Sanguan, in Chinese Daoism, the Three Officials: Tianguan, official of heaven who bestows happiness; Diguan, official of earth who grants remission of sins; and Shuiguan, official of water who averts misfortune. The Chinese theatre did much to popularize Tianguan by introducing a skit before each

Jerry Lewis: Three on a Couch (1966) cast him as an artist trying to woo a psychiatrist (Janet Leigh); The Big Mouth (1967) saw him searching for treasure; and Which Way to the Front? (1970) was a World War II comedy. He also directed the comic mystery…

Georges Duby: …de France, the extraordinarily rich The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined (1978) explored the origins and medieval development of the three estates in French society and was the product of his early seminars at the Collège. A consideration of an idea that played an important role in the history of…

Three Pagodas Pass, mountain pass in the Tenasserim Mountain Range on the Myanmar (Burma)-Thailand border, 100 miles (160 km) southeast of Moulmein, Myanmar. The pass, at an elevation of 925 feet (282 m), links southeastern Myanmar and western Thailand. For centuries it was the chief link between

United States: The 2020 U.S. election: the Oath Keepers, and the Three Percenters—responded to the president’s plea that they come to Washington to participate in a “Save America March.” On January 6, hundreds surrounded the Capitol. Thousands more attended a rally near the White House, at which Trump repeated his false claims regarding the election. He…

Giorgione: Works: The Three Philosophers (c. 1510) is one of the works Michiel saw and specifically identified as being by Giorgione. He stated, however, that it was completed by the Venetian painter Sebastiano del Piombo after the master’s death. The composition and colour are so fully Giorgione’s…

George Santayana: Early life and career: …essays, gathered into two volumes: Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe (1910); and Winds of Doctrine (1913), in which the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and the philosophies of Henri Bergson, a French evolutionary philosopher, and of Bertrand Russell are trenchantly discussed.

Arnold Schoenberg: Evolution from tonality of Arnold Schoenberg: …pieces that constitute his opus 11, the first composition ever to dispense completely with “tonal” means of organization. Such pieces, in which no one tonal centre exists and in which any harmonic or melodic combination of tones may be sounded without restrictions of any kind, are usually called atonal, although…

counterpoint: The 20th century: Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for String Quartet (No. 1) suggests four keys at the same time: G, B, D, and A♭. In this particular work each instrument is limited throughout the piece to a few notes assigned to it. Thus each part is absolutely individual and, except…

Philip Kapleau: That year he published The Three Pillars of Zen, a seminal work that has since been translated into several languages. The following year Kapleau founded the Rochester Zen Center, which became one of the major focal points of Zen education in America. He taught at the center for nearly…

Louise Penny: Three Pines and Armand Gamache: …basis for the TV show Three Pines (2022– ), which starred Alfred Molina as Inspector Gamache.

Three Places in New England, composition for orchestra by American composer Charles Ives, completed and much revised in the first decades of the 20th century and published in its best-known version in 1935. Its three movements portray scenes from the composer’s native New England and feature much

art criticism: Critical response to early avant-garde art: …1908, in his essay “The Three Plastic Virtues,” poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire argued that “the three plastic virtues, [of] purity, unity, and truth” had “triumphantly vanquished over nature” in Cubism. His assertion was the final stamp of approval on the new School of Paris led by Picasso. Pure…

George Bernard Shaw: First plays: Shaw’s next collection of plays, Three Plays for Puritans (1901), continued what became the traditional Shavian preface—an introductory essay in an electric prose style dealing as much with the themes suggested by the plays as the plays themselves. The Devil’s Disciple (performed 1897) is a play set in New Hampshire…

Athol Fugard: …later published under the title Three Port Elizabeth Plays (1974). Boesman and Lena, filmed in 1973 with Fugard as Boesman, played to a wider audience than any previous South African play; another film adaptation was released in 2000.

Three Principles of the People, the ideological basis of the political program of the Chinese Nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), championing the principles of nationalism, democracy, and socialism. The principles were originally formulated as slogans for Sun’s revolutionary student group,

China: New directions in national policy, 1958–61: …inauguration in 1958 of “Three Red Banners”—i.e., the general line of socialist construction, the Great Leap Forward, and the rural people’s communes—are still not fully known. Undoubtedly, a complex mixture of forces came into play. Mao personally felt increasingly uncomfortable with the alliance with the Soviet Union and with…

Triratna, in Buddhism the Triratna comprises the Buddha, the dharma (doctrine, or teaching), and the sangha (the monastic order, or community). One becomes a Buddhist by saying the words “I go to the Buddha for refuge, I go to the Doctrine for refuge, I go to the Order for refuge.” In Jainism the

Taoism: Syncretism: …origin was that of the Three Religions (sanjiao). Its composite moral teachings are represented by popular tracts, the so-called “books on goodness” (shanshu), which have been in extremely wide circulation since the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).

United Kingdom: The politics of war: …restrained the speaker while the Three Resolutions (1629), condemning the collection of tonnage and poundage as well as the doctrine and practice of Arminianism, were introduced. Parliament broke up in pandemonium, with both king and members shocked by the “carriage of diverse fiery spirits.”

Alasdair MacIntyre: After Virtue and later works: …Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990) that justification of such large-scale viewpoints must proceed historically: in order to assess the rationality of adherence to large-scale viewpoints—MacIntyre called them “traditions”—one must look to the history of their development. Traditions are often so different from each…

Three Rivers, district, administrative and historic county of Hertfordshire, southeast England, in the southwestern corner of the county. Three Rivers district is essentially a dormitory suburban area on the northwest border of Greater London. Rickmansworth is the district seat. The district’s

Trois-Rivières, city, Mauricie–Bois-Francs region, southern Quebec province, Canada. It lies on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River, at the mouth of the Saint-Maurice River. Trois-Rivières was founded in 1634 by the French explorer Samuel de Champlain and named for the three channels at the

Pittsburgh Pirates: …60 years, to play in Three Rivers Stadium, where the power hitting of Willie Stargell and Dave Parker helped them clinch the NL Eastern Division six times and win World Series championships in 1971 and 1979. In the mid-1980s the Pirates acquired sluggers Barry Bonds and Bobby Bonilla, and the…

Third Cinema: …Ruiz’s Tres tristes tigres (1968; Three Sad Tigers), which provided a variety of options for social change in its examination of the Santiago underworld through a single handheld camera, emphasizing the city’s atmosphere of entrapment. The Third Cinema approach spread worldwide through international exposure, especially in Europe, overcoming the obstacles…

Vietnam Veterans Memorial: …the commissioning of a traditional statue depicting three servicemen with a flag to stand at the entrance to the memorial. After Lin’s monument was dedicated on November 13, 1982, however, it became a popular and moving tourist attraction.

Three Sisters, Russian drama in four acts by Anton Chekhov, first performed in Moscow in 1901 and published as Tri sestry in the same year. The Prozorov sisters (Olga, Masha, and Irina) yearn for the excitement of Moscow; their dreary provincial life is enlivened only by the arrival of the Imperial

Jacopo Palma: …in such works as the Three Sisters. That work, along with many of his later paintings, shows the influence of Lorenzo Lotto. Sixty-two of Palma’s works remained unfinished at his death and were finished by his pupils. Presumably, this accounts for the variable quality of his work.

milpa, symbiotic and symbolic interplanting of beans, corn (maize), and squash in Mesoamerican and North American Indigenous agricultural tradition. These three crops have long been viewed as the most important food plants to many people groups, and ancient communities found that planting the three

May Sinclair: …and published several novels, including The Three Sisters (1914), which is based loosely on the lives of the Brontë sisters and examines the repressiveness of Victorian and Edwardian society. That was to be the first of what are categorized as her psychological novels, or works that investigated psychological concepts such…

Deirdre: …Three Sorrows of Storytelling (Tri Truaighe Scéalaigheachta). The older version, preserved in The Book of Leinster (c. 1160), is more starkly tragic, less polished, and less romantic than the later version. It describes a Druid’s foretelling, at Deirdre’s birth, that many men would die on her account. Raised in…

law of three stages, theory of human intellectual development propounded by the French social theorist Auguste Comte (1798–1857). According to Comte, human societies moved historically from a theological stage, in which the world and the place of humans within it were explained in terms of gods,

Philip K. Dick: … winner; television series 2015–19), and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), the protagonists must determine their own orientation in an “alternate world.” Beginning with The Simulacra (1964) and culminating in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968; adapted for film as Blade Runner [1982]), the illusion centres on artificial…

the Three Stooges: The movie The Three Stooges, in which a new cast inhabited the familiar roles, was released in 2012.

the Three Stooges, American comedy team noted for violent anarchic slapstick and comedy routines rooted in the burlesque tradition. Six men were members of the team throughout the years: Shemp Howard (original name Samuel Horwitz; b. March 17, 1895, New York, New York, U.S.—d. November 23, 1955,

Jean Negulesco: Film noirs and Johnny Belinda: …other credits that year were Three Strangers, an offbeat noir with Lorre, Greenstreet, and Fitzgerald as joint holders of a sweepstakes ticket, and Humoresque, a romantic drama that starred Garfield (as a violinist who hungers for success) and Joan Crawford (as the wealthy but unstable patron who falls for him).

halfway house: Contemporary halfway houses: …study conducted in 2000, the three-strikes law in California, enacted in 1994 by the legislature and citizen initiative, in its first six years snared over 50,000 “strikers,” each eligible for at least a doubling of their normal sentence, with 5,887 “third strikers” sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

Gustave Flaubert: Later years of Gustave Flaubert: …Pécuchet, in order to write Trois Contes, containing the three short stories “Un Coeur simple,” a tale about the drab and simple life of a faithful servant; “La Légende de Saint Julien l’Hospitalier”; and “Hérodias.” This book, through the diversity of the stories’ themes, shows Flaubert’s talent in all its…

American literature: Miller, Williams, and Albee: …with a complex autobiographical drama, Three Tall Women (1994).

José Carreras: As one of the “Three Tenors” (together with the Italian singer Luciano Pavarotti and the Spanish singer Plácido Domingo), Carreras helped find a larger popular audience for opera.

George Miller: …2022 Miller directed and cowrote Three Thousand Years of Longing, an adaptation of a short story by A.S. Byatt. It centers on a scholar (Tilda Swinton) who discovers a jinni (Idris Elba) and is offered three wishes.

Lionel Richie: Career with the Commodores and songwriting talent: …100 number one hit: “Three Times a Lady,” a sentimental ballad in waltz time. The song was written and sung by Richie, who had been inspired by the celebration of his parents’ 37th wedding anniversary. In 1979 the group scored another number one hit with Richie’s love song “Still.”…

Yaacov Agam: Examples of Agam’s works include Three Times Three Interplay (1970–71) and The Thousand Gates (1972) in the gardens of Israel’s presidential palace in Jerusalem. He also designed an enormous musical fountain situated in the Quartier de la Défense, Paris (1975), and the world’s largest menorah (32 feet [9.75 metres]) in…

Matthew Perry: Other credits: The Whole Nine Yards and The West Wing: …rom-coms Fools Rush In (1997), Three to Tango (1999), and Serving Sara (2002) failed to find an audience. More successful was The Whole Nine Yards (2000), a popular comedy in which he played a dentist whose new neighbor (Bruce Willis) is a gangster. He reprised the role in the 2004…

Guillermo Cabrera Infante: …he acquired international renown with Tres tristes tigres (1964; Three Trapped Tigers), winner of the Bibliotheca Breve Prize given by the Spanish publisher Seix Barral. In the manner of James Joyce’s Ulysses, this highly successful novel chronicles the adventures of several young characters in Havana’s prerevolutionary nightlife. It is a…

aesthetics: Major concerns of 18th-century aesthetics: …forward by James Harris in Three Treatises (1744) and subsequently made famous by Charles Batteux in a book entitled Les Beaux Arts réduits à un même principe (1746; “The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle”). This diffuse and ill-argued work contains the first modern attempt to give a systematic…

San-lun, school of Chinese Buddhism derived from the Indian Mādhyamika school. See

Ntozake Shange: …Mississippi Meets the Amazon (1977), Three Views of Mt. Fuji (1987), and The Love Space Demands: A Continuing Saga (1992).

Agnes de Mille: …The Harvest According (1952), and Three Virgins and a Devil (1941).

Clara Bow: …the Mob (1928; now lost), Three Week Ends (1928; now lost), Dangerous Curves (1929), and The Saturday Night Kid (1929).

Elinor Glyn: Three Weeks (1907), the story of a Balkan queen’s adulterous relationship with an Englishman, caused a sensation. It was widely read and condemned. His Hour (1910), one of her best romances, was set in the court of St. Petersburg and was executed in a keenly…

Three Weeks, (“Between the Straits”), in Judaism, a period of mourning running from the 17th day of Tammuz, the fourth month of the Jewish religious year, to the 9th day of Av (Tisha be-Av), the fifth month (variously, about June to August). The observance commemorates the days between the first

Nicholas Sparks: …in his only nonfiction work, Three Weeks with My Brother (2004), in which he and his brother, Micah, share their own emotional responses to the deaths of their parents and sister.

number game: Graphs and networks: …involves the problem of the three wells. Here (Figure 14) A, B, and C represent three neighbours’ houses, and R, S, and T three wells. It is desired to have paths leading from each house to each well, allowing no path to cross any other path. The proof that the…

Magi, in Christian tradition, the noble pilgrims “from the East” who followed a miraculous guiding star to Bethlehem, where they paid homage to the infant Jesus as king of the Jews (Matthew 2:1–12). Christian theological tradition has always stressed that Gentiles as well as Jews came to worship

Lucille Clifton: …Come Cross the Water (1973), Three Wishes (1976), and My Friend Jacob (1980). She also wrote an award-winning series of books featuring events in the life of Everett Anderson, a young Black boy. These include Some of the Days of Everett Anderson (1970), Everett Anderson’s Goodbye (1983), and One of…

Weird Sisters, the creatures who prophesy the destinies of the main characters in William Shakespeare’s tragic play Macbeth, written sometime in 1606–07 and published in the First Folio of 1623. They make five predictions to Macbeth, which induce him to subvert the order of succession to the

Shailene Woodley: Later roles: Big Little Lies: …sexuality in the limited series Three Women, based on a bestseller of the same name by Lisa Taddeo.

Sylvia Plath: Other works: It also contains Three Women, a radio play in verse that Plath wrote in 1962. The Bell Jar was reissued in Great Britain under her own name in 1966, and it was published in the United States for the first time in 1971. Johnny Panic and the Bible…

Fernand Léger: Three Women (1921) is considered to be the masterpiece of Léger’s mechanical period.

Robert Altman: M*A*S*H and the 1970s: …producer, director, and writer for Three Women (1977). A mystical investigation into the nature of identity (based on a dream Altman had), with Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Janice Rule, it polarized critics. Altman and his production company, Lion’s Gate Films, also played an important role in supporting the career…

Leonora Carrington: …of three women, such as Three Women Around the Table (1951); they are presumed to be paintings of herself, Varo, and Kati Horna, another friend. Carrington flourished in Mexico and painted fantastical compositions that portrayed metamorphoses. In 1946 she married Hungarian photographer Emerico Weisz and bore two children (1946 and…

Wilhelm Leibl: , Three Women in Church, 1878–82). Later he abandoned the hard brilliance of his former works and drew softer outlines. He followed his own strong instinct for colour, reproducing what he saw with a bold, sure touch (e.g., In the Kitchen, 1898). His superb technique enabled…

Three Worlds According to King Ruang, 14th-century cosmology that is the oldest known full-length text written in Thai. See

Colin MacInnes: Later life and work: …Novel of Adventure (1969) and Three Years to Play (1970); the book-length essay Loving Them Both: A Study of Bisexuality and Bisexuals (1973); and Out of the Garden: A Novel (1974), his final novel. In the mid-1960s he acted for a time as the press officer of a Black organization…

biblical literature: The Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men: The first addition to Daniel (in Greek and Latin translations Dan. 3:24–68) contains the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men. These are the prayers of Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, the three young men who…

American Broadcasting Company: Focus on television: …Laverne and Shirley [1976–83], and Three’s Company [1977–84]) and sexually charged dramatic series (Charlie’s Angels [1976–81], The Love Boat [1977– 86], and Fantasy Island [1978–84]), Silverman rapidly elevated ABC to the coveted number one slot. Perhaps to counteract criticism of its lowbrow entertainment fare, the network offered a number of…

hand tool: Geological and archaeological aspects: Thomsen used three categories of materials—stone, bronze, and iron—to represent what he felt had been the ordered succession of technological development. The idea has since been formalized in the designation of a Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age.

China: Reconstruction and consolidation, 1949–52: The Three-Antis campaign targeted communist cadres who had become too close to China’s capitalists. The Five-Antis campaign was aimed at the capitalists themselves and brought them into line on charges of bribery, tax evasion, theft of state property and economic information, and cheating on government contracts.…

Ismail Kadare: Fiction: …Ura me tri harqe (1978; The Three-Arched Bridge), is set in medieval Albania, during the Ottoman expansion, and uses the construction of a bridge as an allegory of modernization imposed on a traditional society. The bridge comes to represent progress, but its completion depends on coercion, sacrifice, and the silencing…

protractor: This instrument, called a three-arm protractor, or station pointer, is composed of a circular scale connected to three arms. The centre arm is fixed, while the outer two are rotatable, capable of being set at any angle relative to the centre one.

armadillo: The three-, six-, and nine-banded armadillos are named for the number of movable bands in their armour. Only one species, the nine-banded armadillo (Dasypus novemcinctus), is found in the United States. Its range has expanded into several southern states since it was first observed in Texas…

three-body problem, in astronomy, the problem of determining the motion of three celestial bodies moving under no influence other than that of their mutual gravitation. No general solution of this problem (or the more general problem involving more than three bodies) is possible, as the motion of

Liu Cixin: …first novel of the trilogy, The Three-Body Problem (2006), won the 2015 Hugo Award for best novel in its English translation and has sold more than 3 million copies in English and 30 million copies worldwide. Liu stated to The Guardian in 2024 that the novel’s English-language sales alone have…

bacteria: Autotrophic metabolism: …the reductive pentose phosphate (Calvin) cycle, the reductive tricarboxylic acid cycle, and the acetyl-CoA pathway. The Calvin cycle, elucidated by American biochemist Melvin Calvin, is the most widely distributed of these pathways, operating in plants, algae, photosynthetic bacteria, and most aerobic lithoautotrophic bacteria. The key step in the Calvin

poker: Three-card poker: Three-card poker is a house-banked stud game in which three cards are dealt facedown to each player and the dealer. Each player makes two initial bets, one bet placed on a centre circle and the other placed on an ante square. The centre…

borane: Structure and bonding of boranes: This structure involves three-centre bridge bonding, in which one electron pair is shared between three (rather than two) atoms—two boron atoms and one hydrogen atom. (See chemical bonding: Advanced aspects of chemical bonding: Boranes for a discussion of the three-centre bond.) The ability of boron to form such…

chemical bonding: Boranes: …as an example of a three-centre, two-electron bond (a 3c,2e bond, as shown in Figure 19). They regard diborane as three atoms held together by a pair of electrons delocalized over three atoms but are aware that this semilocalized picture is only a part of the true picture.

photoengraving: Colourplate production: …colour printing, done with either three or four plates, each using a different colour of ink and overprinting the others, is based on a subtractive system of colours in which intermediate hues are obtained by some combination of two or more of the subtractive, or secondary, colours. The best colour…

Louis Ducos du Hauron: …in 1869 developed the so-called trichrome process of colour photography, a key 19th-century contribution to photography.

pottery: Provincial and export wares: …tile kilns also manufactured “three-coloured” (sancai) wares, perhaps originally a product of the Cizhou kilns. These were decorated with coloured glazes that were often kept from intermingling by threads of clay (cloisonné technique) or were used in conjunction with the pierced technique (fahua). Others have engraved designs under the…

theatre music: Music for ballet: …as a “poème choréographique,” and The Three-cornered Hat (1919) by the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla. Distinctive original scores for ballet continued usually to be the outcome of specific commissions. Composers do not yet normally think in terms of dance (as they do in terms of song), although in Great…

Pedro Antonio de Alarcón y Ariza: …sombrero de tres picos (1874; The Three-Cornered Hat).

Elliott Nugent: His first solo directorial effort, Three-Cornered Moon (1933), is considered by some to be the first screwball comedy. It was set during the Depression and centres on spoiled siblings who must find jobs after their mother loses the family fortune; it starred Claudette Colbert and Mary Boland. Nugent’s other early…

billiards: Carom, or French, billiards: …variety of the game called three-cushion billiards, the cue ball must also touch a cushion or cushions three or more times to complete a carom. Scoring a carom also entitles the player to another shot, and his turn, or inning, continues until he misses, when it becomes his opponent’s turn.

billiards: Carom, or French, billiards: …variety of the game called three-cushion billiards, the cue ball must also touch a cushion or cushions three or more times to complete a carom. Scoring a carom also entitles the player to another shot, and his turn, or inning, continues until he misses, when it becomes his opponent’s turn.

three-day event, equestrian competition, testing the overall abilities of horse and rider in competition at dressage, cross-country and endurance riding, and stadium show jumping. The first day’s event, the dressage competition, tests the horse’s obedience and the rider’s ability. It consists of a

pappataci fever, acute infectious febrile disease caused by a phlebovirus (family Bunyaviridae) and producing temporary incapacitation, marked initially by abdominal symptoms, severe frontal headache, chills, fever, and joint and muscle pain. It is transmitted to humans by the bloodsucking female

cosmic microwave background (CMB), electromagnetic radiation filling the universe that is a residual effect of the big bang 13.8 billion years ago. Because the expanding universe has cooled since this primordial explosion, the background radiation is in the microwave region of the electromagnetic

3-D, motion-picture process that gives a three-dimensional quality to film images. It is based on the fact that humans perceive depth by viewing with both eyes. In the 3-D process, two cameras or a twin-lensed camera are used for filming, one representing the left eye and the other the right. The

3D printing, in manufacturing, any of several processes for fabricating three-dimensional objects by layering two-dimensional cross sections sequentially, one on top of another. The process is analogous to the fusing of ink or toner onto paper in a printer (hence the term printing) but is actually

amorphous solid: Models of atomic scale structures: …a mathematical trajectory called a three-dimensional random walk.

mathematics: Linear algebra: …familiar example is that of three-dimensional space. If one picks an origin, then every point in space can be labeled by the line segment (called a vector) joining it to the origin. Matrices appear as ways of representing linear transformations of a vector space—i.e., transformations that preserve sums and multiplication…

theatre: Development of stage equipment: …culmination of the search for three-dimensionality that had passed through five essential stages since the 18th century. At first, an illusion of depth was achieved by painting perspective scenery on canvas; then the ground plan of the set was rearranged to envelop the actor with the set. The third phase…

Audion, elementary form of radio tube developed in 1906 (patented 1907) by Lee De Forest of the United States. It was the first vacuum tube in which a control grid (in the form of a bent wire) was added between the anode plate and the cathode filament. The control grid enabled De Forest to modulate

three-field system, method of agricultural organization introduced in Europe in the Middle Ages and representing a decisive advance in production techniques. In the old two-field system half the land was sown to crop and half left fallow each season; in the three-field system, however, only a third

Three-fifths compromise, compromise agreement between delegates from the Northern and the Southern states at the United States Constitutional Convention (1787) that three-fifths of the enslaved population would be counted for determining direct taxation and representation in the House of

maple: The three-flowered maple (A. triflorum) and the paperbark maple (A. griseum) have tripartite leaves and attractive peeling bark, in the former tannish and in the latter copper brown.

construction: Steel long-span construction: …hinged at each end) and three-hinge (made of two members hinged at each end and at the meeting point at the crown) trussed arches were widely used, the largest examples being two great airship hangars for the U.S. Navy in New Jersey—the first built in 1922 with a span of…

Akebia: …the fingers on a hand; three-leaf akebia (A. trifoliata) has three leaflets to a leaf. The purplish flowers are unisexual and occur in small clusters, and the oblong purple fruits are edible, though insipid. Both species are twining vines often used for shading and screening on arbors and fences and…