sixteen before falling to Michigan State, the eventual NCAA Champion, in the regional finals by a score of 75–64 (the differential representing the Spartans' narrowest margin of victory in the tournament). Standout Marcus Fizer and Jamaal Tinsley were scoring leaders for the Cyclones who finished the season 32–5. Tinsley returned to lead the Cyclones the following year with another conference title and No. 2 seed, but ISU finished the season with a 25–6 overall record after a stunning loss to No. 15 seed Hampton in the first round.
In 2011–12, Hoiberg's Cyclones finished third in the Big 12 and returned to the NCAA tournament, dethroning defending national champion Connecticut, 77–64, in the second round before losing in the Round of 32 to top-seeded Kentucky. All-Big 12 First Team selection Royce White led the Cyclones with 38 points and 22 rebounds in the two contests, ending the season at 23–11.
The 2013-14 campaign turned out to be another highly successful season. Iowa State went 28–8, won the Big 12 Tournament, and advanced to the Sweet Sixteen by beating North Carolina in the second round of the NCAA tournament. The Cyclones finished 11–7 in Big 12 play, finishing in a tie for third in the league standings, and beat a school-record nine teams (9–3) that were ranked in the Associated Press top 25. The Cyclones opened the season 14–0, breaking the school record for consecutive wins. Melvin Ejim was named the Big 12 Player of the Year and an All-American by five organizations. Deandre Kane was named the Big 12 Tournament's most valuable player.
On June 8, 2015, Steve Prohm took over as head basketball coach replacing Hoiberg who left to take the head coaching position with the Chicago Bulls. In his first season with the Cyclones, Prohm secured a #4 seed in the Midwest region where the Cyclones advanced to the Sweet Sixteen before falling to top-seeded Virginia, 84–71. In 2017, Iowa State stunned 3rd ranked Kansas, 92–89, in overtime, snapping KU's 54-game home winning streak, before winning the 2017 Big 12 men's basketball tournament, its third conference championship in four years, defeating West Virginia in the final.
Of Iowa State's 19 NCAA tournament appearances, the Cyclones have reached the Sweet Sixteen seven times (1944, 1986, 1997, 2000, 2014, 2016, 2022), made two appearances in the Elite Eight (1944, 2000), and reached the Final Four once in 1944.
Iowa State is known for having one of the most successful women's basketball programs in the nation. Since the founding of the Big 12, Coach Bill Fennelly and the Cyclones have won three conference titles (one regular season, two tournament), and have advanced to the Sweet Sixteen five times (1999–2001, 2009, 2010) and the Elite Eight twice (1999, 2009) in the NCAA tournament. The team has one of the largest fan bases in the nation with attendance figures ranked third in the nation in 2009, 2010, 2012, 2016, 2017, and 2020 and second in the nation in 2013, 2014, 2018 and 2022.
Coach Christy Johnson-Lynch led the 2012 Cyclones team to a fifth straight 20-win season and fifth NCAA regional semifinal appearance in six seasons, and leading Iowa State to a 22–8 (13–3 Big 12) overall record and second-place finish in the conference. The Cyclones finished the season with seven wins over top-25 teams, including a victory over No. 1 Nebraska Cornhuskers in Iowa State's first-ever win over a top-ranked opponent in addition to providing the only Big 12 Conference loss to the 2012 conference and NCAA champion Texas Longhorns.
In 2011, Iowa State finished the season 25–6 (13–3 Big 12), placing second in the league, as well as a final national ranking of eighth. 2011 is only the second season in which an Iowa State volleyball team has ever recorded 25 wins. The Cyclones beat No. 9 Florida during the season in Gainesville, its sixth win over a top-10 team in Cyclone history. In 2009, Iowa State finished the season second in the Big 12 behind Texas with a 27–5 record and ranked No. 6, its highest ever national finish.
Johnson-Lynch is the fastest Iowa State coach to clinch 100 victories. In 2011, she became the school's winningest volleyball coach when her team defeated the Texas Tech Red Raiders, her 136th coaching victory, in straight sets.
The ISU wrestling program has captured the NCAA wrestling tournament title eight times between 1928 and 1987, and won the Big 12 Conference Tournament three consecutive years, 2007–2009. On February 7, 2010, the Cyclones became the first collegiate wrestling program to record its 1,000th dual win in program history by defeating the Arizona State Sun Devils, 30–10, in Tempe, Arizona.
In 2002, under former NCAA champion & Olympian Coach Bobby Douglas, Iowa State became the first school to produce a four-time, undefeated NCAA Division I champion, Cael Sanderson (considered by the majority of the wrestling community to be the best college wrestler ever), who also took the gold medal at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, Greece. Dan Gable, another legendary ISU wrestler, is famous for having lost only one match in his entire Iowa State collegiate career - his last - and winning gold at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Germany, while not giving up a single point.
In 2013, Iowa State hosted its eighth NCAA Wrestling Championships. The Cyclones hosted the first NCAA championships in 1928.
In February 2017, former Virginia Tech coach and 2016 NWCA Coach of the Year Kevin Dresser was introduced as the new Cyclone wrestling coach, replacing Kevin Jackson. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Iowa State University of Science and Technology (Iowa State University, Iowa State, or ISU) is a public land-grant research university in Ames, Iowa. Founded in 1858 as the Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm, Iowa State became one of the nation's first designated land-grant institutions when the Iowa Legislature accepted the provisions of the 1862 Morrill Act on September 11, 1862, making Iowa the first state in the nation to do so. On July 4, 1959, the college was officially renamed Iowa State University of Science and Technology.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Iowa State is the largest university in the State of Iowa by total enrollment. The university's academic offerings are administered through eight colleges, including the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the College of Veterinary Medicine, the College of Engineering, the Graduate College, the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, the College of Design, Debbie and Jerry Ivy College of Business, and the College of Human Sciences. They offer over 100 bachelor's degree programs, 112 master's degree programs, and 83 doctoral degree programs, plus a professional degree program in Veterinary Medicine.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Iowa State is classified among \"R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity\". The university is home to the Ames Laboratory, one of ten national U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science research laboratories, the Biorenewables Research Laboratory, the Plant Sciences Institute, and various other research institutes. Iowa State University's athletic teams, the Cyclones, compete in Division I of the NCAA and are a founding member of the Big 12.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In 1856, the Iowa General Assembly enacted legislation to establish the Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm. This institution (now Iowa State University) was officially established on March 22, 1858, by the General Assembly. Story County was chosen as the location on June 21, 1859, beating proposals from Johnson, Kossuth, Marshall and Polk counties. The original farm of 648 acres (2.62 km) was purchased for a cost of $5,379.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Iowa was the first state in the nation to accept the provisions of the Morrill Act of 1862. The state subsequently designated Iowa State as the land-grant college on March 29, 1864. Iowa State University is one of four universities that claims to be the first land-grant institution in the United States, the others being Kansas State University, Michigan State University, and the Pennsylvania State University.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "From the start, Iowa Agricultural College focused on the ideals that higher education should be accessible to all and that the university should teach liberal and practical subjects. These ideals are integral to the land-grant university.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The institution has been coeducational since the first class admitted in 1868. Formal admissions began the following year, and the first graduating class of 1872 consisted of 24 men and two women.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The Farm House, the first building on the Iowa State campus, was completed in 1861 before the campus was occupied by students or classrooms. It became the home of the superintendent of the Model Farm and in later years, the deans of Agriculture, including Seaman Knapp and \"Tama Jim\" Wilson. Iowa State's first president, Adonijah Welch, briefly stayed at the Farm House and penned his inaugural speech in a second floor bedroom.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The Iowa Experiment Station was one of the university's prominent features. Practical courses of instruction were taught, including one designed to give a general training for the career of a farmer. Courses in mechanical, civil, electrical, and mining engineering were also part of the curriculum.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1870, President Welch and I. P. Roberts, professor of agriculture, held three-day farmers' institutes at Cedar Falls, Council Bluffs, Washington, and Muscatine. These became the earliest institutes held off-campus by a land grant institution and were the forerunners of 20th century extension.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In 1872, the first courses were given in domestic economy (home economics, family and consumer sciences) and were taught by Mary B. Welch, the president's wife. Iowa State became the first land grant university to offer training in domestic economy for college credit.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In 1879, the School of Veterinary Science was organized, becoming the first state veterinary college in the United States. This was originally a two-year course leading to a diploma. The veterinary course of study contained classes in zoology, botany, anatomy of domestic animals, veterinary obstetrics, and sanitary science.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "William M. Beardshear was appointed President of Iowa State in 1891. During his tenure, Iowa Agricultural College truly came of age. Beardshear developed new agricultural programs and was instrumental in hiring premier faculty members such as Anson Marston, Louis B. Spinney, J.B. Weems, Perry G. Holden, and Maria Roberts. He also expanded the university administration, and added Morrill Hall (1891), the Campanile (1899), Old Botany (now Carrie Chapman Catt Hall) (1892), and Margaret Hall (1895) to the campus, all of which stand today except for Margaret Hall, which was destroyed by a fire in 1938. In his honor, Iowa State named its central administrative building (Central Building) after Beardshear in 1925. In 1898, reflecting the school's growth during his tenure, it was renamed Iowa State College of Agricultural and Mechanic Arts, or Iowa State for short.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Today, Beardshear Hall holds the offices of the President, Vice-President, Treasurer, Secretary, Registrar, Provost, and student financial aid. Catt Hall is named after alumna and famed suffragette Carrie Chapman Catt, and is the home of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In 1912, Iowa State had its first Homecoming celebration. The idea was first proposed by Professor Samuel Beyer, the college's \"patron saint of athletics\", who suggested that Iowa State inaugurate a celebration for alumni during the annual football game against rival University of Iowa. Iowa State's new president, Raymond A. Pearson, liked the idea and issued a special invitation to alumni two weeks prior to the event: \"We need you, we must have you. Come and see what a school you have made in Iowa State College. Find a way.\" In October 2012 Iowa State marked its 100th Homecoming with a \"CYtennial\" Celebration.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Iowa State celebrated its first VEISHEA on May 11–13, 1922. Wallace McKee (class of 1922) served as the first chairman of the Central Committee and Frank D. Paine (professor of electrical engineering) chose the name, based on the first letters of Iowa State's colleges: Veterinary Medicine, Engineering, Industrial Science, Home Economics, and Agriculture. VEISHEA grew to become the largest student-run festival in the nation.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The Statistical Laboratory was established in 1933, with George W. Snedecor, professor of mathematics, as the first director. It was and is the first research and consulting institute of its kind in the country.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "While attempting to develop a faster method of computation, mathematics and physics professor John Vincent Atanasoff conceptualized the basic tenets of what would become the world's first electronic digital computer, the Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC), during a drive to Illinois in 1937. These included the use of a binary system of arithmetic, the separation of computer and memory functions, and regenerative drum memory, among others. The 1939 prototype was constructed with graduate student Clifford Berry in the basement of the Physics Building.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "During World War II, Iowa State was one of 131 colleges and universities nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program which offered students a path to a Navy commission.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "On July 4, 1959, the college was officially renamed Iowa State University of Science and Technology. However, the short-form name \"Iowa State University\" is used even in official documents, such as diplomas. Official names given to the university's divisions were the College of Agriculture, College of Engineering, College of Home Economics, College of Sciences and Humanities, and College of Veterinary Medicine.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Iowa State's eight colleges today offer more than 100 undergraduate majors and 200 fields of study leading to graduate and professional degrees. The academic program at ISU includes a liberal arts education and research in the biological and physical sciences. The focus on technology has led directly to many research patents and inventions including the first binary computer, the ABC, Maytag blue cheese, and the round hay baler.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Located on a 2,000 acres (8.1 km) campus, the university has grown considerably from its roots as an agricultural college and model farm and is recognized internationally today for its comprehensive research programs. It continues to grow and set a new record for enrollment in the fall of 2015 with 36,001 students.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Iowa State University is organized into eight colleges and two schools that offer 100 Bachelor's degree programs, 112 Masters programs, and 83 Ph.D programs, including one professional degree program in Veterinary Medicine.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "ISU is home to the following schools:",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Classified as one of Carnegie's \"R1: Doctoral Universities - Very High Research Activity,\" Iowa State receives nearly $500 million in research grants annually.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In 2022, Iowa State ranks 401-500 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, and 501-600 in the Academic Ranking of World Universities. In 2017, the two same organizations ranked Iowa State 351-400 and 201-300, respectively. In 2012, these rankings were 184 and 151-200, respectively.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In 2016-17 Iowa State university became part of only fifty-four institutions in the U.S. to earn the \"Innovation and Economic Prosperity University\" designation by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The agriculture and forestry programs were ranked 16th in the world by QS for 2020. The statistics program was tied for 20th in the U.S. according to U.S. News & World Report for 2018. In engineering specialties, at schools whose highest degree is a doctorate, Iowa State's biological/agricultural engineering program is ranked first, the mechanical and civil are ranked 9th and 16th nationally in the U.S. by U.S. News & World Report. Almost all of the engineering specialities at ISU are ranked in the top 30 nationally. ISU's chemistry and physics programs are considered to be some of the best in the world and are ranked in the Top 100 globally and in Top 50 nationally. ISU's Greenlee School of Journalism and Mass Communication is one of the top journalism schools in the country and is notable for being among the first group of accredited journalism and mass communication programs. Greenlee is also cited as one of the leading JMC research programs in the nation, ranked 23rd in a publication by the AEJMC.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The National Science Foundation ranks ISU 71st in the nation in total research and development expenditures and 94th in research and development expenditures for science and engineering. Currently, ISU ranks second nationally in license and options executed on its intellectual property and #2 nationally in license and options that yield income.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In 2016, ISU's landscape architecture program was ranked as the 10th best undergraduate program in the nation, and architecture as the 18th best.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The W. Robert and Ellen Sorge Parks Library contains over 2.6 million books and subscribes to more than 98,600 journal titles. Named for W. Robert Parks (1915–2003), the 11th president of Iowa State University, and his wife, Ellen Sorge Parks, the original library was built in 1925 with three subsequent additions made in 1961, 1969, and 1983. The library was dedicated and named after W. Robert and Ellen Sorge Parks in 1984.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Parks Library provides extensive research collections, services, and information literacy instruction/information for all students. Facilities consist of the main Parks Library, the Veterinary Medical Library, the Design Reading Room, and a remote library storage building.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The library's extensive collections include electronic and print resources that support research and study for all undergraduate and graduate programs. Nationally recognized collections support the basic and applied fields of biological and physical sciences. The Parks Library service points include the Main Desk, Tech Lending, IT Solution Center, and Special Collections (Archives). The Library's instruction program includes a required undergraduate information literacy course as well as a wide variety of subject-based seminars on the effective use of Library resources for undergraduate and graduate students.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The library's website provides access to local and Internet-based resources including electronic journals and books, local collections, online indexes, and a broad range of subject research guides. Electronic Course Reserves materials are accessed through the university's learning management system.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Surrounding the first floor lobby staircase in Parks Library are eight mural panels designed by Iowa artist Grant Wood. As with Breaking the Prairie Sod, Wood's other Iowa State University mural painted two years later, Wood borrowed his theme for When Tillage Begins Other Arts Follow from a speech on agriculture delivered by Daniel Webster in 1840 at the State House in Boston. Webster said, \"When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers therefore are the founders of human civilization.\" Wood had planned to create seventeen mural panels for the library, but only the eleven devoted to agriculture and the practical arts were completed. The final six, which would have hung in the main reading room (now the Periodical Room) and were to have depicted the fine arts, were never begun.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The university has an IEOP for foreign students. Students whose native language is not English can take IEOP courses to improve their English proficiency to help them succeed at University-level study. IEOP course content also helps students prepare for English proficiency exams, like the TOEFL and IELTS. Classes included in the IEOP include Grammar, Reading, Writing, Oral Communication and Business and various bridge classes.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Iowa State is the birthplace of the first electronic digital computer, starting the world's computer technology revolution. Invented by mathematics and physics professor John Atanasoff and engineering graduate student Clifford Berry during 1937–42, the Atanasoff–Berry Computer pioneered important elements of modern computing.",
"title": "Distinctions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "On October 19, 1973, U.S. Federal Judge Earl R. Larson signed his decision following a lengthy court trial which declared the ENIAC patent of Mauchly and Eckert invalid and named Atanasoff the inventor of the electronic digital computer—the Atanasoff–Berry Computer or the ABC.",
"title": "Distinctions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "An ABC Team consisting of Ames Laboratory and Iowa State engineers, technicians, researchers and students unveiled a working replica of the Atanasoff–Berry Computer in 1997 which can be seen on display on campus in the Durham Computation Center.",
"title": "Distinctions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The Extension Service traces its roots to farmers' institutes developed at Iowa State in the late 19th century. Committed to community, Iowa State pioneered the outreach mission of being a land-grant college through creation of the first Extension Service in 1902. In 1906, the Iowa Legislature enacted the Agricultural Extension Act making funds available for demonstration projects. It is believed this was the first specific legislation establishing state extension work, for which Iowa State assumed responsibility. The national extension program was created in 1914 based heavily on the Iowa State model.",
"title": "Distinctions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Iowa State is widely known for VEISHEA, an annual education and entertainment festival that was held on campus each spring. The name VEISHEA was derived from the initials of ISU's five original colleges, forming an acronym as the university existed when the festival was founded in 1922:",
"title": "Distinctions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "VEISHEA was the largest student run festival in the nation, bringing in tens of thousands of visitors to the campus each year.",
"title": "Distinctions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The celebration featured an annual parade and many open-house demonstrations of the university facilities and departments. Campus organizations exhibited products, technologies, and held fund raisers for various charity groups. In addition, VEISHEA brought speakers, lecturers, and entertainers to Iowa State, and throughout its over eight decade history, it has hosted such distinguished guests as Bob Hope, John Wayne, Presidents Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, and Lyndon Johnson, and performers Diana Ross, Billy Joel, Sonny and Cher, The Who, The Goo Goo Dolls, Bobby V, and The Black Eyed Peas.",
"title": "Distinctions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The 2007 VEISHEA festivities marked the start of Iowa State's year-long sesquicentennial celebration.",
"title": "Distinctions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "On August 8, 2014, President Steven Leath announced that VEISHEA would no longer be an annual event at Iowa State and the name VEISHEA would be retired.",
"title": "Distinctions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Iowa State played a role in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II as part of the Manhattan Project, a research and development program begun in 1942 under the Army Corps of Engineers.",
"title": "Distinctions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The process to produce large quantities of high-purity uranium metal became known as the Ames process. One-third of the uranium metal used in the world's first controlled nuclear chain reaction was produced at Iowa State under the direction of Frank Spedding and Harley Wilhelm. The Ames Project received the Army/Navy E Award for Excellence in Production on October 12, 1945, for its work with metallic uranium as a vital war material. Today, ISU is the only university in the United States that has a U.S. Department of Energy research laboratory physically located on its campus.",
"title": "Distinctions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Iowa State University is a member of the Universities Research Association, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. In 2020, Iowa State spent $363.1 million in R&D.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Iowa State was a member of the Association of American Universities from 1958 until April 2022. It departed claiming that AAU's internal ranking indicators unfairly favor institutions with high levels of NIH funding and noted that its strength is not in biomedical research because the school does not have a medical school.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Iowa State is the only university in the United States that has a U.S. Department of Energy research laboratory physically located on its campus. Operated by Iowa State, Ames National Laboratory is one of ten national DOE Office of Science research laboratories.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "ISU research for the government provided Ames National Laboratory its start in the 1940s with the development of a highly efficient process for producing high-purity uranium for atomic energy. Today, Ames National Laboratory continues its leading status in current materials research and focuses diverse fundamental and applied research strengths upon issues of national concern, cultivates research talent, and develops and transfers technologies to improve industrial competitiveness and enhance U.S. economic security. Ames National Laboratory employs more than 430 full- and part-time employees, including more than 250 scientists and engineers. Students make up more than 20 percent of the paid workforce.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Ames National Laboratory is the U.S. home to 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner Dan Shechtman and is intensely engaged with the international scientific community, including hosting a large number of international visitors each year.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The ISU Research Park Corporation was established in 1987 as a not-for-profit, independent, corporation operating under a board of directors appointed by Iowa State University and the ISU Foundation. The corporation manages both the Research Park and incubator programs.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "In 2010, the Biorenewables Research Laboratory opened in a LEED-Gold certified building that complements and helps replace labs and offices across Iowa State and promotes interdisciplinary, systems-level research and collaboration. The Lab houses the Bioeconomy Institute, the Biobased Industry Center, and the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Biorenewable Chemicals, a partnership of six universities as well as the Max Planck Society in Germany and the Technical University of Denmark.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The Engineering Teaching and Research Complex was built in 1999 and is home to Stanley and Helen Howe Hall and Gary and Donna Hoover Hall. The complex is occupied by the Virtual Reality Applications Center (VRAC), Center for Industrial Research and Service (CIRAS), Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Engineering Computer Support Services, Engineering Distance Education, and Iowa Space Grant Consortium. And the complex contains one of the world's only six-sided immersive virtual reality labs (C6), as well as the 240 seat 3D-capable Alliant Energy Lee Liu Auditorium, the Multimodal Experience Testbed and Laboratory (METaL), and the User Experience Lab (UX Lab). All of which supports the research of more than 50 faculty and 200 graduate, undergraduate, and postdoctoral students.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The Plant Sciences Institute was founded in 1999. PSI's research focus is to understand the effects of genotype (genetic makeup) and environment on phenotypes (traits) sufficiently well that it will be able to predict the phenotype of a given genotype in a given environment. The institute is housed in the Roy J. Carver Co-Laboratory and is home to the Plant Sciences Institute Faculty Scholars program.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "There is also the Iowa State University Northeast Research Farm in Nashua.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Iowa State's campus contains over 160 buildings. Several buildings, as well as the Marston Water Tower, are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The central campus includes 490 acres (2.0 km) of trees, plants, and classically designed buildings. The landscape's most dominant feature is the 20-acre (81,000 m) central lawn, which was listed as a \"medallion site\" by the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1999.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Thomas Gaines, in The Campus As a Work of Art, claimed that the Iowa State campus was one of the twenty-five most beautiful campuses in the country.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The campanile was constructed during 1897-1898 as a memorial to Margaret MacDonald Stanton, Iowa State's first dean of women, who died on July 25, 1895. The tower is located on ISU's central campus, just north of the Memorial Union. The site was selected by Margaret's husband, Edgar W. Stanton, with the help of then-university president William M. Beardshear. The campanile stands 110 feet (34 m) tall on a 16 by 16 foot (5 by 5 m) base, and cost $6,510.20 to construct.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The campanile is widely seen as one of the major symbols of Iowa State University. It is featured prominently on the university's official ring and the university's mace, and is also the subject of the university's alma mater, The Bells of Iowa State.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Named for Dr. LaVerne W. Noyes, who also donated the funds to see that Alumni Hall could be completed after sitting unfinished and unused from 1905 to 1907. Dr. Noyes is an 1872 alumnus. Lake LaVerne is located west of the Memorial Union and south of Alumni Hall, Carver Hall, and Music Hall. The lake was a gift from Dr. Noyes in 1916.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Lake LaVerne is the home of two mute swans named Sir Lancelot and Elaine, donated to Iowa State by VEISHEA 1935. In 1944, 1970, and 1971 cygnets (baby swans) made their home on Lake LaVerne. Previously Sir Lancelot and Elaine were trumpeter swans but were too aggressive and in 1999 were replaced with two mute swans.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "In early spring 2003, Lake LaVerne welcomed its newest and most current mute swan duo. In support of Iowa Department of Natural Resources efforts to re-establish the trumpeter swans in Iowa, university officials avoided bringing breeding pairs of male and female mute swans to Iowa State which means the current Sir Lancelot and Elaine are both female.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Iowa State has maintained a horticulture garden since 1914. Reiman Gardens is the third location for these gardens. Today's gardens began in 1993 with a gift from Bobbi and Roy Reiman. Construction began in 1994 and the Gardens' initial 5 acres (20,000 m) were officially dedicated on September 16, 1995.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Reiman Gardens has since grown to become a 14 acres (57,000 m) site consisting of a dozen distinct garden areas, an indoor conservatory and an indoor butterfly \"wing\", butterfly emergence cases, a gift shop, and several supporting greenhouses. Located immediately south of Jack Trice Stadium on the ISU campus, Reiman Gardens is a year-round facility that has become one of the most visited attractions in central Iowa.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The Gardens has received a number of national, state, and local awards since its opening, and its rose gardens are particularly noteworthy. It was honored with the President's Award in 2000 by All American Rose Selections, Inc., which is presented to one public garden in the United States each year for superior rose maintenance and display: \"For contributing to the public interest in rose growing through its efforts in maintaining an outstanding public rose garden.\"",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "The university museums consist of the Brunnier Art Museum, Farm House Museum, the Art on Campus Program, the Christian Petersen Art Museum, and the Elizabeth and Byron Anderson Sculpture Garden. The Museums include a multitude of unique exhibits, each promoting the understanding and delight of the visual arts as well as attempt to incorporate a vast interaction between the arts, sciences, and technology.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "The Brunnier Art Museum, Iowa's only accredited museum emphasizing a decorative arts collection, is one of the nation's few museums located within a performing arts and conference complex, the Iowa State Center. Founded in 1975, the museum is named after its benefactors, Iowa State alumnus Henry J. Brunnier and his wife Ann. The decorative arts collection they donated, called the Brunnier Collection, is extensive, consisting of ceramics, glass, dolls, ivory, jade, and enameled metals.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Other fine and decorative art objects from the University Art Collection include prints, paintings, sculptures, textiles, carpets, wood objects, lacquered pieces, silver, and furniture. About eight to 12 annual changing exhibitions and permanent collection exhibitions provide educational opportunities. Lectures, receptions, conferences, university classes, panel discussions, gallery walks, and gallery talks are presented to assist with further interpretation of objects.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Located near the center of the Iowa State campus, the Farm House Museum sits as a monument to early Iowa State history and culture as well as a National Historic Landmark. As the first building on campus, the Farm House was built in 1860 before campus was occupied by students or even classrooms. The college's first farm tenants primed the land for agricultural experimentation. This early practice lead to Iowa State Agricultural College and Model Farm opening its doors to Iowa students for free in 1869 under the Morrill Act (or Land-grant Act) of 1862.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Many prominent figures have made the Farm House their home throughout its 150 years of use. The first president of the college, Adonijah Welch, briefly stayed at the Farm House and even wrote his inaugural speech in a bedroom on the second floor. James \"Tama Jim\" Wilson resided for much of the 1890s with his family at the Farm House until he joined President William McKinley's cabinet as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture. Agriculture Dean Charles Curtiss and his young family replaced Wilson and became the longest resident of Farm House.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "In 1976, over 110 years after the initial construction, the Farm House became a museum after much time and effort was put into restoring the early beauty of the modest farm home. Today, faculty, students, and community members can enjoy the museum while honoring its significance in shaping a nationally recognized land-grant university. Its collection boasts a large collection of 19th and early 20th century decorative arts, furnishings and material culture reflecting Iowa State and Iowa heritage. Objects include furnishings from Carrie Chapman Catt and Charles Curtiss, a wide variety of quilts, a modest collection of textiles and apparel, and various china and glassware items.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "The Farm House Museum is an on-campus educational resource providing a changing environment of exhibitions among the historical permanent collection objects that are on display.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Iowa State is home to one of the largest campus public art programs in the United States. Over 2,000 works of public art, including 600 by significant national and international artists, are located across campus in buildings, courtyards, open spaces and offices.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "The traditional public art program began during the Depression in the 1930s when Iowa State College's President Raymond Hughes envisioned that \"the arts would enrich and provide substantial intellectual exploration into our college curricula.\" Hughes invited Grant Wood to create the Library's agricultural murals that speak to the founding of Iowa and Iowa State College and Model Farm. He also offered Christian Petersen a one-semester sculptor residency to design and build the fountain and bas relief at the Dairy Industry Building. In 1955, 21 years later, Petersen retired having created 12 major sculptures for the campus and hundreds of small studio sculptures.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "The Art on Campus Collection is a campus-wide resource of over 2000 public works of art. Programs, receptions, dedications, university classes, Wednesday Walks, and educational tours are presented on a regular basis.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "The Christian Petersen Art Museum in Morrill Hall is named for the nation's first permanent campus artist-in-residence, Christian Petersen, who sculpted and taught at Iowa State from 1934 through 1955, and is considered the founding artist of the Art on Campus Collection.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Named for Justin Smith Morrill who created the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act, Morrill Hall was completed in 1891. Originally constructed to fill the capacity of a library, museum, and chapel, its original uses are engraved in the exterior stonework on the east side. The building was vacated in 1996 when it was determined unsafe and was also listed in the National Register of Historic Places the same year. In 2005, $9 million was raised to renovate the building and convert it into a museum. Completed and reopened in March 2007, Morrill Hall is home to the Christian Petersen Art Museum.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "As part of University Museums, the Christian Petersen Art Museum at Morrill Hall is the home of the Christian Petersen Art Collection, the Art on Campus Program, the University Museums's Visual Literacy and Learning Program, and Contemporary Changing Art Exhibitions Program.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Located within the Christian Petersen Art Museum are the Lyle and Nancy Campbell Art Gallery, the Roy and Bobbi Reiman Public Art Studio Gallery, the Margaret Davidson Center for the Study of the Art on Campus Collection, the Edith D. and Torsten E. Lagerstrom Loaned Collections Center, and the Neva M. Petersen Visual Learning Gallery. University Museums shares the James R. and Barbara R. Palmer Small Objects Classroom in Morrill Hall.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "The Elizabeth and Byron Anderson Sculpture Garden is located by the Christian Petersen Art Museum at historic Morrill Hall. The sculpture garden design incorporates sculptures, a gathering arena, and sidewalks and pathways. Planted with perennials, ground cover, shrubs, and flowering trees, the landscape design provides a setting for works of 20th and 21st century sculpture, primarily American. Ranging from forty-four inches to nearly nine feet high and from bronze to other metals, these works of art represent both modern and contemporary sculpture.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "The sculpture garden is adjacent to Iowa State's 22 acres (89,000 m) central campus.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Iowa State's composting facility is capable of processing over 10,000 tons of organic waste every year. The school's $3 million revolving loan fund loans money for energy efficiency and conservation projects on campus. In the 2011 College Sustainability Report Card issued by the Sustainable Endowments Institute, the university received a B grade.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Iowa State operates 20 on-campus residence halls. The residence halls are divided into geographical areas.",
"title": "Student life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "The Union Drive Association (UDA) consists of four residence halls located on the west side of campus, including Friley Hall, which has been declared one of the largest residence halls in the country.",
"title": "Student life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "The Richardson Court Association (RCA) consists of 12 residence halls on the east side of campus.",
"title": "Student life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "The Towers Residence Association (TRA) are located south of the main campus. Two of the four towers, Knapp and Storms Halls, were imploded in 2005; however, Wallace and Wilson Halls still stand.",
"title": "Student life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Buchanan Hall and Geoffroy Hall are nominally considered part of the RCA, despite their distance from the other buildings.",
"title": "Student life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "ISU operates two apartment complexes for upperclassmen, Frederiksen Court and SUV Apartments.",
"title": "Student life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "The governing body for ISU students is ISU Student Government. The ISU Student Government is composed of a president, vice president, finance director, cabinet appointed by the president, a clerk appointed by the vice president, senators representing each college and residence area at the university, a nine-member judicial branch and an election commission.",
"title": "Student life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "ISU has over 900 student organizations on campus that represent a variety of interests. Organizations are supported by Iowa State's Student Engagement Office. Many student organization offices are housed in the Memorial Union.",
"title": "Student life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "The Memorial Union at Iowa State University opened in September 1928 and is currently home to a number of University departments and student organizations, The M-Shop, CyBowl & Billiards, the University Book Store, and the Workspace.",
"title": "Student life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "The original building was designed by architect, William T. Proudfoot. The building employs a classical style of architecture reflecting Greek and Roman influences. The building's design specifically complements the designs of the major buildings surrounding the University's Central Campus area, Beardshear Hall to the west, Curtiss Hall to the east, and MacKay Hall to the north. The style utilizes columns with Corinthian capitals, Palladian windows, triangular pediments, and formally balanced facades.",
"title": "Student life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "Designed to be a living memorial for ISU students lost in World War I, the building includes a solemn memorial hall, named the Gold Star Room, which honors the names of the dead World War I, World War II, Korean, Vietnam, and War on Terrorism veterans engraved in marble. Symbolically, the hall was built directly over a library (the Browsing Library) and a small chapel, the symbol being that no country would ever send its young men to die in a war for a noble cause without a solid foundation on both education (the library) and religion (the chapel). On Veterans Day in 2014, ISU's \"Gold Star Hall\" publicly honored Petty Officer Jerry Leroy Converse, a U.S. Navy sailor that was killed by Israel during the 1967 USS Liberty incident. Converse is buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Cherokee, Iowa. This ceremony came 47 years after the attack.",
"title": "Student life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Renovations and additions have continued through the years to include: elevators, bowling lanes, a parking ramp, a book store, food court, and additional wings.",
"title": "Student life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "The Choral Division of the Department of Music and Theater at Iowa State University consists of over 400 choristers in four main ensembles – the Iowa State Singers, Cantamus, the Iowa Statesmen, and Lyrica – and multiple small ensembles including three a cappella groups, Count Me In (female), Shy of a Dozen (male), and \"Hymn and Her\" (co-ed).",
"title": "Student life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "ISU is home to an active Greek community. There are 50 chapters that involve 14.6 percent of undergraduate students. Collectively, fraternity and sorority members have raised over $82,000 for philanthropies and committed 31,416 hours to community service. In 2006, the ISU Greek community was named the best large Greek community in the Midwest.",
"title": "Student life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "The first fraternity, Delta Tau Delta, was established at Iowa State in 1875, six years after the first graduating class entered Iowa State. The first sorority, I.C. Sorocis, was established only two years later, in 1877. I.C. Sorocis later became a chapter of the first national sorority at Iowa State, Pi Beta Phi. Anti-Greek rioting occurred in 1888. As reported in The Des Moines Register, \"The anti-secret society men of the college met in a mob last night about 11 o'clock in front of the society rooms in chemical and physical hall, determined to break up a joint meeting of three secret societies.\" In 1891, President William Beardshear banned students from joining secret college fraternities, resulting in the eventual closing of all formerly established fraternities. President Storms lifted the ban in 1904.",
"title": "Student life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "Following the lifting of the fraternity ban, the first thirteen national fraternities (IFC) installed on the Iowa State campus between 1904 and 1913 were, in order, Sigma Nu, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, Beta Theta Pi, Phi Gamma Delta, Alpha Tau Omega, Kappa Sigma, Theta Xi, Acacia, Phi Sigma Kappa, Delta Tau Delta, Pi Kappa Alpha, and Phi Delta Theta. Though some have suspended their chapters at various times, many are still active. Many of these chapters existed on campus as local fraternities before being reorganized as national fraternities, prior to 1904.",
"title": "Student life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "The Iowa State Daily is the university's student newspaper. The Daily has its roots from a news sheet titled the Clipper, which was started in the spring of 1890 by a group of students at Iowa Agricultural College led by F.E. Davidson. The Clipper soon led to the creation of the Iowa Agricultural College Student, and the beginnings of what would one day become the Iowa State Daily. It was awarded the 2016 Best All-Around Daily Student Newspaper by the Society of Professional Journalists.",
"title": "Student life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "88.5 KURE is the university's student-run radio station. Programming for KURE includes ISU sports coverage, talk shows, the annual quiz contest Kaleidoquiz, and various music genres.",
"title": "Student life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "ISUtv is the university's student-run television station. It is housed in the former WOI-TV station that was established in 1950. The student organization of ISUtv has many programs including Newswatch, a twice weekly news spot, Cyclone InCyders, the campus sports show, Fortnightly News, a satirical/comedy program, and Cy's Eyes on the Skies, a twice weekly weather show.",
"title": "Student life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "The \"Cyclones\" name dates back to 1895. That year, Iowa suffered an unusually high number of devastating cyclones (as tornadoes were called at the time). In September, Iowa Agricultural College's football team traveled to Northwestern University and defeated that team by a score of 36–0. The next day, the Chicago Tribune's headline read \"Struck by a Cyclone: It Comes from Iowa and Devastates Evanston Town.\" The article began, \"Northwestern might as well have tried to play football with an Iowa cyclone as with the Iowa team it met yesterday.\" The nickname stuck.",
"title": "Athletics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "The school colors are cardinal and gold. The mascot is Cy the Cardinal, introduced in 1954. Since a cyclone was determined to be difficult to depict in costume, the cardinal was chosen in reference to the school colors. A contest was held to select a name for the mascot, with the name Cy being chosen as the winner.",
"title": "Athletics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "The Iowa State Cyclones are a member of the Big 12 Conference and compete in NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), fielding 16 varsity teams in 12 sports. The Cyclones also compete in and are a founding member of the Central States Collegiate Hockey League of the American Collegiate Hockey Association.",
"title": "Athletics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "Iowa State's intrastate archrival is the University of Iowa with whom it competes annually for the Iowa Corn Cy-Hawk Series trophy, an annual athletic competition between the two schools. Sponsored by the Iowa Corn Growers Association, the competition includes all head-to-head regular season competitions between the two rival universities in all sports.",
"title": "Athletics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "Football first made its way onto the Iowa State campus in 1878 as a recreational sport, but it was not until 1892 that Iowa State organized its first team to represent the school in football. In 1894, college president William M. Beardshear spearheaded the foundation of an athletic association to officially sanction Iowa State football teams. The 1894 team finished with a 6–1 mark. The Cyclones compete each year for traveling trophies. Since 1977, Iowa State and Iowa compete annually for the Cy-Hawk Trophy. Iowa State competes in an annual rivalry game against Kansas State known as Farmageddon and against former conference foe Missouri for the Telephone Trophy. The Cyclones also compete against the Iowa Hawkeyes, their in-state rival.",
"title": "Athletics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "The Cyclones play their home games at Jack Trice Stadium, named after Jack Trice, ISU's first African-American athlete and also the first and only Iowa State athlete to die from injuries sustained during athletic competition. Trice died three days after his first game playing for Iowa State against Minnesota in Minneapolis on October 6, 1923. Suffering from a broken collarbone early in the game, he continued to play until he was trampled by a group of Minnesota players. It is disputed whether he was trampled purposely or if it was by accident. The stadium was named in his honor in 1997 and is the only NCAA Division I-A stadium named after an African-American. Jack Trice Stadium, formerly known as Cyclone Stadium, opened on September 20, 1975, with a win against the United States Air Force Academy.",
"title": "Athletics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "Hopes of \"Hilton Magic\" returning took a boost with the hiring of ISU alum, Ames native, and fan favorite Fred Hoiberg as coach of the men's basketball team in April 2010. Hoiberg (\"The Mayor\") played three seasons under legendary coach Johnny Orr and one season under future Chicago Bulls coach Tim Floyd during his standout collegiate career as a Cyclone (1991–95). Orr laid the foundation of success in men's basketball upon his arrival from Michigan in 1980 and is credited with building Hilton Magic. Besides Hoiberg, other Cyclone greats played for Orr and brought winning seasons, including Jeff Grayer, Barry Stevens, and walk-on Jeff Hornacek. The 1985-86 Cyclones were one of the most memorable. Orr coached the team to second place in the Big Eight and produced one of his greatest career wins, a victory over his former team and No. 2 seed Michigan in the second round of the NCAA tournament.",
"title": "Athletics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "Under coaches Floyd (1995–98) and Larry Eustachy (1998–2003), Iowa State achieved even greater success. Floyd took the Cyclones to the Sweet Sixteen in 1997 and Eustachy led ISU to two consecutive Big 12 regular season conference titles in 1999-2000 and 2000–01, plus the conference tournament title in 2000. Seeded No. 2 in the 2000 NCAA tournament, Eustachy and the Cyclones defeated UCLA in the Sweet Sixteen before falling to Michigan State, the eventual NCAA Champion, in the regional finals by a score of 75–64 (the differential representing the Spartans' narrowest margin of victory in the tournament). Standout Marcus Fizer and Jamaal Tinsley were scoring leaders for the Cyclones who finished the season 32–5. Tinsley returned to lead the Cyclones the following year with another conference title and No. 2 seed, but ISU finished the season with a 25–6 overall record after a stunning loss to No. 15 seed Hampton in the first round.",
"title": "Athletics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "In 2011–12, Hoiberg's Cyclones finished third in the Big 12 and returned to the NCAA tournament, dethroning defending national champion Connecticut, 77–64, in the second round before losing in the Round of 32 to top-seeded Kentucky. All-Big 12 First Team selection Royce White led the Cyclones with 38 points and 22 rebounds in the two contests, ending the season at 23–11.",
"title": "Athletics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "The 2013-14 campaign turned out to be another highly successful season. Iowa State went 28–8, won the Big 12 Tournament, and advanced to the Sweet Sixteen by beating North Carolina in the second round of the NCAA tournament. The Cyclones finished 11–7 in Big 12 play, finishing in a tie for third in the league standings, and beat a school-record nine teams (9–3) that were ranked in the Associated Press top 25. The Cyclones opened the season 14–0, breaking the school record for consecutive wins. Melvin Ejim was named the Big 12 Player of the Year and an All-American by five organizations. Deandre Kane was named the Big 12 Tournament's most valuable player.",
"title": "Athletics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "On June 8, 2015, Steve Prohm took over as head basketball coach replacing Hoiberg who left to take the head coaching position with the Chicago Bulls. In his first season with the Cyclones, Prohm secured a #4 seed in the Midwest region where the Cyclones advanced to the Sweet Sixteen before falling to top-seeded Virginia, 84–71. In 2017, Iowa State stunned 3rd ranked Kansas, 92–89, in overtime, snapping KU's 54-game home winning streak, before winning the 2017 Big 12 men's basketball tournament, its third conference championship in four years, defeating West Virginia in the final.",
"title": "Athletics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "Of Iowa State's 19 NCAA tournament appearances, the Cyclones have reached the Sweet Sixteen seven times (1944, 1986, 1997, 2000, 2014, 2016, 2022), made two appearances in the Elite Eight (1944, 2000), and reached the Final Four once in 1944.",
"title": "Athletics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "Iowa State is known for having one of the most successful women's basketball programs in the nation. Since the founding of the Big 12, Coach Bill Fennelly and the Cyclones have won three conference titles (one regular season, two tournament), and have advanced to the Sweet Sixteen five times (1999–2001, 2009, 2010) and the Elite Eight twice (1999, 2009) in the NCAA tournament. The team has one of the largest fan bases in the nation with attendance figures ranked third in the nation in 2009, 2010, 2012, 2016, 2017, and 2020 and second in the nation in 2013, 2014, 2018 and 2022.",
"title": "Athletics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "Coach Christy Johnson-Lynch led the 2012 Cyclones team to a fifth straight 20-win season and fifth NCAA regional semifinal appearance in six seasons, and leading Iowa State to a 22–8 (13–3 Big 12) overall record and second-place finish in the conference. The Cyclones finished the season with seven wins over top-25 teams, including a victory over No. 1 Nebraska Cornhuskers in Iowa State's first-ever win over a top-ranked opponent in addition to providing the only Big 12 Conference loss to the 2012 conference and NCAA champion Texas Longhorns.",
"title": "Athletics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "In 2011, Iowa State finished the season 25–6 (13–3 Big 12), placing second in the league, as well as a final national ranking of eighth. 2011 is only the second season in which an Iowa State volleyball team has ever recorded 25 wins. The Cyclones beat No. 9 Florida during the season in Gainesville, its sixth win over a top-10 team in Cyclone history. In 2009, Iowa State finished the season second in the Big 12 behind Texas with a 27–5 record and ranked No. 6, its highest ever national finish.",
"title": "Athletics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "Johnson-Lynch is the fastest Iowa State coach to clinch 100 victories. In 2011, she became the school's winningest volleyball coach when her team defeated the Texas Tech Red Raiders, her 136th coaching victory, in straight sets.",
"title": "Athletics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "The ISU wrestling program has captured the NCAA wrestling tournament title eight times between 1928 and 1987, and won the Big 12 Conference Tournament three consecutive years, 2007–2009. On February 7, 2010, the Cyclones became the first collegiate wrestling program to record its 1,000th dual win in program history by defeating the Arizona State Sun Devils, 30–10, in Tempe, Arizona.",
"title": "Athletics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "In 2002, under former NCAA champion & Olympian Coach Bobby Douglas, Iowa State became the first school to produce a four-time, undefeated NCAA Division I champion, Cael Sanderson (considered by the majority of the wrestling community to be the best college wrestler ever), who also took the gold medal at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, Greece. Dan Gable, another legendary ISU wrestler, is famous for having lost only one match in his entire Iowa State collegiate career - his last - and winning gold at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Germany, while not giving up a single point.",
"title": "Athletics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "In 2013, Iowa State hosted its eighth NCAA Wrestling Championships. The Cyclones hosted the first NCAA championships in 1928.",
"title": "Athletics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "In February 2017, former Virginia Tech coach and 2016 NWCA Coach of the Year Kevin Dresser was introduced as the new Cyclone wrestling coach, replacing Kevin Jackson.",
"title": "Athletics"
}
]
| Iowa State University of Science and Technology is a public land-grant research university in Ames, Iowa. Founded in 1858 as the Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm, Iowa State became one of the nation's first designated land-grant institutions when the Iowa Legislature accepted the provisions of the 1862 Morrill Act on September 11, 1862, making Iowa the first state in the nation to do so. On July 4, 1959, the college was officially renamed Iowa State University of Science and Technology. Iowa State is the largest university in the State of Iowa by total enrollment. The university's academic offerings are administered through eight colleges, including the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the College of Veterinary Medicine, the College of Engineering, the Graduate College, the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, the College of Design, Debbie and Jerry Ivy College of Business, and the College of Human Sciences. They offer over 100 bachelor's degree programs, 112 master's degree programs, and 83 doctoral degree programs, plus a professional degree program in Veterinary Medicine. Iowa State is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity". The university is home to the Ames Laboratory, one of ten national U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science research laboratories, the Biorenewables Research Laboratory, the Plant Sciences Institute, and various other research institutes. Iowa State University's athletic teams, the Cyclones, compete in Division I of the NCAA and are a founding member of the Big 12. | 2001-08-19T00:39:44Z | 2023-12-30T07:33:21Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_State_University |
14,877 | Induction | Induction or inductive may refer to: | [
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"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Induction or inductive may refer to:",
"title": ""
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| Induction or inductive may refer to: | 2023-06-29T16:52:11Z | [
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"Template:Tocright",
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induction |
|
14,878 | International Astronomical Union | The International Astronomical Union (IAU; French: Union astronomique internationale, UAI) is a non-governmental organisation with the objective of advancing astronomy in all aspects, including promoting astronomical research, outreach, education, and development through global cooperation. It was founded in 1919 and is based in Paris, France.
The IAU is composed of individual members, who include both professional astronomers and junior scientists, and national members, such as professional associations, national societies, or academic institutions. Individual members are organised into divisions, committees, and working groups centered on particular subdisciplines, subjects, or initiatives. As of 2018, the Union had over 13,700 individual members, spanning 90 countries, and 82 national members.
Among the key activities of the IAU is serving as a forum for scientific conferences. It sponsors nine annual symposia and holds a triannual General Assembly that sets policy and includes various scientific meetings. The Union is best known for being the leading authority in assigning official names and designations to astronomical objects, and for setting uniform definitions for astronomical principles. It also coordinates with national and international partners, such as UNESCO, to fulfill its mission.
The IAU is a member of the International Science Council (ISC), which is composed of international scholarly and scientific institutions and national academies of sciences.
The International Astronomical Union is an international association of professional astronomers, at the PhD level and beyond, active in professional research and education in astronomy. Among other activities, it acts as the recognized authority for assigning designations and names to celestial bodies (stars, planets, asteroids, etc.) and any surface features on them.
The IAU is a member of the International Science Council (ISC). Its main objective is to promote and safeguard the science of astronomy in all its aspects through international cooperation. The IAU maintains friendly relations with organizations that include amateur astronomers in their membership. The IAU has its head office on the second floor of the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris in the 14th arrondissement of Paris.
This organisation has many working groups. For example, the Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature (WGPSN), which maintains the astronomical naming conventions and planetary nomenclature for planetary bodies, and the Working Group on Star Names (WGSN), which catalogues and standardizes proper names for stars. The IAU is also responsible for the system of astronomical telegrams which are produced and distributed on its behalf by the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams. The Minor Planet Center also operates under the IAU, and is a "clearinghouse" for all non-planetary or non-moon bodies in the Solar System.
The IAU was founded on 28 July 1919, at the Constitutive Assembly of the International Research Council (now the International Science Council) held in Brussels, Belgium. Two subsidiaries of the IAU were also created at this assembly: the International Time Commission seated at the International Time Bureau in Paris, France, and the International Central Bureau of Astronomical Telegrams initially seated in Copenhagen, Denmark.
The seven initial member states were Belgium, Canada, France, Great Britain, Greece, Japan, and the United States, soon to be followed by Italy and Mexico. The first executive committee consisted of Benjamin Baillaud (President, France), Alfred Fowler (General Secretary, UK), and four vice presidents: William Campbell (US), Frank Dyson (UK), Georges Lecointe (Belgium), and Annibale Riccò (Italy). Thirty-two Commissions (referred to initially as Standing Committees) were appointed at the Brussels meeting and focused on topics ranging from relativity to minor planets. The reports of these 32 Commissions formed the main substance of the first General Assembly, which took place in Rome, Italy, 2–10 May 1922.
By the end of the first General Assembly, ten additional nations (Australia, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, South Africa, and Spain) had joined the Union, bringing the total membership to 19 countries. Although the Union was officially formed eight months after the end of World War I, international collaboration in astronomy had been strong in the pre-war era (e.g., the Astronomische Gesellschaft Katalog projects since 1868, the Astrographic Catalogue since 1887, and the International Union for Solar research since 1904).
The first 50 years of the Union's history are well documented. Subsequent history is recorded in the form of reminiscences of past IAU Presidents and General Secretaries. Twelve of the fourteen past General Secretaries in the period 1964–2006 contributed their recollections of the Union's history in IAU Information Bulletin No. 100. Six past IAU Presidents in the period 1976–2003 also contributed their recollections in IAU Information Bulletin No. 104.
In 2015 and 2019, the Union held the NameExoWorlds contests.
As of 1 August 2019, the IAU has a total of 13,701 individual members, who are professional astronomers from 102 countries worldwide; 81.7% of individual members are male, while 18.3% are female.
Membership also includes 82 national members, professional astronomical communities representing their country's affiliation with the IAU. National members include the Australian Academy of Science, the Chinese Astronomical Society, the French Academy of Sciences, the Indian National Science Academy, the National Academies (United States), the National Research Foundation of South Africa, the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (Argentina), the Council of German Observatories, the Royal Astronomical Society (United Kingdom), the Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Science Council of Japan, among many others.
The sovereign body of the IAU is its General Assembly, which comprises all members. The Assembly determines IAU policy, approves the Statutes and By-Laws of the Union (and amendments proposed thereto) and elects various committees.
The right to vote on matters brought before the Assembly varies according to the type of business under discussion. The Statutes consider such business to be divided into two categories:
On budget matters (which fall into the second category), votes are weighted according to the relative subscription levels of the national members. A second category vote requires a turnout of at least two-thirds of national members to be valid. An absolute majority is sufficient for approval in any vote, except for Statute revision which requires a two-thirds majority. An equality of votes is resolved by the vote of the President of the Union.
Since 1922, the IAU General Assembly meets every three years, except for the period between 1938 and 1948, due to World War II. After a Polish request in 1967, and by a controversial decision of the then President of the IAU, an Extraordinary IAU General Assembly was held in September 1973 in Warsaw, Poland, to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the birth of Nicolaus Copernicus, soon after the regular 1973 GA had been held in Sydney.
Sources.
Commission 46 is a Committee of the Executive Committee of the IAU, playing a special role in the discussion of astronomy development with governments and scientific academies. The IAU is affiliated with the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU), a non-governmental organization representing a global membership that includes both national scientific bodies and international scientific unions. They often encourage countries to become members of the IAU. The Commission further seeks to development, information or improvement of astronomical education. Part of Commission 46, is Teaching Astronomy for Development (TAD) program in countries where there is currently very little astronomical education. Another program is named the Galileo Teacher Training Program (GTTP), is a project of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, among which Hands-On Universe that will concentrate more resources on education activities for children and schools designed to advance sustainable global development. GTTP is also concerned with the effective use and transfer of astronomy education tools and resources into classroom science curricula. A strategic plan for the period 2010–2020 has been published.
In 2004 the IAU contracted with the Cambridge University Press to publish the Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union.
In 2007, the Communicating Astronomy with the Public Journal Working Group prepared a study assessing the feasibility of the Communicating Astronomy with the Public Journal (CAP Journal). | [
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"text": "The International Astronomical Union (IAU; French: Union astronomique internationale, UAI) is a non-governmental organisation with the objective of advancing astronomy in all aspects, including promoting astronomical research, outreach, education, and development through global cooperation. It was founded in 1919 and is based in Paris, France.",
"title": ""
},
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"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The IAU is composed of individual members, who include both professional astronomers and junior scientists, and national members, such as professional associations, national societies, or academic institutions. Individual members are organised into divisions, committees, and working groups centered on particular subdisciplines, subjects, or initiatives. As of 2018, the Union had over 13,700 individual members, spanning 90 countries, and 82 national members.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Among the key activities of the IAU is serving as a forum for scientific conferences. It sponsors nine annual symposia and holds a triannual General Assembly that sets policy and includes various scientific meetings. The Union is best known for being the leading authority in assigning official names and designations to astronomical objects, and for setting uniform definitions for astronomical principles. It also coordinates with national and international partners, such as UNESCO, to fulfill its mission.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The IAU is a member of the International Science Council (ISC), which is composed of international scholarly and scientific institutions and national academies of sciences.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The International Astronomical Union is an international association of professional astronomers, at the PhD level and beyond, active in professional research and education in astronomy. Among other activities, it acts as the recognized authority for assigning designations and names to celestial bodies (stars, planets, asteroids, etc.) and any surface features on them.",
"title": "Function"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The IAU is a member of the International Science Council (ISC). Its main objective is to promote and safeguard the science of astronomy in all its aspects through international cooperation. The IAU maintains friendly relations with organizations that include amateur astronomers in their membership. The IAU has its head office on the second floor of the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris in the 14th arrondissement of Paris.",
"title": "Function"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "This organisation has many working groups. For example, the Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature (WGPSN), which maintains the astronomical naming conventions and planetary nomenclature for planetary bodies, and the Working Group on Star Names (WGSN), which catalogues and standardizes proper names for stars. The IAU is also responsible for the system of astronomical telegrams which are produced and distributed on its behalf by the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams. The Minor Planet Center also operates under the IAU, and is a \"clearinghouse\" for all non-planetary or non-moon bodies in the Solar System.",
"title": "Function"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The IAU was founded on 28 July 1919, at the Constitutive Assembly of the International Research Council (now the International Science Council) held in Brussels, Belgium. Two subsidiaries of the IAU were also created at this assembly: the International Time Commission seated at the International Time Bureau in Paris, France, and the International Central Bureau of Astronomical Telegrams initially seated in Copenhagen, Denmark.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The seven initial member states were Belgium, Canada, France, Great Britain, Greece, Japan, and the United States, soon to be followed by Italy and Mexico. The first executive committee consisted of Benjamin Baillaud (President, France), Alfred Fowler (General Secretary, UK), and four vice presidents: William Campbell (US), Frank Dyson (UK), Georges Lecointe (Belgium), and Annibale Riccò (Italy). Thirty-two Commissions (referred to initially as Standing Committees) were appointed at the Brussels meeting and focused on topics ranging from relativity to minor planets. The reports of these 32 Commissions formed the main substance of the first General Assembly, which took place in Rome, Italy, 2–10 May 1922.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "By the end of the first General Assembly, ten additional nations (Australia, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, South Africa, and Spain) had joined the Union, bringing the total membership to 19 countries. Although the Union was officially formed eight months after the end of World War I, international collaboration in astronomy had been strong in the pre-war era (e.g., the Astronomische Gesellschaft Katalog projects since 1868, the Astrographic Catalogue since 1887, and the International Union for Solar research since 1904).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The first 50 years of the Union's history are well documented. Subsequent history is recorded in the form of reminiscences of past IAU Presidents and General Secretaries. Twelve of the fourteen past General Secretaries in the period 1964–2006 contributed their recollections of the Union's history in IAU Information Bulletin No. 100. Six past IAU Presidents in the period 1976–2003 also contributed their recollections in IAU Information Bulletin No. 104.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In 2015 and 2019, the Union held the NameExoWorlds contests.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "As of 1 August 2019, the IAU has a total of 13,701 individual members, who are professional astronomers from 102 countries worldwide; 81.7% of individual members are male, while 18.3% are female.",
"title": "Composition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Membership also includes 82 national members, professional astronomical communities representing their country's affiliation with the IAU. National members include the Australian Academy of Science, the Chinese Astronomical Society, the French Academy of Sciences, the Indian National Science Academy, the National Academies (United States), the National Research Foundation of South Africa, the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (Argentina), the Council of German Observatories, the Royal Astronomical Society (United Kingdom), the Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Science Council of Japan, among many others.",
"title": "Composition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The sovereign body of the IAU is its General Assembly, which comprises all members. The Assembly determines IAU policy, approves the Statutes and By-Laws of the Union (and amendments proposed thereto) and elects various committees.",
"title": "Composition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The right to vote on matters brought before the Assembly varies according to the type of business under discussion. The Statutes consider such business to be divided into two categories:",
"title": "Composition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "On budget matters (which fall into the second category), votes are weighted according to the relative subscription levels of the national members. A second category vote requires a turnout of at least two-thirds of national members to be valid. An absolute majority is sufficient for approval in any vote, except for Statute revision which requires a two-thirds majority. An equality of votes is resolved by the vote of the President of the Union.",
"title": "Composition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Since 1922, the IAU General Assembly meets every three years, except for the period between 1938 and 1948, due to World War II. After a Polish request in 1967, and by a controversial decision of the then President of the IAU, an Extraordinary IAU General Assembly was held in September 1973 in Warsaw, Poland, to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the birth of Nicolaus Copernicus, soon after the regular 1973 GA had been held in Sydney.",
"title": "General Assemblies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Sources.",
"title": "List of the presidents of the IAU"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Commission 46 is a Committee of the Executive Committee of the IAU, playing a special role in the discussion of astronomy development with governments and scientific academies. The IAU is affiliated with the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU), a non-governmental organization representing a global membership that includes both national scientific bodies and international scientific unions. They often encourage countries to become members of the IAU. The Commission further seeks to development, information or improvement of astronomical education. Part of Commission 46, is Teaching Astronomy for Development (TAD) program in countries where there is currently very little astronomical education. Another program is named the Galileo Teacher Training Program (GTTP), is a project of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, among which Hands-On Universe that will concentrate more resources on education activities for children and schools designed to advance sustainable global development. GTTP is also concerned with the effective use and transfer of astronomy education tools and resources into classroom science curricula. A strategic plan for the period 2010–2020 has been published.",
"title": "Commission 46: Education in astronomy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In 2004 the IAU contracted with the Cambridge University Press to publish the Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union.",
"title": "Publications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In 2007, the Communicating Astronomy with the Public Journal Working Group prepared a study assessing the feasibility of the Communicating Astronomy with the Public Journal (CAP Journal).",
"title": "Publications"
}
]
| The International Astronomical Union is a non-governmental organisation with the objective of advancing astronomy in all aspects, including promoting astronomical research, outreach, education, and development through global cooperation. It was founded in 1919 and is based in Paris, France. The IAU is composed of individual members, who include both professional astronomers and junior scientists, and national members, such as professional associations, national societies, or academic institutions. Individual members are organised into divisions, committees, and working groups centered on particular subdisciplines, subjects, or initiatives. As of 2018, the Union had over 13,700 individual members, spanning 90 countries, and 82 national members. Among the key activities of the IAU is serving as a forum for scientific conferences. It sponsors nine annual symposia and holds a triannual General Assembly that sets policy and includes various scientific meetings. The Union is best known for being the leading authority in assigning official names and designations to astronomical objects, and for setting uniform definitions for astronomical principles. It also coordinates with national and international partners, such as UNESCO, to fulfill its mission. The IAU is a member of the International Science Council (ISC), which is composed of international scholarly and scientific institutions and national academies of sciences. | 2001-08-05T04:21:13Z | 2023-12-22T04:42:58Z | [
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14,879 | Interval | Interval may refer to: | [
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|
14,880 | International Criminal Court | The International Criminal Court (ICC or ICCt) is an intergovernmental organization and international tribunal seated in The Hague, Netherlands. It is the first and only permanent international court with jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for the international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression. The ICC is distinct from the International Court of Justice, an organ of the United Nations that hears disputes between states.
Established in 2002 pursuant to the multilateral Rome Statute, the ICC is considered by its proponents to be a major step toward justice, and an innovation in international law and human rights. However, it has faced a number of criticisms from governments and civil society groups, including objections to its jurisdiction, accusations of bias, Eurocentrism and racism, questioning of the fairness of its case selection and trial procedures, and doubts about its effectiveness.
The establishment of an international tribunal to judge political leaders accused of international crimes was first proposed during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 following the First World War by the Commission of Responsibilities. The issue was addressed again at a conference held in Geneva under the auspices of the League of Nations in 1937, which resulted in the conclusion of the first convention stipulating the establishment of a permanent international court to try acts of international terrorism. The convention was signed by 13 states, but none ratified it and the convention never entered into force.
Following the Second World War, the allied powers established two ad hoc tribunals to prosecute Axis leaders accused of war crimes. The International Military Tribunal, which sat in Nuremberg, prosecuted German leaders while the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo prosecuted Japanese leaders. In 1948 the United Nations General Assembly first recognised the need for a permanent international court to deal with atrocities of the kind prosecuted after World War II. At the request of the General Assembly, the International Law Commission (ILC) drafted two statutes by the early 1950s but these were shelved during the Cold War, which made the establishment of an international criminal court politically unrealistic.
Benjamin B. Ferencz, an investigator of Nazi war crimes after World War II and the Chief Prosecutor for the United States Army at the Einsatzgruppen trial, became a vocal advocate of the establishment of international rule of law and of an international criminal court. In his book Defining International Aggression: The Search for World Peace (1975), he advocated for the establishment of such a court. Another leading proponent was Robert Kurt Woetzel, a German-born professor of international law, who co-edited Toward a Feasible International Criminal Court in 1970 and created the Foundation for the Establishment of an International Criminal Court in 1971.
In June 1989, the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, A. N. R. Robinson, revived the idea of a permanent international criminal court by proposing the creation of tribunal to address the illegal drug trade. In response, the General Assembly tasked the ILC with once again drafting a statute for a permanent court.
While work began on the draft, the UN Security Council established two ad hoc tribunals in the early 1990s: The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, created in 1993 in response to large-scale atrocities committed by armed forces during the Yugoslav Wars, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, created in 1994 following the Rwandan genocide. The creation of these tribunals further highlighted to many the need for a permanent international criminal court.
In 1994, the ILC presented its final draft statute for the International Criminal Court to the General Assembly and recommended that a conference be convened to negotiate a treaty that would serve as the Court's statute.
To consider major substantive issues in the draft statute, the General Assembly established the Ad Hoc Committee on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court, which met twice in 1995. After considering the Committee's report, the General Assembly created the Preparatory Committee on the Establishment of the ICC to prepare a consolidated draft text.
From 1996 to 1998, six sessions of the Preparatory Committee were held at the United Nations headquarters in New York City, during which NGOs provided input and attended meetings under the umbrella organisation of the Coalition for the International Criminal Court (CICC). In January 1998, the Bureau and coordinators of the Preparatory Committee convened for an Inter-Sessional meeting in Zutphen in the Netherlands to technically consolidate and restructure the draft articles into a draft.
Finally, the General Assembly convened a conference in Rome in June 1998, with the aim of finalizing the treaty to serve as the Court's statute. On 17 July 1998, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was adopted by a vote of 120 to seven, with 21 countries abstaining. The seven countries that voted against the treaty were China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar, the U.S., and Yemen.
Israel's opposition to the treaty stemmed from the inclusion in the list of war crimes "the action of transferring population into occupied territory".
The UN General Assembly voted on 9 December 1999 and again on 12 December 2000 to endorse the ICC.
Following 60 ratifications, the Rome Statute entered into force on 1 July 2002 and the International Criminal Court was formally established.
The first bench of 18 judges was elected by the Assembly of States Parties in February 2003. They were sworn in at the inaugural session of the Court on 11 March 2003.
The Court issued its first arrest warrants on 8 July 2005, and the first pre-trial hearings were held in 2006.
The Court issued its first judgment in 2012 when it found Congolese rebel leader Thomas Lubanga Dyilo guilty of war crimes related to using child soldiers. Lubanga was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
In 2010, the states parties of the Rome Statute held the first Review Conference of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in Kampala, Uganda. The Review Conference led to the adoption of two resolutions that amended the crimes under the jurisdiction of the Court. Resolution 5 amended Article 8 on war crimes, criminalizing the use of certain kinds of weapons in non-international conflicts whose use was already forbidden in international conflicts. Resolution 6, pursuant to Article 5(2) of the Statute, provided the definition and a procedure for jurisdiction over the crime of aggression.
The ICC has four principal organs: the Presidency, the Judicial Divisions, the Office of the Prosecutor and the Registry.
The ICC employs over 900 personnel from roughly 100 countries and conducts proceedings in English and French.
The ICC began operations on 1 July 2002, upon the entry into force of the Rome Statute, a multilateral treaty that serves as the court's charter and governing document. States which become party to the Rome Statute become members of the ICC, serving on the Assembly of States Parties, which administers the court. As of November 2023, there are 124 ICC member states; 41 states have neither signed nor become parties to the Rome Statute.
Intended to serve as the "court of last resort", the ICC complements existing national judicial systems and may exercise its jurisdiction only when national courts are unwilling or unable to prosecute criminals. It lacks universal territorial jurisdiction and may only investigate and prosecute crimes committed within member states, crimes committed by nationals of member states, or crimes in situations referred to the Court by the United Nations Security Council.
The ICC held its first hearing in 2006, concerning war crimes charges against Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, a Congolese warlord accused of recruiting child soldiers; his subsequent conviction in 2012 was the first in the court's history. The Office of the Prosecutor has opened twelve official investigations and is conducting an additional nine preliminary examinations.
Dozens of individuals have been indicted in the ICC, including Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony, former President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya, Libyan head of state Muammar Gaddafi, President Laurent Gbagbo of Ivory Coast and former Vice President Jean-Pierre Bemba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
On 17 March 2023, ICC judges issued arrest warrants for Russian leader Vladimir Putin and the Presidential Commissioner for Children's Rights in Russia Maria Lvova-Belova for child abductions in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Putin became the first head of state of a U.N. Security Council Permanent Member to be the subject of an ICC arrest warrant. Although Russia withdrew its signature from the Rome Statute in 2016, and is thus not a participant in the ICC nor under its jurisdiction, Putin can be charged for actions against Ukraine, which is not a party but has accepted jurisdiction of the court since 2014. Should Putin travel to a state party, he can be arrested by local authorities. Later in 2023 Russia's ministry of internal affairs retaliated by placing several ICC officials on its wanted list.
The ICC is governed by the Assembly of States Parties, which is made up of the states that are party to the Rome Statute. The Assembly elects officials of the Court, approves its budget, and adopts amendments to the Rome Statute. The Court itself has four organs: the Presidency, the Judicial Divisions, the Office of the Prosecutor, and the Registry.
As of November 2019, 123 states are parties to the Statute of the Court, including all the countries of South America, nearly all of Europe, most of Oceania and roughly half of Africa. Burundi and the Philippines were member states, but later withdrew effective 27 October 2017 and 17 March 2019, respectively. A further 31 countries have signed but not ratified the Rome Statute. The law of treaties obliges these states to refrain from "acts which would defeat the object and purpose" of the treaty until they declare they do not intend to become a party to the treaty. Four signatory states—Israel in 2002, the United States on 6 May 2002, Sudan on 26 August 2008, and Russia on 30 November 2016—have informed the UN Secretary General that they no longer intend to become states parties and, as such, have no legal obligations arising from their signature of the Statute.
Forty-one additional states have neither signed nor acceded to the Rome Statute. Some of them, including China and India, are critical of the Court. Ukraine, a non-ratifying signatory, has accepted the Court's jurisdiction for a period starting in 2013.
The Court's management oversight and legislative body, the Assembly of States Parties, consists of one representative from each state party. Each state party has one vote and "every effort" has to be made to reach decisions by consensus. If consensus cannot be reached, decisions are made by vote. The Assembly is presided over by a president and two vice-presidents, who are elected by the members to three-year terms.
The Assembly meets in full session once a year, alternating between New York and The Hague, and may also hold special sessions where circumstances require. Sessions are open to observer states and non-governmental organizations.
The Assembly elects the judges and prosecutors, decides the Court's budget, adopts important texts (such as the Rules of Procedure and Evidence), and provides management oversight to the other organs of the Court.< Article 46 of the Rome Statute allows the Assembly to remove from office a judge or prosecutor who "is found to have committed serious misconduct or a serious breach of his or her duties" or "is unable to exercise the functions required by this Statute".
The states parties cannot interfere with the judicial functions of the Court. Disputes concerning individual cases are settled by the Judicial Divisions.
In 2010, Kampala, Uganda hosted the Assembly's Rome Statute Review Conference.
The Court has four organs: the Presidency, the Judicial Division, the Office of the Prosecutor, and the Registry.
The Presidency is responsible for the proper administration of the Court (apart from the Office of the Prosecutor). It comprises the President and the First and Second Vice-Presidents—three judges of the Court who are elected to the Presidency by their fellow judges for a maximum of two three-year terms.
As of March 2021, the President is Piotr Hofmański from Poland, who took office on 11 March 2021, succeeding Chile Eboe-Osuji. His first term will expire in 2024.
The Judicial Divisions consist of the 18 judges of the Court, organized into three chambers—the Pre-Trial Chamber, Trial Chamber and Appeals Chamber—which carry out the judicial functions of the Court. Judges are elected to the Court by the Assembly of States Parties. They serve nine-year terms and are not generally eligible for re-election. All judges must be nationals of states parties to the Rome Statute, and no two judges may be nationals of the same state. They must be "persons of high moral character, impartiality and integrity who possess the qualifications required in their respective States for appointment to the highest judicial offices".
The Prosecutor or any person being investigated or prosecuted may request the disqualification of a judge from "any case in which his or her impartiality might reasonably be doubted on any ground". Any request for the disqualification of a judge from a particular case is decided by an absolute majority of the other judges. Judges may be removed from office if "found to have committed serious misconduct or a serious breach of his or her duties" or is unable to exercise his or her functions. The removal of a judge requires both a two-thirds majority of the other judges and a two-thirds majority of the states parties.
The Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) is responsible for conducting investigations and prosecutions. It is headed by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, who is assisted by one or more Deputy Prosecutors. The Rome Statute provides that the Office of the Prosecutor shall act independently; as such, no member of the Office may seek or act on instructions from any external source, such as states, international organisations, non-governmental organisations or individuals.
The Prosecutor may open an investigation under three circumstances:
Any person being investigated or prosecuted may request the disqualification of a prosecutor from any case "in which their impartiality might reasonably be doubted on any ground".< Requests for the disqualification of prosecutors are decided by the Appeals Chamber. A prosecutor may be removed from office by an absolute majority of the states parties through a finding "to have committed serious misconduct or a serious breach of his or her duties" or is unable to exercise his or her functions. One critic said there are "insufficient checks and balances on the authority of the ICC prosecutor and judges" and "insufficient protection against politicized prosecutions or other abuses". Luis Moreno-Ocampo, chief ICC prosecutor, stressed in 2011 the importance of politics in prosecutions: "You cannot say al-Bashir is in London, arrest him. You need a political agreement." Henry Kissinger says the checks and balances are so weak that the prosecutor "has virtually unlimited discretion in practice".
Lead prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo of Argentina, in office from 2003 to 2012, was succeeded in the role by Fatou Bensouda of Gambia, who served from 16 June 2012 to 16 June 2021 (she was elected to the nine-year term on 12 December 2011).
On 12 February 2021, British barrister Karim Khan was selected in a secret ballot against three other candidates to serve as lead prosecutor as of 16 June 2021. As British barrister, Khan had headed the United Nations' special investigative team when it looked into Islamic State crimes in Iraq. At the ICC, he had been lead defense counsel on cases from Kenya, Sudan and Libya.
A Policy Paper is a document occasionally published by the Office of the Prosecutor which puts forth the considerations given to the topics the office focuses on, and often the criteria for case selection. While a policy paper does not give the Court jurisdiction over a new category of crimes, it promises what the Office of Prosecutor will consider when selecting cases in the upcoming term of service. OTP's policy papers are subject to revision.
The five following Policy Papers have been published since the start of the ICC:
The Policy Paper published in September 2016 announced that the ICC will focus on environmental crimes when selecting the cases. According to this document, the Office will give particular consideration to prosecuting Rome Statute crimes that are committed by means of, or that result in, "inter alia, the destruction of the environment, the illegal exploitation of natural resources or the illegal dispossession of land".
This has been interpreted as a major shift in environmental law and a move with significant effects.
The Registry is responsible for the non-judicial aspects of the administration and servicing of the Court. This includes, among other things, "the administration of legal aid matters, court management, victims and witnesses matters, defence counsel, detention unit, and the traditional services provided by administrations in international organisations, such as finance, translation, building management, procurement and personnel". The Registry is headed by the Registrar, who is elected by the judges to a five-year term. As of April 2023 the Registrar is Osvaldo Zavala Giler.
The process to establish the Court's jurisdiction may be "triggered" by any one of three possible sources: (1) a State party, (2) the Security Council or (3) a Prosecutor. It is then up to the Prosecutor acting ex proprio motu ("of his own motion" so to speak) to initiate an investigation under the requirements of Article 15 of the Rome Statute. The procedure is slightly different when referred by a State Party or the Security Council, in which cases the Prosecutor does not need authorization of the Pre-Trial Chamber to initiate the investigation. Where there is a reasonable basis to proceed, it is mandatory for the Prosecutor to initiate an investigation. The factors listed in Article 53 considered for reasonable basis include whether the case would be admissible, and whether there are substantial reasons to believe that an investigation would not serve the interests of justice (the latter stipulates balancing against the gravity of the crime and the interests of the victims).
The Court's subject-matter jurisdiction means the crimes for which individuals can be prosecuted. Individuals can only be prosecuted for crimes that are listed in the Statute. The primary crimes are listed in article 5 of the Statute and defined in later articles: genocide (defined in article 6), crimes against humanity (defined in article 7), war crimes (defined in article 8), and crimes of aggression (defined in article 8 bis) (since 2018). In addition, article 70 defines offences against the administration of justice, which is a fifth category of crime for which individuals can be prosecuted.
Article 6 defines the crime of genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." There are five such acts which constitute crimes of genocide under article 6:
The definition of these crimes is identical to those contained within the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948.
Article 7 defines crimes against humanity as acts "committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack". The article lists 16 such as individual crimes:
Article 8 defines war crimes depending on whether an armed conflict is either international (which generally means it is fought between states) or non-international (which generally means that it is fought between non-state actors, such as rebel groups, or between a state and such non-state actors). In total there are 74 war crimes listed in article 8. The most serious crimes constitute either grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which only apply to international conflicts, and serious violations of article 3 common to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which apply to non-international conflicts.
Eleven crimes constitute grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and apply only to international armed conflicts:
Seven crimes constitute serious violations of article 3 common to the Geneva Conventions and apply only to non-international armed conflicts:
Another 56 crimes defined by article 8: 35 apply to international armed conflicts and 21 to non-international armed conflicts. Such crimes include attacking civilians or civilian objects, attacking peacekeepers, causing excessive incidental death or damage, transferring populations into occupied territories, treacherously killing or wounding, denying quarter, pillaging, employing poison, using expanding bullets, rape and other forms of sexual violence, and conscripting or using child soldiers.
Article 8 bis defines crimes of aggression. The Statute originally provided that the Court could not exercise its jurisdiction over the crime of aggression until such time as the states parties agreed on a definition of the crime and set out the conditions under which it could be prosecuted. Such an amendment was adopted at the first review conference of the ICC in Kampala, Uganda, in June 2010. This amendment specified that the ICC would not be allowed to exercise jurisdiction of the crime of aggression until two further conditions had been satisfied: (1) the amendment has entered into force for 30 states parties and (2) on or after 1 January 2017, the Assembly of States Parties has voted in favor of allowing the Court to exercise jurisdiction. On 26 June 2016 the first condition was satisfied and the state parties voted in favor of allowing the Court to exercise jurisdiction on 14 December 2017. The Court's jurisdiction to prosecute crimes of aggression was accordingly activated on 17 July 2018.
The Statute, as amended, defines the crime of aggression as "the planning, preparation, initiation or execution, by a person in a position effectively to exercise control over or to direct the political or military action of a State, of an act of aggression which, by its character, gravity and scale, constitutes a manifest violation of the Charter of the United Nations." The Statute defines an "act of aggression" as "the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations." The article also contains a list of seven acts of aggression, which are identical to those in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3314 of 1974 and include the following acts when committed by one state against another state:
Article 70 criminalizes certain intentional acts which interfere with investigations and proceedings before the Court, including giving false testimony, presenting false evidence, corruptly influencing a witness or official of the Court, retaliating against an official of the Court, and soliciting or accepting bribes as an official of the Court.
The Rome Statute requires that several criteria exist in a particular case before an individual can be prosecuted by the Court. The Statute contains three jurisdictional requirements and three admissibility requirements. All criteria must be met for a case to proceed. The three jurisdictional requirements are (1) subject-matter jurisdiction (what acts constitute crimes), (2) territorial or personal jurisdiction (where the crimes were committed or who committed them), and (3) temporal jurisdiction (when the crimes were committed).
For an individual to be prosecuted by the Court either territorial jurisdiction or personal jurisdiction must exist. Therefore, an individual can only be prosecuted if he or she has either (1) committed a crime within the territorial jurisdiction of the Court or (2) committed a crime while being a national of a state that is within the territorial jurisdiction of the Court.
The territorial jurisdiction of the Court includes the territory, registered vessels, and registered aircraft of states which have either (1) become party to the Rome Statute or (2) accepted the Court's jurisdiction by filing a declaration with the Court.
In situations that are referred to the Court by the United Nations Security Council, the territorial jurisdiction is defined by the Security Council, which may be more expansive than the Court's normal territorial jurisdiction. For example, if the Security Council refers a situation that took place in the territory of a state that has both not become party to the Rome Statute and not lodged a declaration with the Court, the Court will still be able to prosecute crimes that occurred within that state.
The personal jurisdiction of the Court extends to all natural persons who commit crimes, regardless of where they are located or where the crimes were committed, as long as those individuals are nationals of either (1) states that are party to the Rome Statute or (2) states that have accepted the Court's jurisdiction by filing a declaration with the Court. As with territorial jurisdiction, the personal jurisdiction can be expanded by the Security Council if it refers a situation to the Court.
Temporal jurisdiction is the time period over which the Court can exercise its powers. No statute of limitations applies to any of the crimes defined in the Statute. This is not completely retroactive. Individuals can only be prosecuted for crimes that took place on or after 1 July 2002, which is the date that the Rome Statute entered into force. If a state became party to the Statute, and therefore a member of the Court, after 1 July 2002, then the Court cannot exercise jurisdiction prior to the membership date for certain cases. For example, if the Statute entered into force for a state on 1 January 2003, the Court could only exercise temporal jurisdiction over crimes that took place in that state or were committed by a national of that state on or after 1 January 2003.
To initiate an investigation, the Prosecutor must (1) have a "reasonable basis to believe that a crime within the jurisdiction of the Court has been or is being committed", (2) the investigation would be consistent with the principle of complementarity, and (3) the investigation serves the interests of justice.
The principle of complementarity means the Court will only prosecute an individual if states are unwilling or unable to prosecute. Therefore, if legitimate national investigations or proceedings into crimes have taken place or are ongoing, the Court will not initiate proceedings. This principle applies regardless of the outcome of national proceedings. Even if an investigation is closed without any criminal charges being filed or if an accused person is acquitted by a national court, the Court will not prosecute an individual for the crime in question so long as it is satisfied that the national proceedings were legitimate. The application of the complementarity principle has recently come under theoretical scrutiny.
The Court will only initiate proceedings if a crime is of "sufficient gravity to justify further action by the Court".
The Prosecutor will initiate an investigation unless there are "substantial reasons to believe that an investigation would not serve the interests of justice" when "[t]aking into account the gravity of the crime and the interests of victims". Furthermore, even if an investigation has been initiated and there are substantial facts to warrant a prosecution and no other admissibility issues, the Prosecutor must determine whether a prosecution would serve the interests of justice "taking into account all the circumstances, including the gravity of the crime, the interests of victims and the age or infirmity of the alleged perpetrator, and his or her role in the alleged crime".
The Court has jurisdiction over natural persons. A person who commits a crime within the jurisdiction of the Court is individually responsible and liable for punishment in accordance with the Rome Statute. In accordance with the Rome Statute, a person shall be criminally responsible and liable for punishment for a crime within the jurisdiction of the Court if that person: Commits such a crime, whether as an individual, jointly with another or through another person, regardless of whether that other person is criminally responsible; Orders, solicits or induces the commission of such a crime which in fact occurs or is attempted; For the purpose of facilitating the commission of such a crime, aids, abets or otherwise assists in its commission or its attempted commission, including providing the means for its commission; In any other way contributes to the commission or attempted commission of such a crime by a group of persons acting with a common purpose. In respect of the crime of genocide, directly and publicly incites others to commit genocide; Attempts to commit such a crime by taking action that commences its execution by means of a substantial step, but the crime does not occur because of circumstances independent of the person's intentions
Trials are conducted under a hybrid common law and civil law judicial system, but it has been argued the procedural orientation and character of the court is still evolving. A majority of the three judges present, as triers of fact in a bench trial, may reach a decision, which must include a full and reasoned statement. Trials are supposed to be public, but proceedings are often closed, and such exceptions to a public trial have not been enumerated in detail. In camera proceedings are allowed for protection of witnesses or defendants as well as for confidential or sensitive evidence. Hearsay and other indirect evidence is not generally prohibited, but it has been argued the court is guided by hearsay exceptions which are prominent in common law systems. There is no subpoena or other means to compel witnesses to come before the court, although the court has some power to compel testimony of those who chose to come before it, such as fines.
The Rome Statute provides that all persons are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt, and establishes certain rights of the accused and persons during investigations. These include the right to be fully informed of the charges against them; the right to have a lawyer appointed, free of charge; the right to a speedy trial; and the right to examine the witnesses against them.
To ensure "equality of arms" between defence and prosecution teams, the ICC has established an independent Office of Public Counsel for the Defence (OPCD) to provide logistical support, advice and information to defendants and their counsel. The OPCD also helps to safeguard the rights of the accused during the initial stages of an investigation. Thomas Lubanga's defence team said they were given a smaller budget than the Prosecutor and that evidence and witness statements were slow to arrive.
One of the great innovations of the Statute of the International Criminal Court and its Rules of Procedure and Evidence is the series of rights granted to victims. For the first time in the history of international criminal justice, victims have the possibility under the Statute to present their views and observations before the Court.
Participation before the Court may occur at various stages of proceedings and may take different forms, although it will be up to the judges to give directions as to the timing and manner of participation.
Participation in the Court's proceedings will in most cases take place through a legal representative and will be conducted "in a manner which is not prejudicial or inconsistent with the rights of the accused and a fair and impartial trial".
The victim-based provisions within the Rome Statute provide victims with the opportunity to have their voices heard and to obtain, where appropriate, some form of reparation for their suffering. It is the aim of this attempted balance between retributive and restorative justice that, it is hoped, will enable the ICC to not only bring criminals to justice but also help the victims themselves obtain some form of justice. Justice for victims before the ICC comprises both procedural and substantive justice, by allowing them to participate and present their views and interests, so that they can help to shape truth, justice and reparations outcomes of the Court.
Article 43(6) establishes a Victims and Witnesses Unit to provide "protective measures and security arrangements, counseling and other appropriate assistance for witnesses, victims who appear before the Court, and others who are at risk on account of testimony given by such witnesses." Article 68 sets out procedures for the "Protection of the victims and witnesses and their participation in the proceedings." The Court has also established an Office of Public Counsel for Victims, to provide support and assistance to victims and their legal representatives.
Victims before the International Criminal Court can also claim reparations under Article 75 of the Rome Statute. Reparations can only be claimed when a defendant is convicted and at the discretion of the Court's judges. So far the Court has ordered reparations against Thomas Lubanga. Reparations can include compensation, restitution and rehabilitation, but other forms of reparations may be appropriate for individual, collective or community victims. Article 79 of the Rome Statute establishes a Trust Fund to provide assistance before a reparation order to victims in a situation or to support reparations to victims and their families if the convicted person has no money.
One of the principles of international law is that a treaty does not create either obligations or rights for third states without their consent, and this is also enshrined in the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. The cooperation of the non-party states with the ICC is envisioned by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court to be of voluntary nature. States not acceded to the Rome Statute might still be subject to an obligation to cooperate with ICC in certain cases. When a case is referred to the ICC by the UN Security Council all UN member states are obliged to cooperate, since its decisions are binding for all of them. Also, there is an obligation to respect and ensure respect for international humanitarian law, which stems from the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol I, which reflects the absolute nature of international humanitarian law.
In relation to cooperation in investigation and evidence gathering, it is implied from the Rome Statute that the consent of a non-party state is a prerequisite for ICC Prosecutor to conduct an investigation within its territory, and it seems that it is even more necessary for him to observe any reasonable conditions raised by that state, since such restrictions exist for states party to the Statute. Taking into account the experience of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (which worked with the principle of the primacy, instead of complementarity) in relation to cooperation, some scholars have expressed their pessimism as to the possibility of ICC to obtain cooperation of non-party states. As for the actions that ICC can take toward non-party states that do not cooperate, the Rome Statute stipulates that the Court may inform the Assembly of States Parties or Security Council, when the matter was referred by it, when non-party state refuses to cooperate after it has entered into an ad hoc arrangement or an agreement with the Court.
It is unclear to what extent the ICC is compatible with reconciliation processes that grant amnesty to human rights abusers as part of agreements to end conflict. Article 16 of the Rome Statute allows the Security Council to prevent the Court from investigating or prosecuting a case, and Article 53 allows the Prosecutor the discretion not to initiate an investigation if he or she believes that "an investigation would not serve the interests of justice". Former ICC president Philippe Kirsch has said that "some limited amnesties may be compatible" with a country's obligations genuinely to investigate or prosecute under the Statute.
It is sometimes argued that amnesties are necessary to allow the peaceful transfer of power from abusive regimes. By denying states the right to offer amnesty to human rights abusers, the International Criminal Court may make it more difficult to negotiate an end to conflict and a transition to democracy. For example, the outstanding arrest warrants for four leaders of the Lord's Resistance Army are regarded by some as an obstacle to ending the insurgency in Uganda. Czech politician Marek Benda argues that "the ICC as a deterrent will in our view only mean the worst dictators will try to retain power at all costs". The United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross maintain that granting amnesty to those accused of war crimes and other serious crimes is a violation of international law.
The official seat of the Court is in The Hague, Netherlands, but its proceedings may take place anywhere.
The Court moved into its first permanent premises in The Hague, located at Oude Waalsdorperweg 10, on 14 December 2015. Part of The Hague's International Zone, which also contains the Peace Palace, Europol, Eurojust, ICTY, OPCW and The Hague World Forum, the court facilities are situated on the site of the Alexanderkazerne, a former military barracks, adjacent to the dune landscape on the northern edge of the city. The ICC's detention centre is a short distance away.
The land and financing for the new construction were provided by the Netherlands. In addition, the host state organised and financed the architectural design competition which started at the end of 2008.
Three architects were chosen by an international jury from a total of 171 applicants to enter into further negotiations. The Danish firm schmidt hammer lassen were ultimately selected to design the new premises since its design met all the ICC criteria, such as design quality, sustainability, functionality and costs.
Demolition of the barracks started in November 2011 and was completed in August 2012. In October 2012 the tendering procedure for the General Contractor was completed and the combination Visser & Smit Bouw and Boele & van Eesteren ("Courtys") was selected.
The building has a compact footprint and consists of six connected building volumes with a garden motif. The tallest volume with a green façade, placed in the middle of the design, is the Court Tower that accommodates three courtrooms. The rest of the building's volumes accommodate the offices of the different organs of the ICC.
Until late 2015, the ICC was housed in interim premises in The Hague provided by the Netherlands. Formerly belonging to KPN, the provisional headquarters were located at Maanweg 174 in the east-central portion of the city.
The ICC's detention centre accommodates both those convicted by the court and serving sentences as well as those suspects detained pending the outcome of their trial. It comprises twelve cells on the premises of the Scheveningen branch of the Haaglanden Penal Institution, The Hague, close to the ICC's headquarters in the Alexanderkazerne.
Suspects held by the former International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia were held in the same prison and shared some facilities, like the fitness room, but had no contact with suspects held by the ICC.
The ICC maintains a liaison office in New York and field offices in places where it conducts its activities. As of 18 October 2007, the Court had field offices in Kampala, Kinshasa, Bunia, Abéché and Bangui.
The ICC is financed by contributions from the states parties. The amount payable by each state party is determined using the same method as the United Nations: each state's contribution is based on the country's capacity to pay, which reflects factors such as a national income and population. The maximum amount a single country can pay in any year is limited to 22% of the Court's budget; Japan paid this amount in 2008.
The Court spent €80.5 million in 2007. The Assembly of States Parties approved a budget of €90.4 million for 2008, €101.2 million for 2009, and €141.6 million for 2017. As of April 2017, the ICC's staff consisted of 800 persons from approximately 100 states.
To date, the Prosecutor has opened investigations in fourteen situations: Afghanistan; Burundi; two in the Central African Republic; Côte d'Ivoire; Darfur, Sudan; the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Georgia; Kenya; Libya; Mali; Uganda; Bangladesh/Myanmar, Palestine and Venezuela. Additionally, the Office of the Prosecutor is conducting preliminary examinations in six situations: Colombia; Guinea; Nigeria; the Philippines; Ukraine and Bolivia.
The Court's Pre-Trial Chambers have publicly indicted 52 people. Proceedings against 20 are ongoing: 15 are at large as fugitives and five are on trial. Proceedings against 32 have been completed: two are serving sentences, seven have finished sentences, four have been acquitted, seven have had the charges against them dismissed, four have had the charges against them withdrawn, and eight have died before the conclusion of the proceedings against them.
Thomas Lubanga, Germain Katanga and Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui were tried by the ICC. Lubanga and Katanga were convicted and sentenced to 14 and 12 years imprisonment, respectively, whereas Chui was acquitted.
The judgment of Jean-Pierre Bemba was rendered in March 2016. Bemba was convicted on two counts of crimes against humanity and three counts of war crimes. This marked the first time the ICC convicted someone of sexual violence as they added rape to his conviction. Bemba's convictions were overturned by the Court's Appeal Chamber in June 2018. The Court refused to compensate Bemba for losses suffered by him during his 10 years of imprisonment. It has been argued that this decision raises important questions about the court's present powers.
Trials in the Ntaganda case (DR Congo), the Bemba et al. OAJ case and the Laurent Gbagbo-Blé Goudé trial in the Côte d'Ivoire situation are ongoing. The Banda trial in the situation of Darfur, Sudan, was scheduled to begin in 2014 but the start date was vacated.
Charges against Ugandan Dominic Ongwen and Malian Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi have been confirmed; as of March 2020 both were awaiting their trials.
On 6 July 2020, two Uyghur activist groups filed a complaint with the ICC calling for it to investigate PRC officials for crimes against Uyghurs, including allegations of genocide.
On 31 October 2023, the Israeli families of over 34 victims of Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, filed an Article 15 communication with the ICC prosecutor's office urging an investigation into the killings and abductions, and the ICC confirmed the receipt of the filing. Reporters Without Borders also lodged a complaint regarding the deaths of eight Palestinian journalists in the Gaza Strip during Israel's bombardment, as well as an Israeli journalist killed during a surprise attack by Hamas in southern Israel.
Currently, the Office of the Prosecutor has opened investigations in Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, Côte d'Ivoire, Darfur in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Libya, Uganda, Bangladesh/Myanmar, Palestine, the Philippines, and Venezuela. Additionally, the Office of the Prosecutor conducted preliminary examinations in situations in Bolivia, Colombia, Guinea, Iraq / the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Georgia, Honduras, South Korea, Ukraine and Venezuela. Preliminary investigations were closed in Gabon; Honduras; registered vessels of Comoros, Greece, and Cambodia; South Korea; and Colombia on events since 1 July 2002. Key: Investigation Investigation pending authorization Preliminary examination ongoing Preliminary examination closed
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Unlike the International Court of Justice, the ICC is legally independent from the United Nations. The Rome Statute grants certain powers to the United Nations Security Council, which limit its functional independence. Article 13 allows the Security Council to refer to the Court situations that would not otherwise fall under the Court's jurisdiction (as it did in relation to the situations in Darfur and Libya, which the Court could not otherwise have prosecuted as neither Sudan nor Libya are state parties). Article 16 allows the Security Council to require the Court to defer from investigating a case for a period of twelve months. Such a deferral may be renewed indefinitely by the Security Council. This sort of an arrangement gives the ICC some of the advantages inhering in the organs of the United Nations such as using the enforcement powers of the Security Council, but it also creates a risk of being tainted with the political controversies of the Security Council.
The Court cooperates with the UN in many different areas, including the exchange of information and logistical support. The Court reports to the UN each year on its activities, and some meetings of the Assembly of States Parties are held at UN facilities. The relationship between the Court and the UN is governed by a "Relationship Agreement between the International Criminal Court and the United Nations".
During the 1970s and 1980s, international human rights and humanitarian Nongovernmental Organizations (or NGOs) began to proliferate at exponential rates. Concurrently, the quest to find a way to punish international crimes shifted from being the exclusive responsibility of legal experts to being shared with international human rights activism.
NGOs helped birth the ICC through advocacy and championing for the prosecution of perpetrators of crimes against humanity. NGOs closely monitor the organization's declarations and actions, ensuring that the work that is being executed on behalf of the ICC is fulfilling its objectives and responsibilities to civil society. According to Benjamin Schiff, "From the Statute Conference onward, the relationship between the ICC and the NGOs has probably been closer, more consistent, and more vital to the Court than have analogous relations between NGOs and any other international organization."
There are a number of NGOs working on a variety of issues related to the ICC. The NGO Coalition for the International Criminal Court has served as a sort of umbrella for NGOs to coordinate with each other on similar objectives related to the ICC. The CICC has 2,500 member organizations in 150 countries. The original steering committee included representatives from the World Federalist Movement, the International Commission of Jurists, Amnesty International, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, Parliamentarians for Global Action, and No Peace Without Justice. Today, many of the NGOs with which the ICC cooperates are members of the CICC. These organizations come from a range of backgrounds, spanning from major international NGOs such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, to smaller, more local organizations focused on peace and justice missions. Many work closely with states, such as the International Criminal Law Network, founded and predominantly funded by the Hague municipality and the Dutch Ministries of Defense and Foreign Affairs. The CICC also claims organizations that are themselves federations, such as the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues (FIDH).
CICC members subscribe to three principles that permit them to work under the umbrella of the CICC, so long as their objectives match them:
The NGOs that work under the CICC do not normally pursue agendas exclusive to the work of the Court, rather they may work for broader causes, such as general human rights issues, victims' rights, gender rights, rule of law, conflict mediation, and peace. The CICC coordinates their efforts to improve the efficiency of NGOs' contributions to the Court and to pool their influence on major common issues. From the ICC side, it has been useful to have the CICC channel NGO contacts with the Court so that its officials do not have to interact individually with thousands of separate organizations.
NGOs have been crucial to the evolution of the ICC, as they assisted in the creation of the normative climate that urged states to seriously consider the Court's formation. Their legal experts helped shape the Statute, while their lobbying efforts built support for it. They advocate Statute ratification globally and work at expert and political levels within member states for passage of necessary domestic legislation. NGOs are greatly represented at meetings for the Assembly of States Parties, and they use the ASP meetings to press for decisions promoting their priorities. Many of these NGOs have reasonable access to important officials at the ICC because of their involvement during the Statute process. They are engaged in monitoring, commenting upon, and assisting in the ICC's activities.
The ICC often depends on NGOs to interact with local populations. The Registry Public Information Office personnel and Victims Participation and Reparations Section officials hold seminars for local leaders, professionals and the media to spread the word about the Court. These are the kinds of events that are often hosted or organized by local NGOs. Because there can be challenges with determining which of these NGOs are legitimate, CICC regional representatives often have the ability to help screen and identify trustworthy organizations.
NGOs are also "sources of criticism, exhortation and pressure upon" the ICC. The ICC heavily depends on NGOs for its operations. Although NGOs and states cannot directly impact the judicial nucleus of the organization, they can impart information on crimes, can help locate victims and witnesses, and can promote and organize victim participation. NGOs outwardly comment on the Court's operations, "push for expansion of its activities especially in the new justice areas of outreach in conflict areas, in victims' participation and reparations, and in upholding due-process standards and defense 'equality of arms' and so implicitly set an agenda for the future evolution of the ICC." The relatively uninterrupted progression of NGO involvement with the ICC may mean that NGOs have become repositories of more institutional historical knowledge about the ICC than its national representatives, and have greater expertise than some of the organization's employees themselves. While NGOs look to mold the ICC to satisfy the interests and priorities that they have worked for since the early 1990s, they unavoidably press against the limits imposed upon the ICC by the states that are members of the organization. NGOs can pursue their own mandates, irrespective of whether they are compatible with those of other NGOs, while the ICC must respond to the complexities of its own mandate as well as those of the states and NGOs.
Another issue has been that NGOs possess "exaggerated senses of their ownership over the organization and, having been vital to and successful in promoting the Court, were not managing to redefine their roles to permit the Court its necessary independence." Additionally, because there does exist such a gap between the large human rights organizations and the smaller peace-oriented organizations, it is difficult for ICC officials to manage and gratify all of their NGOs. "ICC officials recognize that the NGOs pursue their own agendas, and that they will seek to pressure the ICC in the direction of their own priorities rather than necessarily understanding or being fully sympathetic to the myriad constraints and pressures under which the Court operates." Both the ICC and the NGO community avoid criticizing each other publicly or vehemently, although NGOs have released advisory and cautionary messages regarding the ICC. They avoid taking stances that could potentially give the Court's adversaries, particularly the U.S., more motive to berate the organization.
In October 2016, after repeated claims that the court was biased against African states, Burundi, South Africa and the Gambia announced their withdrawals from the Rome Statute. Following Gambia's presidential election later that year, which ended the long rule of Yahya Jammeh, Gambia rescinded its withdrawal notification. A decision by the High Court of South Africa in early 2017 ruled that the attempted withdrawal was unconstitutional, as it had not been agreed by Parliament, prompting the South African government to inform the UN that it was revoking its decision to withdraw.
The ICC has been accused of bias and as being a tool of Western imperialism, only punishing leaders from small, weak states while ignoring crimes committed by richer and more powerful states. This sentiment has been expressed particularly by African leaders due to an alleged disproportionate focus of the Court on Africa, while it claims to have a global mandate. Until January 2016, all nine situations which the ICC had been investigating were in African countries.
African critics have suggested the ICC is acting as a neo-colonial force seeking to further empower Western political and extractive interests in Africa.". Scholar Awol Allo has described the court's underlying problem that has led to these challenges with Africa as not overt racism, but Eurocentrism. Another analysis suggests that African states are motivated by concerns over Africa's place in world order: the problem is the sovereign inequality displayed by the ICC prosecutor's focus.
The prosecution of Kenyan Deputy President William Ruto and President Uhuru Kenyatta (both charged before coming into office) led to the Kenyan parliament passing a motion calling for Kenya's withdrawal from the ICC, and the country called on the other 33 African states party to the ICC to withdraw their support, an issue which was discussed at a special African Union (AU) summit in October 2013.
Though the ICC has denied the charge of disproportionately targeting African leaders, and claims to stand up for victims wherever they may be, Kenya was not alone in criticising the ICC. Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir visited Kenya, South Africa, China, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Ethiopia, Qatar and several other countries despite an outstanding ICC warrant for his arrest but was not arrested; he said that the charges against him are "exaggerated" and that the ICC was a part of a "Western plot" against him. Ivory Coast's government opted not to transfer former first lady Simone Gbagbo to the court but to instead try her at home. Rwanda's ambassador to the African Union, Joseph Nsengimana, argued that "It is not only the case of Kenya. We have seen international justice become more and more a political matter." Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni accused the ICC of "mishandling complex African issues". Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, at the time AU chairman, told the UN General Assembly at the General debate of the sixty-eighth session of the United Nations General Assembly: "The manner in which the ICC has been operating has left a very bad impression in Africa. It is totally unacceptable."
South African President Jacob Zuma said the perceptions of the ICC as "unreasonable" led to the calling of the special AU summit on 13 October 2015. Botswana is a notable supporter of the ICC in Africa. At the summit, the AU did not endorse the proposal for a collective withdrawal from the ICC due to lack of support for the idea. The summit concluded that serving heads of state should not be put on trial and that the Kenyan cases should be deferred. Ethiopian formerly Foreign Minister Tedros Adhanom said: "We have rejected the double standard that the ICC is applying in dispensing international justice." Despite these calls, the ICC went ahead with requiring William Ruto to attend his trial. The UNSC was then asked to consider deferring the trials of Kenyatta and Ruto for a year, but this was rejected. In November, the ICC's Assembly of State Parties responded to Kenya's calls for an exemption for sitting heads of state by agreeing to consider amendments to the Rome Statute to address the concerns.
On 7 October 2016, Burundi announced that it would leave the ICC, after the court began investigating political violence in that nation. In the subsequent two weeks, South Africa and Gambia also announced their intention to leave the court, with Kenya and Namibia reportedly also considering departure. All three nations cited the fact that all 39 people indicted by the court over its history have been African and that the court has made no effort to investigate war crimes tied to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Following Gambia's presidential election later that year, which ended the long rule of Yahya Jammeh, Gambia rescinded its withdrawal notification. The High Court of South Africa ruled on 2 February 2017 that the South African government's notice to withdraw was unconstitutional and invalid. On 7 March 2017 the South African government formally revoked its intention to withdraw. The ruling ANC revealed on 5 July 2017 that its intention to withdraw stands.
Following the announcement that the ICC would open a preliminary investigation on the Philippines in connection to its escalating drug war, President Rodrigo Duterte announced on 14 March 2018 that the Philippines would start to submit plans to withdraw, completing the process on 17 March 2019. The ICC pointed out that it retained jurisdiction over the Philippines during the period when it was a state party to the Rome Statute, from November 2011 to March 2019.
In March 2023, Dmitry Peskov announced that Russia did not recognize the Court's decision to issue an arrest warrant for President Vladimir Putin on account of war crimes in Ukraine and noted that Russia, like many other countries, did not recognise the jurisdiction of the ICC saying "And accordingly, any decisions of this kind are null and void for the Russian Federation from the point of view of law."
The Russian parliament speaker Vyacheslav Volodin replied on Telegram "Yankees, hands off Putin!" calling the move evidence of Western "hysteria", "We regard any attacks on the President of the Russian Federation as aggression against our country", he said.
South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor criticized the ICC for not having what she called an "evenhanded approach" to all leaders responsible for violations of international law. South Africa, which failed in its obligation to arrest visiting Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir in June 2015, invited Vladimir Putin to the 15th BRICS Summit in Durban. On July 19, 2023, South Africa announced that "by mutual agreement" Putin would not attend the summit. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will attend in Putin's place.
In the months following the arrest warrant for Putin being issued, Russia issued warrants for the arrest of multiple ICC officials, including the court's president Piotr Hofmański and its vice-president Luz del Carmen Ibáñez Carranza.
President George W. Bush signed the American Service-Members' Protection Act, (informally referred to as The Hague Invasion Act), to signify the United States' opposition to any possible future jurisdiction of the court or its tribunals. The act gives the President the power to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court". During the administration of Barack Obama, U.S. opposition to the ICC evolved to "positive engagement", although no effort was made to ratify the Rome Statute.
The subsequent Donald Trump administration was considerably more hostile to the Court, similar to the Bush administration threatening prosecution and financial sanctions on ICC judges and staff in U.S. courts as well as imposing visa bans in response to any investigation against American nationals in connection to alleged crimes and atrocities perpetrated by the U.S. in Afghanistan. The threat included sanctions against any of over 120 countries which have ratified the Court for cooperating in the process. In November 2017, Fatou Bensouda advised the court to consider seeking charges for human rights abuses committed during the War in Afghanistan such as alleged rapes and tortures by the U.S. Armed Forces and the Central Intelligence Agency, crime against humanity committed by the Taliban, and war crimes committed by the Afghan National Security Forces. John Bolton, National Security Advisor of the United States, stated that ICC Court had no jurisdiction over the U.S., which did not ratify the Rome Statute. In 2020, overturning the previous decision not to proceed, senior judges at the ICC authorized an investigation into the alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.
In June 2020, the decision to proceed led the Trump administration to empower an economic and legal attack on the court. "The US government has reason to doubt the honesty of the ICC. The Department of Justice has received substantial credible information that raises serious concerns about a long history of financial corruption and malfeasance at the highest levels of the office of the prosecutor", Attorney General William Barr stated. The ICC responded with a statement expressing "profound regret at the announcement of further threats and coercive actions." "These attacks constitute an escalation and an unacceptable attempt to interfere with the rule of law and the Court's judicial proceedings", the statement said. "They are announced with the declared aim of influencing the actions of ICC officials in the context of the court's independent and objective investigations and impartial judicial proceedings."
On 30 September 2020, prominent United States human rights lawyers announced that they would sue Trump and his Administration—including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin, attorney general William Barr, and OFAC director Andrea Gacki, and the departments they head—on the grounds that Trump's Executive Order 13928 order had gagged them, violating their right to free speech and impeding their work in trying to obtain justice on behalf of victims of war crimes. One of the plaintiffs, Diane Marie Amann, stated that, as a result of sanctions against the chief prosecutor at the ICC, she herself risked having her family assets seized if she continued to work for children who are bought and sold by traffickers, killed, tortured, sexually abused and forced to become child soldiers.
On 4 January 2021, U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla in New York City issued a preliminary injunction against the Trump administration from imposing criminal or civil penalties against ICC personnel and those who support the court's work, including the plaintiffs.
The United States Department of State argues that there are "insufficient checks and balances on the authority of the ICC prosecutor and judges" and "insufficient protection against politicized prosecutions or other abuses". The current law in the United States on the ICC is the American Service-Members' Protection Act (ASPA), 116 Stat. 820. The ASPA authorizes the President of the United States to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court". This authorization has led the act to be nicknamed the "Hague Invasion Act", because the freeing of U.S. citizens by force might be possible only through military action.
On 10 September 2018, John R. Bolton, in his first major address as U.S. National Security Advisor, reiterated that the ICC lacks checks and balances, exercises "jurisdiction over crimes that have disputed and ambiguous definitions", and has failed to "deter and punish atrocity crimes". The ICC, Bolton said, was "superfluous", given that "domestic judicial systems already hold American citizens to the highest legal and ethical standards". He added that the U.S. would do everything "to protect our citizens" should the ICC attempt to prosecute U.S. servicemen over alleged detainee abuse in Afghanistan. In that event, ICC judges and prosecutors would be barred from entering the U.S., their funds in the U.S. would be sanctioned and the U.S. "will prosecute them in the U.S. criminal system. We will do the same for any company or state that assists an ICC investigation of Americans", Bolton said. He also criticized Palestinian efforts to bring Israel before the ICC over allegations of human rights abuses in the West Bank and Gaza.
The ICC responded that it will continue to investigate war crimes undeterred.
On 11 June 2020, Mike Pompeo and U.S. President Donald Trump announced sanctions on officials and employees, as well as their families, involved in investigating alleged crimes against humanity committed by U.S. armed forces in Afghanistan. This move was widely criticized by human rights groups. The U.S. ordered sanctions against the ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, and the ICC's head of Jurisdiction, Complementary, and Cooperation Division, Phakiso Mochochok, for an investigation into alleged war crimes by U.S. forces and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Afghanistan since 2003. The sanctions were subsequently lifted by Antony Blinken in April 2021.
Concerning the independent Office of Public Counsel for the Defence (OPCD), Thomas Lubanga's defence team say they were given a smaller budget than the Prosecutor and that evidence and witness statements were slow to arrive.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that the ICC's prosecutor team takes no account of the roles played by the government in the conflict of Uganda, Rwanda or Congo. This led to a flawed investigation, because the ICC did not reach the conclusion of its verdict after considering the governments' position and actions in the conflict.
Research indicates that prosecutions of leaders who are culpable of international crimes in the ICC makes them less likely to peacefully step down, which can prolong conflicts and incentivize them to make continued use of mass violence. It is also argued that justice is a means to peace: "As a result, the ICC has been used as a means of intervention in ongoing conflicts with the expectation that the indictments, arrests, and trials of elite perpetrators have deterrence and preventive effects for atrocity crimes. Despite these legitimate intentions and great expectations, there is little evidence of the efficacy of justice as a means to peace".
That the ICC cannot mount successful cases without state cooperation is problematic for several reasons. It means that the ICC acts inconsistently in its selection of cases, is prevented from taking on hard cases and loses legitimacy. It also gives the ICC less deterrent value, as potential perpetrators of war crimes know that they can avoid ICC judgment by taking over government and refusing to cooperate.
The fundamental principle of complementarity of the ICC Rome Statute is often taken for granted in the legal analysis of international criminal law and its jurisprudence. Initially the thorny issue of the actual application of the complementarity principle arose in 2008, when William Schabas published his influential paper. No substantive research was made by other scholars on this issue for quite some time. In June 2017, Victor Tsilonis advanced the same criticism which is reinforced by events, practices of the Office of the Prosecutor and ICC cases in the Essays in Honour of Nestor Courakis. His paper essentially argues that the Αl‐Senussi case arguably is the first instance of the complementarity principle's actual implementation eleven whole years after the ratification of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
On the other hand, in 2017, Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda invoked the principle of complementarity in the situation between Russia and Georgia in the Ossetia region. Moreover, following the threats of certain African states (initially Burundi, Gambia and South Africa) to withdraw their ratifications, Bensouda again referred to the principle of complementarity as a core principle of ICC's jurisdiction and has more extensively focused on the principle's application on the latest Office of The Prosecutor's Report on Preliminary Examination Activities 2016.
Some advocates have suggested that the ICC go "beyond complementarity" and systematically support national capacity for prosecutions. They argue that national prosecutions, where possible, are more cost-effective, preferable to victims and more sustainable.
There is a debate on whether the ICC should have jurisdiction over corporations that violate international law. Supporters argue that corporations can and do commit human rights violations, such as war crimes linked to raw materials in conflict zones. Critics argue that prosecuting corporations would compromise the principle of complementarity, that it would give corporations excessive power under international law, or that it would compromise voluntary initiatives by companies. John Ruggie has argued that jurisdiction of corporations under international law should be limited to international crimes, while Nicolás Carrillo-Santarelli of La Sabana University argues that it should cover all human rights violations.
Despite its lack of jurisdiction, the ICC announced in 2016 that it would prioritize criminal cases linked to land grabbing, illegal resource extraction, or environmental degradation caused by corporate activity. The proposed crime of ecocide would have jurisdiction over corporations as well as governments. Supporters of criminalizing ecocide argue that it would shift the ICC's priorities away from Africa, since most environmental degradation is caused by states and corporations in the Global North. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The International Criminal Court (ICC or ICCt) is an intergovernmental organization and international tribunal seated in The Hague, Netherlands. It is the first and only permanent international court with jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for the international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression. The ICC is distinct from the International Court of Justice, an organ of the United Nations that hears disputes between states.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Established in 2002 pursuant to the multilateral Rome Statute, the ICC is considered by its proponents to be a major step toward justice, and an innovation in international law and human rights. However, it has faced a number of criticisms from governments and civil society groups, including objections to its jurisdiction, accusations of bias, Eurocentrism and racism, questioning of the fairness of its case selection and trial procedures, and doubts about its effectiveness.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The establishment of an international tribunal to judge political leaders accused of international crimes was first proposed during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 following the First World War by the Commission of Responsibilities. The issue was addressed again at a conference held in Geneva under the auspices of the League of Nations in 1937, which resulted in the conclusion of the first convention stipulating the establishment of a permanent international court to try acts of international terrorism. The convention was signed by 13 states, but none ratified it and the convention never entered into force.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Following the Second World War, the allied powers established two ad hoc tribunals to prosecute Axis leaders accused of war crimes. The International Military Tribunal, which sat in Nuremberg, prosecuted German leaders while the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo prosecuted Japanese leaders. In 1948 the United Nations General Assembly first recognised the need for a permanent international court to deal with atrocities of the kind prosecuted after World War II. At the request of the General Assembly, the International Law Commission (ILC) drafted two statutes by the early 1950s but these were shelved during the Cold War, which made the establishment of an international criminal court politically unrealistic.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Benjamin B. Ferencz, an investigator of Nazi war crimes after World War II and the Chief Prosecutor for the United States Army at the Einsatzgruppen trial, became a vocal advocate of the establishment of international rule of law and of an international criminal court. In his book Defining International Aggression: The Search for World Peace (1975), he advocated for the establishment of such a court. Another leading proponent was Robert Kurt Woetzel, a German-born professor of international law, who co-edited Toward a Feasible International Criminal Court in 1970 and created the Foundation for the Establishment of an International Criminal Court in 1971.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In June 1989, the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, A. N. R. Robinson, revived the idea of a permanent international criminal court by proposing the creation of tribunal to address the illegal drug trade. In response, the General Assembly tasked the ILC with once again drafting a statute for a permanent court.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "While work began on the draft, the UN Security Council established two ad hoc tribunals in the early 1990s: The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, created in 1993 in response to large-scale atrocities committed by armed forces during the Yugoslav Wars, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, created in 1994 following the Rwandan genocide. The creation of these tribunals further highlighted to many the need for a permanent international criminal court.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In 1994, the ILC presented its final draft statute for the International Criminal Court to the General Assembly and recommended that a conference be convened to negotiate a treaty that would serve as the Court's statute.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "To consider major substantive issues in the draft statute, the General Assembly established the Ad Hoc Committee on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court, which met twice in 1995. After considering the Committee's report, the General Assembly created the Preparatory Committee on the Establishment of the ICC to prepare a consolidated draft text.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "From 1996 to 1998, six sessions of the Preparatory Committee were held at the United Nations headquarters in New York City, during which NGOs provided input and attended meetings under the umbrella organisation of the Coalition for the International Criminal Court (CICC). In January 1998, the Bureau and coordinators of the Preparatory Committee convened for an Inter-Sessional meeting in Zutphen in the Netherlands to technically consolidate and restructure the draft articles into a draft.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Finally, the General Assembly convened a conference in Rome in June 1998, with the aim of finalizing the treaty to serve as the Court's statute. On 17 July 1998, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was adopted by a vote of 120 to seven, with 21 countries abstaining. The seven countries that voted against the treaty were China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar, the U.S., and Yemen.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Israel's opposition to the treaty stemmed from the inclusion in the list of war crimes \"the action of transferring population into occupied territory\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The UN General Assembly voted on 9 December 1999 and again on 12 December 2000 to endorse the ICC.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Following 60 ratifications, the Rome Statute entered into force on 1 July 2002 and the International Criminal Court was formally established.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The first bench of 18 judges was elected by the Assembly of States Parties in February 2003. They were sworn in at the inaugural session of the Court on 11 March 2003.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The Court issued its first arrest warrants on 8 July 2005, and the first pre-trial hearings were held in 2006.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The Court issued its first judgment in 2012 when it found Congolese rebel leader Thomas Lubanga Dyilo guilty of war crimes related to using child soldiers. Lubanga was sentenced to 14 years in prison.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In 2010, the states parties of the Rome Statute held the first Review Conference of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in Kampala, Uganda. The Review Conference led to the adoption of two resolutions that amended the crimes under the jurisdiction of the Court. Resolution 5 amended Article 8 on war crimes, criminalizing the use of certain kinds of weapons in non-international conflicts whose use was already forbidden in international conflicts. Resolution 6, pursuant to Article 5(2) of the Statute, provided the definition and a procedure for jurisdiction over the crime of aggression.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The ICC has four principal organs: the Presidency, the Judicial Divisions, the Office of the Prosecutor and the Registry.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The ICC employs over 900 personnel from roughly 100 countries and conducts proceedings in English and French.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The ICC began operations on 1 July 2002, upon the entry into force of the Rome Statute, a multilateral treaty that serves as the court's charter and governing document. States which become party to the Rome Statute become members of the ICC, serving on the Assembly of States Parties, which administers the court. As of November 2023, there are 124 ICC member states; 41 states have neither signed nor become parties to the Rome Statute.",
"title": "Operation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Intended to serve as the \"court of last resort\", the ICC complements existing national judicial systems and may exercise its jurisdiction only when national courts are unwilling or unable to prosecute criminals. It lacks universal territorial jurisdiction and may only investigate and prosecute crimes committed within member states, crimes committed by nationals of member states, or crimes in situations referred to the Court by the United Nations Security Council.",
"title": "Operation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The ICC held its first hearing in 2006, concerning war crimes charges against Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, a Congolese warlord accused of recruiting child soldiers; his subsequent conviction in 2012 was the first in the court's history. The Office of the Prosecutor has opened twelve official investigations and is conducting an additional nine preliminary examinations.",
"title": "Operation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Dozens of individuals have been indicted in the ICC, including Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony, former President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya, Libyan head of state Muammar Gaddafi, President Laurent Gbagbo of Ivory Coast and former Vice President Jean-Pierre Bemba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.",
"title": "Operation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "On 17 March 2023, ICC judges issued arrest warrants for Russian leader Vladimir Putin and the Presidential Commissioner for Children's Rights in Russia Maria Lvova-Belova for child abductions in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Putin became the first head of state of a U.N. Security Council Permanent Member to be the subject of an ICC arrest warrant. Although Russia withdrew its signature from the Rome Statute in 2016, and is thus not a participant in the ICC nor under its jurisdiction, Putin can be charged for actions against Ukraine, which is not a party but has accepted jurisdiction of the court since 2014. Should Putin travel to a state party, he can be arrested by local authorities. Later in 2023 Russia's ministry of internal affairs retaliated by placing several ICC officials on its wanted list.",
"title": "Operation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The ICC is governed by the Assembly of States Parties, which is made up of the states that are party to the Rome Statute. The Assembly elects officials of the Court, approves its budget, and adopts amendments to the Rome Statute. The Court itself has four organs: the Presidency, the Judicial Divisions, the Office of the Prosecutor, and the Registry.",
"title": "Structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "As of November 2019, 123 states are parties to the Statute of the Court, including all the countries of South America, nearly all of Europe, most of Oceania and roughly half of Africa. Burundi and the Philippines were member states, but later withdrew effective 27 October 2017 and 17 March 2019, respectively. A further 31 countries have signed but not ratified the Rome Statute. The law of treaties obliges these states to refrain from \"acts which would defeat the object and purpose\" of the treaty until they declare they do not intend to become a party to the treaty. Four signatory states—Israel in 2002, the United States on 6 May 2002, Sudan on 26 August 2008, and Russia on 30 November 2016—have informed the UN Secretary General that they no longer intend to become states parties and, as such, have no legal obligations arising from their signature of the Statute.",
"title": "Structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Forty-one additional states have neither signed nor acceded to the Rome Statute. Some of them, including China and India, are critical of the Court. Ukraine, a non-ratifying signatory, has accepted the Court's jurisdiction for a period starting in 2013.",
"title": "Structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The Court's management oversight and legislative body, the Assembly of States Parties, consists of one representative from each state party. Each state party has one vote and \"every effort\" has to be made to reach decisions by consensus. If consensus cannot be reached, decisions are made by vote. The Assembly is presided over by a president and two vice-presidents, who are elected by the members to three-year terms.",
"title": "Structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The Assembly meets in full session once a year, alternating between New York and The Hague, and may also hold special sessions where circumstances require. Sessions are open to observer states and non-governmental organizations.",
"title": "Structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The Assembly elects the judges and prosecutors, decides the Court's budget, adopts important texts (such as the Rules of Procedure and Evidence), and provides management oversight to the other organs of the Court.< Article 46 of the Rome Statute allows the Assembly to remove from office a judge or prosecutor who \"is found to have committed serious misconduct or a serious breach of his or her duties\" or \"is unable to exercise the functions required by this Statute\".",
"title": "Structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The states parties cannot interfere with the judicial functions of the Court. Disputes concerning individual cases are settled by the Judicial Divisions.",
"title": "Structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In 2010, Kampala, Uganda hosted the Assembly's Rome Statute Review Conference.",
"title": "Structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The Court has four organs: the Presidency, the Judicial Division, the Office of the Prosecutor, and the Registry.",
"title": "Structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The Presidency is responsible for the proper administration of the Court (apart from the Office of the Prosecutor). It comprises the President and the First and Second Vice-Presidents—three judges of the Court who are elected to the Presidency by their fellow judges for a maximum of two three-year terms.",
"title": "Structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "As of March 2021, the President is Piotr Hofmański from Poland, who took office on 11 March 2021, succeeding Chile Eboe-Osuji. His first term will expire in 2024.",
"title": "Structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The Judicial Divisions consist of the 18 judges of the Court, organized into three chambers—the Pre-Trial Chamber, Trial Chamber and Appeals Chamber—which carry out the judicial functions of the Court. Judges are elected to the Court by the Assembly of States Parties. They serve nine-year terms and are not generally eligible for re-election. All judges must be nationals of states parties to the Rome Statute, and no two judges may be nationals of the same state. They must be \"persons of high moral character, impartiality and integrity who possess the qualifications required in their respective States for appointment to the highest judicial offices\".",
"title": "Structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The Prosecutor or any person being investigated or prosecuted may request the disqualification of a judge from \"any case in which his or her impartiality might reasonably be doubted on any ground\". Any request for the disqualification of a judge from a particular case is decided by an absolute majority of the other judges. Judges may be removed from office if \"found to have committed serious misconduct or a serious breach of his or her duties\" or is unable to exercise his or her functions. The removal of a judge requires both a two-thirds majority of the other judges and a two-thirds majority of the states parties.",
"title": "Structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) is responsible for conducting investigations and prosecutions. It is headed by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, who is assisted by one or more Deputy Prosecutors. The Rome Statute provides that the Office of the Prosecutor shall act independently; as such, no member of the Office may seek or act on instructions from any external source, such as states, international organisations, non-governmental organisations or individuals.",
"title": "Structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The Prosecutor may open an investigation under three circumstances:",
"title": "Structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Any person being investigated or prosecuted may request the disqualification of a prosecutor from any case \"in which their impartiality might reasonably be doubted on any ground\".< Requests for the disqualification of prosecutors are decided by the Appeals Chamber. A prosecutor may be removed from office by an absolute majority of the states parties through a finding \"to have committed serious misconduct or a serious breach of his or her duties\" or is unable to exercise his or her functions. One critic said there are \"insufficient checks and balances on the authority of the ICC prosecutor and judges\" and \"insufficient protection against politicized prosecutions or other abuses\". Luis Moreno-Ocampo, chief ICC prosecutor, stressed in 2011 the importance of politics in prosecutions: \"You cannot say al-Bashir is in London, arrest him. You need a political agreement.\" Henry Kissinger says the checks and balances are so weak that the prosecutor \"has virtually unlimited discretion in practice\".",
"title": "Structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Lead prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo of Argentina, in office from 2003 to 2012, was succeeded in the role by Fatou Bensouda of Gambia, who served from 16 June 2012 to 16 June 2021 (she was elected to the nine-year term on 12 December 2011).",
"title": "Structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "On 12 February 2021, British barrister Karim Khan was selected in a secret ballot against three other candidates to serve as lead prosecutor as of 16 June 2021. As British barrister, Khan had headed the United Nations' special investigative team when it looked into Islamic State crimes in Iraq. At the ICC, he had been lead defense counsel on cases from Kenya, Sudan and Libya.",
"title": "Structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "A Policy Paper is a document occasionally published by the Office of the Prosecutor which puts forth the considerations given to the topics the office focuses on, and often the criteria for case selection. While a policy paper does not give the Court jurisdiction over a new category of crimes, it promises what the Office of Prosecutor will consider when selecting cases in the upcoming term of service. OTP's policy papers are subject to revision.",
"title": "Structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The five following Policy Papers have been published since the start of the ICC:",
"title": "Structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The Policy Paper published in September 2016 announced that the ICC will focus on environmental crimes when selecting the cases. According to this document, the Office will give particular consideration to prosecuting Rome Statute crimes that are committed by means of, or that result in, \"inter alia, the destruction of the environment, the illegal exploitation of natural resources or the illegal dispossession of land\".",
"title": "Structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "This has been interpreted as a major shift in environmental law and a move with significant effects.",
"title": "Structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The Registry is responsible for the non-judicial aspects of the administration and servicing of the Court. This includes, among other things, \"the administration of legal aid matters, court management, victims and witnesses matters, defence counsel, detention unit, and the traditional services provided by administrations in international organisations, such as finance, translation, building management, procurement and personnel\". The Registry is headed by the Registrar, who is elected by the judges to a five-year term. As of April 2023 the Registrar is Osvaldo Zavala Giler.",
"title": "Structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The process to establish the Court's jurisdiction may be \"triggered\" by any one of three possible sources: (1) a State party, (2) the Security Council or (3) a Prosecutor. It is then up to the Prosecutor acting ex proprio motu (\"of his own motion\" so to speak) to initiate an investigation under the requirements of Article 15 of the Rome Statute. The procedure is slightly different when referred by a State Party or the Security Council, in which cases the Prosecutor does not need authorization of the Pre-Trial Chamber to initiate the investigation. Where there is a reasonable basis to proceed, it is mandatory for the Prosecutor to initiate an investigation. The factors listed in Article 53 considered for reasonable basis include whether the case would be admissible, and whether there are substantial reasons to believe that an investigation would not serve the interests of justice (the latter stipulates balancing against the gravity of the crime and the interests of the victims).",
"title": "Process"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The Court's subject-matter jurisdiction means the crimes for which individuals can be prosecuted. Individuals can only be prosecuted for crimes that are listed in the Statute. The primary crimes are listed in article 5 of the Statute and defined in later articles: genocide (defined in article 6), crimes against humanity (defined in article 7), war crimes (defined in article 8), and crimes of aggression (defined in article 8 bis) (since 2018). In addition, article 70 defines offences against the administration of justice, which is a fifth category of crime for which individuals can be prosecuted.",
"title": "Crimes for which individuals can be prosecuted"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Article 6 defines the crime of genocide as \"acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.\" There are five such acts which constitute crimes of genocide under article 6:",
"title": "Crimes for which individuals can be prosecuted"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "The definition of these crimes is identical to those contained within the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948.",
"title": "Crimes for which individuals can be prosecuted"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Article 7 defines crimes against humanity as acts \"committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack\". The article lists 16 such as individual crimes:",
"title": "Crimes for which individuals can be prosecuted"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Article 8 defines war crimes depending on whether an armed conflict is either international (which generally means it is fought between states) or non-international (which generally means that it is fought between non-state actors, such as rebel groups, or between a state and such non-state actors). In total there are 74 war crimes listed in article 8. The most serious crimes constitute either grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which only apply to international conflicts, and serious violations of article 3 common to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which apply to non-international conflicts.",
"title": "Crimes for which individuals can be prosecuted"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Eleven crimes constitute grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and apply only to international armed conflicts:",
"title": "Crimes for which individuals can be prosecuted"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Seven crimes constitute serious violations of article 3 common to the Geneva Conventions and apply only to non-international armed conflicts:",
"title": "Crimes for which individuals can be prosecuted"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Another 56 crimes defined by article 8: 35 apply to international armed conflicts and 21 to non-international armed conflicts. Such crimes include attacking civilians or civilian objects, attacking peacekeepers, causing excessive incidental death or damage, transferring populations into occupied territories, treacherously killing or wounding, denying quarter, pillaging, employing poison, using expanding bullets, rape and other forms of sexual violence, and conscripting or using child soldiers.",
"title": "Crimes for which individuals can be prosecuted"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Article 8 bis defines crimes of aggression. The Statute originally provided that the Court could not exercise its jurisdiction over the crime of aggression until such time as the states parties agreed on a definition of the crime and set out the conditions under which it could be prosecuted. Such an amendment was adopted at the first review conference of the ICC in Kampala, Uganda, in June 2010. This amendment specified that the ICC would not be allowed to exercise jurisdiction of the crime of aggression until two further conditions had been satisfied: (1) the amendment has entered into force for 30 states parties and (2) on or after 1 January 2017, the Assembly of States Parties has voted in favor of allowing the Court to exercise jurisdiction. On 26 June 2016 the first condition was satisfied and the state parties voted in favor of allowing the Court to exercise jurisdiction on 14 December 2017. The Court's jurisdiction to prosecute crimes of aggression was accordingly activated on 17 July 2018.",
"title": "Crimes for which individuals can be prosecuted"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The Statute, as amended, defines the crime of aggression as \"the planning, preparation, initiation or execution, by a person in a position effectively to exercise control over or to direct the political or military action of a State, of an act of aggression which, by its character, gravity and scale, constitutes a manifest violation of the Charter of the United Nations.\" The Statute defines an \"act of aggression\" as \"the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations.\" The article also contains a list of seven acts of aggression, which are identical to those in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3314 of 1974 and include the following acts when committed by one state against another state:",
"title": "Crimes for which individuals can be prosecuted"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Article 70 criminalizes certain intentional acts which interfere with investigations and proceedings before the Court, including giving false testimony, presenting false evidence, corruptly influencing a witness or official of the Court, retaliating against an official of the Court, and soliciting or accepting bribes as an official of the Court.",
"title": "Crimes for which individuals can be prosecuted"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The Rome Statute requires that several criteria exist in a particular case before an individual can be prosecuted by the Court. The Statute contains three jurisdictional requirements and three admissibility requirements. All criteria must be met for a case to proceed. The three jurisdictional requirements are (1) subject-matter jurisdiction (what acts constitute crimes), (2) territorial or personal jurisdiction (where the crimes were committed or who committed them), and (3) temporal jurisdiction (when the crimes were committed).",
"title": "Jurisdiction and admissibility"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "For an individual to be prosecuted by the Court either territorial jurisdiction or personal jurisdiction must exist. Therefore, an individual can only be prosecuted if he or she has either (1) committed a crime within the territorial jurisdiction of the Court or (2) committed a crime while being a national of a state that is within the territorial jurisdiction of the Court.",
"title": "Jurisdiction and admissibility"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "The territorial jurisdiction of the Court includes the territory, registered vessels, and registered aircraft of states which have either (1) become party to the Rome Statute or (2) accepted the Court's jurisdiction by filing a declaration with the Court.",
"title": "Jurisdiction and admissibility"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "In situations that are referred to the Court by the United Nations Security Council, the territorial jurisdiction is defined by the Security Council, which may be more expansive than the Court's normal territorial jurisdiction. For example, if the Security Council refers a situation that took place in the territory of a state that has both not become party to the Rome Statute and not lodged a declaration with the Court, the Court will still be able to prosecute crimes that occurred within that state.",
"title": "Jurisdiction and admissibility"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "The personal jurisdiction of the Court extends to all natural persons who commit crimes, regardless of where they are located or where the crimes were committed, as long as those individuals are nationals of either (1) states that are party to the Rome Statute or (2) states that have accepted the Court's jurisdiction by filing a declaration with the Court. As with territorial jurisdiction, the personal jurisdiction can be expanded by the Security Council if it refers a situation to the Court.",
"title": "Jurisdiction and admissibility"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Temporal jurisdiction is the time period over which the Court can exercise its powers. No statute of limitations applies to any of the crimes defined in the Statute. This is not completely retroactive. Individuals can only be prosecuted for crimes that took place on or after 1 July 2002, which is the date that the Rome Statute entered into force. If a state became party to the Statute, and therefore a member of the Court, after 1 July 2002, then the Court cannot exercise jurisdiction prior to the membership date for certain cases. For example, if the Statute entered into force for a state on 1 January 2003, the Court could only exercise temporal jurisdiction over crimes that took place in that state or were committed by a national of that state on or after 1 January 2003.",
"title": "Jurisdiction and admissibility"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "To initiate an investigation, the Prosecutor must (1) have a \"reasonable basis to believe that a crime within the jurisdiction of the Court has been or is being committed\", (2) the investigation would be consistent with the principle of complementarity, and (3) the investigation serves the interests of justice.",
"title": "Jurisdiction and admissibility"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "The principle of complementarity means the Court will only prosecute an individual if states are unwilling or unable to prosecute. Therefore, if legitimate national investigations or proceedings into crimes have taken place or are ongoing, the Court will not initiate proceedings. This principle applies regardless of the outcome of national proceedings. Even if an investigation is closed without any criminal charges being filed or if an accused person is acquitted by a national court, the Court will not prosecute an individual for the crime in question so long as it is satisfied that the national proceedings were legitimate. The application of the complementarity principle has recently come under theoretical scrutiny.",
"title": "Jurisdiction and admissibility"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "The Court will only initiate proceedings if a crime is of \"sufficient gravity to justify further action by the Court\".",
"title": "Jurisdiction and admissibility"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "The Prosecutor will initiate an investigation unless there are \"substantial reasons to believe that an investigation would not serve the interests of justice\" when \"[t]aking into account the gravity of the crime and the interests of victims\". Furthermore, even if an investigation has been initiated and there are substantial facts to warrant a prosecution and no other admissibility issues, the Prosecutor must determine whether a prosecution would serve the interests of justice \"taking into account all the circumstances, including the gravity of the crime, the interests of victims and the age or infirmity of the alleged perpetrator, and his or her role in the alleged crime\".",
"title": "Jurisdiction and admissibility"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "The Court has jurisdiction over natural persons. A person who commits a crime within the jurisdiction of the Court is individually responsible and liable for punishment in accordance with the Rome Statute. In accordance with the Rome Statute, a person shall be criminally responsible and liable for punishment for a crime within the jurisdiction of the Court if that person: Commits such a crime, whether as an individual, jointly with another or through another person, regardless of whether that other person is criminally responsible; Orders, solicits or induces the commission of such a crime which in fact occurs or is attempted; For the purpose of facilitating the commission of such a crime, aids, abets or otherwise assists in its commission or its attempted commission, including providing the means for its commission; In any other way contributes to the commission or attempted commission of such a crime by a group of persons acting with a common purpose. In respect of the crime of genocide, directly and publicly incites others to commit genocide; Attempts to commit such a crime by taking action that commences its execution by means of a substantial step, but the crime does not occur because of circumstances independent of the person's intentions",
"title": "Individual criminal responsibility"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Trials are conducted under a hybrid common law and civil law judicial system, but it has been argued the procedural orientation and character of the court is still evolving. A majority of the three judges present, as triers of fact in a bench trial, may reach a decision, which must include a full and reasoned statement. Trials are supposed to be public, but proceedings are often closed, and such exceptions to a public trial have not been enumerated in detail. In camera proceedings are allowed for protection of witnesses or defendants as well as for confidential or sensitive evidence. Hearsay and other indirect evidence is not generally prohibited, but it has been argued the court is guided by hearsay exceptions which are prominent in common law systems. There is no subpoena or other means to compel witnesses to come before the court, although the court has some power to compel testimony of those who chose to come before it, such as fines.",
"title": "Procedure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "The Rome Statute provides that all persons are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt, and establishes certain rights of the accused and persons during investigations. These include the right to be fully informed of the charges against them; the right to have a lawyer appointed, free of charge; the right to a speedy trial; and the right to examine the witnesses against them.",
"title": "Procedure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "To ensure \"equality of arms\" between defence and prosecution teams, the ICC has established an independent Office of Public Counsel for the Defence (OPCD) to provide logistical support, advice and information to defendants and their counsel. The OPCD also helps to safeguard the rights of the accused during the initial stages of an investigation. Thomas Lubanga's defence team said they were given a smaller budget than the Prosecutor and that evidence and witness statements were slow to arrive.",
"title": "Procedure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "One of the great innovations of the Statute of the International Criminal Court and its Rules of Procedure and Evidence is the series of rights granted to victims. For the first time in the history of international criminal justice, victims have the possibility under the Statute to present their views and observations before the Court.",
"title": "Procedure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Participation before the Court may occur at various stages of proceedings and may take different forms, although it will be up to the judges to give directions as to the timing and manner of participation.",
"title": "Procedure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Participation in the Court's proceedings will in most cases take place through a legal representative and will be conducted \"in a manner which is not prejudicial or inconsistent with the rights of the accused and a fair and impartial trial\".",
"title": "Procedure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "The victim-based provisions within the Rome Statute provide victims with the opportunity to have their voices heard and to obtain, where appropriate, some form of reparation for their suffering. It is the aim of this attempted balance between retributive and restorative justice that, it is hoped, will enable the ICC to not only bring criminals to justice but also help the victims themselves obtain some form of justice. Justice for victims before the ICC comprises both procedural and substantive justice, by allowing them to participate and present their views and interests, so that they can help to shape truth, justice and reparations outcomes of the Court.",
"title": "Procedure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Article 43(6) establishes a Victims and Witnesses Unit to provide \"protective measures and security arrangements, counseling and other appropriate assistance for witnesses, victims who appear before the Court, and others who are at risk on account of testimony given by such witnesses.\" Article 68 sets out procedures for the \"Protection of the victims and witnesses and their participation in the proceedings.\" The Court has also established an Office of Public Counsel for Victims, to provide support and assistance to victims and their legal representatives.",
"title": "Procedure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Victims before the International Criminal Court can also claim reparations under Article 75 of the Rome Statute. Reparations can only be claimed when a defendant is convicted and at the discretion of the Court's judges. So far the Court has ordered reparations against Thomas Lubanga. Reparations can include compensation, restitution and rehabilitation, but other forms of reparations may be appropriate for individual, collective or community victims. Article 79 of the Rome Statute establishes a Trust Fund to provide assistance before a reparation order to victims in a situation or to support reparations to victims and their families if the convicted person has no money.",
"title": "Procedure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "One of the principles of international law is that a treaty does not create either obligations or rights for third states without their consent, and this is also enshrined in the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. The cooperation of the non-party states with the ICC is envisioned by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court to be of voluntary nature. States not acceded to the Rome Statute might still be subject to an obligation to cooperate with ICC in certain cases. When a case is referred to the ICC by the UN Security Council all UN member states are obliged to cooperate, since its decisions are binding for all of them. Also, there is an obligation to respect and ensure respect for international humanitarian law, which stems from the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol I, which reflects the absolute nature of international humanitarian law.",
"title": "Procedure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "In relation to cooperation in investigation and evidence gathering, it is implied from the Rome Statute that the consent of a non-party state is a prerequisite for ICC Prosecutor to conduct an investigation within its territory, and it seems that it is even more necessary for him to observe any reasonable conditions raised by that state, since such restrictions exist for states party to the Statute. Taking into account the experience of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (which worked with the principle of the primacy, instead of complementarity) in relation to cooperation, some scholars have expressed their pessimism as to the possibility of ICC to obtain cooperation of non-party states. As for the actions that ICC can take toward non-party states that do not cooperate, the Rome Statute stipulates that the Court may inform the Assembly of States Parties or Security Council, when the matter was referred by it, when non-party state refuses to cooperate after it has entered into an ad hoc arrangement or an agreement with the Court.",
"title": "Procedure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "It is unclear to what extent the ICC is compatible with reconciliation processes that grant amnesty to human rights abusers as part of agreements to end conflict. Article 16 of the Rome Statute allows the Security Council to prevent the Court from investigating or prosecuting a case, and Article 53 allows the Prosecutor the discretion not to initiate an investigation if he or she believes that \"an investigation would not serve the interests of justice\". Former ICC president Philippe Kirsch has said that \"some limited amnesties may be compatible\" with a country's obligations genuinely to investigate or prosecute under the Statute.",
"title": "Procedure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "It is sometimes argued that amnesties are necessary to allow the peaceful transfer of power from abusive regimes. By denying states the right to offer amnesty to human rights abusers, the International Criminal Court may make it more difficult to negotiate an end to conflict and a transition to democracy. For example, the outstanding arrest warrants for four leaders of the Lord's Resistance Army are regarded by some as an obstacle to ending the insurgency in Uganda. Czech politician Marek Benda argues that \"the ICC as a deterrent will in our view only mean the worst dictators will try to retain power at all costs\". The United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross maintain that granting amnesty to those accused of war crimes and other serious crimes is a violation of international law.",
"title": "Procedure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "The official seat of the Court is in The Hague, Netherlands, but its proceedings may take place anywhere.",
"title": "Facilities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "The Court moved into its first permanent premises in The Hague, located at Oude Waalsdorperweg 10, on 14 December 2015. Part of The Hague's International Zone, which also contains the Peace Palace, Europol, Eurojust, ICTY, OPCW and The Hague World Forum, the court facilities are situated on the site of the Alexanderkazerne, a former military barracks, adjacent to the dune landscape on the northern edge of the city. The ICC's detention centre is a short distance away.",
"title": "Facilities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "The land and financing for the new construction were provided by the Netherlands. In addition, the host state organised and financed the architectural design competition which started at the end of 2008.",
"title": "Facilities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Three architects were chosen by an international jury from a total of 171 applicants to enter into further negotiations. The Danish firm schmidt hammer lassen were ultimately selected to design the new premises since its design met all the ICC criteria, such as design quality, sustainability, functionality and costs.",
"title": "Facilities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Demolition of the barracks started in November 2011 and was completed in August 2012. In October 2012 the tendering procedure for the General Contractor was completed and the combination Visser & Smit Bouw and Boele & van Eesteren (\"Courtys\") was selected.",
"title": "Facilities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "The building has a compact footprint and consists of six connected building volumes with a garden motif. The tallest volume with a green façade, placed in the middle of the design, is the Court Tower that accommodates three courtrooms. The rest of the building's volumes accommodate the offices of the different organs of the ICC.",
"title": "Facilities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Until late 2015, the ICC was housed in interim premises in The Hague provided by the Netherlands. Formerly belonging to KPN, the provisional headquarters were located at Maanweg 174 in the east-central portion of the city.",
"title": "Facilities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "The ICC's detention centre accommodates both those convicted by the court and serving sentences as well as those suspects detained pending the outcome of their trial. It comprises twelve cells on the premises of the Scheveningen branch of the Haaglanden Penal Institution, The Hague, close to the ICC's headquarters in the Alexanderkazerne.",
"title": "Facilities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Suspects held by the former International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia were held in the same prison and shared some facilities, like the fitness room, but had no contact with suspects held by the ICC.",
"title": "Facilities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "The ICC maintains a liaison office in New York and field offices in places where it conducts its activities. As of 18 October 2007, the Court had field offices in Kampala, Kinshasa, Bunia, Abéché and Bangui.",
"title": "Facilities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "The ICC is financed by contributions from the states parties. The amount payable by each state party is determined using the same method as the United Nations: each state's contribution is based on the country's capacity to pay, which reflects factors such as a national income and population. The maximum amount a single country can pay in any year is limited to 22% of the Court's budget; Japan paid this amount in 2008.",
"title": "Finance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "The Court spent €80.5 million in 2007. The Assembly of States Parties approved a budget of €90.4 million for 2008, €101.2 million for 2009, and €141.6 million for 2017. As of April 2017, the ICC's staff consisted of 800 persons from approximately 100 states.",
"title": "Finance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "To date, the Prosecutor has opened investigations in fourteen situations: Afghanistan; Burundi; two in the Central African Republic; Côte d'Ivoire; Darfur, Sudan; the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Georgia; Kenya; Libya; Mali; Uganda; Bangladesh/Myanmar, Palestine and Venezuela. Additionally, the Office of the Prosecutor is conducting preliminary examinations in six situations: Colombia; Guinea; Nigeria; the Philippines; Ukraine and Bolivia.",
"title": "Trial history to date"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "The Court's Pre-Trial Chambers have publicly indicted 52 people. Proceedings against 20 are ongoing: 15 are at large as fugitives and five are on trial. Proceedings against 32 have been completed: two are serving sentences, seven have finished sentences, four have been acquitted, seven have had the charges against them dismissed, four have had the charges against them withdrawn, and eight have died before the conclusion of the proceedings against them.",
"title": "Trial history to date"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "Thomas Lubanga, Germain Katanga and Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui were tried by the ICC. Lubanga and Katanga were convicted and sentenced to 14 and 12 years imprisonment, respectively, whereas Chui was acquitted.",
"title": "Trial history to date"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "The judgment of Jean-Pierre Bemba was rendered in March 2016. Bemba was convicted on two counts of crimes against humanity and three counts of war crimes. This marked the first time the ICC convicted someone of sexual violence as they added rape to his conviction. Bemba's convictions were overturned by the Court's Appeal Chamber in June 2018. The Court refused to compensate Bemba for losses suffered by him during his 10 years of imprisonment. It has been argued that this decision raises important questions about the court's present powers.",
"title": "Trial history to date"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "Trials in the Ntaganda case (DR Congo), the Bemba et al. OAJ case and the Laurent Gbagbo-Blé Goudé trial in the Côte d'Ivoire situation are ongoing. The Banda trial in the situation of Darfur, Sudan, was scheduled to begin in 2014 but the start date was vacated.",
"title": "Trial history to date"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "Charges against Ugandan Dominic Ongwen and Malian Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi have been confirmed; as of March 2020 both were awaiting their trials.",
"title": "Trial history to date"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "On 6 July 2020, two Uyghur activist groups filed a complaint with the ICC calling for it to investigate PRC officials for crimes against Uyghurs, including allegations of genocide.",
"title": "Trial history to date"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "On 31 October 2023, the Israeli families of over 34 victims of Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, filed an Article 15 communication with the ICC prosecutor's office urging an investigation into the killings and abductions, and the ICC confirmed the receipt of the filing. Reporters Without Borders also lodged a complaint regarding the deaths of eight Palestinian journalists in the Gaza Strip during Israel's bombardment, as well as an Israeli journalist killed during a surprise attack by Hamas in southern Israel.",
"title": "Trial history to date"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "Currently, the Office of the Prosecutor has opened investigations in Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, Côte d'Ivoire, Darfur in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Libya, Uganda, Bangladesh/Myanmar, Palestine, the Philippines, and Venezuela. Additionally, the Office of the Prosecutor conducted preliminary examinations in situations in Bolivia, Colombia, Guinea, Iraq / the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Georgia, Honduras, South Korea, Ukraine and Venezuela. Preliminary investigations were closed in Gabon; Honduras; registered vessels of Comoros, Greece, and Cambodia; South Korea; and Colombia on events since 1 July 2002. Key: Investigation Investigation pending authorization Preliminary examination ongoing Preliminary examination closed",
"title": "Investigations and preliminary examinations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "Notes",
"title": "Investigations and preliminary examinations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "Notes",
"title": "Investigations and preliminary examinations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "Unlike the International Court of Justice, the ICC is legally independent from the United Nations. The Rome Statute grants certain powers to the United Nations Security Council, which limit its functional independence. Article 13 allows the Security Council to refer to the Court situations that would not otherwise fall under the Court's jurisdiction (as it did in relation to the situations in Darfur and Libya, which the Court could not otherwise have prosecuted as neither Sudan nor Libya are state parties). Article 16 allows the Security Council to require the Court to defer from investigating a case for a period of twelve months. Such a deferral may be renewed indefinitely by the Security Council. This sort of an arrangement gives the ICC some of the advantages inhering in the organs of the United Nations such as using the enforcement powers of the Security Council, but it also creates a risk of being tainted with the political controversies of the Security Council.",
"title": "Relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "The Court cooperates with the UN in many different areas, including the exchange of information and logistical support. The Court reports to the UN each year on its activities, and some meetings of the Assembly of States Parties are held at UN facilities. The relationship between the Court and the UN is governed by a \"Relationship Agreement between the International Criminal Court and the United Nations\".",
"title": "Relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "During the 1970s and 1980s, international human rights and humanitarian Nongovernmental Organizations (or NGOs) began to proliferate at exponential rates. Concurrently, the quest to find a way to punish international crimes shifted from being the exclusive responsibility of legal experts to being shared with international human rights activism.",
"title": "Relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "NGOs helped birth the ICC through advocacy and championing for the prosecution of perpetrators of crimes against humanity. NGOs closely monitor the organization's declarations and actions, ensuring that the work that is being executed on behalf of the ICC is fulfilling its objectives and responsibilities to civil society. According to Benjamin Schiff, \"From the Statute Conference onward, the relationship between the ICC and the NGOs has probably been closer, more consistent, and more vital to the Court than have analogous relations between NGOs and any other international organization.\"",
"title": "Relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "There are a number of NGOs working on a variety of issues related to the ICC. The NGO Coalition for the International Criminal Court has served as a sort of umbrella for NGOs to coordinate with each other on similar objectives related to the ICC. The CICC has 2,500 member organizations in 150 countries. The original steering committee included representatives from the World Federalist Movement, the International Commission of Jurists, Amnesty International, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, Parliamentarians for Global Action, and No Peace Without Justice. Today, many of the NGOs with which the ICC cooperates are members of the CICC. These organizations come from a range of backgrounds, spanning from major international NGOs such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, to smaller, more local organizations focused on peace and justice missions. Many work closely with states, such as the International Criminal Law Network, founded and predominantly funded by the Hague municipality and the Dutch Ministries of Defense and Foreign Affairs. The CICC also claims organizations that are themselves federations, such as the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues (FIDH).",
"title": "Relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "CICC members subscribe to three principles that permit them to work under the umbrella of the CICC, so long as their objectives match them:",
"title": "Relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "The NGOs that work under the CICC do not normally pursue agendas exclusive to the work of the Court, rather they may work for broader causes, such as general human rights issues, victims' rights, gender rights, rule of law, conflict mediation, and peace. The CICC coordinates their efforts to improve the efficiency of NGOs' contributions to the Court and to pool their influence on major common issues. From the ICC side, it has been useful to have the CICC channel NGO contacts with the Court so that its officials do not have to interact individually with thousands of separate organizations.",
"title": "Relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "NGOs have been crucial to the evolution of the ICC, as they assisted in the creation of the normative climate that urged states to seriously consider the Court's formation. Their legal experts helped shape the Statute, while their lobbying efforts built support for it. They advocate Statute ratification globally and work at expert and political levels within member states for passage of necessary domestic legislation. NGOs are greatly represented at meetings for the Assembly of States Parties, and they use the ASP meetings to press for decisions promoting their priorities. Many of these NGOs have reasonable access to important officials at the ICC because of their involvement during the Statute process. They are engaged in monitoring, commenting upon, and assisting in the ICC's activities.",
"title": "Relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "The ICC often depends on NGOs to interact with local populations. The Registry Public Information Office personnel and Victims Participation and Reparations Section officials hold seminars for local leaders, professionals and the media to spread the word about the Court. These are the kinds of events that are often hosted or organized by local NGOs. Because there can be challenges with determining which of these NGOs are legitimate, CICC regional representatives often have the ability to help screen and identify trustworthy organizations.",
"title": "Relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "NGOs are also \"sources of criticism, exhortation and pressure upon\" the ICC. The ICC heavily depends on NGOs for its operations. Although NGOs and states cannot directly impact the judicial nucleus of the organization, they can impart information on crimes, can help locate victims and witnesses, and can promote and organize victim participation. NGOs outwardly comment on the Court's operations, \"push for expansion of its activities especially in the new justice areas of outreach in conflict areas, in victims' participation and reparations, and in upholding due-process standards and defense 'equality of arms' and so implicitly set an agenda for the future evolution of the ICC.\" The relatively uninterrupted progression of NGO involvement with the ICC may mean that NGOs have become repositories of more institutional historical knowledge about the ICC than its national representatives, and have greater expertise than some of the organization's employees themselves. While NGOs look to mold the ICC to satisfy the interests and priorities that they have worked for since the early 1990s, they unavoidably press against the limits imposed upon the ICC by the states that are members of the organization. NGOs can pursue their own mandates, irrespective of whether they are compatible with those of other NGOs, while the ICC must respond to the complexities of its own mandate as well as those of the states and NGOs.",
"title": "Relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "Another issue has been that NGOs possess \"exaggerated senses of their ownership over the organization and, having been vital to and successful in promoting the Court, were not managing to redefine their roles to permit the Court its necessary independence.\" Additionally, because there does exist such a gap between the large human rights organizations and the smaller peace-oriented organizations, it is difficult for ICC officials to manage and gratify all of their NGOs. \"ICC officials recognize that the NGOs pursue their own agendas, and that they will seek to pressure the ICC in the direction of their own priorities rather than necessarily understanding or being fully sympathetic to the myriad constraints and pressures under which the Court operates.\" Both the ICC and the NGO community avoid criticizing each other publicly or vehemently, although NGOs have released advisory and cautionary messages regarding the ICC. They avoid taking stances that could potentially give the Court's adversaries, particularly the U.S., more motive to berate the organization.",
"title": "Relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "In October 2016, after repeated claims that the court was biased against African states, Burundi, South Africa and the Gambia announced their withdrawals from the Rome Statute. Following Gambia's presidential election later that year, which ended the long rule of Yahya Jammeh, Gambia rescinded its withdrawal notification. A decision by the High Court of South Africa in early 2017 ruled that the attempted withdrawal was unconstitutional, as it had not been agreed by Parliament, prompting the South African government to inform the UN that it was revoking its decision to withdraw.",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "The ICC has been accused of bias and as being a tool of Western imperialism, only punishing leaders from small, weak states while ignoring crimes committed by richer and more powerful states. This sentiment has been expressed particularly by African leaders due to an alleged disproportionate focus of the Court on Africa, while it claims to have a global mandate. Until January 2016, all nine situations which the ICC had been investigating were in African countries.",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "African critics have suggested the ICC is acting as a neo-colonial force seeking to further empower Western political and extractive interests in Africa.\". Scholar Awol Allo has described the court's underlying problem that has led to these challenges with Africa as not overt racism, but Eurocentrism. Another analysis suggests that African states are motivated by concerns over Africa's place in world order: the problem is the sovereign inequality displayed by the ICC prosecutor's focus.",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "The prosecution of Kenyan Deputy President William Ruto and President Uhuru Kenyatta (both charged before coming into office) led to the Kenyan parliament passing a motion calling for Kenya's withdrawal from the ICC, and the country called on the other 33 African states party to the ICC to withdraw their support, an issue which was discussed at a special African Union (AU) summit in October 2013.",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "Though the ICC has denied the charge of disproportionately targeting African leaders, and claims to stand up for victims wherever they may be, Kenya was not alone in criticising the ICC. Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir visited Kenya, South Africa, China, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Ethiopia, Qatar and several other countries despite an outstanding ICC warrant for his arrest but was not arrested; he said that the charges against him are \"exaggerated\" and that the ICC was a part of a \"Western plot\" against him. Ivory Coast's government opted not to transfer former first lady Simone Gbagbo to the court but to instead try her at home. Rwanda's ambassador to the African Union, Joseph Nsengimana, argued that \"It is not only the case of Kenya. We have seen international justice become more and more a political matter.\" Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni accused the ICC of \"mishandling complex African issues\". Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, at the time AU chairman, told the UN General Assembly at the General debate of the sixty-eighth session of the United Nations General Assembly: \"The manner in which the ICC has been operating has left a very bad impression in Africa. It is totally unacceptable.\"",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 123,
"text": "South African President Jacob Zuma said the perceptions of the ICC as \"unreasonable\" led to the calling of the special AU summit on 13 October 2015. Botswana is a notable supporter of the ICC in Africa. At the summit, the AU did not endorse the proposal for a collective withdrawal from the ICC due to lack of support for the idea. The summit concluded that serving heads of state should not be put on trial and that the Kenyan cases should be deferred. Ethiopian formerly Foreign Minister Tedros Adhanom said: \"We have rejected the double standard that the ICC is applying in dispensing international justice.\" Despite these calls, the ICC went ahead with requiring William Ruto to attend his trial. The UNSC was then asked to consider deferring the trials of Kenyatta and Ruto for a year, but this was rejected. In November, the ICC's Assembly of State Parties responded to Kenya's calls for an exemption for sitting heads of state by agreeing to consider amendments to the Rome Statute to address the concerns.",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 124,
"text": "On 7 October 2016, Burundi announced that it would leave the ICC, after the court began investigating political violence in that nation. In the subsequent two weeks, South Africa and Gambia also announced their intention to leave the court, with Kenya and Namibia reportedly also considering departure. All three nations cited the fact that all 39 people indicted by the court over its history have been African and that the court has made no effort to investigate war crimes tied to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Following Gambia's presidential election later that year, which ended the long rule of Yahya Jammeh, Gambia rescinded its withdrawal notification. The High Court of South Africa ruled on 2 February 2017 that the South African government's notice to withdraw was unconstitutional and invalid. On 7 March 2017 the South African government formally revoked its intention to withdraw. The ruling ANC revealed on 5 July 2017 that its intention to withdraw stands.",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 125,
"text": "Following the announcement that the ICC would open a preliminary investigation on the Philippines in connection to its escalating drug war, President Rodrigo Duterte announced on 14 March 2018 that the Philippines would start to submit plans to withdraw, completing the process on 17 March 2019. The ICC pointed out that it retained jurisdiction over the Philippines during the period when it was a state party to the Rome Statute, from November 2011 to March 2019.",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 126,
"text": "In March 2023, Dmitry Peskov announced that Russia did not recognize the Court's decision to issue an arrest warrant for President Vladimir Putin on account of war crimes in Ukraine and noted that Russia, like many other countries, did not recognise the jurisdiction of the ICC saying \"And accordingly, any decisions of this kind are null and void for the Russian Federation from the point of view of law.\"",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 127,
"text": "The Russian parliament speaker Vyacheslav Volodin replied on Telegram \"Yankees, hands off Putin!\" calling the move evidence of Western \"hysteria\", \"We regard any attacks on the President of the Russian Federation as aggression against our country\", he said.",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 128,
"text": "South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor criticized the ICC for not having what she called an \"evenhanded approach\" to all leaders responsible for violations of international law. South Africa, which failed in its obligation to arrest visiting Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir in June 2015, invited Vladimir Putin to the 15th BRICS Summit in Durban. On July 19, 2023, South Africa announced that \"by mutual agreement\" Putin would not attend the summit. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will attend in Putin's place.",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 129,
"text": "In the months following the arrest warrant for Putin being issued, Russia issued warrants for the arrest of multiple ICC officials, including the court's president Piotr Hofmański and its vice-president Luz del Carmen Ibáñez Carranza.",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 130,
"text": "President George W. Bush signed the American Service-Members' Protection Act, (informally referred to as The Hague Invasion Act), to signify the United States' opposition to any possible future jurisdiction of the court or its tribunals. The act gives the President the power to use \"all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court\". During the administration of Barack Obama, U.S. opposition to the ICC evolved to \"positive engagement\", although no effort was made to ratify the Rome Statute.",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 131,
"text": "The subsequent Donald Trump administration was considerably more hostile to the Court, similar to the Bush administration threatening prosecution and financial sanctions on ICC judges and staff in U.S. courts as well as imposing visa bans in response to any investigation against American nationals in connection to alleged crimes and atrocities perpetrated by the U.S. in Afghanistan. The threat included sanctions against any of over 120 countries which have ratified the Court for cooperating in the process. In November 2017, Fatou Bensouda advised the court to consider seeking charges for human rights abuses committed during the War in Afghanistan such as alleged rapes and tortures by the U.S. Armed Forces and the Central Intelligence Agency, crime against humanity committed by the Taliban, and war crimes committed by the Afghan National Security Forces. John Bolton, National Security Advisor of the United States, stated that ICC Court had no jurisdiction over the U.S., which did not ratify the Rome Statute. In 2020, overturning the previous decision not to proceed, senior judges at the ICC authorized an investigation into the alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 132,
"text": "In June 2020, the decision to proceed led the Trump administration to empower an economic and legal attack on the court. \"The US government has reason to doubt the honesty of the ICC. The Department of Justice has received substantial credible information that raises serious concerns about a long history of financial corruption and malfeasance at the highest levels of the office of the prosecutor\", Attorney General William Barr stated. The ICC responded with a statement expressing \"profound regret at the announcement of further threats and coercive actions.\" \"These attacks constitute an escalation and an unacceptable attempt to interfere with the rule of law and the Court's judicial proceedings\", the statement said. \"They are announced with the declared aim of influencing the actions of ICC officials in the context of the court's independent and objective investigations and impartial judicial proceedings.\"",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 133,
"text": "On 30 September 2020, prominent United States human rights lawyers announced that they would sue Trump and his Administration—including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin, attorney general William Barr, and OFAC director Andrea Gacki, and the departments they head—on the grounds that Trump's Executive Order 13928 order had gagged them, violating their right to free speech and impeding their work in trying to obtain justice on behalf of victims of war crimes. One of the plaintiffs, Diane Marie Amann, stated that, as a result of sanctions against the chief prosecutor at the ICC, she herself risked having her family assets seized if she continued to work for children who are bought and sold by traffickers, killed, tortured, sexually abused and forced to become child soldiers.",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 134,
"text": "On 4 January 2021, U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla in New York City issued a preliminary injunction against the Trump administration from imposing criminal or civil penalties against ICC personnel and those who support the court's work, including the plaintiffs.",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 135,
"text": "The United States Department of State argues that there are \"insufficient checks and balances on the authority of the ICC prosecutor and judges\" and \"insufficient protection against politicized prosecutions or other abuses\". The current law in the United States on the ICC is the American Service-Members' Protection Act (ASPA), 116 Stat. 820. The ASPA authorizes the President of the United States to use \"all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court\". This authorization has led the act to be nicknamed the \"Hague Invasion Act\", because the freeing of U.S. citizens by force might be possible only through military action.",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 136,
"text": "On 10 September 2018, John R. Bolton, in his first major address as U.S. National Security Advisor, reiterated that the ICC lacks checks and balances, exercises \"jurisdiction over crimes that have disputed and ambiguous definitions\", and has failed to \"deter and punish atrocity crimes\". The ICC, Bolton said, was \"superfluous\", given that \"domestic judicial systems already hold American citizens to the highest legal and ethical standards\". He added that the U.S. would do everything \"to protect our citizens\" should the ICC attempt to prosecute U.S. servicemen over alleged detainee abuse in Afghanistan. In that event, ICC judges and prosecutors would be barred from entering the U.S., their funds in the U.S. would be sanctioned and the U.S. \"will prosecute them in the U.S. criminal system. We will do the same for any company or state that assists an ICC investigation of Americans\", Bolton said. He also criticized Palestinian efforts to bring Israel before the ICC over allegations of human rights abuses in the West Bank and Gaza.",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 137,
"text": "The ICC responded that it will continue to investigate war crimes undeterred.",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 138,
"text": "On 11 June 2020, Mike Pompeo and U.S. President Donald Trump announced sanctions on officials and employees, as well as their families, involved in investigating alleged crimes against humanity committed by U.S. armed forces in Afghanistan. This move was widely criticized by human rights groups. The U.S. ordered sanctions against the ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, and the ICC's head of Jurisdiction, Complementary, and Cooperation Division, Phakiso Mochochok, for an investigation into alleged war crimes by U.S. forces and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Afghanistan since 2003. The sanctions were subsequently lifted by Antony Blinken in April 2021.",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 139,
"text": "Concerning the independent Office of Public Counsel for the Defence (OPCD), Thomas Lubanga's defence team say they were given a smaller budget than the Prosecutor and that evidence and witness statements were slow to arrive.",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 140,
"text": "Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that the ICC's prosecutor team takes no account of the roles played by the government in the conflict of Uganda, Rwanda or Congo. This led to a flawed investigation, because the ICC did not reach the conclusion of its verdict after considering the governments' position and actions in the conflict.",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 141,
"text": "Research indicates that prosecutions of leaders who are culpable of international crimes in the ICC makes them less likely to peacefully step down, which can prolong conflicts and incentivize them to make continued use of mass violence. It is also argued that justice is a means to peace: \"As a result, the ICC has been used as a means of intervention in ongoing conflicts with the expectation that the indictments, arrests, and trials of elite perpetrators have deterrence and preventive effects for atrocity crimes. Despite these legitimate intentions and great expectations, there is little evidence of the efficacy of justice as a means to peace\".",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 142,
"text": "That the ICC cannot mount successful cases without state cooperation is problematic for several reasons. It means that the ICC acts inconsistently in its selection of cases, is prevented from taking on hard cases and loses legitimacy. It also gives the ICC less deterrent value, as potential perpetrators of war crimes know that they can avoid ICC judgment by taking over government and refusing to cooperate.",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 143,
"text": "The fundamental principle of complementarity of the ICC Rome Statute is often taken for granted in the legal analysis of international criminal law and its jurisprudence. Initially the thorny issue of the actual application of the complementarity principle arose in 2008, when William Schabas published his influential paper. No substantive research was made by other scholars on this issue for quite some time. In June 2017, Victor Tsilonis advanced the same criticism which is reinforced by events, practices of the Office of the Prosecutor and ICC cases in the Essays in Honour of Nestor Courakis. His paper essentially argues that the Αl‐Senussi case arguably is the first instance of the complementarity principle's actual implementation eleven whole years after the ratification of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 144,
"text": "On the other hand, in 2017, Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda invoked the principle of complementarity in the situation between Russia and Georgia in the Ossetia region. Moreover, following the threats of certain African states (initially Burundi, Gambia and South Africa) to withdraw their ratifications, Bensouda again referred to the principle of complementarity as a core principle of ICC's jurisdiction and has more extensively focused on the principle's application on the latest Office of The Prosecutor's Report on Preliminary Examination Activities 2016.",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 145,
"text": "Some advocates have suggested that the ICC go \"beyond complementarity\" and systematically support national capacity for prosecutions. They argue that national prosecutions, where possible, are more cost-effective, preferable to victims and more sustainable.",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 146,
"text": "There is a debate on whether the ICC should have jurisdiction over corporations that violate international law. Supporters argue that corporations can and do commit human rights violations, such as war crimes linked to raw materials in conflict zones. Critics argue that prosecuting corporations would compromise the principle of complementarity, that it would give corporations excessive power under international law, or that it would compromise voluntary initiatives by companies. John Ruggie has argued that jurisdiction of corporations under international law should be limited to international crimes, while Nicolás Carrillo-Santarelli of La Sabana University argues that it should cover all human rights violations.",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 147,
"text": "Despite its lack of jurisdiction, the ICC announced in 2016 that it would prioritize criminal cases linked to land grabbing, illegal resource extraction, or environmental degradation caused by corporate activity. The proposed crime of ecocide would have jurisdiction over corporations as well as governments. Supporters of criminalizing ecocide argue that it would shift the ICC's priorities away from Africa, since most environmental degradation is caused by states and corporations in the Global North.",
"title": "Criticisms & opposition"
}
]
| The International Criminal Court is an intergovernmental organization and international tribunal seated in The Hague, Netherlands. It is the first and only permanent international court with jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for the international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression. The ICC is distinct from the International Court of Justice, an organ of the United Nations that hears disputes between states. Established in 2002 pursuant to the multilateral Rome Statute, the ICC is considered by its proponents to be a major step toward justice, and an innovation in international law and human rights. However, it has faced a number of criticisms from governments and civil society groups, including objections to its jurisdiction, accusations of bias, Eurocentrism and racism, questioning of the fairness of its case selection and trial procedures, and doubts about its effectiveness. | 2001-11-14T13:40:00Z | 2023-12-26T15:16:52Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court |
14,881 | ICC | ICC may refer to: | [
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| ICC may refer to: | 2002-02-25T15:43:11Z | 2023-10-13T10:12:35Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC |
14,882 | Incubus (disambiguation) | An incubus is a male demon that has sexual intercourse with sleeping women.
Incubus may also refer to: | [
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| An incubus is a male demon that has sexual intercourse with sleeping women. Incubus may also refer to: | 2023-01-01T00:49:12Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubus_(disambiguation) |
|
14,883 | Iberian Peninsula | The Iberian Peninsula (/aɪˈbɪəriən/), also known as Iberia, is a peninsula in Southwestern Europe, defining the westernmost edge of Eurasia. It is divided between Peninsular Spain and Continental Portugal, comprising most of the region, as well as Andorra, Gibraltar and a small part of Southern France. With an area of approximately 583,254 square kilometres (225,196 sq mi), and a population of roughly 53 million, it is the second-largest European peninsula by area, after the Scandinavian Peninsula.
The word Iberia is a noun adapted from the Latin word "Hiberia" originating in the Ancient Greek word Ἰβηρία (Ibēríā), used by Greek geographers under the rule of the Roman Empire to refer to what is known today in English as the Iberian Peninsula. At that time, the name did not describe a single geographical entity or a distinct population; the same name was used for the Kingdom of Iberia, natively known as Kartli in the Caucasus, the core region of what would later become the Kingdom of Georgia. It was Strabo who first reported the delineation of "Iberia" from Gaul (Keltikē) by the Pyrenees and included the entire land mass southwest (he says "west") from there. With the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the consolidation of romanic languages, the word "Iberia" continued the Roman word "Hiberia" and the Greek word "Ἰβηρία".
The ancient Greeks reached the Iberian Peninsula, of which they had heard from the Phoenicians, by voyaging westward on the Mediterranean. Hecataeus of Miletus was the first known to use the term Iberia, which he wrote about c. 500 BCE. Herodotus of Halicarnassus says of the Phocaeans that "it was they who made the Greeks acquainted with […] Iberia." According to Strabo, prior historians used Iberia to mean the country "this side of the Ἶβηρος" (Ibēros, the Ebro) as far north as the Rhône, but in his day they set the Pyrenees as the limit. Polybius respects that limit, but identifies Iberia as the Mediterranean side as far south as Gibraltar, with the Atlantic side having no name. Elsewhere he says that Saguntum is "on the seaward foot of the range of hills connecting Iberia and Celtiberia."
According to Charles Ebel, the ancient sources in both Latin and Greek use Hispania and Hiberia (Greek: Iberia) as synonyms. The confusion of the words was because of an overlapping in political and geographic perspectives. The Latin word Hiberia, similar to the Greek Iberia, literally translates to "land of the Hiberians". This word was derived from the river Hiberus (now called Ebro or Ebre). Hiber (Iberian) was thus used as a term for peoples living near the river Ebro. The first mention in Roman literature was by the annalist poet Ennius in 200 BCE. Virgil wrote impacatos (H)iberos ("restless Iberi") in his Georgics. The Roman geographers and other prose writers from the time of the late Roman Republic called the entire peninsula Hispania.
In Greek and Roman antiquity, the name Hesperia was used for both the Italian and Iberian Peninsula; in the latter case Hesperia Ultima (referring to its position in the far west) appears as form of disambiguation from the former among Roman writers. Also since Roman antiquity, Jews gave the name Sepharad to the peninsula.
As they became politically interested in the former Carthaginian territories, the Romans began to use the names Hispania Citerior and Hispania Ulterior for 'near' and 'far' Hispania. At the time Hispania was made up of three Roman provinces: Hispania Baetica, Hispania Tarraconensis, and Hispania Lusitania. Strabo says that the Romans use Hispania and Iberia synonymously, distinguishing between the near northern and the far southern provinces. (The name Iberia was ambiguous, being also the name of the Kingdom of Iberia in the Caucasus.)
Whatever languages may generally have been spoken on the peninsula soon gave way to Latin, except for that of the Vascones, which was preserved as a language isolate by the barrier of the Pyrenees.
The modern phrase "Iberian Peninsula" was coined by the French geographer Jean-Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent on his 1823 work "Guide du Voyageur en Espagne". Prior to that date, geographers had used the terms 'Spanish Peninsula' or 'Pyrenaean Peninsula'.
The Iberian Peninsula has always been associated with the River Ebro (Ibēros in ancient Greek and Ibērus or Hibērus in Latin). The association was so well known it was hardly necessary to state; for example, Ibēria was the country "this side of the Ibērus" in Strabo. Pliny goes so far as to assert that the Greeks had called "the whole of Spain" Hiberia because of the Hiberus River. The river appears in the Ebro Treaty of 226 BCE between Rome and Carthage, setting the limit of Carthaginian interest at the Ebro. The fullest description of the treaty, stated in Appian, uses Ibērus. With reference to this border, Polybius states that the "native name" is Ibēr, apparently the original word, stripped of its Greek or Latin -os or -us termination.
The early range of these natives, which geographers and historians place from the present southern Spain to the present southern France along the Mediterranean coast, is marked by instances of a readable script expressing a yet unknown language, dubbed "Iberian". Whether this was the native name or was given to them by the Greeks for their residence near the Ebro remains unknown. Credence in Polybius imposes certain limitations on etymologizing: if the language remains unknown, the meanings of the words, including Iber, must also remain unknown. In modern Basque, the word ibar means "valley" or "watered meadow", while ibai means "river", but there is no proof relating the etymology of the Ebro River with these Basque names.
The Iberian Peninsula has been inhabited by members of the Homo genus for at least 1.2 million years as remains found in the sites in the Atapuerca Mountains demonstrate. Among these sites is the cave of Gran Dolina, where six hominin skeletons, dated between 780,000 and one million years ago, were found in 1994. Experts have debated whether these skeletons belong to the species Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, or a new species called Homo antecessor.
Around 200,000 BP, during the Lower Paleolithic period, Neanderthals first entered the Iberian Peninsula. Around 70,000 BP, during the Middle Paleolithic period, the last glacial event began and the Neanderthal Mousterian culture was established. Around 37,000 BP, during the Upper Paleolithic, the Neanderthal Châtelperronian cultural period began. Emanating from Southern France, this culture extended into the north of the peninsula. It continued to exist until around 30,000 BP, when Neanderthal man faced extinction.
About 40,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans entered the Iberian Peninsula from across the Pyrenees. Haplogroup R1b is common in modern Portuguese and Spanish males. On the Iberian Peninsula, modern humans developed a series of different cultures, such as the Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean and Magdalenian cultures, some of them characterized by the complex forms of the art of the Upper Paleolithic.
During the Neolithic expansion, various megalithic cultures developed in the Iberian Peninsula. An open seas navigation culture from the east Mediterranean, called the Cardium culture, also extended its influence to the eastern coasts of the peninsula, possibly as early as the 5th millennium BCE. These people may have had some relation to the subsequent development of the Iberian civilization.
As is the case for most of the rest of Southern Europe, the principal ancestral origin of modern Iberians are Early European Farmers who arrived during the Neolithic. The large predominance of Y-Chromosome Haplogroup R1b, common throughout Western Europe, is testimony to a considerable input from various waves of (predominantly male) Western Steppe Herders from the Pontic–Caspian steppe during the Bronze Age. Iberia experienced a significant genetic turnover, with 100% of the paternal ancestry and 40% of the overall ancestry being replaced by peoples with steppe-related ancestry.
In the Chalcolithic (c. 3000 BCE), a series of complex cultures developed that would give rise to the peninsula's first civilizations and to extensive exchange networks reaching to the Baltic, Middle East and North Africa. Around 2800 – 2700 BCE, the Beaker culture, which produced the Maritime Bell Beaker, probably originated in the vibrant copper-using communities of the Tagus estuary and spread from there to many parts of western Europe.
Bronze Age cultures developed beginning c. 1800 BCE, when the culture of Los Millares was followed by that of El Argar. During the Early Bronze Age, southeastern Iberia saw the emergence of important settlements, a development that has compelled some archeologists to propose that these settlements indicate the advent of state-level social structures. From this centre, bronze metalworking technology spread to other cultures like the Bronze of Levante, South-Western Iberian Bronze and Las Cogotas.
Preceded by the Chalcolithic sites of Los Millares, the Argaric culture flourished in southeastern Iberia in from 2200 BC to 1550 BC, when depopulation of the area ensued along with disappearing of copper–bronze–arsenic metallurgy. The most accepted model for El Argar has been that of an early state society, most particularly in terms of class division, exploitation, and coercion, with agricultural production, maybe also human labour, controlled by the larger hilltop settlements, and the elite using violence in practical and ideological terms to clamp down on the population. Ecological degradation, landscape opening, fires, pastoralism, and maybe tree cutting for mining have been suggested as reasons for the collapse.
The culture of the motillas developed an early system of groundwater supply plants (the so-called motillas) in the upper Guadiana basin (in the southern meseta) in a context of extreme aridification in the area in the wake of the 4.2-kiloyear climatic event, which roughly coincided with the transition from the Copper Age to the Bronze Age. Increased precipitation and recovery of the water table from about 1800 BC onward should have led to the forsaking of the motillas (which may have flooded) and the redefinition of the relation of the inhabitants of the territory with the environment.
By the Iron Age, starting in the 7th century BCE, the Iberian Peninsula consisted of complex agrarian and urban civilizations, either Pre-Celtic or Celtic (such as the Celtiberians, Gallaeci, Astures, Celtici, Lusitanians and others), the cultures of the Iberians in the eastern and southern zones and the cultures of the Aquitanian in the western portion of the Pyrenees.
As early as the 12th century BCE, the Phoenicians, a thalassocratic civilization originally from the Eastern Mediterranean, began to explore the coastline of the peninsula, interacting with the metal-rich communities in the southwest of the peninsula (contemporarily known as the semi-mythical Tartessos). Around 1100 BCE, Phoenician merchants founded the trading colony of Gadir or Gades (modern day Cádiz). Phoenicians established a permanent trading port in the Gadir colony c. 800 BCE in response to the increasing demand of silver from the Assyrian Empire.
The seafaring Phoenicians, Greeks and Carthaginians successively settled along the Mediterranean coast and founded trading colonies there over a period of several centuries. In the 8th century BCE, the first Greek colonies, such as Emporion (modern Empúries), were founded along the Mediterranean coast on the east, leaving the south coast to the Phoenicians.
Together with the presence of Phoenician and Greek epigraphy, a number of paleohispanic scripts developed in the Iberian Peninsula along the 1st millennium BCE. The development of a primordial paleohispanic script antecessor to the rest of paleohispanic scripts (originally supposed to be a non-redundant semi-syllabary) derived from the Phoenician alphabet and originated in Southwestern Iberia by the 7th century BCE has been tentatively proposed.
In the sixth century BCE, the Carthaginians arrived in the peninsula while struggling with the Greeks for control of the Western Mediterranean. Their most important colony was Carthago Nova (modern-day Cartagena, Spain).
In 218 BCE, during the Second Punic War against the Carthaginians, the first Roman troops occupied the Iberian Peninsula, known to them as Hispania. After 197, the territories of the peninsula most accustomed to external contact and with the most urban tradition (the Mediterranean Coast and the Guadalquivir Valley) were divided by Romans into Hispania Ulterior and Hispania Citerior. Local rebellions were quelled, with a 195 Roman campaign under Cato the Elder ravaging hospots of resistance in the northeastern Ebro Valley and beyond. The threat to Roman interests posed by Celtiberians and Lusitanians in uncontrolled territories lingered in. Further wars of indigenous resistance, such as the Celtiberian Wars and the Lusitanian War, were fought in the 2nd century. Urban growth took place, and population progressively moved from hillforts to the plains.
An example of the interaction of slaving and ecocide, the aftermath of the conquest increased mining extractive processes in the southwest of the peninsula (which required a massive number of forced laborers, initially from Hispania and latter also from the Gallic borderlands and other locations of the Mediterranean), bringing in a far-reaching environmental outcome vis-à-vis long-term global pollution records, with levels of atmospheric pollution from mining across the Mediterranean during Classical Antiquity having no match until the Industrial Revolution.
In addition to mineral extraction (of which the region was the leading supplier in the early Roman world, with production of the likes of gold, silver, copper, lead, and cinnabar), Hispania also produced manufactured goods (sigillata pottery, colourless glass, linen garments) fish and fish sauce (garum), dry crops (such as wheat and, more importantly, esparto), olive oil, and wine.
The process of Romanization spurred on throughout the first century BC. The peninsula was also the battleground of civil wars between rulers of the Roman republic, such as the Sertorian War or the conflict between Caesar and Pompey later in the century.
During their 600-year occupation of the Iberian Peninsula, the Romans introduced the Latin language that influenced many of the languages that exist today in the Iberian peninsula.
In the early fifth century, Germanic peoples occupied the peninsula, namely the Suebi, the Vandals (Silingi and Hasdingi) and their allies, the Alans. Only the kingdom of the Suebi (Quadi and Marcomanni) would endure after the arrival of another wave of Germanic invaders, the Visigoths, who occupied all of the Iberian Peninsula and expelled or partially integrated the Vandals and the Alans. The Visigoths eventually occupied the Suebi kingdom and its capital city, Bracara (modern day Braga), in 584–585. They would also occupy the province of the Byzantine Empire (552–624) of Spania in the south of the peninsula. However, Balearic Islands remained in Byzantine hands until Umayyad conquest, which began in 703 CE and was completed in 902 CE.
In 711, a Muslim army conquered the Visigothic Kingdom in Hispania. Under Tariq ibn Ziyad, the Islamic army landed at Gibraltar and, in an eight-year campaign, occupied all except the northern kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula in the Umayyad conquest of Hispania. Al-Andalus (Arabic: الإندلس, tr. al-ʾAndalūs, possibly "Land of the Vandals"), is the Arabic name given to Muslim Iberia. The Muslim conquerors were Arabs and Berbers; following the conquest, conversion and arabization of the Hispano-Roman population took place, (muwalladum or Muladí). After a long process, spurred on in the 9th and 10th centuries, the majority of the population in Al-Andalus eventually converted to Islam. The Muslims were referred to by the generic name Moors. The Muslim population was divided per ethnicity (Arabs, Berbers, Muladí), and the supremacy of Arabs over the rest of group was a recurrent causal for strife, rivalry and hatred, particularly between Arabs and Berbers. Arab elites could be further divided in the Yemenites (first wave) and the Syrians (second wave). Christians and Jews were allowed to live as part of a stratified society under the dhimmah system, although Jews became very important in certain fields. Some Christians migrated to the Northern Christian kingdoms, while those who stayed in Al-Andalus progressively arabised and became known as musta'arab (mozarabs). The slave population comprised the Ṣaqāliba (literally meaning "slavs", although they were slaves of generic European origin) as well as Sudanese slaves.
The Umayyad rulers faced a major Berber Revolt in the early 740s; the uprising originally broke out in North Africa (Tangier) and later spread across the peninsula. Following the Abbasid takeover from the Umayyads and the shift of the economic centre of the Islamic Caliphate from Damascus to Baghdad, the western province of al-Andalus was marginalised and ultimately became politically autonomous as independent emirate in 756, ruled by one of the last surviving Umayyad royals, Abd al-Rahman I.
Al-Andalus became a center of culture and learning, especially during the Caliphate of Córdoba. The Caliphate reached the height of its power under the rule of Abd-ar-Rahman III and his successor al-Hakam II, becoming then, in the view of Jaime Vicens Vives, "the most powerful state in Europe". Abd-ar-Rahman III also managed to expand the clout of Al-Andalus across the Strait of Gibraltar, waging war, as well as his successor, against the Fatimid Empire.
Between the 8th and 12th centuries, Al-Andalus enjoyed a notable urban vitality, both in terms of the growth of the preexisting cities as well as in terms of founding of new ones: Córdoba reached a population of 100,000 by the 10th century, Toledo 30,000 by the 11th century and Seville 80,000 by the 12th century.
During the Middle Ages, the North of the peninsula housed many small Christian polities including the Kingdom of Castile, the Kingdom of Aragon, the Kingdom of Navarre, the Kingdom of León or the Kingdom of Portugal, as well as a number of counties that spawned from the Carolingian Marca Hispanica. Christian and Muslim polities fought and allied among themselves in variable alliances. The Christian kingdoms progressively expanded south taking over Muslim territory in what is historiographically known as the "Reconquista" (the latter concept has been however noted as product of the claim to a pre-existing Spanish Catholic nation and it would not necessarily convey adequately "the complexity of centuries of warring and other more peaceable interactions between Muslim and Christian kingdoms in medieval Iberia between 711 and 1492").
The Caliphate of Córdoba was subsumed in a period of upheaval and civil war (the Fitna of al-Andalus) and collapsed in the early 11th century, spawning a series of ephemeral statelets, the taifas. Until the mid 11th century, most of the territorial expansion southwards of the Kingdom of Asturias/León was carried out through a policy of agricultural colonization rather than through military operations; then, profiting from the feebleness of the taifa principalities, Ferdinand I of León seized Lamego and Viseu (1057–1058) and Coimbra (1064) away from the Taifa of Badajoz (at times at war with the Taifa of Seville); Meanwhile, in the same year Coimbra was conquered, in the Northeastern part of the Iberian Peninsula, the Kingdom of Aragon took Barbastro from the Hudid Taifa of Lérida as part of an international expedition sanctioned by Pope Alexander II. Most critically, Alfonso VI of León-Castile conquered Toledo and its wider taifa in 1085, in what it was seen as a critical event at the time, entailing also a huge territorial expansion, advancing from the Sistema Central to La Mancha. In 1086, following the siege of Zaragoza by Alfonso VI of León-Castile, the Almoravids, religious zealots originally from the deserts of the Maghreb, landed in the Iberian Peninsula, and, having inflicted a serious defeat to Alfonso VI at the battle of Zalaca, began to seize control of the remaining taifas.
The Almoravids in the Iberian peninsula progressively relaxed strict observance of their faith, and treated both Jews and Mozarabs harshly, facing uprisings across the peninsula, initially in the Western part. The Almohads, another North-African Muslim sect of Masmuda Berber origin who had previously undermined the Almoravid rule south of the Strait of Gibraltar, first entered the peninsula in 1146.
Somewhat straying from the trend taking place in other locations of the Latin West since the 10th century, the period comprising the 11th and 13th centuries was not one of weakening monarchical power in the Christian kingdoms. The relatively novel concept of "frontier" (Sp: frontera), already reported in Aragon by the second half of the 11th century become widespread in the Christian Iberian kingdoms by the beginning of the 13th century, in relation to the more or less conflictual border with Muslim lands.
By the beginning of the 13th century, a power reorientation took place in the Iberian Peninsula (parallel to the Christian expansion in Southern Iberia and the increasing commercial impetus of Christian powers across the Mediterranean) and to a large extent, trade-wise, the Iberian Peninsula reorientated towards the North away from the Muslim World.
During the Middle Ages, the monarchs of Castile and León, from Alfonso V and Alfonso VI (crowned Hispaniae Imperator) to Alfonso X and Alfonso XI tended to embrace an imperial ideal based on a dual Christian and Jewish ideology.
Merchants from Genoa and Pisa were conducting an intense trading activity in Catalonia already by the 12th century, and later in Portugal. Since the 13th century, the Crown of Aragon expanded overseas; led by Catalans, it attained an overseas empire in the Western Mediterranean, with a presence in Mediterranean islands such as the Balearics, Sicily and Sardinia, and even conquering Naples in the mid-15th century. Genoese merchants invested heavily in the Iberian commercial enterprise with Lisbon becoming, according to Virgínia Rau, the "great centre of Genoese trade" in the early 14th century. The Portuguese would later detach their trade to some extent from Genoese influence. The Nasrid Kingdom of Granada, neighbouring the Strait of Gibraltar and founded upon a vassalage relationship with the Crown of Castile, also insinuated itself into the European mercantile network, with its ports fostering intense trading relations with the Genoese as well, but also with the Catalans, and to a lesser extent, with the Venetians, the Florentines, and the Portuguese.
Between 1275 and 1340, Granada became involved in the "crisis of the Strait", and was caught in a complex geopolitical struggle ("a kaleidoscope of alliances") with multiple powers vying for dominance of the Western Mediterranean, complicated by the unstable relations of Muslim Granada with the Marinid Sultanate. The conflict reached a climax in the 1340 Battle of Río Salado, when, this time in alliance with Granada, the Marinid Sultan (and Caliph pretender) Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Othman made the last Marinid attempt to set up a power base in the Iberian Peninsula. The lasting consequences of the resounding Muslim defeat to an alliance of Castile and Portugal with naval support from Aragon and Genoa ensured Christian supremacy over the Iberian Peninsula and the preeminence of Christian fleets in the Western Mediterranean.
The 1348–1350 bubonic plague devastated large parts of the Iberian Peninsula, leading to a sudden economic cessation. Many settlements in northern Castile and Catalonia were left forsaken. The plague marked the start of the hostility and downright violence towards religious minorities (particularly the Jews) as an additional consequence in the Iberian realms.
The 14th century was a period of great upheaval in the Iberian realms. After the death of Peter the Cruel of Castile (reigned 1350–69), the House of Trastámara succeeded to the throne in the person of Peter's half brother, Henry II (reigned 1369–79). In the kingdom of Aragón, following the death without heirs of John I (reigned 1387–96) and Martin I (reigned 1396–1410), a prince of the House of Trastámara, Ferdinand I (reigned 1412–16), succeeded to the Aragonese throne. The Hundred Years' War also spilled over into the Iberian peninsula, with Castile particularly taking a role in the conflict by providing key naval support to France that helped lead to that nation's eventual victory. After the accession of Henry III to the throne of Castile, the populace, exasperated by the preponderance of Jewish influence, perpetrated a massacre of Jews at Toledo. In 1391, mobs went from town to town throughout Castile and Aragon, killing an estimated 50,000 Jews, or even as many as 100,000, according to Jane Gerber. Women and children were sold as slaves to Muslims, and many synagogues were converted into churches. According to Hasdai Crescas, about 70 Jewish communities were destroyed.
During the 15th century, Portugal, which had ended its southwards territorial expansion across the Iberian Peninsula in 1249 with the conquest of the Algarve, initiated an overseas expansion in parallel to the rise of the House of Aviz, conquering Ceuta (1415) arriving at Porto Santo (1418), Madeira and the Azores, as well as establishing additional outposts along the North-African Atlantic coast. In addition, already in the Early Modern Period, between the completion of the Granada War in 1492 and the death of Ferdinand of Aragon in 1516, the Hispanic Monarchy would make strides in the imperial expansion along the Mediterranean coast of the Maghreb. During the Late Middle Ages, the Jews acquired considerable power and influence in Castile and Aragon.
Throughout the late Middle Ages, the Crown of Aragon took part in the mediterranean slave trade, with Barcelona (already in the 14th century), Valencia (particularly in the 15th century) and, to a lesser extent, Palma de Mallorca (since the 13th century), becoming dynamic centres in this regard, involving chiefly eastern and Muslim peoples. Castile engaged later in this economic activity, rather by adhering to the incipient atlantic slave trade involving sub-saharan people thrusted by Portugal (Lisbon being the largest slave centre in Western Europe) since the mid 15th century, with Seville becoming another key hub for the slave trade. Following the advance in the conquest of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada, the seizure of Málaga entailed the addition of another notable slave centre for the Crown of Castile.
By the end of the 15th century (1490) the Iberian kingdoms (including here the Balearic Islands) had an estimated population of 6.525 million (Crown of Castile, 4.3 million; Portugal, 1.0 million; Principality of Catalonia, 0.3 million; Kingdom of Valencia, 0.255 million; Kingdom of Granada, 0.25 million; Kingdom of Aragon, 0.25 million; Kingdom of Navarre, 0.12 million and the Kingdom of Mallorca, 0.05 million).
For three decades in the 15th century, the Hermandad de las Marismas, the trading association formed by the ports of Castile along the Cantabrian coast, resembling in some ways the Hanseatic League, fought against the latter, an ally of England, a rival of Castile in political and economic terms. Castile sought to claim the Gulf of Biscay as its own. In 1419, the powerful Castilian navy thoroughly defeated a Hanseatic fleet in La Rochelle.
In the late 15th century, the imperial ambition of the Iberian powers was pushed to new heights by the Catholic Monarchs in Castile and Aragon, and by Manuel I in Portugal.
The last Muslim stronghold, Granada, was conquered by a combined Castilian and Aragonese force in 1492. As many as 100,000 Moors died or were enslaved in the military campaign, while 200,000 fled to North Africa. Muslims and Jews throughout the period were variously tolerated or shown intolerance in different Christian kingdoms. After the fall of Granada, all Muslims and Jews were ordered to convert to Christianity or face expulsion—as many as 200,000 Jews were expelled from Spain. Approximately 3,000,000 Muslims fled or were driven out of Spain between 1492 and 1610. Historian Henry Kamen estimates that some 25,000 Jews died en route from Spain. The Jews were also expelled from Sicily and Sardinia, which were under Aragonese rule, and an estimated 37,000 to 100,000 Jews left.
In 1497, King Manuel I of Portugal forced all Jews in his kingdom to convert or leave. That same year he expelled all Muslims that were not slaves, and in 1502 the Catholic Monarchs followed suit, imposing the choice of conversion to Christianity or exile and loss of property. Many Jews and Muslims fled to North Africa and the Ottoman Empire, while others publicly converted to Christianity and became known respectively as Marranos and Moriscos (after the old term Moors). However, many of these continued to practice their religion in secret. The Moriscos revolted several times and were ultimately forcibly expelled from Spain in the early 17th century. From 1609 to 1614, over 300,000 Moriscos were sent on ships to North Africa and other locations, and, of this figure, around 50,000 died resisting the expulsion, and 60,000 died on the journey.
The change of relative supremacy from Portugal to the Hispanic Monarchy in the late 15th century has been described as one of the few cases of avoidance of the Thucydides Trap.
Challenging the conventions about the advent of modernity, Immanuel Wallerstein pushed back the origins of the capitalist modernity to the Iberian expansion of the 15th century. During the 16th century Spain created a vast empire in the Americas, with a state monopoly in Seville becoming the center of the ensuing transatlantic trade, based on bullion. Iberian imperialism, starting by the Portuguese establishment of routes to Asia and the posterior transatlantic trade with the New World by Spaniards and Portuguese (along Dutch, English and French), precipitated the economic decline of the Italian Peninsula. The 16th century was one of population growth with increased pressure over resources; in the case of the Iberian Peninsula a part of the population moved to the Americas meanwhile Jews and Moriscos were banished, relocating to other places in the Mediterranean Basin. Most of the Moriscos remained in Spain after the Morisco revolt in Las Alpujarras during the mid-16th century, but roughly 300,000 of them were expelled from the country in 1609–1614, and emigrated en masse to North Africa.
In 1580, after the political crisis that followed the 1578 death of King Sebastian, Portugal became a dynastic composite entity of the Hapsburg Monarchy; thus, the whole peninsula was united politically during the period known as the Iberian Union (1580–1640). During the reign of Philip II of Spain (I of Portugal), the Councils of Portugal, Italy, Flanders and Burgundy were added to the group of counselling institutions of the Hispanic Monarchy, to which the Councils of Castile, Aragon, Indies, Chamber of Castile, Inquisition, Orders, and Crusade already belonged, defining the organization of the Royal court that underpinned the Polysynodial System through which the empire operated. During the Iberian union, the "first great wave" of the transatlantic slave trade happened, according to Enriqueta Vila Villar, as new markets opened because of the unification gave thrust to the slave trade.
By 1600, the percentage of urban population for Spain was roughly 11.4%, while for Portugal the urban population was estimated as 14.1%, which were both above the 7.6% European average of the time (edged only by the Low Countries and the Italian Peninsula). Some striking differences appeared among the different Iberian realms. Castile, extending across a 60% of the territory of the peninsula and having 80% of the population was a rather urbanised country, yet with a widespread distribution of cities. Meanwhile, the urban population in the Crown of Aragon was highly concentrated in a handful of cities: Zaragoza (Kingdom of Aragon), Barcelona (Principality of Catalonia), and, to a lesser extent in the Kingdom of Valencia, in Valencia, Alicante and Orihuela. The case of Portugal presented an hypertrophied capital, Lisbon (which greatly increased its population during the 16th century, from 56,000 to 60,000 inhabitants by 1527, to roughly 120,000 by the third quarter of the century) with its demographic dynamism stimulated by the Asian trade, followed at great distance by Porto and Évora (both roughly accounting for 12,500 inhabitants). Throughout most of the 16th century, both Lisbon and Seville were among the Western Europe's largest and most dynamic cities.
The 17th century has been largely considered as a very negative period for the Iberian economies, seen as a time of recession, crisis or even decline, the urban dynamism chiefly moving to Northern Europe. A dismantling of the inner city network in the Castilian plateau took place during this period (with a parallel accumulation of economic activity in the capital, Madrid), with only New Castile resisting recession in the interior. Regarding the Atlantic façade of Castile, aside from the severing of trade with Northern Europe, inter-regional trade with other regions in the Iberian Peninsula also suffered to some extent. In Aragon, suffering from similar problems than Castile, the expelling of the Moriscos in 1609 in the Kingdom of Valencia aggravated the recession. Silk turned from a domestic industry into a raw commodity to be exported. However, the crisis was uneven (affecting longer the centre of the peninsula), as both Portugal and the Mediterranean coastline recovered in the later part of the century by fuelling a sustained growth.
The aftermath of the intermittent 1640–1668 Portuguese Restoration War brought the House of Braganza as the new ruling dynasty in the Portuguese territories across the world (bar Ceuta), putting an end to the Iberian Union.
Despite both Portugal and Spain starting their path towards modernization with the liberal revolutions of the first half of the 19th century, this process was, concerning structural changes in the geographical distribution of the population, relatively tame compared to what took place after World War II in the Iberian Peninsula, when strong urban development ran in parallel to substantial rural flight patterns.
The Iberian Peninsula is the westernmost of the three major southern European peninsulas—the Iberian, Italian, and Balkan. It is bordered on the southeast and east by the Mediterranean Sea, and on the north, west, and southwest by the Atlantic Ocean. The Pyrenees mountains are situated along the northeast edge of the peninsula, where it adjoins the rest of Europe. Its southern tip, located in Tarifa is the southernmost point of the European continent and is very close to the northwest coast of Africa, separated from it by the Strait of Gibraltar and the Mediterranean Sea.
The Iberian Peninsula encompasses 583,254 km and has very contrasting and uneven relief. The mountain ranges of the Iberian Peninsula are mainly distributed from west to east, and in some cases reach altitudes of approximately 3000 mamsl, resulting in the region having the second highest mean altitude (637 mamsl) in Western Europe.
The Iberian Peninsula extends from the southernmost extremity at Punta de Tarifa to the northernmost extremity at Punta de Estaca de Bares over a distance between lines of latitude of about 865 km (537 mi) based on a degree length of 111 km (69 mi) per degree, and from the westernmost extremity at Cabo da Roca to the easternmost extremity at Cap de Creus over a distance between lines of longitude at 40° N latitude of about 1,155 km (718 mi) based on an estimated degree length of about 90 km (56 mi) for that latitude. The irregular, roughly octagonal shape of the peninsula contained within this spherical quadrangle was compared to an ox-hide by the geographer Strabo.
About three quarters of that rough octagon is the Meseta Central, a vast plateau ranging from 610 to 760 m in altitude. It is located approximately in the centre, staggered slightly to the east and tilted slightly toward the west (the conventional centre of the Iberian Peninsula has long been considered Getafe just south of Madrid). It is ringed by mountains and contains the sources of most of the rivers, which find their way through gaps in the mountain barriers on all sides.
The coastline of the Iberian Peninsula is 3,313 km (2,059 mi), 1,660 km (1,030 mi) on the Mediterranean side and 1,653 km (1,027 mi) on the Atlantic side. The coast has been inundated over time, with sea levels having risen from a minimum of 115–120 m (377–394 ft) lower than today at the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) to its current level at 4,000 years BP. The coastal shelf created by sedimentation during that time remains below the surface; however, it was never very extensive on the Atlantic side, as the continental shelf drops rather steeply into the depths. An estimated 700 km (430 mi) length of Atlantic shelf is only 10–65 km (6.2–40.4 mi) wide. At the 500 m (1,600 ft) isobath, on the edge, the shelf drops off to 1,000 m (3,300 ft).
The submarine topography of the coastal waters of the Iberian Peninsula has been studied extensively in the process of drilling for oil. Ultimately, the shelf drops into the Bay of Biscay on the north (an abyss), the Iberian abyssal plain at 4,800 m (15,700 ft) on the west, and Tagus abyssal plain to the south. In the north, between the continental shelf and the abyss, is an extension called the Galicia Bank, a plateau that also contains the Porto, Vigo, and Vasco da Gama seamounts, which form the Galicia interior basin. The southern border of these features is marked by Nazaré Canyon, which splits the continental shelf and leads directly into the abyss.
The major rivers flow through the wide valleys between the mountain systems. These are the Ebro, Douro, Tagus, Guadiana and Guadalquivir. All rivers in the Iberian Peninsula are subject to seasonal variations in flow.
The Tagus is the longest river on the peninsula and, like the Douro, flows westwards with its lower course in Portugal. The Guadiana river bends southwards and forms the border between Spain and Portugal in the last stretch of its course.
The terrain of the Iberian Peninsula is largely mountainous. The major mountain systems are:
The Iberian Peninsula contains rocks of every geological period from the Ediacaran to the Recent, and almost every kind of rock is represented. World-class mineral deposits can also be found there. The core of the Iberian Peninsula consists of a Hercynian cratonic block known as the Iberian Massif. On the northeast, this is bounded by the Pyrenean fold belt, and on the southeast it is bounded by the Baetic System. These twofold chains are part of the Alpine belt. To the west, the peninsula is delimited by the continental boundary formed by the magma-poor opening of the Atlantic Ocean. The Hercynian Foldbelt is mostly buried by Mesozoic and Tertiary cover rocks to the east, but nevertheless outcrops through the Sistema Ibérico and the Catalan Mediterranean System.
The Iberian Peninsula features one of the largest lithium deposits belts in Europe (an otherwise relatively scarce resource in the continent), scattered along the Iberian Massif's Central Iberian Zone [es] and Galicia Tras-Os-Montes Zone [es]. Also in the Iberian Massif, and similarly to other Hercynian blocks in Europe, the peninsula hosts some uranium deposits, largely located in the Central Iberian Zone unit.
The Iberian Pyrite Belt, located in the SW quadrant of the Peninsula, ranks among the most important volcanogenic massive sulphide districts on Earth, and it has been exploited for millennia.
The Iberian Peninsula's location and topography, as well as the effects of large atmospheric circulation patterns induce a NW to SE gradient of yearly precipitation (roughly from 2,000 mm to 300 mm).
The Iberian peninsula has three dominant climate types. One of these is the oceanic climate seen in the northeast in which precipitation has barely any difference between winter and summer. However, most of Portugal and Spain have a Mediterranean climate; the Warm-summer Mediterranean climate and the Hot-summer Mediterranean climate, with various differences in precipitation and temperature depending on latitude and position versus the sea, this applies greatly to the Portuguese and Galician Atlantic coasts where, due to upwelling/downwelling phenomena average temperatures in summer can vary through as much as 10 °C (50 °F) in only a few kilometers (e.g. Peniche vs Santarém) There are also more localized semi-arid climates in central Spain, with temperatures resembling a more continental Mediterranean climate. In other extreme cases highland alpine climates such as in Sierra Nevada and areas with extremely low precipitation and desert climates or semi-arid climates such as the Almería area, Murcia area and southern Alicante area. In the southwestern interior of the Iberian Peninsula the hottest temperatures in Europe are found, with Córdoba averaging around 37 °C (99 °F) in July. The Spanish Mediterranean coast usually averages around 30 °C (86 °F) in summer. In sharp contrast A Coruña at the northern tip of Galicia has a summer daytime high average at just below 23 °C (73 °F). This cool and wet summer climate is replicated throughout most of the northern coastline. Winters in the Peninsula are for the most part, mild, although frosts are common in higher altitude areas of central Spain. The warmest winter nights are usually found in downwelling favourable areas of the west coast, such as on capes. Precipitation varies greatly between regions on the Peninsula, in December for example the northern west coast averages above 200 mm (7.9 in) whereas the southeast can average below 30 mm (1.2 in). Insolation can vary from just 1,600 hours in the Bilbao area, to above 3,000 hours in the Algarve and Gulf of Cádiz.
The current political configuration of the Iberian Peninsula comprises the bulk of Portugal and Spain, the whole microstate of Andorra, a small part of the French department of Pyrénées-Orientales (French Cerdagne), and the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar.
French Cerdagne is on the south side of the Pyrenees mountain range, which runs along the border between Spain and France. For example, the Segre river, which runs west and then south to meet the Ebro, has its source on the French side. The Pyrenees range is often considered the northeastern boundary of Iberian Peninsula, although the French coastline curves away from the rest of Europe north of the range, which is the reason why Perpignan, which is also known as the capital of Northern Catalonia, is often considered as the entrance to the Iberian Peninsula.
Regarding Portugal and Spain, this chiefly excludes the Macaronesian archipelagos (the Azores and Madeira of Portugal, and the Canary Islands of Spain), the Balearic Islands (Spain), and the Spanish overseas territories in North Africa (most conspicuously the cities of Ceuta and Melilla, as well as unpopulated islets and rocks).
Political divisions of the Iberian Peninsula:
The Iberian city network is dominated by three international metropolises (Barcelona, Lisbon, and Madrid) and four regional metropolises (Bilbao, Porto, Seville, and Valencia). The relatively weak integration of the network favours a competitive approach vis-à-vis the inter-relation between the different centres. Among these metropolises, Madrid stands out within the global urban hierarchy in terms of its status as a major service centre and enjoys the greatest degree of connectivity.
According to Eurostat (2019), the metropolitan regions with a population over one million are listed as follows:
The woodlands of the Iberian Peninsula are distinct ecosystems. Although the various regions are each characterized by distinct vegetation, there are some similarities across the peninsula.
While the borders between these regions are not clearly defined, there is a mutual influence that makes it very hard to establish boundaries and some species find their optimal habitat in the intermediate areas.
The endangered Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus) is a symbol of the Iberian mediterranean forest and of the fauna of the Iberian Peninsula altogether.
A new Podarcis lizard species, Podarcis virescens, was accepted as a species by the Taxonomic Committee of the Societas Europaea Herpetologica in 2020. This lizard is native to the Iberian Peninsula and found near rivers in the region.
The Iberian Peninsula is an important stopover on the East Atlantic flyway for birds migrating from northern Europe to Africa. For example, curlew sandpipers rest in the region of the Bay of Cádiz.
In addition to the birds migrating through, some seven million wading birds from the north spend the winter in the estuaries and wetlands of the Iberian Peninsula, mainly at locations on the Atlantic coast. In Galicia are Ría de Arousa (a home of grey plover), Ria de Ortigueira, Ria de Corme and Ria de Laxe. In Portugal, the Aveiro Lagoon hosts Recurvirostra avosetta, the common ringed plover, grey plover and little stint. Ribatejo Province on the Tagus supports Recurvirostra arosetta, grey plover, dunlin, bar-tailed godwit and common redshank. In the Sado Estuary are dunlin, Eurasian curlew, grey plover and common redshank. The Algarve hosts red knot, common greenshank and turnstone. The Guadalquivir Marshes region of Andalusia and the Salinas de Cádiz are especially rich in wintering wading birds: Kentish plover, common ringed plover, sanderling, and black-tailed godwit in addition to the others. And finally, the Ebro delta is home to all the species mentioned above.
With the sole exception of Basque, which is of unknown origin, all modern Iberian languages descend from Vulgar Latin and belong to the Western Romance languages. Throughout history (and pre-history), many different languages have been spoken in the Iberian Peninsula, contributing to the formation and differentiation of the contemporaneous languages of Iberia; however, most of them have become extinct or fallen into disuse. Basque is the only non-Indo-European surviving language in Iberia and Western Europe.
In modern times, Spanish (the official language of Spain, spoken by the entire 45 million population in the country, the native language of about 36 million in Europe), Portuguese (the official language of Portugal, with a population over 10 million), Catalan (over 7 million speakers in Europe, 3.4 million with Catalan as first language), Galician (understood by the 93% of the 2.8 million Galician population) and Basque (cf. around 1 million speakers) are the most widely spoken languages in the Iberian Peninsula. Spanish and Portuguese have expanded beyond Iberia to the rest of world, becoming global languages.
Other minority romance languages with some degree of recognition include the several varieties of Astur-leonese, collectively amounting to about 0.6 million speakers, and the Aragonese (barely spoken by the 8% of the 130,000 people inhabiting the Alto Aragón).
English is the official language of Gibraltar. Llanito is a unique language in the territory, an amalgamation of mostly English and Spanish. In Spain, only 54.3% could speak a foreign language, below that of the EU-28 average. Portugal meanwhile achieved 69%, above the EU average, but still below the EU median. Spain ranks 25th out of 33 European countries in the English Proficiency Index.
Both Spain and Portugal have traditionally used a non-standard rail gauge (the 1,668 mm Iberian gauge) since the construction of the first railroads in the 19th century. Spain has progressively introduced the 1,435 mm standard gauge in its new high-speed rail network (one of the most extensive in the world), inaugurated in 1992 with the Madrid–Seville line, followed to name a few by the Madrid–Barcelona (2008), Madrid–Valencia (2010), an Alicante branch of the latter (2013) and the connection to France of the Barcelona line. Portugal however suspended all the high-speed rail projects in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, putting an end for the time being to the possibility of a high-speed rail connection between Lisbon, Porto and Madrid.
Handicapped by a mountainous range (the Pyrenees) hindering the connection to the rest of Europe, Spain (and subsidiarily Portugal) only has two meaningful rail connections to France able for freight transport, located at both ends of the mountain range. An international rail line across the Central Pyrenees linking Zaragoza and the French city of Pau through a tunnel existed in the past; however, an accident in the French part destroyed a stretch of the railroad in 1970 and the Canfranc Station has been a cul-de-sac since then.
There are four points connecting the Portuguese and Spanish rail networks: Valença do Minho–Tui, Vilar Formoso–Fuentes de Oñoro, Marvão-Beirã–Valencia de Alcántara and Elvas–Badajoz.
The prospect of the development (as part of a European-wide effort) of the Central, Mediterranean and Atlantic rail corridors is expected to be a way to improve the competitiveness of the ports of Tarragona, Valencia, Sagunto, Bilbao, Santander, Sines and Algeciras vis-à-vis the rest of Europe and the World.
In 1980, Morocco and Spain started a joint study on the feasibility of a fixed link (tunnel or bridge) across the Strait of Gibraltar, possibly through a connection of Punta Paloma [es] with Cape Malabata. Years of studies have, however, made no real progress thus far.
A transit point for many submarine cables, the Fibre-optic Link Around the Globe, Europe India Gateway, and the SEA-ME-WE 3 feature landing stations in the Iberian Peninsula. The West Africa Cable System, Main One, SAT-3/WASC, Africa Coast to Europe also land in Portugal. MAREA, a high capacity communication transatlantic cable, connects the north of the Iberian Peninsula (Bilbao) to North America (Virginia), whereas Grace Hopper is an upcoming cable connecting the Iberian Peninsula (Bilbao) to the UK and the US intended to be operative by 2022 and EllaLink is an upcoming high-capacity communication cable expected to connect the Peninsula (Sines) to South America and the mammoth 2Africa project intends to connect the peninsula to the United Kingdom, Europe and Africa (via Portugal and Barcelona) by 2023–24.
Two gas pipelines: the Pedro Duran Farell pipeline and (more recently) the Medgaz (from, respectively, Morocco and Algeria) link the Maghreb and the Iberian Peninsula, providing Spain with Algerian natural gas. However the contract for the first pipeline expires on 31 October 2021 and—amidst a tense climate of Algerian–Moroccan relations—there are no plans to renew it.
The official currency across Iberia is the Euro, with the exception of Gibraltar, which uses the Gibraltar Pound (at parity with Sterling).
Major industries include mining, tourism, small farms, and fishing. Because the coast is so long, fishing is popular, especially sardines, tuna and anchovies. Most of the mining occurs in the Pyrenees mountains. Commodities mined include: iron, gold, coal, lead, silver, zinc, and salt.
Regarding their role in the global economy, both the microstate of Andorra and the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar have been described as tax havens.
The Galician region of Spain, in the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula, became one of the biggest entry points of cocaine in Europe, on a par with the Dutch ports. Hashish is smuggled from Morocco via the Strait of Gibraltar. | [
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"text": "The Iberian Peninsula (/aɪˈbɪəriən/), also known as Iberia, is a peninsula in Southwestern Europe, defining the westernmost edge of Eurasia. It is divided between Peninsular Spain and Continental Portugal, comprising most of the region, as well as Andorra, Gibraltar and a small part of Southern France. With an area of approximately 583,254 square kilometres (225,196 sq mi), and a population of roughly 53 million, it is the second-largest European peninsula by area, after the Scandinavian Peninsula.",
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{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The word Iberia is a noun adapted from the Latin word \"Hiberia\" originating in the Ancient Greek word Ἰβηρία (Ibēríā), used by Greek geographers under the rule of the Roman Empire to refer to what is known today in English as the Iberian Peninsula. At that time, the name did not describe a single geographical entity or a distinct population; the same name was used for the Kingdom of Iberia, natively known as Kartli in the Caucasus, the core region of what would later become the Kingdom of Georgia. It was Strabo who first reported the delineation of \"Iberia\" from Gaul (Keltikē) by the Pyrenees and included the entire land mass southwest (he says \"west\") from there. With the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the consolidation of romanic languages, the word \"Iberia\" continued the Roman word \"Hiberia\" and the Greek word \"Ἰβηρία\".",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The ancient Greeks reached the Iberian Peninsula, of which they had heard from the Phoenicians, by voyaging westward on the Mediterranean. Hecataeus of Miletus was the first known to use the term Iberia, which he wrote about c. 500 BCE. Herodotus of Halicarnassus says of the Phocaeans that \"it was they who made the Greeks acquainted with […] Iberia.\" According to Strabo, prior historians used Iberia to mean the country \"this side of the Ἶβηρος\" (Ibēros, the Ebro) as far north as the Rhône, but in his day they set the Pyrenees as the limit. Polybius respects that limit, but identifies Iberia as the Mediterranean side as far south as Gibraltar, with the Atlantic side having no name. Elsewhere he says that Saguntum is \"on the seaward foot of the range of hills connecting Iberia and Celtiberia.\"",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "According to Charles Ebel, the ancient sources in both Latin and Greek use Hispania and Hiberia (Greek: Iberia) as synonyms. The confusion of the words was because of an overlapping in political and geographic perspectives. The Latin word Hiberia, similar to the Greek Iberia, literally translates to \"land of the Hiberians\". This word was derived from the river Hiberus (now called Ebro or Ebre). Hiber (Iberian) was thus used as a term for peoples living near the river Ebro. The first mention in Roman literature was by the annalist poet Ennius in 200 BCE. Virgil wrote impacatos (H)iberos (\"restless Iberi\") in his Georgics. The Roman geographers and other prose writers from the time of the late Roman Republic called the entire peninsula Hispania.",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In Greek and Roman antiquity, the name Hesperia was used for both the Italian and Iberian Peninsula; in the latter case Hesperia Ultima (referring to its position in the far west) appears as form of disambiguation from the former among Roman writers. Also since Roman antiquity, Jews gave the name Sepharad to the peninsula.",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "As they became politically interested in the former Carthaginian territories, the Romans began to use the names Hispania Citerior and Hispania Ulterior for 'near' and 'far' Hispania. At the time Hispania was made up of three Roman provinces: Hispania Baetica, Hispania Tarraconensis, and Hispania Lusitania. Strabo says that the Romans use Hispania and Iberia synonymously, distinguishing between the near northern and the far southern provinces. (The name Iberia was ambiguous, being also the name of the Kingdom of Iberia in the Caucasus.)",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Whatever languages may generally have been spoken on the peninsula soon gave way to Latin, except for that of the Vascones, which was preserved as a language isolate by the barrier of the Pyrenees.",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The modern phrase \"Iberian Peninsula\" was coined by the French geographer Jean-Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent on his 1823 work \"Guide du Voyageur en Espagne\". Prior to that date, geographers had used the terms 'Spanish Peninsula' or 'Pyrenaean Peninsula'.",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The Iberian Peninsula has always been associated with the River Ebro (Ibēros in ancient Greek and Ibērus or Hibērus in Latin). The association was so well known it was hardly necessary to state; for example, Ibēria was the country \"this side of the Ibērus\" in Strabo. Pliny goes so far as to assert that the Greeks had called \"the whole of Spain\" Hiberia because of the Hiberus River. The river appears in the Ebro Treaty of 226 BCE between Rome and Carthage, setting the limit of Carthaginian interest at the Ebro. The fullest description of the treaty, stated in Appian, uses Ibērus. With reference to this border, Polybius states that the \"native name\" is Ibēr, apparently the original word, stripped of its Greek or Latin -os or -us termination.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The early range of these natives, which geographers and historians place from the present southern Spain to the present southern France along the Mediterranean coast, is marked by instances of a readable script expressing a yet unknown language, dubbed \"Iberian\". Whether this was the native name or was given to them by the Greeks for their residence near the Ebro remains unknown. Credence in Polybius imposes certain limitations on etymologizing: if the language remains unknown, the meanings of the words, including Iber, must also remain unknown. In modern Basque, the word ibar means \"valley\" or \"watered meadow\", while ibai means \"river\", but there is no proof relating the etymology of the Ebro River with these Basque names.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The Iberian Peninsula has been inhabited by members of the Homo genus for at least 1.2 million years as remains found in the sites in the Atapuerca Mountains demonstrate. Among these sites is the cave of Gran Dolina, where six hominin skeletons, dated between 780,000 and one million years ago, were found in 1994. Experts have debated whether these skeletons belong to the species Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, or a new species called Homo antecessor.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Around 200,000 BP, during the Lower Paleolithic period, Neanderthals first entered the Iberian Peninsula. Around 70,000 BP, during the Middle Paleolithic period, the last glacial event began and the Neanderthal Mousterian culture was established. Around 37,000 BP, during the Upper Paleolithic, the Neanderthal Châtelperronian cultural period began. Emanating from Southern France, this culture extended into the north of the peninsula. It continued to exist until around 30,000 BP, when Neanderthal man faced extinction.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "About 40,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans entered the Iberian Peninsula from across the Pyrenees. Haplogroup R1b is common in modern Portuguese and Spanish males. On the Iberian Peninsula, modern humans developed a series of different cultures, such as the Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean and Magdalenian cultures, some of them characterized by the complex forms of the art of the Upper Paleolithic.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "During the Neolithic expansion, various megalithic cultures developed in the Iberian Peninsula. An open seas navigation culture from the east Mediterranean, called the Cardium culture, also extended its influence to the eastern coasts of the peninsula, possibly as early as the 5th millennium BCE. These people may have had some relation to the subsequent development of the Iberian civilization.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "As is the case for most of the rest of Southern Europe, the principal ancestral origin of modern Iberians are Early European Farmers who arrived during the Neolithic. The large predominance of Y-Chromosome Haplogroup R1b, common throughout Western Europe, is testimony to a considerable input from various waves of (predominantly male) Western Steppe Herders from the Pontic–Caspian steppe during the Bronze Age. Iberia experienced a significant genetic turnover, with 100% of the paternal ancestry and 40% of the overall ancestry being replaced by peoples with steppe-related ancestry.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In the Chalcolithic (c. 3000 BCE), a series of complex cultures developed that would give rise to the peninsula's first civilizations and to extensive exchange networks reaching to the Baltic, Middle East and North Africa. Around 2800 – 2700 BCE, the Beaker culture, which produced the Maritime Bell Beaker, probably originated in the vibrant copper-using communities of the Tagus estuary and spread from there to many parts of western Europe.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Bronze Age cultures developed beginning c. 1800 BCE, when the culture of Los Millares was followed by that of El Argar. During the Early Bronze Age, southeastern Iberia saw the emergence of important settlements, a development that has compelled some archeologists to propose that these settlements indicate the advent of state-level social structures. From this centre, bronze metalworking technology spread to other cultures like the Bronze of Levante, South-Western Iberian Bronze and Las Cogotas.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Preceded by the Chalcolithic sites of Los Millares, the Argaric culture flourished in southeastern Iberia in from 2200 BC to 1550 BC, when depopulation of the area ensued along with disappearing of copper–bronze–arsenic metallurgy. The most accepted model for El Argar has been that of an early state society, most particularly in terms of class division, exploitation, and coercion, with agricultural production, maybe also human labour, controlled by the larger hilltop settlements, and the elite using violence in practical and ideological terms to clamp down on the population. Ecological degradation, landscape opening, fires, pastoralism, and maybe tree cutting for mining have been suggested as reasons for the collapse.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The culture of the motillas developed an early system of groundwater supply plants (the so-called motillas) in the upper Guadiana basin (in the southern meseta) in a context of extreme aridification in the area in the wake of the 4.2-kiloyear climatic event, which roughly coincided with the transition from the Copper Age to the Bronze Age. Increased precipitation and recovery of the water table from about 1800 BC onward should have led to the forsaking of the motillas (which may have flooded) and the redefinition of the relation of the inhabitants of the territory with the environment.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "By the Iron Age, starting in the 7th century BCE, the Iberian Peninsula consisted of complex agrarian and urban civilizations, either Pre-Celtic or Celtic (such as the Celtiberians, Gallaeci, Astures, Celtici, Lusitanians and others), the cultures of the Iberians in the eastern and southern zones and the cultures of the Aquitanian in the western portion of the Pyrenees.",
"title": "Proto-history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "As early as the 12th century BCE, the Phoenicians, a thalassocratic civilization originally from the Eastern Mediterranean, began to explore the coastline of the peninsula, interacting with the metal-rich communities in the southwest of the peninsula (contemporarily known as the semi-mythical Tartessos). Around 1100 BCE, Phoenician merchants founded the trading colony of Gadir or Gades (modern day Cádiz). Phoenicians established a permanent trading port in the Gadir colony c. 800 BCE in response to the increasing demand of silver from the Assyrian Empire.",
"title": "Proto-history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The seafaring Phoenicians, Greeks and Carthaginians successively settled along the Mediterranean coast and founded trading colonies there over a period of several centuries. In the 8th century BCE, the first Greek colonies, such as Emporion (modern Empúries), were founded along the Mediterranean coast on the east, leaving the south coast to the Phoenicians.",
"title": "Proto-history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Together with the presence of Phoenician and Greek epigraphy, a number of paleohispanic scripts developed in the Iberian Peninsula along the 1st millennium BCE. The development of a primordial paleohispanic script antecessor to the rest of paleohispanic scripts (originally supposed to be a non-redundant semi-syllabary) derived from the Phoenician alphabet and originated in Southwestern Iberia by the 7th century BCE has been tentatively proposed.",
"title": "Proto-history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In the sixth century BCE, the Carthaginians arrived in the peninsula while struggling with the Greeks for control of the Western Mediterranean. Their most important colony was Carthago Nova (modern-day Cartagena, Spain).",
"title": "Proto-history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In 218 BCE, during the Second Punic War against the Carthaginians, the first Roman troops occupied the Iberian Peninsula, known to them as Hispania. After 197, the territories of the peninsula most accustomed to external contact and with the most urban tradition (the Mediterranean Coast and the Guadalquivir Valley) were divided by Romans into Hispania Ulterior and Hispania Citerior. Local rebellions were quelled, with a 195 Roman campaign under Cato the Elder ravaging hospots of resistance in the northeastern Ebro Valley and beyond. The threat to Roman interests posed by Celtiberians and Lusitanians in uncontrolled territories lingered in. Further wars of indigenous resistance, such as the Celtiberian Wars and the Lusitanian War, were fought in the 2nd century. Urban growth took place, and population progressively moved from hillforts to the plains.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "An example of the interaction of slaving and ecocide, the aftermath of the conquest increased mining extractive processes in the southwest of the peninsula (which required a massive number of forced laborers, initially from Hispania and latter also from the Gallic borderlands and other locations of the Mediterranean), bringing in a far-reaching environmental outcome vis-à-vis long-term global pollution records, with levels of atmospheric pollution from mining across the Mediterranean during Classical Antiquity having no match until the Industrial Revolution.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In addition to mineral extraction (of which the region was the leading supplier in the early Roman world, with production of the likes of gold, silver, copper, lead, and cinnabar), Hispania also produced manufactured goods (sigillata pottery, colourless glass, linen garments) fish and fish sauce (garum), dry crops (such as wheat and, more importantly, esparto), olive oil, and wine.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The process of Romanization spurred on throughout the first century BC. The peninsula was also the battleground of civil wars between rulers of the Roman republic, such as the Sertorian War or the conflict between Caesar and Pompey later in the century.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "During their 600-year occupation of the Iberian Peninsula, the Romans introduced the Latin language that influenced many of the languages that exist today in the Iberian peninsula.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In the early fifth century, Germanic peoples occupied the peninsula, namely the Suebi, the Vandals (Silingi and Hasdingi) and their allies, the Alans. Only the kingdom of the Suebi (Quadi and Marcomanni) would endure after the arrival of another wave of Germanic invaders, the Visigoths, who occupied all of the Iberian Peninsula and expelled or partially integrated the Vandals and the Alans. The Visigoths eventually occupied the Suebi kingdom and its capital city, Bracara (modern day Braga), in 584–585. They would also occupy the province of the Byzantine Empire (552–624) of Spania in the south of the peninsula. However, Balearic Islands remained in Byzantine hands until Umayyad conquest, which began in 703 CE and was completed in 902 CE.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In 711, a Muslim army conquered the Visigothic Kingdom in Hispania. Under Tariq ibn Ziyad, the Islamic army landed at Gibraltar and, in an eight-year campaign, occupied all except the northern kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula in the Umayyad conquest of Hispania. Al-Andalus (Arabic: الإندلس, tr. al-ʾAndalūs, possibly \"Land of the Vandals\"), is the Arabic name given to Muslim Iberia. The Muslim conquerors were Arabs and Berbers; following the conquest, conversion and arabization of the Hispano-Roman population took place, (muwalladum or Muladí). After a long process, spurred on in the 9th and 10th centuries, the majority of the population in Al-Andalus eventually converted to Islam. The Muslims were referred to by the generic name Moors. The Muslim population was divided per ethnicity (Arabs, Berbers, Muladí), and the supremacy of Arabs over the rest of group was a recurrent causal for strife, rivalry and hatred, particularly between Arabs and Berbers. Arab elites could be further divided in the Yemenites (first wave) and the Syrians (second wave). Christians and Jews were allowed to live as part of a stratified society under the dhimmah system, although Jews became very important in certain fields. Some Christians migrated to the Northern Christian kingdoms, while those who stayed in Al-Andalus progressively arabised and became known as musta'arab (mozarabs). The slave population comprised the Ṣaqāliba (literally meaning \"slavs\", although they were slaves of generic European origin) as well as Sudanese slaves.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The Umayyad rulers faced a major Berber Revolt in the early 740s; the uprising originally broke out in North Africa (Tangier) and later spread across the peninsula. Following the Abbasid takeover from the Umayyads and the shift of the economic centre of the Islamic Caliphate from Damascus to Baghdad, the western province of al-Andalus was marginalised and ultimately became politically autonomous as independent emirate in 756, ruled by one of the last surviving Umayyad royals, Abd al-Rahman I.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Al-Andalus became a center of culture and learning, especially during the Caliphate of Córdoba. The Caliphate reached the height of its power under the rule of Abd-ar-Rahman III and his successor al-Hakam II, becoming then, in the view of Jaime Vicens Vives, \"the most powerful state in Europe\". Abd-ar-Rahman III also managed to expand the clout of Al-Andalus across the Strait of Gibraltar, waging war, as well as his successor, against the Fatimid Empire.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Between the 8th and 12th centuries, Al-Andalus enjoyed a notable urban vitality, both in terms of the growth of the preexisting cities as well as in terms of founding of new ones: Córdoba reached a population of 100,000 by the 10th century, Toledo 30,000 by the 11th century and Seville 80,000 by the 12th century.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "During the Middle Ages, the North of the peninsula housed many small Christian polities including the Kingdom of Castile, the Kingdom of Aragon, the Kingdom of Navarre, the Kingdom of León or the Kingdom of Portugal, as well as a number of counties that spawned from the Carolingian Marca Hispanica. Christian and Muslim polities fought and allied among themselves in variable alliances. The Christian kingdoms progressively expanded south taking over Muslim territory in what is historiographically known as the \"Reconquista\" (the latter concept has been however noted as product of the claim to a pre-existing Spanish Catholic nation and it would not necessarily convey adequately \"the complexity of centuries of warring and other more peaceable interactions between Muslim and Christian kingdoms in medieval Iberia between 711 and 1492\").",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The Caliphate of Córdoba was subsumed in a period of upheaval and civil war (the Fitna of al-Andalus) and collapsed in the early 11th century, spawning a series of ephemeral statelets, the taifas. Until the mid 11th century, most of the territorial expansion southwards of the Kingdom of Asturias/León was carried out through a policy of agricultural colonization rather than through military operations; then, profiting from the feebleness of the taifa principalities, Ferdinand I of León seized Lamego and Viseu (1057–1058) and Coimbra (1064) away from the Taifa of Badajoz (at times at war with the Taifa of Seville); Meanwhile, in the same year Coimbra was conquered, in the Northeastern part of the Iberian Peninsula, the Kingdom of Aragon took Barbastro from the Hudid Taifa of Lérida as part of an international expedition sanctioned by Pope Alexander II. Most critically, Alfonso VI of León-Castile conquered Toledo and its wider taifa in 1085, in what it was seen as a critical event at the time, entailing also a huge territorial expansion, advancing from the Sistema Central to La Mancha. In 1086, following the siege of Zaragoza by Alfonso VI of León-Castile, the Almoravids, religious zealots originally from the deserts of the Maghreb, landed in the Iberian Peninsula, and, having inflicted a serious defeat to Alfonso VI at the battle of Zalaca, began to seize control of the remaining taifas.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The Almoravids in the Iberian peninsula progressively relaxed strict observance of their faith, and treated both Jews and Mozarabs harshly, facing uprisings across the peninsula, initially in the Western part. The Almohads, another North-African Muslim sect of Masmuda Berber origin who had previously undermined the Almoravid rule south of the Strait of Gibraltar, first entered the peninsula in 1146.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Somewhat straying from the trend taking place in other locations of the Latin West since the 10th century, the period comprising the 11th and 13th centuries was not one of weakening monarchical power in the Christian kingdoms. The relatively novel concept of \"frontier\" (Sp: frontera), already reported in Aragon by the second half of the 11th century become widespread in the Christian Iberian kingdoms by the beginning of the 13th century, in relation to the more or less conflictual border with Muslim lands.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "By the beginning of the 13th century, a power reorientation took place in the Iberian Peninsula (parallel to the Christian expansion in Southern Iberia and the increasing commercial impetus of Christian powers across the Mediterranean) and to a large extent, trade-wise, the Iberian Peninsula reorientated towards the North away from the Muslim World.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "During the Middle Ages, the monarchs of Castile and León, from Alfonso V and Alfonso VI (crowned Hispaniae Imperator) to Alfonso X and Alfonso XI tended to embrace an imperial ideal based on a dual Christian and Jewish ideology.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Merchants from Genoa and Pisa were conducting an intense trading activity in Catalonia already by the 12th century, and later in Portugal. Since the 13th century, the Crown of Aragon expanded overseas; led by Catalans, it attained an overseas empire in the Western Mediterranean, with a presence in Mediterranean islands such as the Balearics, Sicily and Sardinia, and even conquering Naples in the mid-15th century. Genoese merchants invested heavily in the Iberian commercial enterprise with Lisbon becoming, according to Virgínia Rau, the \"great centre of Genoese trade\" in the early 14th century. The Portuguese would later detach their trade to some extent from Genoese influence. The Nasrid Kingdom of Granada, neighbouring the Strait of Gibraltar and founded upon a vassalage relationship with the Crown of Castile, also insinuated itself into the European mercantile network, with its ports fostering intense trading relations with the Genoese as well, but also with the Catalans, and to a lesser extent, with the Venetians, the Florentines, and the Portuguese.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Between 1275 and 1340, Granada became involved in the \"crisis of the Strait\", and was caught in a complex geopolitical struggle (\"a kaleidoscope of alliances\") with multiple powers vying for dominance of the Western Mediterranean, complicated by the unstable relations of Muslim Granada with the Marinid Sultanate. The conflict reached a climax in the 1340 Battle of Río Salado, when, this time in alliance with Granada, the Marinid Sultan (and Caliph pretender) Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Othman made the last Marinid attempt to set up a power base in the Iberian Peninsula. The lasting consequences of the resounding Muslim defeat to an alliance of Castile and Portugal with naval support from Aragon and Genoa ensured Christian supremacy over the Iberian Peninsula and the preeminence of Christian fleets in the Western Mediterranean.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The 1348–1350 bubonic plague devastated large parts of the Iberian Peninsula, leading to a sudden economic cessation. Many settlements in northern Castile and Catalonia were left forsaken. The plague marked the start of the hostility and downright violence towards religious minorities (particularly the Jews) as an additional consequence in the Iberian realms.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The 14th century was a period of great upheaval in the Iberian realms. After the death of Peter the Cruel of Castile (reigned 1350–69), the House of Trastámara succeeded to the throne in the person of Peter's half brother, Henry II (reigned 1369–79). In the kingdom of Aragón, following the death without heirs of John I (reigned 1387–96) and Martin I (reigned 1396–1410), a prince of the House of Trastámara, Ferdinand I (reigned 1412–16), succeeded to the Aragonese throne. The Hundred Years' War also spilled over into the Iberian peninsula, with Castile particularly taking a role in the conflict by providing key naval support to France that helped lead to that nation's eventual victory. After the accession of Henry III to the throne of Castile, the populace, exasperated by the preponderance of Jewish influence, perpetrated a massacre of Jews at Toledo. In 1391, mobs went from town to town throughout Castile and Aragon, killing an estimated 50,000 Jews, or even as many as 100,000, according to Jane Gerber. Women and children were sold as slaves to Muslims, and many synagogues were converted into churches. According to Hasdai Crescas, about 70 Jewish communities were destroyed.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "During the 15th century, Portugal, which had ended its southwards territorial expansion across the Iberian Peninsula in 1249 with the conquest of the Algarve, initiated an overseas expansion in parallel to the rise of the House of Aviz, conquering Ceuta (1415) arriving at Porto Santo (1418), Madeira and the Azores, as well as establishing additional outposts along the North-African Atlantic coast. In addition, already in the Early Modern Period, between the completion of the Granada War in 1492 and the death of Ferdinand of Aragon in 1516, the Hispanic Monarchy would make strides in the imperial expansion along the Mediterranean coast of the Maghreb. During the Late Middle Ages, the Jews acquired considerable power and influence in Castile and Aragon.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Throughout the late Middle Ages, the Crown of Aragon took part in the mediterranean slave trade, with Barcelona (already in the 14th century), Valencia (particularly in the 15th century) and, to a lesser extent, Palma de Mallorca (since the 13th century), becoming dynamic centres in this regard, involving chiefly eastern and Muslim peoples. Castile engaged later in this economic activity, rather by adhering to the incipient atlantic slave trade involving sub-saharan people thrusted by Portugal (Lisbon being the largest slave centre in Western Europe) since the mid 15th century, with Seville becoming another key hub for the slave trade. Following the advance in the conquest of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada, the seizure of Málaga entailed the addition of another notable slave centre for the Crown of Castile.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "By the end of the 15th century (1490) the Iberian kingdoms (including here the Balearic Islands) had an estimated population of 6.525 million (Crown of Castile, 4.3 million; Portugal, 1.0 million; Principality of Catalonia, 0.3 million; Kingdom of Valencia, 0.255 million; Kingdom of Granada, 0.25 million; Kingdom of Aragon, 0.25 million; Kingdom of Navarre, 0.12 million and the Kingdom of Mallorca, 0.05 million).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "For three decades in the 15th century, the Hermandad de las Marismas, the trading association formed by the ports of Castile along the Cantabrian coast, resembling in some ways the Hanseatic League, fought against the latter, an ally of England, a rival of Castile in political and economic terms. Castile sought to claim the Gulf of Biscay as its own. In 1419, the powerful Castilian navy thoroughly defeated a Hanseatic fleet in La Rochelle.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "In the late 15th century, the imperial ambition of the Iberian powers was pushed to new heights by the Catholic Monarchs in Castile and Aragon, and by Manuel I in Portugal.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The last Muslim stronghold, Granada, was conquered by a combined Castilian and Aragonese force in 1492. As many as 100,000 Moors died or were enslaved in the military campaign, while 200,000 fled to North Africa. Muslims and Jews throughout the period were variously tolerated or shown intolerance in different Christian kingdoms. After the fall of Granada, all Muslims and Jews were ordered to convert to Christianity or face expulsion—as many as 200,000 Jews were expelled from Spain. Approximately 3,000,000 Muslims fled or were driven out of Spain between 1492 and 1610. Historian Henry Kamen estimates that some 25,000 Jews died en route from Spain. The Jews were also expelled from Sicily and Sardinia, which were under Aragonese rule, and an estimated 37,000 to 100,000 Jews left.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "In 1497, King Manuel I of Portugal forced all Jews in his kingdom to convert or leave. That same year he expelled all Muslims that were not slaves, and in 1502 the Catholic Monarchs followed suit, imposing the choice of conversion to Christianity or exile and loss of property. Many Jews and Muslims fled to North Africa and the Ottoman Empire, while others publicly converted to Christianity and became known respectively as Marranos and Moriscos (after the old term Moors). However, many of these continued to practice their religion in secret. The Moriscos revolted several times and were ultimately forcibly expelled from Spain in the early 17th century. From 1609 to 1614, over 300,000 Moriscos were sent on ships to North Africa and other locations, and, of this figure, around 50,000 died resisting the expulsion, and 60,000 died on the journey.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "The change of relative supremacy from Portugal to the Hispanic Monarchy in the late 15th century has been described as one of the few cases of avoidance of the Thucydides Trap.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Challenging the conventions about the advent of modernity, Immanuel Wallerstein pushed back the origins of the capitalist modernity to the Iberian expansion of the 15th century. During the 16th century Spain created a vast empire in the Americas, with a state monopoly in Seville becoming the center of the ensuing transatlantic trade, based on bullion. Iberian imperialism, starting by the Portuguese establishment of routes to Asia and the posterior transatlantic trade with the New World by Spaniards and Portuguese (along Dutch, English and French), precipitated the economic decline of the Italian Peninsula. The 16th century was one of population growth with increased pressure over resources; in the case of the Iberian Peninsula a part of the population moved to the Americas meanwhile Jews and Moriscos were banished, relocating to other places in the Mediterranean Basin. Most of the Moriscos remained in Spain after the Morisco revolt in Las Alpujarras during the mid-16th century, but roughly 300,000 of them were expelled from the country in 1609–1614, and emigrated en masse to North Africa.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "In 1580, after the political crisis that followed the 1578 death of King Sebastian, Portugal became a dynastic composite entity of the Hapsburg Monarchy; thus, the whole peninsula was united politically during the period known as the Iberian Union (1580–1640). During the reign of Philip II of Spain (I of Portugal), the Councils of Portugal, Italy, Flanders and Burgundy were added to the group of counselling institutions of the Hispanic Monarchy, to which the Councils of Castile, Aragon, Indies, Chamber of Castile, Inquisition, Orders, and Crusade already belonged, defining the organization of the Royal court that underpinned the Polysynodial System through which the empire operated. During the Iberian union, the \"first great wave\" of the transatlantic slave trade happened, according to Enriqueta Vila Villar, as new markets opened because of the unification gave thrust to the slave trade.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "By 1600, the percentage of urban population for Spain was roughly 11.4%, while for Portugal the urban population was estimated as 14.1%, which were both above the 7.6% European average of the time (edged only by the Low Countries and the Italian Peninsula). Some striking differences appeared among the different Iberian realms. Castile, extending across a 60% of the territory of the peninsula and having 80% of the population was a rather urbanised country, yet with a widespread distribution of cities. Meanwhile, the urban population in the Crown of Aragon was highly concentrated in a handful of cities: Zaragoza (Kingdom of Aragon), Barcelona (Principality of Catalonia), and, to a lesser extent in the Kingdom of Valencia, in Valencia, Alicante and Orihuela. The case of Portugal presented an hypertrophied capital, Lisbon (which greatly increased its population during the 16th century, from 56,000 to 60,000 inhabitants by 1527, to roughly 120,000 by the third quarter of the century) with its demographic dynamism stimulated by the Asian trade, followed at great distance by Porto and Évora (both roughly accounting for 12,500 inhabitants). Throughout most of the 16th century, both Lisbon and Seville were among the Western Europe's largest and most dynamic cities.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The 17th century has been largely considered as a very negative period for the Iberian economies, seen as a time of recession, crisis or even decline, the urban dynamism chiefly moving to Northern Europe. A dismantling of the inner city network in the Castilian plateau took place during this period (with a parallel accumulation of economic activity in the capital, Madrid), with only New Castile resisting recession in the interior. Regarding the Atlantic façade of Castile, aside from the severing of trade with Northern Europe, inter-regional trade with other regions in the Iberian Peninsula also suffered to some extent. In Aragon, suffering from similar problems than Castile, the expelling of the Moriscos in 1609 in the Kingdom of Valencia aggravated the recession. Silk turned from a domestic industry into a raw commodity to be exported. However, the crisis was uneven (affecting longer the centre of the peninsula), as both Portugal and the Mediterranean coastline recovered in the later part of the century by fuelling a sustained growth.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The aftermath of the intermittent 1640–1668 Portuguese Restoration War brought the House of Braganza as the new ruling dynasty in the Portuguese territories across the world (bar Ceuta), putting an end to the Iberian Union.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Despite both Portugal and Spain starting their path towards modernization with the liberal revolutions of the first half of the 19th century, this process was, concerning structural changes in the geographical distribution of the population, relatively tame compared to what took place after World War II in the Iberian Peninsula, when strong urban development ran in parallel to substantial rural flight patterns.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The Iberian Peninsula is the westernmost of the three major southern European peninsulas—the Iberian, Italian, and Balkan. It is bordered on the southeast and east by the Mediterranean Sea, and on the north, west, and southwest by the Atlantic Ocean. The Pyrenees mountains are situated along the northeast edge of the peninsula, where it adjoins the rest of Europe. Its southern tip, located in Tarifa is the southernmost point of the European continent and is very close to the northwest coast of Africa, separated from it by the Strait of Gibraltar and the Mediterranean Sea.",
"title": "Geography and geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The Iberian Peninsula encompasses 583,254 km and has very contrasting and uneven relief. The mountain ranges of the Iberian Peninsula are mainly distributed from west to east, and in some cases reach altitudes of approximately 3000 mamsl, resulting in the region having the second highest mean altitude (637 mamsl) in Western Europe.",
"title": "Geography and geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The Iberian Peninsula extends from the southernmost extremity at Punta de Tarifa to the northernmost extremity at Punta de Estaca de Bares over a distance between lines of latitude of about 865 km (537 mi) based on a degree length of 111 km (69 mi) per degree, and from the westernmost extremity at Cabo da Roca to the easternmost extremity at Cap de Creus over a distance between lines of longitude at 40° N latitude of about 1,155 km (718 mi) based on an estimated degree length of about 90 km (56 mi) for that latitude. The irregular, roughly octagonal shape of the peninsula contained within this spherical quadrangle was compared to an ox-hide by the geographer Strabo.",
"title": "Geography and geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "About three quarters of that rough octagon is the Meseta Central, a vast plateau ranging from 610 to 760 m in altitude. It is located approximately in the centre, staggered slightly to the east and tilted slightly toward the west (the conventional centre of the Iberian Peninsula has long been considered Getafe just south of Madrid). It is ringed by mountains and contains the sources of most of the rivers, which find their way through gaps in the mountain barriers on all sides.",
"title": "Geography and geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "The coastline of the Iberian Peninsula is 3,313 km (2,059 mi), 1,660 km (1,030 mi) on the Mediterranean side and 1,653 km (1,027 mi) on the Atlantic side. The coast has been inundated over time, with sea levels having risen from a minimum of 115–120 m (377–394 ft) lower than today at the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) to its current level at 4,000 years BP. The coastal shelf created by sedimentation during that time remains below the surface; however, it was never very extensive on the Atlantic side, as the continental shelf drops rather steeply into the depths. An estimated 700 km (430 mi) length of Atlantic shelf is only 10–65 km (6.2–40.4 mi) wide. At the 500 m (1,600 ft) isobath, on the edge, the shelf drops off to 1,000 m (3,300 ft).",
"title": "Geography and geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "The submarine topography of the coastal waters of the Iberian Peninsula has been studied extensively in the process of drilling for oil. Ultimately, the shelf drops into the Bay of Biscay on the north (an abyss), the Iberian abyssal plain at 4,800 m (15,700 ft) on the west, and Tagus abyssal plain to the south. In the north, between the continental shelf and the abyss, is an extension called the Galicia Bank, a plateau that also contains the Porto, Vigo, and Vasco da Gama seamounts, which form the Galicia interior basin. The southern border of these features is marked by Nazaré Canyon, which splits the continental shelf and leads directly into the abyss.",
"title": "Geography and geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "The major rivers flow through the wide valleys between the mountain systems. These are the Ebro, Douro, Tagus, Guadiana and Guadalquivir. All rivers in the Iberian Peninsula are subject to seasonal variations in flow.",
"title": "Geography and geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "The Tagus is the longest river on the peninsula and, like the Douro, flows westwards with its lower course in Portugal. The Guadiana river bends southwards and forms the border between Spain and Portugal in the last stretch of its course.",
"title": "Geography and geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The terrain of the Iberian Peninsula is largely mountainous. The major mountain systems are:",
"title": "Geography and geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "The Iberian Peninsula contains rocks of every geological period from the Ediacaran to the Recent, and almost every kind of rock is represented. World-class mineral deposits can also be found there. The core of the Iberian Peninsula consists of a Hercynian cratonic block known as the Iberian Massif. On the northeast, this is bounded by the Pyrenean fold belt, and on the southeast it is bounded by the Baetic System. These twofold chains are part of the Alpine belt. To the west, the peninsula is delimited by the continental boundary formed by the magma-poor opening of the Atlantic Ocean. The Hercynian Foldbelt is mostly buried by Mesozoic and Tertiary cover rocks to the east, but nevertheless outcrops through the Sistema Ibérico and the Catalan Mediterranean System.",
"title": "Geography and geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "The Iberian Peninsula features one of the largest lithium deposits belts in Europe (an otherwise relatively scarce resource in the continent), scattered along the Iberian Massif's Central Iberian Zone [es] and Galicia Tras-Os-Montes Zone [es]. Also in the Iberian Massif, and similarly to other Hercynian blocks in Europe, the peninsula hosts some uranium deposits, largely located in the Central Iberian Zone unit.",
"title": "Geography and geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "The Iberian Pyrite Belt, located in the SW quadrant of the Peninsula, ranks among the most important volcanogenic massive sulphide districts on Earth, and it has been exploited for millennia.",
"title": "Geography and geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "The Iberian Peninsula's location and topography, as well as the effects of large atmospheric circulation patterns induce a NW to SE gradient of yearly precipitation (roughly from 2,000 mm to 300 mm).",
"title": "Geography and geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "The Iberian peninsula has three dominant climate types. One of these is the oceanic climate seen in the northeast in which precipitation has barely any difference between winter and summer. However, most of Portugal and Spain have a Mediterranean climate; the Warm-summer Mediterranean climate and the Hot-summer Mediterranean climate, with various differences in precipitation and temperature depending on latitude and position versus the sea, this applies greatly to the Portuguese and Galician Atlantic coasts where, due to upwelling/downwelling phenomena average temperatures in summer can vary through as much as 10 °C (50 °F) in only a few kilometers (e.g. Peniche vs Santarém) There are also more localized semi-arid climates in central Spain, with temperatures resembling a more continental Mediterranean climate. In other extreme cases highland alpine climates such as in Sierra Nevada and areas with extremely low precipitation and desert climates or semi-arid climates such as the Almería area, Murcia area and southern Alicante area. In the southwestern interior of the Iberian Peninsula the hottest temperatures in Europe are found, with Córdoba averaging around 37 °C (99 °F) in July. The Spanish Mediterranean coast usually averages around 30 °C (86 °F) in summer. In sharp contrast A Coruña at the northern tip of Galicia has a summer daytime high average at just below 23 °C (73 °F). This cool and wet summer climate is replicated throughout most of the northern coastline. Winters in the Peninsula are for the most part, mild, although frosts are common in higher altitude areas of central Spain. The warmest winter nights are usually found in downwelling favourable areas of the west coast, such as on capes. Precipitation varies greatly between regions on the Peninsula, in December for example the northern west coast averages above 200 mm (7.9 in) whereas the southeast can average below 30 mm (1.2 in). Insolation can vary from just 1,600 hours in the Bilbao area, to above 3,000 hours in the Algarve and Gulf of Cádiz.",
"title": "Geography and geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "The current political configuration of the Iberian Peninsula comprises the bulk of Portugal and Spain, the whole microstate of Andorra, a small part of the French department of Pyrénées-Orientales (French Cerdagne), and the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar.",
"title": "Major modern countries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "French Cerdagne is on the south side of the Pyrenees mountain range, which runs along the border between Spain and France. For example, the Segre river, which runs west and then south to meet the Ebro, has its source on the French side. The Pyrenees range is often considered the northeastern boundary of Iberian Peninsula, although the French coastline curves away from the rest of Europe north of the range, which is the reason why Perpignan, which is also known as the capital of Northern Catalonia, is often considered as the entrance to the Iberian Peninsula.",
"title": "Major modern countries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Regarding Portugal and Spain, this chiefly excludes the Macaronesian archipelagos (the Azores and Madeira of Portugal, and the Canary Islands of Spain), the Balearic Islands (Spain), and the Spanish overseas territories in North Africa (most conspicuously the cities of Ceuta and Melilla, as well as unpopulated islets and rocks).",
"title": "Major modern countries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Political divisions of the Iberian Peninsula:",
"title": "Major modern countries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "The Iberian city network is dominated by three international metropolises (Barcelona, Lisbon, and Madrid) and four regional metropolises (Bilbao, Porto, Seville, and Valencia). The relatively weak integration of the network favours a competitive approach vis-à-vis the inter-relation between the different centres. Among these metropolises, Madrid stands out within the global urban hierarchy in terms of its status as a major service centre and enjoys the greatest degree of connectivity.",
"title": "Cities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "According to Eurostat (2019), the metropolitan regions with a population over one million are listed as follows:",
"title": "Cities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "The woodlands of the Iberian Peninsula are distinct ecosystems. Although the various regions are each characterized by distinct vegetation, there are some similarities across the peninsula.",
"title": "Ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "While the borders between these regions are not clearly defined, there is a mutual influence that makes it very hard to establish boundaries and some species find their optimal habitat in the intermediate areas.",
"title": "Ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "The endangered Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus) is a symbol of the Iberian mediterranean forest and of the fauna of the Iberian Peninsula altogether.",
"title": "Ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "A new Podarcis lizard species, Podarcis virescens, was accepted as a species by the Taxonomic Committee of the Societas Europaea Herpetologica in 2020. This lizard is native to the Iberian Peninsula and found near rivers in the region.",
"title": "Ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "The Iberian Peninsula is an important stopover on the East Atlantic flyway for birds migrating from northern Europe to Africa. For example, curlew sandpipers rest in the region of the Bay of Cádiz.",
"title": "Ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "In addition to the birds migrating through, some seven million wading birds from the north spend the winter in the estuaries and wetlands of the Iberian Peninsula, mainly at locations on the Atlantic coast. In Galicia are Ría de Arousa (a home of grey plover), Ria de Ortigueira, Ria de Corme and Ria de Laxe. In Portugal, the Aveiro Lagoon hosts Recurvirostra avosetta, the common ringed plover, grey plover and little stint. Ribatejo Province on the Tagus supports Recurvirostra arosetta, grey plover, dunlin, bar-tailed godwit and common redshank. In the Sado Estuary are dunlin, Eurasian curlew, grey plover and common redshank. The Algarve hosts red knot, common greenshank and turnstone. The Guadalquivir Marshes region of Andalusia and the Salinas de Cádiz are especially rich in wintering wading birds: Kentish plover, common ringed plover, sanderling, and black-tailed godwit in addition to the others. And finally, the Ebro delta is home to all the species mentioned above.",
"title": "Ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "With the sole exception of Basque, which is of unknown origin, all modern Iberian languages descend from Vulgar Latin and belong to the Western Romance languages. Throughout history (and pre-history), many different languages have been spoken in the Iberian Peninsula, contributing to the formation and differentiation of the contemporaneous languages of Iberia; however, most of them have become extinct or fallen into disuse. Basque is the only non-Indo-European surviving language in Iberia and Western Europe.",
"title": "Languages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "In modern times, Spanish (the official language of Spain, spoken by the entire 45 million population in the country, the native language of about 36 million in Europe), Portuguese (the official language of Portugal, with a population over 10 million), Catalan (over 7 million speakers in Europe, 3.4 million with Catalan as first language), Galician (understood by the 93% of the 2.8 million Galician population) and Basque (cf. around 1 million speakers) are the most widely spoken languages in the Iberian Peninsula. Spanish and Portuguese have expanded beyond Iberia to the rest of world, becoming global languages.",
"title": "Languages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Other minority romance languages with some degree of recognition include the several varieties of Astur-leonese, collectively amounting to about 0.6 million speakers, and the Aragonese (barely spoken by the 8% of the 130,000 people inhabiting the Alto Aragón).",
"title": "Languages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "English is the official language of Gibraltar. Llanito is a unique language in the territory, an amalgamation of mostly English and Spanish. In Spain, only 54.3% could speak a foreign language, below that of the EU-28 average. Portugal meanwhile achieved 69%, above the EU average, but still below the EU median. Spain ranks 25th out of 33 European countries in the English Proficiency Index.",
"title": "Languages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Both Spain and Portugal have traditionally used a non-standard rail gauge (the 1,668 mm Iberian gauge) since the construction of the first railroads in the 19th century. Spain has progressively introduced the 1,435 mm standard gauge in its new high-speed rail network (one of the most extensive in the world), inaugurated in 1992 with the Madrid–Seville line, followed to name a few by the Madrid–Barcelona (2008), Madrid–Valencia (2010), an Alicante branch of the latter (2013) and the connection to France of the Barcelona line. Portugal however suspended all the high-speed rail projects in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, putting an end for the time being to the possibility of a high-speed rail connection between Lisbon, Porto and Madrid.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Handicapped by a mountainous range (the Pyrenees) hindering the connection to the rest of Europe, Spain (and subsidiarily Portugal) only has two meaningful rail connections to France able for freight transport, located at both ends of the mountain range. An international rail line across the Central Pyrenees linking Zaragoza and the French city of Pau through a tunnel existed in the past; however, an accident in the French part destroyed a stretch of the railroad in 1970 and the Canfranc Station has been a cul-de-sac since then.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "There are four points connecting the Portuguese and Spanish rail networks: Valença do Minho–Tui, Vilar Formoso–Fuentes de Oñoro, Marvão-Beirã–Valencia de Alcántara and Elvas–Badajoz.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "The prospect of the development (as part of a European-wide effort) of the Central, Mediterranean and Atlantic rail corridors is expected to be a way to improve the competitiveness of the ports of Tarragona, Valencia, Sagunto, Bilbao, Santander, Sines and Algeciras vis-à-vis the rest of Europe and the World.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "In 1980, Morocco and Spain started a joint study on the feasibility of a fixed link (tunnel or bridge) across the Strait of Gibraltar, possibly through a connection of Punta Paloma [es] with Cape Malabata. Years of studies have, however, made no real progress thus far.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "A transit point for many submarine cables, the Fibre-optic Link Around the Globe, Europe India Gateway, and the SEA-ME-WE 3 feature landing stations in the Iberian Peninsula. The West Africa Cable System, Main One, SAT-3/WASC, Africa Coast to Europe also land in Portugal. MAREA, a high capacity communication transatlantic cable, connects the north of the Iberian Peninsula (Bilbao) to North America (Virginia), whereas Grace Hopper is an upcoming cable connecting the Iberian Peninsula (Bilbao) to the UK and the US intended to be operative by 2022 and EllaLink is an upcoming high-capacity communication cable expected to connect the Peninsula (Sines) to South America and the mammoth 2Africa project intends to connect the peninsula to the United Kingdom, Europe and Africa (via Portugal and Barcelona) by 2023–24.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "Two gas pipelines: the Pedro Duran Farell pipeline and (more recently) the Medgaz (from, respectively, Morocco and Algeria) link the Maghreb and the Iberian Peninsula, providing Spain with Algerian natural gas. However the contract for the first pipeline expires on 31 October 2021 and—amidst a tense climate of Algerian–Moroccan relations—there are no plans to renew it.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "The official currency across Iberia is the Euro, with the exception of Gibraltar, which uses the Gibraltar Pound (at parity with Sterling).",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "Major industries include mining, tourism, small farms, and fishing. Because the coast is so long, fishing is popular, especially sardines, tuna and anchovies. Most of the mining occurs in the Pyrenees mountains. Commodities mined include: iron, gold, coal, lead, silver, zinc, and salt.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "Regarding their role in the global economy, both the microstate of Andorra and the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar have been described as tax havens.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "The Galician region of Spain, in the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula, became one of the biggest entry points of cocaine in Europe, on a par with the Dutch ports. Hashish is smuggled from Morocco via the Strait of Gibraltar.",
"title": "Economy"
}
]
| The Iberian Peninsula, also known as Iberia, is a peninsula in Southwestern Europe, defining the westernmost edge of Eurasia. It is divided between Peninsular Spain and Continental Portugal, comprising most of the region, as well as Andorra, Gibraltar and a small part of Southern France. With an area of approximately 583,254 square kilometres (225,196 sq mi), and a population of roughly 53 million, it is the second-largest European peninsula by area, after the Scandinavian Peninsula. | 2001-08-06T10:36:16Z | 2023-12-23T22:52:43Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian_Peninsula |
14,884 | Intermediate value theorem | In mathematical analysis, the intermediate value theorem states that if f {\displaystyle f} is a continuous function whose domain contains the interval [a, b], then it takes on any given value between f ( a ) {\displaystyle f(a)} and f ( b ) {\displaystyle f(b)} at some point within the interval.
This has two important corollaries:
This captures an intuitive property of continuous functions over the real numbers: given f {\displaystyle f} continuous on [ 1 , 2 ] {\displaystyle [1,2]} with the known values f ( 1 ) = 3 {\displaystyle f(1)=3} and f ( 2 ) = 5 {\displaystyle f(2)=5} , then the graph of y = f ( x ) {\displaystyle y=f(x)} must pass through the horizontal line y = 4 {\displaystyle y=4} while x {\displaystyle x} moves from 1 {\displaystyle 1} to 2 {\displaystyle 2} . It represents the idea that the graph of a continuous function on a closed interval can be drawn without lifting a pencil from the paper.
The intermediate value theorem states the following:
Consider an interval I = [ a , b ] {\displaystyle I=[a,b]} of real numbers R {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} } and a continuous function f : I → R {\displaystyle f\colon I\to \mathbb {R} } . Then
Remark: Version II states that the set of function values has no gap. For any two function values c , d ∈ f ( I ) {\displaystyle c,d\in f(I)} with c < d {\displaystyle c<d} , even if they are outside the interval between f ( a ) {\displaystyle f(a)} and f ( b ) {\displaystyle f(b)} , all points in the interval [ c , d ] {\displaystyle {\bigl [}c,d{\bigr ]}} are also function values,
A subset of the real numbers with no internal gap is an interval. Version I is naturally contained in Version II.
The theorem depends on, and is equivalent to, the completeness of the real numbers. The intermediate value theorem does not apply to the rational numbers Q because gaps exist between rational numbers; irrational numbers fill those gaps. For example, the function f ( x ) = x 2 {\displaystyle f(x)=x^{2}} for x ∈ Q {\displaystyle x\in \mathbb {Q} } satisfies f ( 0 ) = 0 {\displaystyle f(0)=0} and f ( 2 ) = 4 {\displaystyle f(2)=4} . However, there is no rational number x {\displaystyle x} such that f ( x ) = 2 {\displaystyle f(x)=2} , because 2 {\displaystyle {\sqrt {2}}} is an irrational number.
The theorem may be proven as a consequence of the completeness property of the real numbers as follows:
We shall prove the first case, f ( a ) < u < f ( b ) {\displaystyle f(a)<u<f(b)} . The second case is similar.
Let S {\displaystyle S} be the set of all x ∈ [ a , b ] {\displaystyle x\in [a,b]} such that f ( x ) < u {\displaystyle f(x)<u} . Then S {\displaystyle S} is non-empty since a {\displaystyle a} is an element of S {\displaystyle S} . Since S {\displaystyle S} is non-empty and bounded above by b {\displaystyle b} , by completeness, the supremum c = sup S {\displaystyle c=\sup S} exists. That is, c {\displaystyle c} is the smallest number that is greater than or equal to every member of S {\displaystyle S} .
Note that, due to the continuity of f {\displaystyle f} at a {\displaystyle a} , we can keep f ( x ) {\displaystyle f(x)} within any ε > 0 {\displaystyle \varepsilon >0} of f ( a ) {\displaystyle f(a)} by keeping x {\displaystyle x} sufficiently close to a {\displaystyle a} . Since f ( a ) < u {\displaystyle f(a)<u} is a strict inequality, consider the implication when ε {\displaystyle \varepsilon } is the distance between u {\displaystyle u} and f ( a ) {\displaystyle f(a)} . No x {\displaystyle x} sufficiently close to a {\displaystyle a} can then make f ( x ) {\displaystyle f(x)} greater than or equal to u {\displaystyle u} , which means there are values greater than a {\displaystyle a} in S {\displaystyle S} . A more detailed proof goes like this:
Choose ε = u − f ( a ) > 0 {\displaystyle \varepsilon =u-f(a)>0} . Then ∃ δ > 0 {\displaystyle \exists \delta >0} such that ∀ x ∈ [ a , b ] {\displaystyle \forall x\in [a,b]} ,
Consider the interval [ a , min ( a + δ , b ) ) = I 1 {\displaystyle [a,\min(a+\delta ,b))=I_{1}} . Notice that I 1 ⊆ [ a , b ] {\displaystyle I_{1}\subseteq [a,b]} and every x ∈ I 1 {\displaystyle x\in I_{1}} satisfies the condition | x − a | < δ {\displaystyle |x-a|<\delta } . Therefore for every x ∈ I 1 {\displaystyle x\in I_{1}} we have f ( x ) < u {\displaystyle f(x)<u} . Hence c {\displaystyle c} cannot be a {\displaystyle a} .
Likewise, due to the continuity of f {\displaystyle f} at b {\displaystyle b} , we can keep f ( x ) {\displaystyle f(x)} within any ε > 0 {\displaystyle \varepsilon >0} of f ( b ) {\displaystyle f(b)} by keeping x {\displaystyle x} sufficiently close to b {\displaystyle b} . Since u < f ( b ) {\displaystyle u<f(b)} is a strict inequality, consider the similar implication when ε {\displaystyle \varepsilon } is the distance between u {\displaystyle u} and f ( b ) {\displaystyle f(b)} . Every x {\displaystyle x} sufficiently close to b {\displaystyle b} must then make f ( x ) {\displaystyle f(x)} greater than u {\displaystyle u} , which means there are values smaller than b {\displaystyle b} that are upper bounds of S {\displaystyle S} . A more detailed proof goes like this:
Choose ε = f ( b ) − u > 0 {\displaystyle \varepsilon =f(b)-u>0} . Then ∃ δ > 0 {\displaystyle \exists \delta >0} such that ∀ x ∈ [ a , b ] {\displaystyle \forall x\in [a,b]} ,
Consider the interval ( max ( a , b − δ ) , b ] = I 2 {\displaystyle (\max(a,b-\delta ),b]=I_{2}} . Notice that I 2 ⊆ [ a , b ] {\displaystyle I_{2}\subseteq [a,b]} and every x ∈ I 2 {\displaystyle x\in I_{2}} satisfies the condition | x − b | < δ {\displaystyle |x-b|<\delta } . Therefore for every x ∈ I 2 {\displaystyle x\in I_{2}} we have f ( x ) > u {\displaystyle f(x)>u} . Hence c {\displaystyle c} cannot be b {\displaystyle b} .
With c ≠ a {\displaystyle c\neq a} and c ≠ b {\displaystyle c\neq b} , it must be the case c ∈ ( a , b ) {\displaystyle c\in (a,b)} . Now we claim that f ( c ) = u {\displaystyle f(c)=u} .
Fix some ε > 0 {\displaystyle \varepsilon >0} . Since f {\displaystyle f} is continuous at c {\displaystyle c} , ∃ δ 1 > 0 {\displaystyle \exists \delta _{1}>0} such that ∀ x ∈ [ a , b ] {\displaystyle \forall x\in [a,b]} , | x − c | < δ 1 ⟹ | f ( x ) − f ( c ) | < ε {\displaystyle |x-c|<\delta _{1}\implies |f(x)-f(c)|<\varepsilon } .
Since c ∈ ( a , b ) {\displaystyle c\in (a,b)} and ( a , b ) {\displaystyle (a,b)} is open, ∃ δ 2 > 0 {\displaystyle \exists \delta _{2}>0} such that ( c − δ 2 , c + δ 2 ) ⊆ ( a , b ) {\displaystyle (c-\delta _{2},c+\delta _{2})\subseteq (a,b)} . Set δ = min ( δ 1 , δ 2 ) {\displaystyle \delta =\min(\delta _{1},\delta _{2})} . Then we have
for all x ∈ ( c − δ , c + δ ) {\displaystyle x\in (c-\delta ,c+\delta )} . By the properties of the supremum, there exists some a ∗ ∈ ( c − δ , c ] {\displaystyle a^{*}\in (c-\delta ,c]} that is contained in S {\displaystyle S} , and so
Picking a ∗ ∗ ∈ ( c , c + δ ) {\displaystyle a^{**}\in (c,c+\delta )} , we know that a ∗ ∗ ∉ S {\displaystyle a^{**}\not \in S} because c {\displaystyle c} is the supremum of S {\displaystyle S} . This means that
Both inequalities
are valid for all ε > 0 {\displaystyle \varepsilon >0} , from which we deduce f ( c ) = u {\displaystyle f(c)=u} as the only possible value, as stated.
We will only prove the case of f ( a ) < u < f ( b ) {\displaystyle f(a)<u<f(b)} , as the f ( a ) > u > f ( b ) {\displaystyle f(a)>u>f(b)} case is similar.
Define g ( x ) = f ( x ) − u {\displaystyle g(x)=f(x)-u} which is equivalent to f ( x ) = g ( x ) + u {\displaystyle f(x)=g(x)+u} and lets us rewrite f ( a ) < u < f ( b ) {\displaystyle f(a)<u<f(b)} as g ( a ) < 0 < g ( b ) {\displaystyle g(a)<0<g(b)} , and we have to prove, that g ( c ) = 0 {\displaystyle g(c)=0} for some c ∈ [ a , b ] {\displaystyle c\in [a,b]} , which is more intuitive. We further define the set S = { x ∈ [ a , b ] : g ( x ) ≤ 0 } {\displaystyle S=\{x\in [a,b]:g(x)\leq 0\}} . Because g ( a ) < 0 {\displaystyle g(a)<0} we know, that a ∈ S {\displaystyle a\in S} so, that S {\displaystyle S} is not empty. Moreover, as S ⊆ [ a , b ] {\displaystyle S\subseteq [a,b]} , we know that S {\displaystyle S} is bounded and non-empty, so by Completeness, the supremum c = sup ( S ) {\displaystyle c=\sup(S)} exists.
There are 3 cases for the value of g ( c ) {\displaystyle g(c)} , those being g ( c ) < 0 , g ( c ) > 0 {\displaystyle g(c)<0,g(c)>0} and g ( c ) = 0 {\displaystyle g(c)=0} . For contradiction, let us assume, that g ( c ) < 0 {\displaystyle g(c)<0} . Then, by the definition of continuity, for ϵ = 0 − g ( c ) {\displaystyle \epsilon =0-g(c)} , there exists a δ > 0 {\displaystyle \delta >0} such that x ∈ ( c − δ , c + δ ) {\displaystyle x\in (c-\delta ,c+\delta )} implies, that | g ( x ) − g ( c ) | < − g ( c ) {\displaystyle |g(x)-g(c)|<-g(c)} , which is equivalent to g ( x ) < 0 {\displaystyle g(x)<0} . If we just chose x = c + δ N {\displaystyle x=c+{\frac {\delta }{N}}} , where N > δ b − c {\displaystyle N>{\frac {\delta }{b-c}}} , then g ( x ) < 0 {\displaystyle g(x)<0} and c < x < b {\displaystyle c<x<b} , so x ∈ S {\displaystyle x\in S} . It follows that x {\displaystyle x} is an upper bound for S {\displaystyle S} . However, x > c {\displaystyle x>c} , contradicting the upper bound property of the least upper bound c {\displaystyle c} , so g ( c ) ≥ 0 {\displaystyle g(c)\geq 0} . Assume then, that g ( c ) > 0 {\displaystyle g(c)>0} . We similarly chose ϵ = g ( c ) − 0 {\displaystyle \epsilon =g(c)-0} and know, that there exists a δ > 0 {\displaystyle \delta >0} such that x ∈ ( c − δ , c + δ ) {\displaystyle x\in (c-\delta ,c+\delta )} implies | g ( x ) − g ( c ) | < g ( c ) {\displaystyle |g(x)-g(c)|<g(c)} . We can rewrite this as − g ( c ) < g ( x ) − g ( c ) < g ( c ) {\displaystyle -g(c)<g(x)-g(c)<g(c)} which implies, that g ( x ) > 0 {\displaystyle g(x)>0} . If we now chose x = c − δ 2 {\displaystyle x=c-{\frac {\delta }{2}}} , then g ( x ) > 0 {\displaystyle g(x)>0} and a < x < c {\displaystyle a<x<c} . It follows that x {\displaystyle x} is an upper bound for S {\displaystyle S} . However, x < c {\displaystyle x<c} , which contradict the least property of the least upper bound c {\displaystyle c} , which means, that g ( c ) > 0 {\displaystyle g(c)>0} is impossible. If we combine both results, we get that g ( c ) = 0 {\displaystyle g(c)=0} or f ( c ) = u {\displaystyle f(c)=u} is the only remaining possibility.
Remark: The intermediate value theorem can also be proved using the methods of non-standard analysis, which places "intuitive" arguments involving infinitesimals on a rigorous footing.
A form of the theorem was postulated as early as the 5th century BCE, in the work of Bryson of Heraclea on squaring the circle. Bryson argued that, as circles larger than and smaller than a given square both exist, there must exist a circle of equal area. The theorem was first proved by Bernard Bolzano in 1817. Bolzano used the following formulation of the theorem:
Let f , ϕ {\displaystyle f,\phi } be continuous functions on the interval between α {\displaystyle \alpha } and β {\displaystyle \beta } such that f ( α ) < ϕ ( α ) {\displaystyle f(\alpha )<\phi (\alpha )} and f ( β ) > ϕ ( β ) {\displaystyle f(\beta )>\phi (\beta )} . Then there is an x {\displaystyle x} between α {\displaystyle \alpha } and β {\displaystyle \beta } such that f ( x ) = ϕ ( x ) {\displaystyle f(x)=\phi (x)} .
The equivalence between this formulation and the modern one can be shown by setting ϕ {\displaystyle \phi } to the appropriate constant function. Augustin-Louis Cauchy provided the modern formulation and a proof in 1821. Both were inspired by the goal of formalizing the analysis of functions and the work of Joseph-Louis Lagrange. The idea that continuous functions possess the intermediate value property has an earlier origin. Simon Stevin proved the intermediate value theorem for polynomials (using a cubic as an example) by providing an algorithm for constructing the decimal expansion of the solution. The algorithm iteratively subdivides the interval into 10 parts, producing an additional decimal digit at each step of the iteration. Before the formal definition of continuity was given, the intermediate value property was given as part of the definition of a continuous function. Proponents include Louis Arbogast, who assumed the functions to have no jumps, satisfy the intermediate value property and have increments whose sizes corresponded to the sizes of the increments of the variable. Earlier authors held the result to be intuitively obvious and requiring no proof. The insight of Bolzano and Cauchy was to define a general notion of continuity (in terms of infinitesimals in Cauchy's case and using real inequalities in Bolzano's case), and to provide a proof based on such definitions.
A Darboux function is a real-valued function f that has the "intermediate value property," i.e., that satisfies the conclusion of the intermediate value theorem: for any two values a and b in the domain of f, and any y between f(a) and f(b), there is some c between a and b with f(c) = y. The intermediate value theorem says that every continuous function is a Darboux function. However, not every Darboux function is continuous; i.e., the converse of the intermediate value theorem is false.
As an example, take the function f : [0, ∞) → [−1, 1] defined by f(x) = sin(1/x) for x > 0 and f(0) = 0. This function is not continuous at x = 0 because the limit of f(x) as x tends to 0 does not exist; yet the function has the intermediate value property. Another, more complicated example is given by the Conway base 13 function.
In fact, Darboux's theorem states that all functions that result from the differentiation of some other function on some interval have the intermediate value property (even though they need not be continuous).
Historically, this intermediate value property has been suggested as a definition for continuity of real-valued functions; this definition was not adopted.
The Poincaré-Miranda theorem is a generalization of the Intermediate value theorem from a (one-dimensional) interval to a (two-dimensional) rectangle, or more generally, to an n-dimensional cube.
Vrahatis presents a similar generalization to triangles, or more generally, n-dimensional simplices. Let D be an n-dimensional simplex with n+1 vertices denoted by v0,...,vn. Let F=(f1,...,fn) be a function from D to R, that never equals 0 on the boundary of D. Suppose F satisfies the following conditions:
Then there is a point z in the interior of D on which F(z)=(0,...,0).
It is possible to normalize the fi such that fi(vi)>0 for all i; then the conditions become simpler:
The theorem can be proved based on the Knaster–Kuratowski–Mazurkiewicz lemma. In can be used for approximations of fixed points and zeros.
The intermediate value theorem is closely linked to the topological notion of connectedness and follows from the basic properties of connected sets in metric spaces and connected subsets of R in particular:
In fact, connectedness is a topological property and (*) generalizes to topological spaces: If X {\displaystyle X} and Y {\displaystyle Y} are topological spaces, f : X → Y {\displaystyle f\colon X\to Y} is a continuous map, and X {\displaystyle X} is a connected space, then f ( X ) {\displaystyle f(X)} is connected. The preservation of connectedness under continuous maps can be thought of as a generalization of the intermediate value theorem, a property of real valued functions of a real variable, to continuous functions in general spaces.
Recall the first version of the intermediate value theorem, stated previously:
Intermediate value theorem (Version I) — Consider a closed interval I = [ a , b ] {\displaystyle I=[a,b]} in the real numbers R {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} } and a continuous function f : I → R {\displaystyle f\colon I\to \mathbb {R} } . Then, if u {\displaystyle u} is a real number such that min ( f ( a ) , f ( b ) ) < u < max ( f ( a ) , f ( b ) ) {\displaystyle \min(f(a),f(b))<u<\max(f(a),f(b))} , there exists c ∈ ( a , b ) {\displaystyle c\in (a,b)} such that f ( c ) = u {\displaystyle f(c)=u} .
The intermediate value theorem is an immediate consequence of these two properties of connectedness:
By (**), I = [ a , b ] {\displaystyle I=[a,b]} is a connected set. It follows from (*) that the image, f ( I ) {\displaystyle f(I)} , is also connected. For convenience, assume that f ( a ) < f ( b ) {\displaystyle f(a)<f(b)} . Then once more invoking (**), f ( a ) < u < f ( b ) {\displaystyle f(a)<u<f(b)} implies that u ∈ f ( I ) {\displaystyle u\in f(I)} , or f ( c ) = u {\displaystyle f(c)=u} for some c ∈ I {\displaystyle c\in I} . Since u ≠ f ( a ) , f ( b ) {\displaystyle u\neq f(a),f(b)} , c ∈ ( a , b ) {\displaystyle c\in (a,b)} must actually hold, and the desired conclusion follows. The same argument applies if f ( b ) < f ( a ) {\displaystyle f(b)<f(a)} , so we are done. Q.E.D.
The intermediate value theorem generalizes in a natural way: Suppose that X is a connected topological space and (Y, <) is a totally ordered set equipped with the order topology, and let f : X → Y be a continuous map. If a and b are two points in X and u is a point in Y lying between f(a) and f(b) with respect to <, then there exists c in X such that f(c) = u. The original theorem is recovered by noting that R is connected and that its natural topology is the order topology.
The Brouwer fixed-point theorem is a related theorem that, in one dimension, gives a special case of the intermediate value theorem.
In constructive mathematics, the intermediate value theorem is not true. Instead, one has to weaken the conclusion:
A similar result is the Borsuk–Ulam theorem, which says that a continuous map from the n {\displaystyle n} -sphere to Euclidean n {\displaystyle n} -space will always map some pair of antipodal points to the same place.
Take f {\displaystyle f} to be any continuous function on a circle. Draw a line through the center of the circle, intersecting it at two opposite points A {\displaystyle A} and B {\displaystyle B} . Define d {\displaystyle d} to be f ( A ) − f ( B ) {\displaystyle f(A)-f(B)} . If the line is rotated 180 degrees, the value −d will be obtained instead. Due to the intermediate value theorem there must be some intermediate rotation angle for which d = 0, and as a consequence f(A) = f(B) at this angle.
In general, for any continuous function whose domain is some closed convex n {\displaystyle n} -dimensional shape and any point inside the shape (not necessarily its center), there exist two antipodal points with respect to the given point whose functional value is the same.
The theorem also underpins the explanation of why rotating a wobbly table will bring it to stability (subject to certain easily met constraints). | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "In mathematical analysis, the intermediate value theorem states that if f {\\displaystyle f} is a continuous function whose domain contains the interval [a, b], then it takes on any given value between f ( a ) {\\displaystyle f(a)} and f ( b ) {\\displaystyle f(b)} at some point within the interval.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "This has two important corollaries:",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "This captures an intuitive property of continuous functions over the real numbers: given f {\\displaystyle f} continuous on [ 1 , 2 ] {\\displaystyle [1,2]} with the known values f ( 1 ) = 3 {\\displaystyle f(1)=3} and f ( 2 ) = 5 {\\displaystyle f(2)=5} , then the graph of y = f ( x ) {\\displaystyle y=f(x)} must pass through the horizontal line y = 4 {\\displaystyle y=4} while x {\\displaystyle x} moves from 1 {\\displaystyle 1} to 2 {\\displaystyle 2} . It represents the idea that the graph of a continuous function on a closed interval can be drawn without lifting a pencil from the paper.",
"title": "Motivation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The intermediate value theorem states the following:",
"title": "Theorem"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Consider an interval I = [ a , b ] {\\displaystyle I=[a,b]} of real numbers R {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {R} } and a continuous function f : I → R {\\displaystyle f\\colon I\\to \\mathbb {R} } . Then",
"title": "Theorem"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Remark: Version II states that the set of function values has no gap. For any two function values c , d ∈ f ( I ) {\\displaystyle c,d\\in f(I)} with c < d {\\displaystyle c<d} , even if they are outside the interval between f ( a ) {\\displaystyle f(a)} and f ( b ) {\\displaystyle f(b)} , all points in the interval [ c , d ] {\\displaystyle {\\bigl [}c,d{\\bigr ]}} are also function values,",
"title": "Theorem"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "A subset of the real numbers with no internal gap is an interval. Version I is naturally contained in Version II.",
"title": "Theorem"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The theorem depends on, and is equivalent to, the completeness of the real numbers. The intermediate value theorem does not apply to the rational numbers Q because gaps exist between rational numbers; irrational numbers fill those gaps. For example, the function f ( x ) = x 2 {\\displaystyle f(x)=x^{2}} for x ∈ Q {\\displaystyle x\\in \\mathbb {Q} } satisfies f ( 0 ) = 0 {\\displaystyle f(0)=0} and f ( 2 ) = 4 {\\displaystyle f(2)=4} . However, there is no rational number x {\\displaystyle x} such that f ( x ) = 2 {\\displaystyle f(x)=2} , because 2 {\\displaystyle {\\sqrt {2}}} is an irrational number.",
"title": "Relation to completeness"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The theorem may be proven as a consequence of the completeness property of the real numbers as follows:",
"title": "Proof"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "We shall prove the first case, f ( a ) < u < f ( b ) {\\displaystyle f(a)<u<f(b)} . The second case is similar.",
"title": "Proof"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Let S {\\displaystyle S} be the set of all x ∈ [ a , b ] {\\displaystyle x\\in [a,b]} such that f ( x ) < u {\\displaystyle f(x)<u} . Then S {\\displaystyle S} is non-empty since a {\\displaystyle a} is an element of S {\\displaystyle S} . Since S {\\displaystyle S} is non-empty and bounded above by b {\\displaystyle b} , by completeness, the supremum c = sup S {\\displaystyle c=\\sup S} exists. That is, c {\\displaystyle c} is the smallest number that is greater than or equal to every member of S {\\displaystyle S} .",
"title": "Proof"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Note that, due to the continuity of f {\\displaystyle f} at a {\\displaystyle a} , we can keep f ( x ) {\\displaystyle f(x)} within any ε > 0 {\\displaystyle \\varepsilon >0} of f ( a ) {\\displaystyle f(a)} by keeping x {\\displaystyle x} sufficiently close to a {\\displaystyle a} . Since f ( a ) < u {\\displaystyle f(a)<u} is a strict inequality, consider the implication when ε {\\displaystyle \\varepsilon } is the distance between u {\\displaystyle u} and f ( a ) {\\displaystyle f(a)} . No x {\\displaystyle x} sufficiently close to a {\\displaystyle a} can then make f ( x ) {\\displaystyle f(x)} greater than or equal to u {\\displaystyle u} , which means there are values greater than a {\\displaystyle a} in S {\\displaystyle S} . A more detailed proof goes like this:",
"title": "Proof"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "",
"title": "Proof"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Choose ε = u − f ( a ) > 0 {\\displaystyle \\varepsilon =u-f(a)>0} . Then ∃ δ > 0 {\\displaystyle \\exists \\delta >0} such that ∀ x ∈ [ a , b ] {\\displaystyle \\forall x\\in [a,b]} ,",
"title": "Proof"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Consider the interval [ a , min ( a + δ , b ) ) = I 1 {\\displaystyle [a,\\min(a+\\delta ,b))=I_{1}} . Notice that I 1 ⊆ [ a , b ] {\\displaystyle I_{1}\\subseteq [a,b]} and every x ∈ I 1 {\\displaystyle x\\in I_{1}} satisfies the condition | x − a | < δ {\\displaystyle |x-a|<\\delta } . Therefore for every x ∈ I 1 {\\displaystyle x\\in I_{1}} we have f ( x ) < u {\\displaystyle f(x)<u} . Hence c {\\displaystyle c} cannot be a {\\displaystyle a} .",
"title": "Proof"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Likewise, due to the continuity of f {\\displaystyle f} at b {\\displaystyle b} , we can keep f ( x ) {\\displaystyle f(x)} within any ε > 0 {\\displaystyle \\varepsilon >0} of f ( b ) {\\displaystyle f(b)} by keeping x {\\displaystyle x} sufficiently close to b {\\displaystyle b} . Since u < f ( b ) {\\displaystyle u<f(b)} is a strict inequality, consider the similar implication when ε {\\displaystyle \\varepsilon } is the distance between u {\\displaystyle u} and f ( b ) {\\displaystyle f(b)} . Every x {\\displaystyle x} sufficiently close to b {\\displaystyle b} must then make f ( x ) {\\displaystyle f(x)} greater than u {\\displaystyle u} , which means there are values smaller than b {\\displaystyle b} that are upper bounds of S {\\displaystyle S} . A more detailed proof goes like this:",
"title": "Proof"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Choose ε = f ( b ) − u > 0 {\\displaystyle \\varepsilon =f(b)-u>0} . Then ∃ δ > 0 {\\displaystyle \\exists \\delta >0} such that ∀ x ∈ [ a , b ] {\\displaystyle \\forall x\\in [a,b]} ,",
"title": "Proof"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Consider the interval ( max ( a , b − δ ) , b ] = I 2 {\\displaystyle (\\max(a,b-\\delta ),b]=I_{2}} . Notice that I 2 ⊆ [ a , b ] {\\displaystyle I_{2}\\subseteq [a,b]} and every x ∈ I 2 {\\displaystyle x\\in I_{2}} satisfies the condition | x − b | < δ {\\displaystyle |x-b|<\\delta } . Therefore for every x ∈ I 2 {\\displaystyle x\\in I_{2}} we have f ( x ) > u {\\displaystyle f(x)>u} . Hence c {\\displaystyle c} cannot be b {\\displaystyle b} .",
"title": "Proof"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "With c ≠ a {\\displaystyle c\\neq a} and c ≠ b {\\displaystyle c\\neq b} , it must be the case c ∈ ( a , b ) {\\displaystyle c\\in (a,b)} . Now we claim that f ( c ) = u {\\displaystyle f(c)=u} .",
"title": "Proof"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Fix some ε > 0 {\\displaystyle \\varepsilon >0} . Since f {\\displaystyle f} is continuous at c {\\displaystyle c} , ∃ δ 1 > 0 {\\displaystyle \\exists \\delta _{1}>0} such that ∀ x ∈ [ a , b ] {\\displaystyle \\forall x\\in [a,b]} , | x − c | < δ 1 ⟹ | f ( x ) − f ( c ) | < ε {\\displaystyle |x-c|<\\delta _{1}\\implies |f(x)-f(c)|<\\varepsilon } .",
"title": "Proof"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Since c ∈ ( a , b ) {\\displaystyle c\\in (a,b)} and ( a , b ) {\\displaystyle (a,b)} is open, ∃ δ 2 > 0 {\\displaystyle \\exists \\delta _{2}>0} such that ( c − δ 2 , c + δ 2 ) ⊆ ( a , b ) {\\displaystyle (c-\\delta _{2},c+\\delta _{2})\\subseteq (a,b)} . Set δ = min ( δ 1 , δ 2 ) {\\displaystyle \\delta =\\min(\\delta _{1},\\delta _{2})} . Then we have",
"title": "Proof"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "for all x ∈ ( c − δ , c + δ ) {\\displaystyle x\\in (c-\\delta ,c+\\delta )} . By the properties of the supremum, there exists some a ∗ ∈ ( c − δ , c ] {\\displaystyle a^{*}\\in (c-\\delta ,c]} that is contained in S {\\displaystyle S} , and so",
"title": "Proof"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Picking a ∗ ∗ ∈ ( c , c + δ ) {\\displaystyle a^{**}\\in (c,c+\\delta )} , we know that a ∗ ∗ ∉ S {\\displaystyle a^{**}\\not \\in S} because c {\\displaystyle c} is the supremum of S {\\displaystyle S} . This means that",
"title": "Proof"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Both inequalities",
"title": "Proof"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "are valid for all ε > 0 {\\displaystyle \\varepsilon >0} , from which we deduce f ( c ) = u {\\displaystyle f(c)=u} as the only possible value, as stated.",
"title": "Proof"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "We will only prove the case of f ( a ) < u < f ( b ) {\\displaystyle f(a)<u<f(b)} , as the f ( a ) > u > f ( b ) {\\displaystyle f(a)>u>f(b)} case is similar.",
"title": "Proof"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Define g ( x ) = f ( x ) − u {\\displaystyle g(x)=f(x)-u} which is equivalent to f ( x ) = g ( x ) + u {\\displaystyle f(x)=g(x)+u} and lets us rewrite f ( a ) < u < f ( b ) {\\displaystyle f(a)<u<f(b)} as g ( a ) < 0 < g ( b ) {\\displaystyle g(a)<0<g(b)} , and we have to prove, that g ( c ) = 0 {\\displaystyle g(c)=0} for some c ∈ [ a , b ] {\\displaystyle c\\in [a,b]} , which is more intuitive. We further define the set S = { x ∈ [ a , b ] : g ( x ) ≤ 0 } {\\displaystyle S=\\{x\\in [a,b]:g(x)\\leq 0\\}} . Because g ( a ) < 0 {\\displaystyle g(a)<0} we know, that a ∈ S {\\displaystyle a\\in S} so, that S {\\displaystyle S} is not empty. Moreover, as S ⊆ [ a , b ] {\\displaystyle S\\subseteq [a,b]} , we know that S {\\displaystyle S} is bounded and non-empty, so by Completeness, the supremum c = sup ( S ) {\\displaystyle c=\\sup(S)} exists.",
"title": "Proof"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "There are 3 cases for the value of g ( c ) {\\displaystyle g(c)} , those being g ( c ) < 0 , g ( c ) > 0 {\\displaystyle g(c)<0,g(c)>0} and g ( c ) = 0 {\\displaystyle g(c)=0} . For contradiction, let us assume, that g ( c ) < 0 {\\displaystyle g(c)<0} . Then, by the definition of continuity, for ϵ = 0 − g ( c ) {\\displaystyle \\epsilon =0-g(c)} , there exists a δ > 0 {\\displaystyle \\delta >0} such that x ∈ ( c − δ , c + δ ) {\\displaystyle x\\in (c-\\delta ,c+\\delta )} implies, that | g ( x ) − g ( c ) | < − g ( c ) {\\displaystyle |g(x)-g(c)|<-g(c)} , which is equivalent to g ( x ) < 0 {\\displaystyle g(x)<0} . If we just chose x = c + δ N {\\displaystyle x=c+{\\frac {\\delta }{N}}} , where N > δ b − c {\\displaystyle N>{\\frac {\\delta }{b-c}}} , then g ( x ) < 0 {\\displaystyle g(x)<0} and c < x < b {\\displaystyle c<x<b} , so x ∈ S {\\displaystyle x\\in S} . It follows that x {\\displaystyle x} is an upper bound for S {\\displaystyle S} . However, x > c {\\displaystyle x>c} , contradicting the upper bound property of the least upper bound c {\\displaystyle c} , so g ( c ) ≥ 0 {\\displaystyle g(c)\\geq 0} . Assume then, that g ( c ) > 0 {\\displaystyle g(c)>0} . We similarly chose ϵ = g ( c ) − 0 {\\displaystyle \\epsilon =g(c)-0} and know, that there exists a δ > 0 {\\displaystyle \\delta >0} such that x ∈ ( c − δ , c + δ ) {\\displaystyle x\\in (c-\\delta ,c+\\delta )} implies | g ( x ) − g ( c ) | < g ( c ) {\\displaystyle |g(x)-g(c)|<g(c)} . We can rewrite this as − g ( c ) < g ( x ) − g ( c ) < g ( c ) {\\displaystyle -g(c)<g(x)-g(c)<g(c)} which implies, that g ( x ) > 0 {\\displaystyle g(x)>0} . If we now chose x = c − δ 2 {\\displaystyle x=c-{\\frac {\\delta }{2}}} , then g ( x ) > 0 {\\displaystyle g(x)>0} and a < x < c {\\displaystyle a<x<c} . It follows that x {\\displaystyle x} is an upper bound for S {\\displaystyle S} . However, x < c {\\displaystyle x<c} , which contradict the least property of the least upper bound c {\\displaystyle c} , which means, that g ( c ) > 0 {\\displaystyle g(c)>0} is impossible. If we combine both results, we get that g ( c ) = 0 {\\displaystyle g(c)=0} or f ( c ) = u {\\displaystyle f(c)=u} is the only remaining possibility.",
"title": "Proof"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "",
"title": "Proof"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Remark: The intermediate value theorem can also be proved using the methods of non-standard analysis, which places \"intuitive\" arguments involving infinitesimals on a rigorous footing.",
"title": "Proof"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "A form of the theorem was postulated as early as the 5th century BCE, in the work of Bryson of Heraclea on squaring the circle. Bryson argued that, as circles larger than and smaller than a given square both exist, there must exist a circle of equal area. The theorem was first proved by Bernard Bolzano in 1817. Bolzano used the following formulation of the theorem:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Let f , ϕ {\\displaystyle f,\\phi } be continuous functions on the interval between α {\\displaystyle \\alpha } and β {\\displaystyle \\beta } such that f ( α ) < ϕ ( α ) {\\displaystyle f(\\alpha )<\\phi (\\alpha )} and f ( β ) > ϕ ( β ) {\\displaystyle f(\\beta )>\\phi (\\beta )} . Then there is an x {\\displaystyle x} between α {\\displaystyle \\alpha } and β {\\displaystyle \\beta } such that f ( x ) = ϕ ( x ) {\\displaystyle f(x)=\\phi (x)} .",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The equivalence between this formulation and the modern one can be shown by setting ϕ {\\displaystyle \\phi } to the appropriate constant function. Augustin-Louis Cauchy provided the modern formulation and a proof in 1821. Both were inspired by the goal of formalizing the analysis of functions and the work of Joseph-Louis Lagrange. The idea that continuous functions possess the intermediate value property has an earlier origin. Simon Stevin proved the intermediate value theorem for polynomials (using a cubic as an example) by providing an algorithm for constructing the decimal expansion of the solution. The algorithm iteratively subdivides the interval into 10 parts, producing an additional decimal digit at each step of the iteration. Before the formal definition of continuity was given, the intermediate value property was given as part of the definition of a continuous function. Proponents include Louis Arbogast, who assumed the functions to have no jumps, satisfy the intermediate value property and have increments whose sizes corresponded to the sizes of the increments of the variable. Earlier authors held the result to be intuitively obvious and requiring no proof. The insight of Bolzano and Cauchy was to define a general notion of continuity (in terms of infinitesimals in Cauchy's case and using real inequalities in Bolzano's case), and to provide a proof based on such definitions.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "A Darboux function is a real-valued function f that has the \"intermediate value property,\" i.e., that satisfies the conclusion of the intermediate value theorem: for any two values a and b in the domain of f, and any y between f(a) and f(b), there is some c between a and b with f(c) = y. The intermediate value theorem says that every continuous function is a Darboux function. However, not every Darboux function is continuous; i.e., the converse of the intermediate value theorem is false.",
"title": "Converse is false"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "As an example, take the function f : [0, ∞) → [−1, 1] defined by f(x) = sin(1/x) for x > 0 and f(0) = 0. This function is not continuous at x = 0 because the limit of f(x) as x tends to 0 does not exist; yet the function has the intermediate value property. Another, more complicated example is given by the Conway base 13 function.",
"title": "Converse is false"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In fact, Darboux's theorem states that all functions that result from the differentiation of some other function on some interval have the intermediate value property (even though they need not be continuous).",
"title": "Converse is false"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Historically, this intermediate value property has been suggested as a definition for continuity of real-valued functions; this definition was not adopted.",
"title": "Converse is false"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The Poincaré-Miranda theorem is a generalization of the Intermediate value theorem from a (one-dimensional) interval to a (two-dimensional) rectangle, or more generally, to an n-dimensional cube.",
"title": "Generalizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Vrahatis presents a similar generalization to triangles, or more generally, n-dimensional simplices. Let D be an n-dimensional simplex with n+1 vertices denoted by v0,...,vn. Let F=(f1,...,fn) be a function from D to R, that never equals 0 on the boundary of D. Suppose F satisfies the following conditions:",
"title": "Generalizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Then there is a point z in the interior of D on which F(z)=(0,...,0).",
"title": "Generalizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "It is possible to normalize the fi such that fi(vi)>0 for all i; then the conditions become simpler:",
"title": "Generalizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The theorem can be proved based on the Knaster–Kuratowski–Mazurkiewicz lemma. In can be used for approximations of fixed points and zeros.",
"title": "Generalizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The intermediate value theorem is closely linked to the topological notion of connectedness and follows from the basic properties of connected sets in metric spaces and connected subsets of R in particular:",
"title": "Generalizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "In fact, connectedness is a topological property and (*) generalizes to topological spaces: If X {\\displaystyle X} and Y {\\displaystyle Y} are topological spaces, f : X → Y {\\displaystyle f\\colon X\\to Y} is a continuous map, and X {\\displaystyle X} is a connected space, then f ( X ) {\\displaystyle f(X)} is connected. The preservation of connectedness under continuous maps can be thought of as a generalization of the intermediate value theorem, a property of real valued functions of a real variable, to continuous functions in general spaces.",
"title": "Generalizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Recall the first version of the intermediate value theorem, stated previously:",
"title": "Generalizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Intermediate value theorem (Version I) — Consider a closed interval I = [ a , b ] {\\displaystyle I=[a,b]} in the real numbers R {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {R} } and a continuous function f : I → R {\\displaystyle f\\colon I\\to \\mathbb {R} } . Then, if u {\\displaystyle u} is a real number such that min ( f ( a ) , f ( b ) ) < u < max ( f ( a ) , f ( b ) ) {\\displaystyle \\min(f(a),f(b))<u<\\max(f(a),f(b))} , there exists c ∈ ( a , b ) {\\displaystyle c\\in (a,b)} such that f ( c ) = u {\\displaystyle f(c)=u} .",
"title": "Generalizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The intermediate value theorem is an immediate consequence of these two properties of connectedness:",
"title": "Generalizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "By (**), I = [ a , b ] {\\displaystyle I=[a,b]} is a connected set. It follows from (*) that the image, f ( I ) {\\displaystyle f(I)} , is also connected. For convenience, assume that f ( a ) < f ( b ) {\\displaystyle f(a)<f(b)} . Then once more invoking (**), f ( a ) < u < f ( b ) {\\displaystyle f(a)<u<f(b)} implies that u ∈ f ( I ) {\\displaystyle u\\in f(I)} , or f ( c ) = u {\\displaystyle f(c)=u} for some c ∈ I {\\displaystyle c\\in I} . Since u ≠ f ( a ) , f ( b ) {\\displaystyle u\\neq f(a),f(b)} , c ∈ ( a , b ) {\\displaystyle c\\in (a,b)} must actually hold, and the desired conclusion follows. The same argument applies if f ( b ) < f ( a ) {\\displaystyle f(b)<f(a)} , so we are done. Q.E.D.",
"title": "Generalizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The intermediate value theorem generalizes in a natural way: Suppose that X is a connected topological space and (Y, <) is a totally ordered set equipped with the order topology, and let f : X → Y be a continuous map. If a and b are two points in X and u is a point in Y lying between f(a) and f(b) with respect to <, then there exists c in X such that f(c) = u. The original theorem is recovered by noting that R is connected and that its natural topology is the order topology.",
"title": "Generalizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The Brouwer fixed-point theorem is a related theorem that, in one dimension, gives a special case of the intermediate value theorem.",
"title": "Generalizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "In constructive mathematics, the intermediate value theorem is not true. Instead, one has to weaken the conclusion:",
"title": "In constructive mathematics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "A similar result is the Borsuk–Ulam theorem, which says that a continuous map from the n {\\displaystyle n} -sphere to Euclidean n {\\displaystyle n} -space will always map some pair of antipodal points to the same place.",
"title": "Practical applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Take f {\\displaystyle f} to be any continuous function on a circle. Draw a line through the center of the circle, intersecting it at two opposite points A {\\displaystyle A} and B {\\displaystyle B} . Define d {\\displaystyle d} to be f ( A ) − f ( B ) {\\displaystyle f(A)-f(B)} . If the line is rotated 180 degrees, the value −d will be obtained instead. Due to the intermediate value theorem there must be some intermediate rotation angle for which d = 0, and as a consequence f(A) = f(B) at this angle.",
"title": "Practical applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "In general, for any continuous function whose domain is some closed convex n {\\displaystyle n} -dimensional shape and any point inside the shape (not necessarily its center), there exist two antipodal points with respect to the given point whose functional value is the same.",
"title": "Practical applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The theorem also underpins the explanation of why rotating a wobbly table will bring it to stability (subject to certain easily met constraints).",
"title": "Practical applications"
}
]
| In mathematical analysis, the intermediate value theorem states that if f is a continuous function whose domain contains the interval [a, b], then it takes on any given value between f and f at some point within the interval. This has two important corollaries: If a continuous function has values of opposite sign inside an interval, then it has a root in that interval. The image of a continuous function over an interval is itself an interval. | 2001-08-06T17:25:07Z | 2023-12-23T18:09:47Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate_value_theorem |
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