OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Plot

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​PLOT, a term originally meaning a space of ground used for a specific purpose, especially as a building site, formerly in frequent usage in the sense of a plan, a surveyed space of ground; hence the literary sense of a plan or design. The word is of doubtful origin; there is a collateral form “plat,” which appears in the 16th century, according to the New English Dictionary, under the influence of “plat,” flat place, surface (Fr. plat, Late Lat. plattus, probably from Gr. πλατύς, broad). Skeat (Etym. Dict.) refers “plot,” in the sense of a space of ground, to the O. Eng. plaec, Mid. Eng. pleck, later platch, patch. “Plot,” in the sense of plan, scheme, would then be identical with “plot,” a conspiracy, which may be a shortened form of “complot,” a French word, also of doubtful origin, meaning in the 12th century “a compact body of men”; in the 14th century “conspiracy.”
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Ploërmel

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​PLOËRMEL, a town of western France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Morbihan, 36 m. N .N.E. of Vannes by rail. Pop. (1906), town, 2492; commune, 5424. The Renaissance church of St Armel (16th century) is remarkable for the delicate carving of the north façade and for fine stained glass. It also possesses statues of John II. and John III., dukes of Brittany, which were transferred to the church from their tomb in an ancient Carmelite monastery founded in 1273 and destroyed by the Protestants in 1592 and again at the Revolution. The lower ecclesiastical seminary has an apartment in which the Estates of Brittany held several meetings. Remains of ramparts of the 15th century and some houses of the 16th century are also of interest. Farm-implements are manufactured, slate quarries are worked in the neighbourhood, and there is trade in cattle, wool, hemp, cloth, &c. Ploërmel (Plou Armel, people of Armel) owes its name to Armel, a hermit who lived in the district in the 6th century.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Ploen

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​PLOEN, a town of Germany, in Schleswig-Holstein, beautifully situated between two lakes, the large and the small Ploener-See, 20 m. S. from Kiel by the railway to Eutin and Lubeck. Pop. (1905), 3735. It has a palace built about 1630 and now converted into a cadet school, a gymnasium and a biological station. Tobacco, soap, soda, beer and furniture are manufactured, and there is a considerable trade in timber and grain. The lakes afford good fishing, and are navigated in summer by steamboats. Ploen is mentioned as early as the 11th century as a Wendish settlement, and a fortified place. It passed in 1559 to Duke John the Younger, founder of the line of Holstein-Sonderburg, on the extinction of which, in 1761, it fell to Denmark, and in 1867, with Schleswig-Holstein, to Prussia. The sons of the emperor William II. received their early education here.
See H. Eggers, Schloss und Stadt Ploen (Kiel, 1877), and J. C. Kinder, Urkundenbuch zur Chronik der Stadt Ploen (Plön, 1890).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Plot, Robert

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​PLOT, ROBERT (1640–1696), English naturalist and antiquary, was born at Borden in Kent in 1640. He was educated at Wye, and at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, where he graduated B.A. in 1661, and proceeded to M.A. (1664) and D.C.L. (1671). He was distinguished for his folio work The Natural History of Oxfordshire (1677), in which various fossils, as well as other objects of interest, were figured and described. It was regarded as a model for many subsequent works. In 1677 Plot was elected F.R.S., and he was secretary of the Royal Society from 1682 to 1684. He was appointed in 1683 the first keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, and in the same year he became professor of chemistry. In 1686 he wrote the Natural History of of Staffordshire. Two years later he became historiographer-royal. He died on the 30th of April 1696.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Siwalik Hills

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​SIWALIK HILLS, a name given to the foot-hills of the Himalayas in Dehra Dun district of the United Provinces of India, and in Nahan state and Hoshiarpur district of the Punjab. The range runs parallel with the Himalayan system from Hardwar on the Ganges to the banks of the Beas, with a length of 200 m. and an average width of 10 m. The elevation varies from 2000 to 3500 ft. Geologically speaking the Siwaliks belong to the tertiary deposits of the outer Himalayas, and are chiefly composed of low sandstone and conglomerate hills, the solidified and upheaved detritus of the great range in their rear. The intermediate valley lying between the outer hills and the Mussoorie ​mountains is known as the Dehra Dun (or Dehra valley) and contains a considerable Eurasian colony and some British tea-planters. The principal pass is that of Mohan by which the main road from Saharanpur to Dehra and Mussoorie traverses the range. The Siwalik formation (distinguished for its extraordinary wealth of palaeontological remains) is found on the North-West Frontier occupying much the same position relatively to the Suliman range as it does to the Himalayas, i.e. it faces the plains and becomes the outermost wall of the hills.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Sivaganga

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​SIVAGANGA, a town of British India, in the Madura district of Madras, 25 m. E. of Madura. Pop. (1901) 9097. It contains the residence of a zamindar, whose estate covers an area of 1680 sq. m. and pays a permanent land revenue of £20,000. The succession has been the subject of prolonged litigation.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Sivori, Ernesto Camillo

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​SIVORI, ERNESTO CAMILLO (1815–1894), Italian violinist, was born at Genoa on the 25th of October 1815, and was taught by Restano, Paganini, Costa and Dellepiane. His talent was extraordinarily precocious. From 1827 Sivori began the career of a travelling virtuoso, which lasted almost without interruption until 1864. He played Mendelssohn's concerto for the first time in England, in 1846, and was in England again in the seasons of 1851 and 1864. He lived for many years in Paris, and died at Genoa on the 18th of February 1894.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Sivri-Hissar

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​SIVRI-HISSAR, “Pointed-Castle,” a town of Asia Minor, in the Angora vilayet, situated 8 m. N. of the site of Pessinus, at the foot of a lofty double-peaked ridge of rock, which bears the ruins of a Byzantine castle. It is a road and commercial centre, with a trade in opium and mohair. The population includes a large Armenian community. The town occupies the site of ancient Palia, re-founded and re-named Justinianopolis by the emperor Justinian. It was one of the chain of fortresses on the Byzantine military road across Asia Minor, and became the chief city of Galatia Salutaris about A.D. 700, succeeding to the heritage of Pessinus, whose metropolitan transferred his seat to the new capital, and held the title of “archbishop of Pessinus or of Justinianopolis.”
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Sizar

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​SIZAR, one of a class of students at a college of Cambridge University and at Trinity College, Dublin, who, being persons of limited means, are received for lower fees, and obtain free commons, lodgings or other assistance towards their education during their terms of residence. At Oxford there was formerly a similar class, known as “Battelers” or “Batlers,” who originally waited on the Fellow of the College who had nominated them, and a still more humble class, the “servitors,” who, perhaps, answered more to a “subsizar” at Cambridge. The name “sizar” is to be connected with the “sizes” or “sizings” (“size” being a shortened form of “assize”), that is the specified portions of food and drink issued at a fixed price from the buttery of the college; the sizar was so styled either because as one of his former duties he had to fetch the “sizes” for others, or because he obtained his own free. The menial duties of “sizars” at Cambridge have long become obsolete.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Sivaji

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​SIVAJI (1627-1680), founder of the Mahratta power in India, was born in May 1627. He was the son of Shahji Bhonsla, a Mahratta soldier of fortune who held a jagir under the Bijapur government. From an early age he excelled in horsemanship and the use of weapons, and regarded himself as appointed to free the Hindus from the Mahommedan yoke. With this object he formed a national party among the Hindus of the Deccan, and opposed in turn the vassal power of Bijapur and the imperial armies of the Mogul of Delhi. By dint of playing off his enemies against each other and by means of treachery, assassination and hard fighting, Sivaji won for the Mahrattas practical supremacy in western India. In 1659 he lured Afzul Khan, the Bijapur general, into a personal conference, and killed him with his own hand, while his men attacked and routed the Bijapur army. In 1666 he visited the Mogul emperor, Aurangzeb, at Delhi, but on his expressing dissatisfaction at not being treated with sufficient dignity, he was placed under arrest. Having effected his escape in a sweetmeat basket, he raised the standard of revolt, assumed the title of raja, and the prerogative of coining money in his own name. But whilst at the height of his power he died on the 5th of April 1680 at the age of fifty-three. Sivaji was an extraordinary man, showing a genius both for war and for peaceful administration; but he always preferred to attain his ends by fraud rather than by force. He is the national hero of the Mahrattas, by whom he is regarded almost as a deity.
See Grant Duff, History of the Mahrattas (1826); Krishnaji Ananta, Life and Exploits of Sivaji (1884); and M. G Ranade, Rise of the Maratha Power (Bombay, 1900).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Siward

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​SIWARD (d. 1055), earl of Northumbria, was a Dane by birth and probably came to England with Canute. He became earl of Deira after the death of Eadwulf Cutel, earl of Northumbria, about 1038, and earl of all Northumbria after murdering Eadwulf, earl of Bernicia, in 1041. He supported Edward the Confessor in his quarrel with Earl Godwine in 1051, and was appointed earl of Huntingdon soon after this date. In 1054 Siward invaded Scotland in the interests of his kinsman Malcolm Canmore, and he completely routed King Macbeth in a battle in which his son Osbeorn was killed. Early in 1055 the earl died at York. Shakespeare introduces Siward and his son, whom he calls young Siward, into the tragedy of Macbeth, and represents the old man as saying when he heard that his son’s wounds were in front, “Had I as many sons as I have hairs, I would not wish them to a fairer death.” Siward, a man of unusual strength and size, is said to have risen from his bed at the approach of death, and to have died dressed in all his armour. He built a minster near York which he dedicated to St Olaf, and where he was buried; and one of his sons was Earl Waltheof.
See E. A. Freeman, The Norman Conquest, vols. ii. and iii. (1870–1876); and W. F. Skene, Celtic Scotland (1876–1880).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Pontécoulant, Louis Gustave le Doulcet, Comte de

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​PONTÉCOULANT, LOUIS GUSTAVE LE DOULCET, Comte de (1764–1853), French politician, was born at Caen on the 17th of November 1764. He began a career in the army in 1778. ​A moderate supporter of the revolution, he was returned to the Convention for the department of Calvados in 1792, and became Commissary with the army of the North. He voted for the imprisonment of Louis XVI. during the war, and his banishment after the peace. He then attached himself to the party of the Gironde, and in August 1793 was outlawed. He had refused to defend his compatriot Charlotte Corday, who wrote him a letter of reproach on her way to the scaffold. He returned to the Convention on the 8th of March 1795, and showed an unusual spirit of moderation by defending Prieur de la Marne and Robert Lindet. President of the Convention in July 1795, he was for some months a member of the council of public safety. He was subsequently elected to the council of five hundred, but was suspected of royalist leanings, and had to spend some time in retirement before the establishment of the consulate., Becoming senator in 1805, and count of the empire in 1808, he organized the national guard in Franche Comté in 1811, and the defence of the north-eastern frontier in 1813. At the first restoration Louis XVIII. made him a peer of France, and although he received a similar honour from Napoleon during the Hundred Days, he sat in the upper house under the Second Restoration. He died in Paris on the 3rd of April 1853, leaving memoirs and correspondence from which were extracted four volumes (1861–1865) of Souvenirs historiques et parlementaires 1764–1848.
His son Louis Adolphe Le Doulcet, comte de Pontécoulant (1794–1882), served under Napoleon in 1812 and 1814, and then emigrated to Brazil, where he took part in the abortive insurrection at Pernambuco in 1817. He also organized a French volunteer contingent in the Belgian revolution of 1830, and was wounded at Louvain. The rest of his life was spent. in Paris in the study of ancient music and acoustics. Among his works was one on the Musée instrumental du conservatoire de musique (1864). A younger brother, Philippe Gustave Le Doulcet, comte de Pontécoulant (1795–1874), served in the army until 1849, when he retired to devote himself to mathematics and astronomy. His works include Théorie analytique du système du monde (Paris, 1829–1846) and Traité élementaire de physique céleste (2 vols., Paris, 1840).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Pony

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​PONY (from the Lowland Scots powney, probably from O. Fr. pouleriet diminutive of poulain, a colt or foal Late Lat. pullanus Lat. pullus, a young animal), a horse of a small breed, sometimes confined to such as do not exceed 13 hands in height, but generally applied to any horse under 14 hands (see Horse). The word is of frequent use as a slang term—e.g. for a sum of £25, for a liquor measure or glass containing less than a half-pint; and in America for a literal translation of a foreign or classical author, a “crib.”
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Poole, Reginald Stuart

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POOLE, REGINALD STUART (1832-1895), English archaeologist and orientalist, was born in London on the 27th of January 1832. His father was the Rev. Edward Poole, a well-known bibliophile. His mother, Sophia, authoress of The Englishwoman in Egypt (1844), was the sister of E. W. Lane, the Arabic scholar, with whom R. S. Poole lived in Cairo from 1842 to 1849, thus imbibing an early taste for Egyptian antiquities. In 1852 he became an assistant in the British Museum, and was assigned to the department of coins and medals, of which in 1870 he became keeper. In that capacity he did work of the highest value, alike as a writer, teacher and administrator. In 1882 he was largely responsible for founding the Egypt Exploration Fund, and in 1884 for starting the Society of English Medallists. He retired in 1893, and died on the 8th of February 1895. Some of Poole's best work was done in his articles for the Ency. Brit. (9th ed.) on Egypt, Hieroglyphics and Numismatics, and considerable portions have been retained in the present edition, even though later research has been active in his sphere of work; he also wrote for Smith's Dictionary of the Bible, and published several volumes dealing with his special subjects. He was for some time professor of archaeology at University College, London, and also lecturer at the Royal Academy.
His elder brother, Edward Stanley Poole (1830-1867), who was chief clerk in the science and art department at South Kensington, was an Arabic scholar, whose early death cut short a promising career. His two sons, Stanley Lane-Poole (b. 1854), professor of Arabic in Trinity College, Dublin, and Reginald Lane-Poole (b. 1857), keeper of the archives at Oxford, lecturer in diplomatic, and author of various historical works, carried on the family tradition of scholarship.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Pood

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​POOD, a Russian weight, equivalent to 40 ℔ Russian and about 36 ℔ avoirdupois. A little more than 62 poods go to the ton. The word is an adaptation of the Low German or Norse pund, pound.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Poole, Paul Falconer

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POOLE, PAUL FALCONER (1806–1879), English painter, was born at Bristol in 1806. Though self-taught his fine feeling for colour, poetic sympathy and dramatic power gained for him a high position among British artists. He exhibited his first work in the Royal Academy at the age of twenty-five, the subject being "The Well," a scene in Naples. There was an interval of seven years before he next exhibited his "Farewell, Farewell" in 1837, which was followed by the "Emigrant's Departure," "Hermann and Dorothea" and "By the Waters of Babylon." In 1843 his position was made secure by his "Solomon Eagle," and by his success in the Cartoon Exhibition, in which he received from the Fine Art Commissioners a prize of £300 sterling. After his exhibition of the "Surrender of Syon House" he was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1846, and was made an academician in 1861. He died in 1879.
Poole's subjects divide themselves into two orders—one idyllic, the other dramatic. Of the former his "May Day" (1852) is a typical example. Of both styles there were excellent examples to be seen in the small collection of his works shown at Burlington House in the Winter Exhibition of 1883–1884. Among his early dramatic pictures was "Solomon Eagle exhorting the People to Repentance during the Plague of 1665," painted in 1843. To this class belongs also the "Messenger announcing to Job the Irruption of the Sabeans and the Slaughter of the Servants" (exhibited in 1850), and "Robert, Duke of Normandy and Arletta" (1848). Finer examples of his more mature power in this direction are to be found in his "Prodigal Son," painted in 1869; the "Escape of Glaucus and lone with the blind girl Nydia from Pompeii" (1860); and "Cunstaunce sent adrift by the Constable of Alla, King of Northumberland," painted in 1868. More peaceful than these are the "Song of Troubadours" (painted in 1854) and the "Goths in Italy" (1851), the latter an important historical work of great power and beauty. Of a less lofty strain, but still more beautiful in its workmanship, is the "Seventh Day of the Decameron," painted in 1857. In this picture Poole rises to his full height as a colourist. In his pastorals he is soft and tender, as in the "Mountain Path" (1853), the "Water-cress Gatherers" (1870), the "Shepston Maiden" (1872). But when he turns to the grander and more sublime views of nature his work is bold and vigorous. Fine examples of this style may be seen in the "Vision of Ezekiel" of the National Gallery, "Solitude" (1876), the "Entrance to the Cave of Mammon" (1875), the "Dragon's Cavern" (1877), and perhaps best of all in the "Lion in the Path" (1873), a great representation of mountain and cloud form.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Pool

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​POOL. (1) A pond, or a small body of still water; also a place in a river or stream where the water is deep and still, so applied in the Thames to that part of the river known as The Pool, which reaches from below London Bridge to Limehouse. The word in Old English was pól, which may be related to pull or pyll, and the similar Celtic words, e.g. Cornish pol, a creek, common on the Bristol Channel and estuary of the Severn, on the English side in the form “pill.” A further connexion has been suggested with Lat. pallus, marsh; Gr. πηλός, mud. (2) A name for the stakes, penalties, &c., in various, card and other games when collected together to be paid out to the winners; also the name of a variety of games of billiards (q.v.). This word has a curious history. It is certainly adapted from Fr. poule, hen, chicken, apparently a slang term for the stakes in a game, possibly, as the New English Dictionary suggests, used as a synonym for plunder, booty. “Chicken-hazard” might be cited as a parallel, though that has been taken to be a corruption of “chequeen,” a form of the Turkish coin, a sequin. When the word came into use in English at the end of the 17th century, it seems to have been at once identified with “pool,” pond, as Fr. fiche (ficher, to fix), a counter, was with “fish,” counters in card games often taking the form of “fish” made of mother-of-pearl, &c. “Pool,” in the sense of a common fund, has been adopted as a commercial term for a combination for the purpose of speculating in stocks and shares, the several owners of securities “pooling” them and placing them under a single control, and sharing all losses and profits. Similarly the name is given to a form of trade combination, especially in railway or shipping companies, by which the receipts or profits are divided on a certain agreed-upon basis, for the purpose of avoiding competition (see Trusts).