A curtain raiser is a short performance or performer that introduces a show or event before the main attraction. It is usually shorter than the main attraction, though this is not always the case. The term comes from the action of raising the curtain on a stage.
A crown of sonnets, also called a sonnet corona, is a group of sonnets, often written for one person and/or focused on one topic. Each sonnet talks about one part of the topic and is connected to the sonnets before and after it by using the last line of the previous sonnet as its first line. The first line of the first sonnet is used again as the last line of the final sonnet, which ends the group.
An acrostic is a type of poem or writing where the first letter of each line (or other part of the text) spells out a word, message, or the alphabet. The word comes from French and Latin, and means “highest” and “verse” in ancient Greek. Acrostics are a form of writing with rules and can help people remember information.
A crisis (plural: crises; adjective: critical) is an event or time that causes a situation that is not safe and is hard to control. It affects one person, a group of people, or everyone in society. Crises are bad changes in people’s lives or the environment, especially when they happen suddenly with little or no warning.
An incunable, also called an incunabulum, is a book, pamphlet, or broadside printed during the very early years of printing in Europe, up to the year 1500. The exact date is not fixed, but the number of printed books grew rapidly in the next century. Because of this, all incunabula, which were made before the printing press became common in Europe, are rare.
An ode is a type of lyric poetry that originated in Ancient Greece. Odes are carefully organized poems that praise or celebrate events or people. They describe nature in both thoughtful and emotional ways.
In poetry, a couplet is two lines that rhyme and have the same rhythm. A couplet can be formal (closed) or run-on (open). In a formal (closed) couplet, each line ends with a pause, showing that the sentence stops at the end of the line.
A convention is a set of rules, standards, or social practices that people agree upon, often forming a custom. In the physical sciences, numerical values such as constants, quantities, or measurement scales are considered conventional when they do not reflect a natural property measured from the environment. Instead, these values come from agreements among scientists, such as averages calculated from many measurements.
Contrast is the difference in brightness or color that helps an object stand out from its background. Human eyes are better at noticing differences in brightness than seeing the actual level of brightness. This means that how something looks can stay similar even if the lighting changes a lot.
ConTeXt, styled as ConT e Xt, is a tool for creating documents. Like LaTeX, it is based on the TeX typesetting system. ConTeXt is especially useful for creating structured documents, producing documents automatically, achieving detailed typography, and typesetting in many languages.