| alee |
at or toward that side of a ship which is farthest from the source of wind. |
| a leg to stand on |
a valid or convincing basis for a point of view. |
| alehouse |
an establishment where ale is served; tavern. |
| alembic |
a device, used in the past for distillation, whose main vessel has a beaked top. [2 definitions] |
| aleph |
the name of the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. |
| alert |
keenly attentive or responsive; quick to perceive. [3 definitions] |
| Aleut |
a member of a native people of the Aleutian Islands, or a descendant thereof; Aleutian. [2 definitions] |
| Aleutian |
of or pertaining to the Aleutian Islands or their people, culture, or the like. [2 definitions] |
| Aleutian Islands |
a chain of Alaskan islands that extends from the southwest coast toward Russia. |
| alewife1 |
a small fish, related to the herring and resembling the shad, found in North America in the Atlantic Ocean and the Great Lakes. |
| alewife2 |
a female alehouse keeper. |
| Alexander Graham Bell |
U.S. inventor of the telephone (b.1847--d.1922). |
| Alexander the Great |
the king of Macedonia in 336-323 B.C. and conqueror of an empire that included Persia, Egypt, and part of Greece (356-323 B.C.). |
| Alexandria |
an Egyptian seaport on the Nile delta, founded by Alexander the Great. |
| Alexandrian |
of or pertaining to Alexander the Great or the period of his reign. [2 definitions] |
| alexandrine |
(sometimes cap.) in poetry, a twelve-syllable line with alternating unstressed and stressed syllables, usu. with a clear pause after six syllables. [2 definitions] |
| Alex Haley |
a U.S. author celebrated for his pulitzer prize-winning work of historical fiction, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976), a publication whose subsequent television broadcast adaptation spawned a national discussion about race and race relations (b.1921--d.1992). |
| alexia |
the loss of reading ability, caused by lesions in the brain. |
| alfalfa |
a legume with purple flowers that is grown widely as forage for cattle and horses. |
| al fine |
to the finish (used as a musical direction to continue to the end of a repeated section). |
| Alfred Nobel |
a Swedish engineer, industrialist, and philanthropist who invented dynamite and established the Nobel prizes (b.1833--d.1896). |